[pushingbits]

"Because these people are paid poorly, they have a sense of living on a precipice and will do anything to avoid falling off."

This is actually a positive externality (well, depending on how you look at it) of providing some sort of social security net. You get to live in a society where people are less incentivized to stab each other in the back. Of course, they are also less incentivized to work themselves out of being-close-to-the-cliff.

On the other hand, in societies where, if you don't have any money, you are starving on the street as well as ostracized, you can hardly ever trust anyone not to carve you up if there is anything to be gained by it.

I once heard of a doctor working for an NGO in a major Indian city (I think it was Calcutta), who talked about how it was virtually impossible for a white person to make a friend there, because everyone he met was just trying to use him to gain status/money in some fashion.

[michaelochurch]

I agree completely. Why does the US have so much crime? Because there's no safety net. (The War on Drugs also contributes in a major way.) This ends up being foolish, because we pay more to keep people in prison (over $30,000 per year) than we would by providing them with education and training. We have the resources to get rid of poverty, but we're spending what we have in phenomenally stupid ways.

[newbie12]

There was far less crime in America before the War on Poverty dramatically expanded the social safety net in the 1960s.

America has a significant anti-poverty safety net -- welfare payments, food stamps, Medicaid health care, public housing vouchers, earned income tax credit, child care subsidies.

[RobertKohr]

You have two separate arguments twisted into one.

1) Getting rid of the war on drugs would be a good thing. As it would save money and not cause as much crime (drug war causes crime).

2) You can spend money on education and training to reduce poverty.

Please keep your arguments separate rather than using one issue as a support for another. That 30K per prisoner could be spent on any number of things, or simply not collected from the public at all.

Personally, I agree with 1. That would be fantastic, and I think that there is a political ball rolling slowly towards that.

The second, well, we do spend a lot on education and training. I am not so sure that it does much more than make education more expensive.

[rhizome]

(drug war causes crime)

I phrase this as "the drug war is a collection of laws that are not required for the proper functioning of society."