DEAMONS!

why are the majority picking on a minority to pay for their social programs? all they are is a bunch of bullies extorting money. wonder if it's cheaper to pay the mob to protect me from the government, instead of paying the government to protect me from the mob? if i have to go out and make money to pay for another person simply because they exist, then they have to go out and work to pay for me simply because i exist. and they bloody well ain't doing too good of a job of it. or their check got lost in the mail. bah. 2/3rds of the country don't even make enough money to pay US taxes. why am i suppossed to go out and make money for them?

bloody socialists ruined another one of my work days. they need to get off the couch and earn some money instead of pissing me off in the morning.

because you want money for yourself, probably, and, despite paying taxes, believe it or not, the more you earn the more you have.


a war on poverty since the 60s? if so, i dont think our hearts have really been in that war haha, and is that war really to blame for our curret debt, or... http://static.safehaven.com/authors/casey/24417.png

the "War on Poverty" i remember from the 60s was the one waged by the black panthers, and they all ended up slaughtered by the FBI or disrupted through cointelpro. i don't remember our welfare programs ever trying to reorganize society to end poverty. they simply apply a band-aid, allowing the rich and privileged to retain their power while offering up a bare ethical minimum in welfare, intended to limit the number of kids and old people starving in the streets or calling for CEOs heads. and the welfare programs work for that purpose, to some degree. in fact, i wanna look at social security a bit to take on what i'd call a shortsighted argument about the "war on poverty" (heh) being a failure...

like, the whole "war on poverty" concept you're peddling seems to imply that unless poverty is eradicated, the "war" is a failure, and these programs are all worthless money sinkholes. but what about all the people who are directly benefiting from the programs?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/..._Poverty%2C_1959-2010.png

elderly people continue to need social security income with no end in sight, but the program sure helps to keep the elderly above the poverty line. so why should this 'war' be a failure, in this case? there's legitimate good being done there as it prevents a bunch of umberto d scenarios. like with medicaid, there's lives being saved there, so how can you characterize it as a failure that should be ended? what will happen to these people? maybe they'll rise up... lol

nothing you're saying is as offensively disgusting as Klown saying he'd equate himself to a slave, but you're still espousing a lot of troulbing rhetoric. for example, when you say you were in poverty due to "your own choices," you're implying that that's a significant cause for poverty and people can just 'bootstrap' their way out by getting off the dole or whatever and working hard. that's simply not true. in most cases, poverty is institutional. people growing up in impoverished homes, attending impoverished schools, with few opportunities available to them.

the more i have. the more they leech. which means i have to make more to have more, or i end up losing what i have because the government seizes it back.

what? The higher your income, the more money you get. If you make more you bring home more.

Western nations have state-led capitalism. One of the functions of the state is to redistribute wealth. All successful societies do this.
When they didn't, like in the 19th century, revolutions followed and tyrannical communist states were established.

no. the more i have, the more money i need to make to keep it. unless i waste my money on a bunch of junk that doesn't take up much space.

The vast majority of people living in poverty were born into poverty. There is a wealth of evidence that indicates that class mobility is extremely difficult. As a result, it is inaccurate to argue that everyone is impoverished because of poor choices.

A certain amount of that is true, but more importantly is that most impoverished people were set up to fail to begin with. This is due to poverty in childhood contributing to a lack of quality education choices (a symptom of school funding being tied to regional property tax rolls), and a general prioritization towards "surviving now" vs. preparing to be successful in the future.

Social programs are suppose to target this issue by reducing the inequity in opportunity. How successful that has been, though, is questionable.

I would like one of you socialists to explain to me why my neighbor who sits at home all day drinking alcohol and using recreational drugs when he can afford it while collecting a social security 'disability' check for a fictitious disability deserves my money more than me, who works 60 hours per week. And no, in this area my neighbor is not at all an isolated case. He is the norm.

There is no excuse for it. However, most "socialists", as you would call them, would argue that it is a reasonable price to pay to ensure that those who actually do need the help, get it.

Derive a signalling method that will successfully weed out those who free-ride vs those in legitimate need, and I would support it without question. Although I'm a fiscal conservative so I may not fall into your "socialist" definition.

They don't. But its the statists you're talking to, not the socialists.

I'd like one of you poor people haters to tell me why the 3rd generation poor person does not deserve medical help for his lifelong condition when someone born into a rich family gets it without question.

Did he tell you his disability is fictitious or did you just decide it was?

speaking of drinking all day,

Because there needs to be something preventing every single person obtaining the most expensive health treatments possible. Our economy cannot afford to spend that much money on health care. At some point we need to say that the benefit versus the cost does not justify the public funding treatment that would benefit a sick person.

true rockman, but costs could reduce overall if more people were covered and more focus was placed on preventative health care.

That's also correct. We would also reduce overall cost if we actually socialized health insurance, rather than just laying a tax on people who don't "voluntarily" purchase health insurance from a private company.

Forcing people to purchase health insurance from private companies who are tremendously profitable due to their connections with the government is not socialism. I wish people would stop calling Obama a socialist. He's a friend of big business, and he is happy to let them make their profits. He does not wish to socialize industries, he merely wishes to use the government to protect the monopolies given by the government to privately owned enterprises.

http://econc10.bu.edu/...Marxism/marxism_frame.htm

This is true.

my drinking is more of an annoyance than a disability. well, annoying to other people. i'm rather fond of it. doesn't keep me from making money and the poor starving bastages get a little extra something in their stockings for Christmas. and i haven't been drinking all day. i just started. run for cover.

here's a thought. poor people in the US are too expensive to maintain. we need to get rid of them and import some of the poor people form the world at large who are living off of $2.50 a day. we could support a whole lot more poor people that way.

costs of living are higher in the US, the same people would not be able to survive off 2.50 per day there.

that's probably only because of land value. if we put them out yonder in the middle of no where, they might be able to do it.

We could put them on reservations and tax their 2.50 at 35%. Bring in 10 trillion people... Boom, no more national debt!

Also, we should clone dinosaurs, kill them, wait 10 million years... Boom, more oil!

was i seeing things, or did blid mention the poor elderly? you mean the people who lived 65 years in the land of opportunity and failed to accomplish anything? did they have public education when they were born? were they taught anything worth learning? why we pay all this money simply to keep people breathing and eating? so we have a reason to pay farmers to grow nothing?

jesus i hope you're at least several drinks in at this point

meh. my country is going bankrupt and 40-60% of the nation is a bunch of obese mad fat cows who need an SUV to get to the food troff(sp?). really don't think i should bother with a sober day for the rest of my life.

wow dibs... i dont think i can take you seriously anymore.

ok. though i wonder why you bother with telling me this. is there a reason why you would think that i value your evaluation of me?

if you want them to eat then teach them how to fish. don't yell at me saying i have to catch more fish for them. i couldn't care less whether or not they eat.

maybe they worked all their lives but don't have enough savings to show for it. just put them on ice floes and push them off to sea hey? it's funny that all the right wing people in this thread have outed themselves as disgusting monsters

what did they spend their money on? 30 years should've bought a house and paid for raising their children. so, that leaves 20 years left to save for retirement? did they just blow it all on wine, women and song? can't have spent it on their medical because the majority of medical expenses only happen to a minority of people.

lol.

People under save for retirement in general dibs, it isn't really correlated with income (except at high ends of the income scale, wealthy people tend to save more).

It is hard to say why this is, but it probably has to do with short-sightedness. People simply don't worry about saving for retirement because it is so far into the future that they aren't prioritizing their needs for that given point of time.

It is unfortunate, but at the same time it is probably something that society needs to prepare for because at the end of the day, we likely won't allow that many people to fall into poverty post--retirement due to poor retirement planning. As such it is less costly to tackle the problem now rather then dishing out $ for income assistance later.

That is why I recommend seriously beefing up any public pension plan that exists (I think you guys call it social security down in the states?), but anyway.

blid, you are a pathetic person. You rival RaNG for biggest idiot in the history of Earth forums. Still, I'm curious. How old are you?

we dont need to "beef up" social security. we need to make it so people cant abuse it anymore, along with welfare and any other govt handout programs. with obama extending the length of time you can collect unemployment to 99 weeks, that system is getting abused too. you only have to work for 9 months and youre able to collect unemployment benefits for 2 years. tell me that aint broken.

How do you abuse a system that you can't access until 65 and it is based on the amount you contributed?

I also don't see how your point has any relevance to my point. Abuse has no bearing on whether the amount collected/disbursed on a per person basis is adequate.

H4xor, you can abuse Social Security by claiming disability. The folks around here do this. If you can get someone to sign off that you are too disabled to work, you can collect disability from Social Security for the rest of your life.

http://www.newsmax.com/...bers/2012/07/02/id/444255

Crappy article but you get the point.

ah I see.

I didn't realize that disability and the pension plan were integrated in the US. In Canada they are distinct.

yes like klown said you dont need to be retired to collect social security benefits. disability is just one of several programs that can be collected off social security.

you dont even need to be disabled. you can claim you have anger issues that prevent you from working with people and the govt will pay you not to work.

fyi h4xor, welfare fraud is primarily a Republican fiction that preys on people's stereotypes to turn them against the system. right-wing myths have been passed around for decades, ronald reagan is particularly famous for spreading outright falsehoods, here's a funny one:

3/1/82 Sen. Bob Packwood (R‑OR) reveals that President Reagan frequently offers up transparently fictional anecdotes as if they were real. “We’ve got a $120 billion deficit coming,” says Packwood, “and the President says, ‘You know, a young man, went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka. That’s what’s wrong.’ And we just shake our heads.”

3/24/82 Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been unable to document President Reagan’s horror stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. “It’s not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents,” she says. Deputy White House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn’t tell these stories “unless he thought they were accurate.”

he would just completely make up stuff all the time without giving a fluff. one of his more infamous inventions was the "welfare queen" which, though entirely fictional, continues to color people's perceptions to this day.



note the stark differences between the myth and the reality: some woman with 80 names raking in $150k a year unchecked vs. a woman that scammed $8k who was charged and found guilty, lol. here's a snopes article about a related bit of lies and propaganda that still get passed around today
http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/grapes.asp

here's a good article that expands on this beginning where i leeave off
http://womenslawproject.wordpress.com/...y-receives-tanf-benefits/

Actually Poverty was dropping at a very steady rate, untill @ 1965 since it has fluctuated sideways @ 12% +/- 2% since.

Oh that was the LBJ supposed start of "THE WAR on POVERTY"

There are lots of government programs with that same outcome Oceana. I would get some facts on affirmative action actually hurting those it tries to help, but I don't care enough to spend that kind of time in finding stuff I read a few years ago.

The war on poverty is a disaster and there is no getting around it. Yet, somehow because those on the right think with our minds and not our hearts we are monsters? All the compassion in the world won't create prosperity, however cold facts and logical thinking will. Spending trillions of dollars on the impoverished only creates a larger problem with dependents not striving to improve themselves.

Here is how I see it went down:
-Program created with good intentions
-People back politicians giving them money, creating a permanent voting bloc
-Program fails to show results, however it would be political suicide to remove such program
-Politicians use program to continually promise more for votes
-16 trillion dollars later, we have a program that does not help anybody and yet still costs the American taxpayers billions each year


This is why charity will always do a better job. The means testing is built into the system and a charitable organization can refuse someone if they aren't helping themselves. A government program always ends up bloated and inefficient.

since they started keeping traack in 1959, i guess you're talking it dropping at a steady rate... for like about 5 years? impressive. there's no way it just reached a natural equilibrium, in fact i'd say it absolutely would have continued to drop at that rate indefinitely despite having less and less room to go down, if not for the "WAR ON POVERTY."

too many generalizations and value statements without supporting evidence.

If you truely want to prove a program to be ineffective you have to be able to present the counter-factual scenario. I am yet to see it.

Proving a negative H4? Not me. I've yet to see a factual argument showing a reason for the program to exist.

Yeah you don't care enough, that's why you can't find these "facts"

this is a classic right-wing trope, pretending that just because you're cold-hearted you can't be thick-headed. the guy who says he can be equated to a slave and the guy who says seniors who need social security should just die, these guys are straight thinkers willing to accept cold facts. and the reverse is also true, i'm not using cold facts or logical thinking in my posts, just by definition, because i advocate helping the impoverished which is obviously just a bunch of bleeding heart illogical bs, because it doesn't agree with your right-wing thinking.

what goes in your heads, like what are you imagining would happen if the "WAR ON POVERTY" was ended? suddenly the poverty rate would manage to drop below 10%? do you believe that? considering your own economist heroes like milton friedman have posited that there's a "natural rate of unemployment" in capitalism, how exactly would that poverty level somehow keep dropping lower, just because you took away the access of the poor to food, health care, and living assistance?

and, it looks liek you haven't read back the old posts in this thread, because i already made the point that the fact that poverty still exists does not mean aid given to those in poverty somehow is worthless. maybe to you, you don't care if those people can afford food or get medical help, if seniors without incomes can get by day to day. maybe to you, because these people still exist, the programs are failures. but i bet the people themselves would have a different opinion?

heh, do you not realize that almost all government programs have all kinds of hurdles and rules about who is and can remain eligible? do you honestly believe charity organizations would somehow crop up to supply something to the tune of over a trillion dollars to help people in need? would charity ever be capable of running the kinds of efficient single-payer universal health care systems prevalent in other developed nations? do you not believe in economies of scale? did charity manage to keep poverty stamped down during the great recession or in the years preceding it?

Blid: I still want you to answer. How old are you and have you ever had a real job?

You've repeatedly reminded me that you're not talking to me, did you forget?