Voting Rights for the Poor

Just this past evening I was watching videos on my YouTube subscription feed when I saw this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL0V9AGhOW0 about this story:

http://www.ksla.com/story/23679489/walmart-shelves-in-springhill-mansfield-cleared-in-ebt-glitch

 

http://swordattheready.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/food-stamp-shutdown-threat-obama-to-incite-riots-chaos/

 

 http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post--food-stamp-glitch-leads-to-wal-mart-stampede

Watch the video; the other links are just there to provide news-type sources for those interested.

One of the top comments on the video was:

“looter culture.

just wait until the parasites can't use those cards at all...or their welfare checks don't come....of the cable and electricity doesn't work....

just wait and see how "civilized" American "civilization" has become. the only thing preventing complete animal barbarism in the US is a thin layer of FREE MONEY” 

By Knowthingman.

I am beginning to believe that the poor should not vote. I know, that’s elitist and hateful of me and I’m just being racist and so on, but let me explain myself.

Something I’ve realized is that you can never understand being poor until you have experienced two things. You need to have actually been poor, and I mean poor as in deciding which bills you’ll pay this month. And you also need to have advanced out of being poor. The reason for that in envy, which Bill Whittle explains superbly in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4

You need to actually be poor to know what it’s like, and you need to not be poor to understand it better.

Not having to work or pay taxes, getting your necessities for free and with money left over for things you want but don’t need leaves you envious, ungrateful, selfish and greedy. The nature of envy and the actions of these people when they are not limited makes a powerful argument to me that they will use their votes to abuse the power of the state.

Under the current system, if you do not pay income tax or did not before you retired I do not believe you should be allowed to vote. If you want a vote you should get a job; you need to provide support for yourself and have a stake in the outcome of the country before you get a say in it.

Demand driven economy?

A couple of months ago a classmate and I were arguing about the effect of tax breaks for the rich and he said something that I couldn't answer at the time. He said that the economy was demand driven. He meant that tax breaks for higher-income businesses do not match how the economy works. Rather, his point was that we should give tax breaks to the lower-incomes and the middle class, let them keep more of their money, and they will use that money to buy products from the businesses.

While all that is technically true, the conclusion that the economy is demand driven is horribly wrong, but my concern here is this idea of "demand-driven".

Obviously it is a play against so-called "supply-side" economics, which are supposed to claim that when the suppliers in an economy do well (with more money) they will increase production and hire more workers and everybody will be better off. So does supply create demand, or does demand create supply?

It is easy to see that producers only rarely create markets for the products they want to make, but rather fill needs with their skills and products. The demand is already there, and they answer it; when there is no demand, businesses fail. But what is the policy that this supports?

According to the principle of demand driven economics, to get an economy to grow faster you just need to increase demand. Demand is how much of a product are people trying to buy at a particular price: the lower the price, the more of it people buy. So how about price controls? Lowering the cost of widgets makes more people able to afford them and more people who can afford to buy more of them. With all the extra widgets that people are buying, or the increasing demand, supply of widgets should increase to meet that demand. Therefore, price controls should increase the number of widgets that everyone has, and are the answer to home-ownership, affordable HeathCare and starving children.

But price controls do not achieve that. On the contrary, every time that price controls have been instituted, shortages have occurred and not corrected themselves. When low-cost apartments get their prices reduced by price controls, the number of homeless increase and the construction of high-cost apartments goes up. The same thing happens to food, gas, toilet paper: nothing is exempt from the occurence of shortages after price controls are enacted.

That's because businesses and people do not supply in order to meet demand. They supply in order to profit from demand. Used car dealers aren't simply meeting demand because demand exists, but because they can make money off of it. Price controls do not control the cost of supplying something; they just reduce how much you can make off of selling it. And when it is not worth selling something, people do not sell it, leaving unmet demand.

But price controls are not the only thing that leaves unmet demands. If people are not willing to pay enough higher for widgets than the cost of producing widgets, people will not make them just to sell at a loss. Cost limits how much of what is made. And taxes are a cost.

Raising taxes on businesses increases the prices they need to charge in order to make the profits necessary to justify their existence. Reducing taxes reduces those costs, allowing competition to lower the prices.

This is not to say that the economy is driven by supply. Rather, it is a supply and demand driven economy. To leave out one is like leaving one blade of a pair of scissors unused while the other tries to cut something. You need both or it won't function properly.