How can we help?

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

In the last post of this series, I asked what made Adam Shepard different from the working poor who, despite working diligently and exercising discipline over their spending, were unable to improve their lot in life.

Today, I want to think about what we can do to help. I believe that the current system has some serious problems^[a].

• We give money to those in need. This encourages a small subset of the population to abuse the system (“Hey, free money! Now I can spend this on [some luxury in lieu the basic needs it was intended to cover]“), which wastes money that could be going to more deserving individuals (either members of the working poor who are actually trying to improve their lots in life, or the people who actually earned the money in the first place). Encouraging the abuse of the system also has a much more detrimental effect — it tarnishes the image of those who are genuinely trying to get out of their current situation. One bad apple spoils the bunch, so to speak.
• We punish those who are trying to improve their lot in life I’ve had this come up a few times in discussions with individuals who have a more liberal bent than me. There are a number of people who receive government assistance who stay on it because trying to get off of it makes their situation worse. If they earn too much, they lose their government assistance, and their situation actually gets worse because they’re trying to improve it.

Do you agree that the current system needs fixed? How would you fix it^[b]? I’ll post my answer tomorrow.

1. I’m only listing two here, because I think these are two of the three biggest problems. The third biggest problem is the topic of tomorrow’s post. [↩]
2. For anyone with a Conserv-atarian bent who would like to answer, assume that the government is going to do this regardless — what’s the best way to fix it [↩]

I had a brief moment of panic yesterday when a co-worker caught me in the office kitchen and mentioned this post. I wasn’t aware she knew about the blog, and it took me aback at first. I can’t help remembering examples like Dooce.com and the late Rob Smith, aka “Acidman”, where bloggers were fired for things they had written on their blogs.

I don’t blog anonymously. The name I use here is my real name, or part of it, at least. I don’t advertise my full last name anymore, but it is out there and it’s pretty easy to find my blog if you know my name (it’s also pretty easy to do the reverse, it turns out). With that in mind, I have to expect that some people I know personally will know about my blog even if I didn’t tell them about it. In fact, after we’d been dating a little while, my fiancée confessed to me that she’d found my blog and read through some of it before we our relationship had gotten serious.

Because of that, I try to follow a couple of basic rules. I avoid talking about work — I don’t talk about things that happen at work (except for relatively innocuous things like this post), and I don’t talk about the sort of work we do. Also, because of the nature of my job, I avoid talking about the state government. The reverse of that is that I don’t talk about this blog (or most of the topics I cover on this blog) at work.

The reason I don’t blog anonymously is that I am not ashamed of my opinions. I accept that other people disagree with me. I even accept that I may very well be completely and utterly wrong (and on those occasions where I have faced evidence that I was wrong, I’ve changed my opinions). I believe that I have fairly solid reasons for believing what I believe, and I blog mostly because it helps me to work through why I believe the things I believe. That other people can comment is a bonus to blogging, but it isn’t the primary reason I blog.

I don’t think that anything I believe is so offensive that it should necessitate my losing my job, but should it ever come to that, I believe that being able to discuss my thoughts and opinions freely is worth that risk.

Identifying the problem

I’ve gotten a few comments on my post about Adam Shepard, and hopefully those readers will be back, because I have a couple of questions I would like to ask them. I am genuinely looking for answers because I want to understand the other side — I am not looking to humiliate anyone or to prove a point with these questions.

This will be a three-part series of questions, but to avoid muddying the answers (and to make my little calendar over on the right look like I’ve been posting regularly), I will be posting them in separate posts on separate days.

I believe that there is a significant subset of the “working poor” whose situation is more-or-less reflected by the starting point of Adam Shepard’s experiment. I believe that, for that subset of the population, Adam Shepard’s experiment is meaningful, because it shows that the ability for these people to improve their lifestyles is not dependent on having more physical stuff, but on intangibles.

I believe that Adam was able to do what he did because he believed that it could be done, which gave him both hope and confidence. He also had discipline, a basic education on how to handle money because of his upbringing, goals he set for himself. I think that these things that could be taught or conveyed without throwing a lot of money at the problem (indeed, many of these things are often undermined by throwing money at the problem).

Others disagree with me, obviously. If you are one of those people, please answer the following question:

What set Adam apart from these individuals? Do you believe that the difference is in something tangible, or do you believe that it’s something intangible that we can’t give to the working poor?

Shorter Consumerist: “Evil conservatives are making people live up to the contacts they signed.”

There’s only so much the administration can do to bail out people who took out loans that were more than they could afford. If we bail them out completely, that’s sending the wrong message: “Don’t worry about whether you can afford this loan in a few years. Don’t worry about putting something away in case of emergency. Don’t worry — just spend without thinking. If you get into trouble, Big Brother will come and help.”

Encouraging government help into people’s lives is encouraging government interference into people’s lives. Relying on Big Brother to bail you out every time you have a problem is the same as inviting Big Brother to come and make sure you never take a risk that could result in extra expenses for him. If the government has to bail us out every time we find that our decisions have put us in a bad place, it won’t be long until the government dictates every single aspect of our lives.

I do feel sorry for those who signed a mortgage that they could nominally afford and who then found that, due to some unforeseen event or another, found that they really couldn’t afford it. Bad things happen and that sucks, but we need to take that into account when making decisions, especially decisions as big as buying a home.

This was a very good episode, but neither of the reveals really grabbed me. Spoilers below. You know the drill.

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