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Kako Ito

Public insurance and the least well-off | Lane Kenworthy - 6 views

  • Public insurance also boosts the living standards of the poor. It increases their income, and it provides them with services for which they bear relatively little of the cost.
  • Critics charge that public social programs tend to hurt the poor in the long run by reducing employment and economic growth. Are they correct?
  • Does public insurance erode self-reliance? Is a large private safety net as helpful to the least well-off as a large public one? Are universal programs more effective than targeted ones? Are income transfers the key, or are services important too?
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  • Once again we see no indication that public insurance generosity has had a damaging effect
  • Note also that the employment rate increased in nearly all of the countries during this period. On average, it rose by nine percentage points between 1979 and 2013. That’s not what we would expect to see if generous public insurance programs were inducing large numbers of able adults to withdraw from the labor market
  • What we see in the chart is that countries with more generous public insurance programs tend to have less material deprivation.
  • With globalization, the advance of computers and robots, increased pressure from shareholders for short-run profit maximization, union weakening, and other shifts, wages have been under pressure. Couple this with the fact that many people at the low end of the income ladder have labor market disadvantages — disability, family constraint, geographic vulnerability to structural unemployment — and we have a recipe for stagnation in the market incomes of the poor.
  • here’s a good reason for these shifts: government provision offers economies of scale and scope, which reduces the cost of a good or service and thereby makes it available to many people who couldn’t or wouldn’t get it on their own.
  • Government provides more insurance now than it used to. All of us, not just some, are dependent on it. And life for almost everyone is better because of it
  • hese expenditures are encouraged by government tax advantages.22 But they do little to help people on the bottom of the ladder, who often work for employers that don’t provide retirement or health benefits.
  • To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. Does that hurt their poor? Not much. The tax rates increase with household income, so much of the tax clawback hits middle- and upper-income households.
  • Another difference is that public services such as schooling, childcare, medical care, housing, and transportation are more plentiful and of better quality for the poor in the Nordic countries. Public services reduce deprivation and free up income to be spent on other needs. It’s difficult to measure the impact of services on living standards, but one indirect way is to look at indicators of material deprivation,
  • Targeted transfers are directed (sometimes disproportionately, sometimes exclusively) to those with low incomes and assets, whereas universal transfers are provided to most or all citizens.
  • Targeted programs are more efficient at reducing poverty; each dollar or euro or kroner transferred is more likely to go to the least well-off. Increased targeting therefore could be an effective way to maintain or enhance public insurance in the face of diminished resources.
  • “the more we target benefits to the poor … the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality.”
  • Korpi and Palme found that the pattern across eleven affluent nations supported the hypothesis that greater use of targeting in transfers yields less redistribution
  • The hypothesis that targeting in social policy reduces political support and thereby lessens redistributive effort is a sensible one. Yet the experience of the rich countries in recent decades suggests reason to question it. Targeting has drawbacks relative to universalism: more stigma for recipients, lower take-up rates, and possibly less social trust.44 But targeting is less expensive. As pressures to contain government expenditures mount, policy makers may therefore turn to greater use of targeting. That may not be a bad thing.
  • Public insurance programs boost the incomes of the least well-off and improve their material well-being. If such programs are too generous, this benefit could be offset by reduced employment or economic growth, but the comparative evidence suggests that the world’s rich nations haven’t reached or exceeded the tipping point.
  • Spending lots of money on social protection is not in and of itself helpful to the poor. Total social expenditures in the United States are greater than in Denmark and Sweden, because the US has a large private welfare state. But relatively little of America’s private social spending reaches the poor.
  • Public services are an important antipoverty tool. Their benefit doesn’t show up in income data, but they appear to play a key role in reducing material hardship. Services expand the sphere of consumption for which the cost is zero or minimal. And they help to boost the earnings and capabilities of the poor by enhancing human capital, assisting with job search and placement, and facilitating work-family balance.
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    Through this article I have gained a deeper insight in how public expenditures and public goods promote wealth equality in a society. "Public services are an important antipoverty tool."
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    This article really helped me deepen my understanding of redistributing wealth downwards. I never thought about it, but things like social security, affirmative action programs, and public education are actually insurances that attempt to provide everybody with more equality when it comes to living standards as well as basic human rights.
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    Yeah, it is a very common argument to say that social expenditures disincentives workers; interesting analysis on how wealthy countries haven't reached the "tipping point." I am curious to see what happens to labor force participation and employment in the next decades as robots further divorce economic growth from labor supply/demand.
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    Cool theory in regards to "the tipping point". Interesting, and solid criticism of large social expenditures. Wonder how socialists view this, as opposed to free-market economists.
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    "Public services are an important antipoverty tool. Their benefit doesn't show up in income data, but they appear to play a key role in reducing material hardship." INteresting to see the statistics and how social expenditures help reduce poverty and the wealth gap.
samoshay

Why Britain is not so unequal after all - 15 views

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    Super interesting article; ties in to the week's big themes; I highly recommend a read.
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    This article was interesting because it was analyzing many of the aspects of political economy that we have read/discussed this past week. I also was very interested by the graph about a single person's welfare benefits over a life span because I had never seen information about this topic displayed in a graphic like this one.
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    This article brought really counter intuitive points up - though backed by data, specifically how inequality at an instance is often lower than over a lifetime because people do not remain incredibly poor for most of their lives.
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    This article points out how much an income can vary over a lifetime which is super important because it illegitimizes a lot of data collected on a yearly basis in that id does not incorporate the full picture or provide context. This question of legitimacy could serve as an argument for people pro and against welfare because they can disregard data collected based on the idea that income can vary, making it unable to represent current conditions accurately without considering other variables.
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    This article was really informative and I really liked the visual components. The article was easy to read and very clear about the how the British taxation system redistributes income downwards.
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    As simple as it seems, the idea of government taxation in your youth and "getting back" in your retirement seems to have lost attention on many political platforms. In addition, it is quite interesting too look at not just the inequality gap, but who actually is a part of the top middle and bottom.
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    I found it very interesting that the poorest in a given year, are not necessarily the poorest for their entire lives. As well as the point that income is distributed over one's lifetime, versus given in one particular moment--> which helps redistribute wealth, instead of letting it go stagnant.
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    Super interesting how little effect cutting or expanding government benefits has on long term poverty.
anishakaul

EU offers olive branch to easterners on migrant crisis | Reuters - Firstpost - 3 views

  • we can redistribute asylum seekers from other countries
Kay Bradley

Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.
  • A low-end worker may not have a high school diploma and is often barely literate or numerate while also struggling with a dependency; more than seven million Americans also have suspended driver’s licenses for failing to pay child support or court-related debt, meaning that they may not reliably show up at work.
  • If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
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  • First, well-paying jobs disappeared, partly because of technology and globalization but also because of political pressure on unions and a general redistribution of power toward the wealthy and corporations.
  • Second, there was an explosion of drugs — oxycodone, meth, heroin, crack cocaine and fentanyl — aggravated by the reckless marketing of prescription painkillers by pharmaceutical companies.Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.
  • Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools. Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
  • we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children.
  • Job training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
  • The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
  • For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario.
  • Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
  • Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending, according to the George Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • We need the government to step up and jump-start nationwide programs in early childhood education, job retraining, drug treatment and more.
  • Nicholas Kristof
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