Not very successful. But it actually has nothing to do with the business cycle (which is what we're talking about when we're talking about these issues).yomomma wrote:That's an absurd claim. How successful have fiscal Democrats/Liberals been in breaking the cycle of poverty?Tribble wrote:What keeps poor people in the poor people cycle is our social structure. We have, in America, the least mobile society in the West. And it's because of our Libertarian/Morality Police policies that are made as minimal as possible by Conservatives and their Libertarian cousins.
It has nothing to do with welfare, or other social services.
What it has to do with is inflation.
To put it simply, in most Western countries the decision was made to stop economies using fiscal tools before they could reach full employment in order to hold wage inflation down. IMO Greenspan's decision to do that at the end of the Clinton presidency was the trigger for the economy up to today.
The best way to fight poverty without social welfare programs is to increase wages. But we've made the decision to hold wages down in order to fight inflation. As such, those social services are the PRICE of low inflation. Poverty is working as intended. People being unable to find decent paying full-time jobs is working as intended.
It's intentional. And yes, both the Democrats and Republicans are to blame, as well as an economic establishment that wouldn't know the proper elasticity of all sorts of things if it snapped back into their face as they're so out of touch with the real world...one based heavily around a service economy...and not still in the pre-globalization industrial world.
And that's the big problem right there. Economics as a whole hasn't realized that economies in the technological age vastly different than economies in the industrial age.