**** Elections thread *****

[spoonitnow]

wut?

Slums happen BECAUSE there is no welfare. We don't have slums in the UK, and as best I know they don't exist in USA, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal... the list of countries with slums will be very similar to the list of countries that have no basic welfare, places like Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, Bangladesh, India... do you suppose this is a coincidence?

The only way to make a slum no longer a slum is to demolish it, and you can only do that when there's no people living there.

I don't know if that correlation would be meaningful in a regression (it probably wouldn't be), but I do know that economic theory describes why welfare is very unlikely to cause increasing prosperity.

I want to interject with the following:

There are are lot of different types of welfare, and there are lots of different types of incentives that can come along with those different types. A safety net for people who are in a shitty situation that's not necessarily (or completely) their own fault is one thing. Providing incentives for people to continue depending on welfare that are larger than the incentives to become a productive member of society is something different.

While I think that the former should be provided by charity instead of forced taxation, it's important to note the differences. Most people are much more okay with the former than the latter.