Merit

Okay, I misread Chris's proposition, and thought that it was capped.

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Well why not give everyone $50,000 instead?

Or a cool million? Or their own money print?

Just from first principles, it seems weird that poverty- a very complicated problem- could be 'solved' by such an easy solution.

Actually I'm not exactly clear on the problem. I think the problem isn't that poor people have no money. That's the obvious empirical symptom, but not necessarily the root cause. Poverty has many causes, from insanity to lack of motivation to no jobs in your town.

Poverty is also contextual. We're all fucking rich, comparitively speaking, because we've all obviously got damn computers.

Knowledge is fucking free, which is amazing. Anyone can learn anything they want here. Poverty is an educational problem and a behavioral problem.

So I didn't see Brokeback Mountain, but I read the New Yorker short story it was based off of. And honestly I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the tortured gay cowboy, because if he'd just moved out of the ranch to say, the Castro District in SF, he wouldn't have to be tortured anymore. His problem really wasn't that he was gay, it was that he didn't know enough to know that gay was okay, somewhere else in the world. He was just too lazy to move off the fucking ranch.

Employment isn't 100% how smart you are though, it's also about CHA and who you know, obviously. Meeting potential employers still isn't a problem that $xx,xxx in the pocket is likely to fix on a wide scale.

Acutally I think the real underlying problem is kids. If you don't have kids, you feel more free to drift around, city to city or country to country until you find work. Once you have kids, not only can you not move, you have a lot more expenses.

I've got another idea that would fix two problems. Draft the poor into the military. Adjust income for age (older people should make more money because they've had more time to invest, more time for education and experience), and if your age-adjusted income is below a certain level- into the Forces with you for a year. Even grampa could be useful somewhere I'm sure. Then, you've got a year grace period to increase your funds, or it's back you go.

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A private foundation gives me about $40000 a year to do whatever I want. That pays my salary. But they don't just give that money away. You apply for it. And your application is evaluated based on merit, track record, and what you plan on doing with the money. Even just the act of filling out a damn application is a hoop that has to be jumped through to get the money.

And I can't just blow it all off and have a great time. Actually I could do that, but then the next time I apply for such a thing, I wouldn't have much to show for it, and wouldn't get re-funded.

My point is that a competitve, merit-based application process is a fantastic solution. If you're worried about giving money to drug abusers- repeatedly giving them money to fuel their habit- then, just make it so they won't get re-funded. First time's free, then you've got to show what you've done with it.

But... it seems that on a grand scale, the current economic system is sort of a competitive, merit-based application process. (Especially if you factor in unemployment checks and welfare.) Right?