[AlexandrB]

I get this argument. It has strong intuitive and emotional appeal. The problem is that it ignores all the environmental factors that make poor life choices particularly punishing for the poor.

Certainly, there are some individuals that can overcome hardships while coming from any background - but these are rare. The more typical case is someone who will make some good choices and some bad choices. If that individual comes from a well-off background, the poor choices (e.g. kids early) can be papered over while the good choices can be better leveraged through access to more opportunities.

For someone from a less well-off background each mistake can be very costly. Have kids too early and you are unlikely to be able to support the kids while working and paying for college. Opportunities are harder to seize as well - living paycheque to paycheque would make it hard to pick up and move to SF to found a startup for example.

I'm not saying it's impossible to escape poverty without help - as I said, a dedicated individual can most certainly do it. From a statistical point of view, however, poverty will beget more poverty because the average poor person will not have enough second chances to make it out. If we want society to improve, we MUST provide a way for the average poor person to get past some of their mistakes. Yes, it looks like undeserved handouts, but I think it's the right thing to do.

P.S. Don't get me started on education. This is the single best thing we can do to help kids escape their background and we continuously underfund and mismanage it. It's fucking criminal.

[ams6110]

I would agree that we mismanage education, but not that we underfund it. We spend more per student on public education than we ever have (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66).

[AlexandrB]

Fair enough. I guess I don't know enough about the overall funding picture.

What gives me the impression of underfunding though is that education spending is one of the first things to get cut when there is fiscal crunch. I think this is ass-backwards and a result of optimizing for the short term and ignoring the long-term consequences.

Still if the spending is at record levels...

[yummyfajitas]

Local governments cut education spending first because it is the single biggest category of spending. Added up over the nation, police, fire, prisons, roads and mass transit cost less than half of what education does (at the local level).

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total

[rick888]

"Opportunities are harder to seize as well - living paycheque to paycheque would make it hard to pick up and move to SF to found a startup for example."

There are always many different types of opportunities around. If someone can't pick up and move to SF, they can run their startup from anywhere. The great part about right now is that you can start up a business with pretty much nothing.

"From a statistical point of view, however, poverty will beget more poverty because the average poor person will not have enough second chances to make it out."

Some decisions in life have long-lasting consequences. The poor should be concentrating on not making those bad decisions in the first place. Another problem is environmental. Parents pass their bad habits and decision making onto their kids. Wealthy parents most likely already have good habits and pass those good habits onto their kids.

"If we want society to improve, we MUST provide a way for the average poor person to get past some of their mistakes. Yes, it looks like undeserved handouts, but I think it's the right thing to do."

I don't think I can agree with you here. If we allow people to easily get past their mistakes, they will continue to make them (and society won't improve) If you know that a mistake can cost you pain and suffering in the future, you will most likely think twice before making it. Some people will never learn, but I don't feel that I should have to continue to pay for those people until they finally do.

[artmageddon]

I had a long comment to the parent but yours was more eloquent. There will be people who game the system re: "handouts" but that's the price you pay. The health care system in the US is horrendous, too.

[rwl]

> There will be people who game the system re: "handouts" but that's the price you pay.

Exactly. Even if it's true (and I'm not sure that it is, despite much ado to the contrary) that redistribution will create a class of people that "rely on government handouts," it isn't clear that that's a bad thing, at least as long as the "handouts" are understood to be things like food stamps and welfare checks. No one is getting rich off those. If it's really true that such a class of people necessarily exists whenever you put anti-poverty programs in place, then so be it: I'm happy to let them have the money, especially if it buys a more robust social safety net that the vast majority will use responsibly.

(Now, a different kind of "handout" strikes me as much more problematic: we spend a lot more, it seems to me, on handouts like non-competitive government contracts, government-created monopolies, earmarks, bailouts, etc. -- and people are getting rich off those. But I suppose that's a bit off topic here...)

[yummyfajitas]

Well, the poor also make a disproportionate amount of bad choices. For instance, the vast majority of the poor choose not to have a job.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf

People below the poverty line also choose to risk unwanted pregnancies at a much higher rates than richer people. (The unwanted pregnancy rate for poor people is 88/1000, vs 29/1000 for people above double the poverty line.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3002498.html#15

So it's not just the case that bad choices have a disproportionate effect on the poor. The poor also make bad choices at a rate much higher than the non-poor.