The ultimate productive capacity of any economy is in people.
Invest in human capital, and reap the rewards. Fail to invest, and you will also reap what you sow.
Anyhoo, I gotta get to work. Be back on my lunch break.
Sounds great, the problem is that history has demonstrated, time and again, that allowing people to reep the rewards of their individual productivity and ingenuity, by far, is the greatest engine for an economy's productivity. I have not seen a cost/benefit study of public assistance/investment that shows such correlation.
I didn't know that RandomGuy was an unmarried white woman.
That's pretty much what I said.
Allowing people to invest in themselves and their children can only benefit us as a nation.
Tax benefits support parents who can set up college trusts for their children, college tuition breaks are available to advantaged families who can lock in tuition costs by prepaying, and free postsecondary education is available to affluent retirees who as "guest students" on college campuses across the country take tuition-free college courses. Yet policymakers have continued to ignore the potential education has to help welfare recipients achieve similar goals.
a student on welfare who wants and needs income must get a job, even if taking a job forces her to leave school. While the President is sounding the theme that the country needs a better educated workforce, caseworkers are telling welfare recipients to find jobs and drop out of college. It is estimated that community colleges will lose up to 60 percent of their welfare students as states are mandated to put larger proportions of their caseloads to work (Ritter, 1997).
New Jersey reluctantly releases welfare study
The study concludes that additional cash benefits have no effect on the birth rate of women who receive public assistance. Mothers who received extra benefits per child and those whose monthly benefits remained the same had equal birth rates.
Iowa Welfare Study Shows Mixed Results
80 percent of the heads of families found employment shortly after leaving welfare, but one in four of these was no longer working 12 months later...
Why did people on welfare lose the jobs they had? Kauff says the primary reason was due to physical or mental health problems. To combat the job loss, "policymakers will need to pay attention to that [factor] as well as child care and transportation," she says
The Labor Market Consequences of an Inadequate Education
Summary:
“The income and tax revenue losses associated with a lack of high school completion are already large… While it is difficult and expensive to improve educational attainment among those at-risk of not completing high school, as a society it will also become increasingly costly not to.”
A high school dropout earns about $260,000 over a lifetime than a high school graduate and pays about $60,000 less in taxes.
Annual losses exceed $50 billion in federal and state income taxes for all 23,000,000 U.S. high school dropouts ages 18-67 -- enough to cover the annual discretionary expenditures of the U.S. Department of Education.
America loses $192 billion – 1.6% of GDP -- in combined income and tax revenue losses with each cohort of 18 year olds who never complete high school. Increasing the educational attainment of that cohort by one year would recoup nearly half those losses.
She's black.
Damn, you ferreted out my real iden y. I am Cleopatra Jones.
Let me know where Doodlebug is and no one gets hurt. I'm gonna school that sucka.
Ah yes, the static world of the economist.
IF EVERYONE had a college degree, , a Masters degree - some people would still have to have the jobs. Then you'd have to find a different criteria on which to base lifetime earnings shortfalls.
Those kinds of studies are silly.
As my wife is a professor at a large state school in PA - one that is not particularly selective, believe me when I say that right now we are graduating many many people from college who aren't going to make all that much money. The trends you cite are going to change. People without the academic for ude to earn a degree are getting them anyway; professors are dumbing down classes - standards are lowering. The schism between high school and college graduates in terms of income earning potential is going to shift to college degrees from schools that offer, basically 13 - 17 grade, and real universities. Tradesmen, however, are going to make out real good.
I'd also like to see the disparity between people that graduated from private vs. public schools. Bet it's dramatic.
RG, what is the real purpose of welfare? No where in all the
items you have posted does it spell it out. Is it suppose to be from
cradle to grave. A helping hand. Tell me what you think the purpose
of welfare should be.
Would that be a function of the school, or a function of the income level of the parents?
Poverty tends to be "sticky" for the reasons outlined in the article.
Yes, people still will have to do crappy jobs. But people with kids should be given every opportunity to get out of poverty, because those kids will be tomorrows criminals that require $50k per year each in prison costs.
Republi s don't want to spend tax money on poor kids, but will throw trillions at a prison system without batting an eyelash.
Seems to me that this is a very inefficient use of money.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
