HighOnAcid is certainly earning his handle...
36 million Americans - about 1 in 8 people - live in poverty. 15 million live in severe poverty, with incomes less than half of the poverty level. Typically,
ONE-THIRD of all Americans will be classified as poor for at least 2 months in a year.
If your moral code allows you to dismiss this issue, common sense and self-preservation should not. There are over 2 million Americans in prison, which at a cost of $20,000 per head (the average poor
family lives on less than $9,000 per year), totals $40 billion a year. We have the biggest prison population and the highest ratio of our population in prison: more than so-called repressive regimes such as those of Russia and China.
Since crime rates are directly linked to poverty and specifically to employment levels, if your "solutions" were invoked, we could expect to see more people in prison and more cost. And how long before crime reaches a level where it is more accurately called civil disorder? As the British have learned in Northern Ireland, if you effectively abandon a large part of your population, those people will eventually recognize that it is against their own interests to continue to support the system.
There is a small kernel of truth from which the original poster drew his foolish conclusions: for example, it is true that the prison population has been increased by the imprisonment of growing numbers of drug offenders. But many people are put away for drug offences because they are easier to prosecute than many of the crimes they commit to support their habits. Even assuming lower drug costs came with legitimization, crime would rise if all these people were back on the streets.
Likewise the medical issue: do some proper research. Less than 5% of the cost of our healthcare system relates to malpractice insurance and although GW likes to quote from a couple of out-dated and now discredited surveys, there is no evidence to suggest that limiting or even preventing claims would reduce costs at all without also reducing the effectiveness of our healthcare system still further. The issue is merely an emotive one to divert our attention from the reality that we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world and yet it ranks as one of the worst among industrialized nations.
Employment too. Throw everyone off welfare and they will have to fend for themselves. A real vote catcher, but unfortunately one which ignores the fact that we don't have enough jobs! Two-thirds of officially poor families already have at least one parent in employment and if we forced a few million people to work or starve, the main impact would be to reduce unskilled wages still further and put more people into poverty.
And just as throwing money at policing does not reduce crime, throwing money at education does not improve it. Yes, teachers are perhaps underpaid, but that is only one - probably not the main - of our problems. Like our healthcare system, our education system is the most expensive and again, one of the least functional. You can blame most of that on a desire for less government which actually produces more government - three levels of it, national, state and local - with, like it or not, local boards of education being responsible for most of what is wrong with our schools.
Etc. Etc.
People who support simplistic, emotionally appealing solutions, rarely have any real interest in solutions at all. Certainly they are usually totally disinterested in facts. Fine, but does it never occur to such people that there has to be a reason these solutions have never been adopted? In fact, if they knew a little history, they would discover simple solutions have been tried (in Nazi Germany for example) and failed.
http://www.usccb.org/cchd/povertyusa/povfacts.shtml
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...-prisons_x.htm