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vivianbear
04-17-2008, 08:39 PM
^^ yes, I don't mean to say that all of the poor in this country are full of free-floating rage and ignorance. Many are justifiably more concerned with feeding and clothing their children than anything else. You know, when they aren't shooting possums or making crystal meth. ;)


:laughing: OMG..I'm reading this and fantasizing about watching Obama say it on CNN...like, "Really, everyone just misunderstood..."
All I know is I'm voting for Obama if he's the nominee, Hillary if Obama is the running-mate and McCain if Obama is not included as an option. Lots of reasons, I see more coming every day.

Melonie
04-18-2008, 02:53 AM
Jester and Kitten, I would argue that you're both touching on the edges of the REAL problem, which is the 'moral hazard' created by our present system interacting with the human nature of those who would use / abuse that system. If the system basically guarantees that a person will be provided a 'minimum acceptable standard of living' by the gov't (i.e. by taxpayers), that person then faces a 'moral' decision of whether or not to work 16 hours per week and stay at that 'minimum acceptable standard of living', or working 40 hours per week and improving that 'minimum acceptable standard of living' by some marginal amount. 20 years ago, social 'morality' or social stigma or whatever provided some driving force towards working 40 hours versus collecting benefits, but today it is increasingly a cold, hard cash decision.

The same gov't created 'moral hazard' is also a part of mortgage bailout plans, is a huge part of proposed national health care plans, etc. as generally proposed by O and H. These actually increase 'moral hazard' on both ends. They first improve the 'minimum acceptable standard of living' available to benefit recipients. They then reduce the standard of living differential available to a person who makes the effort to work full time, by increasing taxes on the full time worker in order to fund benefits provided to others who choose to only work 16 hours per week ! American social welfare policies and taxation policies have already created a financial 'dead zone' ...where reduction / loss of social welfare benefit eligibility basically ensure that a person earning $20k per year and a person earning $30k per year enjoy essentially the SAME standard of living. Expansion of gov't benefit programs, and increasing taxes to pay for it, as proposed by O and H, will simply expand that 'dead zone' up to $40k or $50k annual income levels.

bem401
04-18-2008, 05:19 AM
The reason the government programs are a farce is because they are disincentives to hard work. The government is willing to provide a certain standard of living to people who do nothing. For example, if the government will provide someone with a standard of living equivalent to $18K, why would that person work at all if all they could make was $20-$22K. To put it in SC terms, if you are a dancer who makes $500 a night in the club and someone was willing to pay you $400 to stay home, I sincerely doubt you'd go in for that extra $100. Its human nature. The government just shouldn't provide that type of incentive.

Sophia_Starina
04-18-2008, 12:11 PM
The reason the government programs are a farce is because they are disincentives to hard work. The government is willing to provide a certain standard of living to people who do nothing. For example, if the government will provide someone with a standard of living equivalent to $18K, why would that person work at all if all they could make was $20-$22K. To put it in SC terms, if you are a dancer who makes $500 a night in the club and someone was willing to pay you $400 to stay home, I sincerely doubt you'd go in for that extra $100. Its human nature. The government just shouldn't provide that type of incentive.



How about the people who want to work... or the people that don't want to be dancers? I assume that's the majority of the American population. Should I draw you a venn diagram?

Working is part of human nature. I dance because I love it (not all the time of course) and I don't want to be doing anything else. People who do what they love can't be kept home for $18,000 a year.

bem401
04-18-2008, 12:46 PM
Should I draw you a venn diagram?

Draw me all the Venn Diagrams you want (I'm a math teacher). The fact would remain that the overwhelming majority of people, if offered say 80% of their daily pay to stay home, would in fact stay home.

This is what the government social programs do. They make it possible to live nearly the same quality of life while not having to work so hard and in some cases not do a damn thing.

Sophia_Starina
04-18-2008, 01:31 PM
Draw me all the Venn Diagrams you want (I'm a math teacher). The fact would remain that the overwhelming majority of people, if offered say 80% of their daily pay to stay home, would in fact stay home.

This is what the government social programs do. They make it possible to live nearly the same quality of life while not having to work so hard and in some cases not do a damn thing.

I think welfare is a sign of a compassionate society. It's meant to help people who can't help themselves.

There are people known as the working poor... who through no fault of their own work very hard and can't make enough to scrape by. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_poor)

Welfare to the rescue!

I don't know what sort of "quality" life can be had on $18,000 a year (that's under $50 a day... I want to wow the math teacher) so I don't think it's fair to say that people on public assistance are living it up on your dime.

:shrug:

Melonie
04-18-2008, 04:03 PM
^^^ from a global viewpoint, the 'quality of life' of American Welfare recipients live like the 'middle class' in China or Mexico or Vietnam ... and they don't have to work 80 hours a week to achieve it ! And the American definition of 'poor' is attractive enough to motivate millions to sneak across our border ...

(snip)"The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various gov*ernment reports:

Forty-three percent of all poor households actu*ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6 percent of poor households are over*crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. "(snip)

(snip)"In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year— nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

While work and marriage are steady ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to require work and encourage marriage, poverty among children would drop substantially.

However, while renewed welfare reform can help to reduce poverty, under current conditions, such efforts will be partially offset by the poverty-boost*ing impact of the nation's immigration system. Each year, the U.S. imports, through both legal and illegal immigration, hundreds of thousands of additional poor persons from abroad. As a result, one-quarter of all poor persons in the U.S. are now first-genera*tion immigrants or the minor children of those immigrants. Roughly one in ten of the persons counted among the poor by the Census Bureau is either an illegal immigrant or the minor child of an illegal. As long as the present steady flow of poverty-prone persons from foreign countries continues, efforts to reduce the total number of poor in the U.S. will be far more difficult. A sound anti-poverty strategy must seek to increase work and marriage, reduce illegal immigration, and increase the skill level of future legal immigrants."(snip)


from

Sophia_Starina
04-18-2008, 04:07 PM
^^^ yes but.... that's not a bad thing, per se. Living like the middle class in Mexico isn't exactly striking it rich. And punishing the poor for circumstances they can't control smacks of social-Darwinism.

Melonie
04-18-2008, 04:13 PM
^^^ American poor are not being punished ... they are being rewarded for their lack of skills / work ethic ! You've got it half right though ... take the 'Darwin' out of SOCIALdarwinISM !

Sophia_Starina
04-18-2008, 04:28 PM
^^^ American poor are not being punished ... they are being rewarded for their lack of skills / work ethic ! You've got it half right though ... take the 'Darwin' out of SOCIALdarwinISM !


Hehehehe... I see your point. But what is the other option? Allow families to starve because they lack skills? A biiiiiiiig chunk of the unskilled labor jobs are being shipped overseas. Big business seems to be pulling rug out from under a huge demographic and creating a pool of people that cannot get work. Whereas before, they could get work... now there is no work to get.



I'm a pretty big proponent of socialism, you have that right... it works for a number of European countries. So I can't knock it.

Melonie
04-19-2008, 03:23 AM
Big business seems to be pulling rug out from under a huge demographic and creating a pool of people that cannot get work. Whereas before, they could get work... now there is no work to get.

GLOBALISM pulled the rug out from under unskilled American workers. The point is that, on a level playing field, unskilled labor in ANY country is worth the cost of unskilled labor in the lowest priced country ... which right now amounts to something like one dollar an hour. Thus the 'standard of living' that unskilled labor in any country is able to provide for themselves is what a one dollar per hour paycheck can buy. In America, the 'minimum acceptable standard of living' provided by the gov't (or more accurately provided by taxing more highly skilled Americans and transferring their money to the unskilled) is far FAR above that level. Arguably the associated high taxes will force more highly skilled Americans, and their employers, to 'vote with their feet', which in turn leaves behind the 'rich' and the 'poor'.

This phenomenon is already underway in Europe big time as younger people with valuable skills look to emigrate to lower tax countries, while unskilled 'foreigners' try to immigrate to take advantage of the generous social welfare benefits provided by many European govt's ( resulting in 25% unemployment rates among 'unassimilated' immigrant groups, and huge new costs to those European govt's to maintain unemployed unskilled residents on the 'dole') . This phenomenon has also been underway for a while in American rust belt states, and is now gaining momentum in other states with high / rising taxes such as CA, NY, NJ as well.

How can this be stopped ? Well if you look to history, one step would be to bring back Smoot-Hawley i.e. start charging high tariffs on all imported goods. This 'insulates' the US labor market from the world labor market to some degree. However, it also increases US prices in order to cover the far higher costs of US unskilled labor ... which last time it was tried resulted in the great depression.

Another step would be to start WW3 ... and send a few million unskilled Americans off to their death as a casualty of war. The last two times this was tried, WW1 and WW2, it resulted in a post-war economic boom of unprecedented proportions. And all the better if, as part of the war effort, 90% of the production capacity of foreign 'competitors' can be blown to smithereens - meaning that post-war production by US companies would again have a virtual monopoly on world exports to the former foreign 'competitor' countries (who are no longer able to produce, thus no longer able to compete).

Yet another way is to allow a pandemic to develop ... which will kill off a few million people, and take a heavier 'toll' on the poor than on the rich based on the limited ability of poor people to 'insulate themselves' on a mountain top ( or gated community, or private school, or suburban village). We haven't had a really effective pandemic since 1918, which in conjunction with the end if WW1 resulted in the most prosperous period in American history i.e. the 'roaring 20's'.

... ummm, history doesn't seem to be very helpful


Circling back on topic, Obama has so far proposed or given tacit approval of ...

- allowing the GWB tax cuts to expire, resulting in a one trillion dollar income tax increase
- raising capital gains taxes from the current 15% to the 25% ballpark
- imposing a 'carbon tax' on anything that has a fossil fuel component ... which will raise the price of gasoline / food / US manufactured goods
- increasing 'gov't subsidized' industries i.e. ethanol, wind, solar, now homebuilders
- increasing social programs for the 'poor'.
- instituting gov't bailouts for 'poor' homeowners
- erecting 27% tariffs against Chinese imported goods

collectively, all of the above maintain / improve the standard of living for the 'poor', degrade the standard of living for the 'middle class', and arguably are neutral to the 'rich' (since loopholes would preserved to allow the 'rich' to escape the vast majority of the supposed additional tax burden that would be directed towards them). IMHO all of the above decrease incentives for the 'middle class' to continue to work their butts off.

bem401
04-19-2008, 06:58 AM
I think welfare is a sign of a compassionate society. It's meant to help people who can't help themselves.

There are people known as the working poor... who through no fault of their own work very hard and can't make enough to scrape by. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_poor)

Welfare to the rescue!

I don't know what sort of "quality" life can be had on $18,000 a year (that's under $50 a day... I want to wow the math teacher) so I don't think it's fair to say that people on public assistance are living it up on your dime.

:shrug:

I'm not saying there should be no welfare. I'm saying there should be an awful lot less. Nobody gives me anything. Anything I want, I have to earn it. The same should go for everybody else. $18K is not a lot of money, but it is apparently enough to convince people not to give it up for a job that pays a few thousand more.

I teach in an inner-city school where most of the students, probably upwards of 90%, are on some sort of assistance. Yet, they all have cell phones, MP3's, brand name clothes, and the latest sneakers. Many of them have their own cars. Every day they get a free breakfast and free lunch. I'm not allowed to go down and grab myself a juice though, even though I paid some of the taxes that paid for it in the first place.

When I run into a student 3 or 4 years after graduation and ask them if they're working or in school, the answer more often then not is " nah, I'm just chilling". This indicates that another generation is living off the government. Any expansion of social programs will only serve to intensify this problem.