>Liberalism is 95% about the liberal's feelings and desire to soothe the conscience. (See how easy that was?)
Yes. You say whatever you want because you want to. I happen to have spent about 15 years around philanthropists and I'm speaking from experience.
>The point is that when it comes to "government philanthropy," it is hardly ever efficient.
Yeah? ssa.gov
Wanna show me charities with 0.8% administrative costs? In general, 15% is considered really good (I hate that measure, but some people like it). 0.8% is practically unheard of.
>Private charities and donations have traditionally been the American way to help the poor, as it should be.
That was the case for the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th centuries. Because that didn't work, government began to step in.
>When you try to "force" charity upon society, the results never turn out the way you intend.
Do you have any evidence for that? You say this sort of thing a lot... whenever there's something you don't want to happen, you say that it could have unintended consequences.
Well, even if that were the case, better unintended consequences than no good consequences at all.
The War on Poverty was fought for about a decade. It cut poverty in half. Pretty decent when it comes to the intended consequences.
Social Security was supposed to keep seniors out of poverty. In the 2008 downturn, the age demographic that took the lightest hit was senior citizens. Good intended consequences.
Now, look at the private sector's retirement solutions -- IRAs and 401(k)s instead of traditional pensions. We were told that the intention was to make everyone rich. Well, today, the average person between the age of 55 and 64 that has an IRA or 401(k) has something like $30K in it. Terrible consequences. Truth is though, that the consequences we got were intended, we were just lied to about them. The banks got fat and the labor force became destabilized.
So, back to my question about Medicaid. Medicaid's administrative costs are roughly 7%... not as good as SS, but still really good.
kaiserhealthnews.org
This means that about $280 billion each year goes to actually treating Medicaid beneficiaries. I'll be really "charitable" and withdraw my statement that 15-20% of the $300 billion charitable sector goes to the poor (even though I was being generous already) because it doesn't matter for the sake of the argument. Let's say 100% of charitable contributions go to causes related to the poor. And let's be even more charitable and say that charities have 0% overhead. If Medicaid -- alone -- not SS, not Medicare, not TANF, not Section 8, nothing else -- were to disappear today and taxpayers did not have to pay anything for Medicaid, would the charitable sector balloon from $300 billion to $580 billion?
Yes/No? If yes, then great. I'm all in.
If no, then what happens to the people that were getting the $280 billion in medical services?
-Z |
