Watch a Live Debate on the Welfare State's Impact on the Poor

Neera Tanden from the Center for American Progress vs. Tarren Bragdon from the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Fifteen million able-bodied adults on government welfare would have a better chance at economic betterment if they were taken off welfare.

That's the subject of a debate happening right now at the Soho Forum between Neera Tanden from the Center for American Progress and Tarren Bragdon from the Foundation for Government Accountability. Watch below, and submit questions in the Facebook comments. We'll read aloud a couple of the best during the Q&A session.

Comments

[Don't look at me.]

Fifteen million able-bodied adults on government welfare would have a better chance at economic betterment if they were taken off welfare.
So why don't they do it themselves?

[Get To Da Chippah]

I DESERVE FREE MONEY!

[Tony]

Being poor means you make bad judgments. Like choosing to be poor for a start.

What's impressive is how much unfairness and misery libertarians can hand-wave away with that little bit of circular, sanctimonious reasoning.

[MarkLastname]

That's not the argument, moron. 80% of Americans will be in the bottom quintile at some point (mostly when they're young). There's actually quite a bit of mobility in the US, and the notion of a nearly fixed upper or lower class in this country is a leftist myth.

People who end up poor or stay poor, however, are generally the ones who make bad judgments. Unfortunately, it's largely hereditary, both because IQ is ~50% genetic and because bad habits are often passed on from parent to child.

But anyway, tell us again about how pro-science you are while denying that intelligence is partly genetic. Or denying the basic logic (not to mention empirical economic data) that when you pay people to make poor choices, it tends to eliminate incentives not to make poor choices.

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[JeremyR]

How about this - stop giving welfare to corporations first?

I mean, in my state, people get like $5 a day from food stamps if they can prove they are poor. And they are only eligible for 3 months unless they get a job.

No one is living lavishly on that.

Meanwhile, our local hockey team just for a ton of money for renovations for their stadium. While I realize that Reason is against those things, that's really only the most public of government to corporation handouts. There are so many more

[Don't look at me.]

List more than one.

[Sevo]

"How about this - stop giving welfare to corporations first?"

How about wee stop entirely first?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I'm glad to see Sen. Sanders included in the debate.

[Jerryskids]

Might be a good place to mention it's George Mason's birthday.

Every petty-officer of government? assumes a dispensing-power over the laws?[so] a man can have no security in his property.

Supplying the public-wants by seizures, is? unequal, oppressive and unjust; being in fact, only another name for public-robbery.

[Laws] have taken away all security for private-property, and ruined many...by encouraging knavery and legalizing fraud, [they] have corrupted and depraved the morals of the people.

[Tony]

Property is the most intrusive legal fiction of all. But it's OK, not only OK but worth sacrificing all others on the altar of, because, I dunno, you like owning shit and government should give you want you want?

[KBeckman]

So it's not the concept of property just the idea that anyone but the government can control it?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

The Ukrainians discovered just how big a legal fiction property was.

[MarkLastname]

"Property is the most intrusive legal fiction of all."
Then why do you bitch incessantly about what your febrile mind imagines people are owed by the taxpayer? Jesus Christ, your nonstop whining about the unfair distribution of property assumes a definition of property, that people are entitled to something which was wrongly taken or withheld from them by someone else. That's a notion of property.

You're not 'deconstructing socially constructed phenomena.' You're spewing nihilistic horseshit that, if correct, renders all rules or principles moot and morally meaningless, then you're supplanting your own (equally socially constructed) framework in its place and hoping no one notices that you refuted your own worldview along with the one you're trying to refute.

Is it even within the realm of possibility to make an actual, internally coherent argument? "It's all, like socially constructed man, by, like, the powers that be" doesn't logically lead to the necessity or desirability of your idiotic pseudo-socialist, system.

[Microaggressor]

"Private property is theft, maaan."
/retreats into commieblock that gradually falls apart because nobody owns it (except the state)
/spends another evening without food because food production has been collectivized, nobody may own it (except the state) so nobody may profit from it, so only the bare minimum gets produced

Tony is a treasure.

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