Folks have been trying this. When the poorest folks have enough money to spend on things, everyone tends to benefit - it isn't a new theory. But mostly, teaching folks this has failed. It is either that, or you need to settle on "people simply dislike giving others help, even if they reap rewards."

I think part of the issue is that the rewards aren't nearly as visible or shockingly impactful as actually being given money to thrive.

The same may not happen on a national scale if you’re circulating inside it.

Universal income promises to tax the capital economy and shift that money into the productive economy. In effect, you are taking gold that previously was sitting idle underneath the sleeping dragon and returning it to the village, increasing the real productive money supply by taking money that's just being sat upon and using it for real productive use.

Why do you think it is?

I mostly see propaganda and lies directed at stopping this from happening rather than a basic human response to it.

Like say the 'welfare queen' myth, or the trope that 'giving people money will just cause them problems or make them lazy', seems you have to really stretch to convince people that helping the poor is a bad idea and the standard human response is to help.

In my experience, these attitudes are more common among those who live around poor people than among those who don't. It's my wife who taught me the difference between "people who are good at being poor and ones who aren't." Coming from a privileged background, I had no idea.

It's a sociocultural adaptation to scarcity. Historically, whether you were in a Bangladeshi village or rural Oregon, even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to help more than a few people. And there were no rich foreigners or central government to swoop in. In that scenario, anticipating and expecting help is maladaptive. Everybody in the village needs to be incentivized to work as hard as possible for themselves before relying on anyone else.

It's great that they were all working so hard in grinding poverty and just letting the weak die or whatever, very inspirational, but being vaguely aware of reality might have served them better overall.

The New Deal agriculture subsidies must have really confused them if they didn't even know about the state government.

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/narratives/the-world-ru...

Hopefully they can ditch those unhelpful socioeconomic adaptations they picked up now they've rejoined society.

It shouldn't exactly come as a shock that the people who have to live in proximity to the results of such systems have more to say about the downsides than those who can just observe from their ivory tower and can look at some spreadsheet, do a little math and say things like "net positive" with a clear conscience. Even if you have very good results the former group is simply going to be much more aware of the tradeoffs than the latter who will at best only know second hand.

Potato, potahto

This wildly underestimates how rich some people are in the US. For example, just 5% of the wealth from only the 20 wealthiest Americans would cover all federal, state and local funding for housing support in a year.

Then I wondered, "what kind of tax could cover that cost?" and I found a list of net worths and saw that about 5% of the wealth of the top 20 US billionaires covered that entire spending for a year. There's much more compelling comparisons to be made but I didn't have all day.

This doesn't happen every time as is demonstrated by this study, but history has plenty of example where it has and hasn't worked. The open question is to figure out when it work and why it doesn't work in other situations.

Personally I view the two major factors to be post pandemic shipping costs and the Ukraine. A meaningful response from government could have headed this off but instead we're seeing energy producers hit record profits while large parts of society are going to be unable turn their heating on over the winter and on top of that rising interest rates are going to see every other aspect of their budget become even more expensive as well.

Actually, it partially is. One third of the current inflation is demand driven according to the Fed (i.e. stimulus checks, unemployment payments, above-market wages due to unemployment checks, etc.) [1]. There are also supply shortages but it's hard to disentangle what part of the supply shortages are due to shipping costs vs. having labor shortages due to said unemployment checks.

We're seeing a lot of the price pressures calm down now as coincidentally, the labor force grows back to pre-pandemic size. [2]

> A meaningful response from government could have headed this off

Like what, putting a price cap on oil? That doesn't work and you and I both know it.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/demand-issues-account-one...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-steak-is-getting-cheaper-a...

Yours source doesn’t mention these at all. Unemployment stimulus ended last year at the latest. It mentions supply being half the cause, and demand, being a third.

This doesn’t deny your point, but your reasoning is unfounded. When are people going to stop blaming stimulus and unemployment that stopped happening years ago at this point?

Because even though it stopped happening a year and a half ago, a lot of stuff was closed down still so people weren't spending yet. They were saving. Americans built up $2.7T in "excess" savings [1]. That money is being spent, and has been spent, over the last 6 months to a year. Notice that inflation really only started up after re-opening.

The article gives two examples, one of a public policy employee who got an extra $500/mo from the pause in student loan payments and built up substantial savings, and a family that was laid off but received equivalent funds from unemployment, and ended up with more money than they previously had due to stimulus+child tax credit. The family ended up spending money on dance/karate lessons for their kids.

So not only did a lot of people not seek alternative employment (e.g. in a different field) when laid off due to inflated unemployment benefits, but they also ended up being able to spend more than they could previously afford due to stimulus. What does that additional spending require? More labor, which there was a shortage of due to unemployment payments.

If it was only energy costs and supply chain that was causing inflation, we'd see substantially decreased consumption and few wage hikes. Wage hikes are driven by labor's supply relative to demand, not by cost of living (although CoL can affect supply). We are seeing relatively high demand relative to supply and increased bargaining power for a lot of labor, which implies decreased supply. Guess where that decrease came from?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-finances-got-stronger...

The two major one that seems to make most sense to me is "net importing vs net exporter", and the other is the theory about low supply. For the first one, if a country is importing more than exporting, then the imports is being paid over time by the exports. Increasing the amount of money in such country does nothing since its the exported products that pay for the imports, not the currency.

The second theory is that in periods where demand exceed that of supply. In those situation people will bid to buy the limited resource, and if you increase the amount of money circulating then the bids will simply go up for the same limited resource. Natural gas is being used as an example in Europe, where the only way to reduce inflation is to reduce consumption. Reduced consumption however slows economic growth and thus a conflict between inflation and growth.

I wasn't suggesting a general explanation for all cases of inflation. I'm saying that the current inflationary period has some easily identifiable causes and the measures that central banks take against general background inflation are actively harmful in this situation and instead should be tackled by government directly.

The second theory is the closest explanation for the current inflationary period and the measures are perfectly fine if you're talking about curbing the consumption of luxury goods and services. It falls down when you're targeting the necessities of survival because at that point you're effectively choosing to kill off some of your population because of a refusal to regulate.

That's why we have means testing at all: not to prevent people from needlessly getting benefits, but to prevent those who are undeserving of them from getting them.

A lot of things make more sense when you understand this imo, and stop trying to frame other people's views into your own moral framework (giving you the mistaken impression that they're hypocrites about it).

Now that gun-pointing redistribution programs are fully entrenched, some people are still trying to have some say - ANY say - in where their money goes.

It's a good thing I didn't say it was then, isn't it? I'll help you, if you really want to try to strawman what I said, it would be closer to: "the conservative perspective is that bad people deserve to be poor."

But I do think "poor people stay poor" is the net effect of conservative policies, because they prioritize other things over lifting people out of poverty, as you're doing in this post.

Instead they focus on lifting the "right people" out of poverty. Because that's the main reason to be able to pick and choose your charity: to make sure it goes to the people you think deserve it, or will use it right, or so on.

(Smarter conservative arguments focus on utilitarian claims that [forms of] redistribution reduce incentives to grow the economy and build houses, rather than dubious moral claims that Uncle Sam pointing his tax collectors at Steve is somehow more immoral than Steve pointing his bailiffs at tenants)

What really disappoints me is that Marxist don't follow a very simple idea, let profits and capital gains reach zero through market forces. That would fulfill the spirit but not the letter of communism.

Wealth gaps are a sign of wealthy societies — the question is wealth distribution, not distance from the lowest to highest.

Reducing the wealth gap is crucial, I think you're severely misunderstanding.

Way more effective would be caps on rent, but for some reason politicians don't want to use this tool....

[1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deaths-of-despair-effe...

Who is going to suffer because of the enormous covid handouts and subsequent inflation?

It was nice while it happened but a lot of rich people really benefited and a lot of poor people are going to go through the worst consequences of inflation and recession.

Don't know how it played where you live, but in my country, most covid handouts went to the rich, not to the poor.

1. Cash was given to companies they could then give to the people, instead of straight to the people.

2. Cheap/free loans were given to companies/rich people, not poor people, because poor people can't pay off loans so nobody gives them any.

The insane stock market profits were the result of this - rich people getting excess money. If it went to the poor people, they'd buy food and shelter, not stonks.

And much expanded unemployment payments, +$600 and +$300 *weekly on top of normal unemployment for long periods, as well as significantly expanded eligibility for who could get it and for how long.

Plenty of people made more money unemployed for significant amounts of time than they did with their jobs pre-pandemic.

Something like 10% of the population was on unemployment for a good while.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett...

They didn't say anything that would let you conclude either of those things in the article, one they said the exact opposite of. Not read the whole paper yet though.

What is clear however, that increased prices for labor, wheat and energy, combined with post-covid logistics issues, have very clearly increased consumer pricing.

Or perhaps another way to say it is this: cash doesn’t matter. It’s all about capital. If you want to reduce inequality, give the poor some capital. Unfortunately, I think they’ll likely sell their capital to buy food or pay rent.

When the government was handing out money indiscriminately to everyone right after Covid, we just put the money in the bank. That helped us. But it didn’t stimulate the economy. When they gave the same amount of money to some people we knew that lost their jobs, they spent it on necessities - helping the economy.

Giving money to people who will spend it obviously helps everyone. But there have been plenty of studies showing that people will hurt themselves financially even if it will help other people. Especially if it helps “them”.