Did Brazil Find the Solution to Poverty?
Scape @ Sat Sep 25, 2021 3:37 pm
housewife @ Mon Sep 27, 2021 9:09 am
Imagine that if you don’t treat people like criminals they don’t act like criminals.
I was talking to a man who had been told that he couldn’t get on disability till he sold all his toys, vehicles, used up his retirement money and sold his home. He has been shamed for becoming sick. Now he’s in a small low income apartment with nothing to his to his name!
Scape @ Mon Sep 27, 2021 1:23 pm
And it's not just welfare but disability as well. EVERY MONTH as someone who has a long term, chronic condition you have to resubmit reports confirming you still have the condition in order to qualify for assistance and if you do not file they close you file permanently and you can't reapply even if you are still crippled.
This is paper shuffling for paper shuffling sake. You are punishing people for something they have no means to rectify.
Scape @ Mon Sep 27, 2021 1:25 pm
Add to that if you have an open file and TRY to work they claw back the payments if you make anything more than minimum wage. Who does this help??
housewife @ Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:34 am
No one is really helped with the system we have. The dollar for dollar claw back doesn’t help either. Between that and the possibility of getting worse there’s no incentive to even try. I idea that people only get help once they are destitute isn’t helpful. Not too mention the paperwork and the years it takes to get on.
JaredMilne @ Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:58 pm
Lula da Silva's achievements were amazing, and while this program certainly helped, I also wonder about another element of Brazil's economic policy-namely, the private sector's role in achieving national ends. Here's a piece from the Globe and Mail in 2013:
$1:
Brazil has embraced a "Greater Brazil" model of industrial development to accelerate economic growth and fill gaps where the private sector isn't yet active. "They are more willing to use private sector industry and businesses as a tool for national ends than we are in Canada," Mr. Dade said. "That causes some friction."
Mr. Ciuriak said Brazil's industrial policies are largely outward rather than inward-looking. "It's not old industry protectionism, but it is interventionist." Brazil, he said, can't afford to be overly protectionist because it needs to import so many of the components used by its nascent industries, such as aerospace.
And we have a long history of doing exactly that here in Canada with everything from railroads to electricity grids...or at least we did before we surrendered a lot of power to unelected, unaccountable trade bureaucrats in free trade agreements.
Brazil does all this while achieving a huge reduction in poverty. Could it be that marshaling private sector initiative as a nationalist tool could be...*gasp* a good thing?