A surprising number, actually. If they didn’t sell such stores would not stock them.
Yes, and despite those costs the total amount spent on “welfare” is dwarfed by the rest of the Federal budget!
Depending on how you define “welfare” (and leaving out SS, Medicare, and mortgage deductions) it’s at most 3-6%. At most. And that’s during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Yes, it’s a small slice of the total.
Ah, right, decimal points. Well, this is why I’m not an accountant.
uh huh.
yeah, there would be no poor people if that happened.
Is that sarcastic? They do.
There would be a lot fewer. Also, put the blame where it’s due. War destroys wealth. Also, for a sense of proportion, see Broomstick’s reply to you, a few posts above.
We could support the same number of poor people while paying fewer taxes.
It’s not like you can’t google this.
16.3% Unemployment
8.9% Medicaid & Children’s
2.2% Health & Human Services
1.34% housing and urban development
And that doesn’t count the money used in other categories such as education for school lunches and other social services.
they don’t. The money comes back in the form of unearned tax credits. Note the term UNEARNED.
When you can get China to pick up the slack as World’s policeman that would be swell. Really.
The US is hardly the world’s policeman, if you define “world’s policeman” as some sort of principled, ethical “good cop” keeping the peace, and apprehending those who threaten it.
Now that I think about it, the US is the world’s policeman, if you define “world’s policeman” as someone actually doing what police do in the real world, i.e. defending power and privilege, and oppressing marginalized communities.
I sure wish the American people could have back all the money they spent attacking or otherwise interfering in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador, Venezuela, and so on, on top of maintaining all the garrisons I mentioned earlier. Keep in mind, those are just the recent examples!
In case my position hasn’t been completely clear the entire time I have been on this board, no I do not have compassion for the chronically poor in general. Being poor is not a virtue in and of itself. Don’t get me wrong, the chances are excellent that I have been more poor than the vast majority of Americans for a few extended periods of time and that is a big part of the reason I dislike them so much. I completely understand what it is like to live on less than $2 a day for food and all other ‘luxuries’ because I have done it myself but I never let it stay that way for long.
I have always dug myself out of that hole fairly quickly and have been a member of all classes at some points (I prefer rich but all of them are workable and have their charms).
The thing that really disgusts me is that white liberals seem to think that poor people are completely stupid and incapable of thinking or taking care of themselves. They are not because most of them are not dumb in their own personal sense. They have skills that you could only wish for because they live in a perverse but precarious and semi-sustainable environment often assisted by other people.
The problem arises when people that have no idea what they are talking about prescribe grand solutions to poverty. That is a fallacy because their isn’t a single cause. Like I already said, some people are temporarily poor because of circumstances (they will generally do just fine over time as long as they keep trying), others are disabled and I do think that society should help them but many others others are simple degenerates who would be back to the same place or in the grave in just a few years if you gave them $1 million tomorrow.
What do you do about the sizable latter group? I get absolutely sick of liberal types that assume that all people are basically good and responsible. It is a flat-out lie and we all know it because we all know counter-examples. All people aren’t essentially good and waiting on an opportunity to do better. That is hopeless Pollyanna thinking. Many of them could screw up anything you could possibly give them including money, jobs or other opportunities. The problem is that the real screw-ups tend to be pretty happy in their situation and have no reason to change. Short-sighted thinking leads them to believe that, as long as things are going reasonably well today, life is good. I don’t hate children or other innocent people caught in that trap but you have to walk a tightrope in which falling to one side is supposedly compassionate and the other is enabling.
BTW, the extended condom argument above was one of the dumbest and most naive arguments that I have ever read. Do you honestly think this is 1950? What teenage doesn’t know how pregancy and condoms work? I didn’t even have sex in high school in the 80’s and I was still perfectly clear on the concept as was everyone else. You would literally have to be mentally disabled these days if you didn’t understand how pregnancy happens by age 14 at the latest. That is not an excuse for most people and I never bought the argument that sex just breaks out spontaneously and there is nothing you can do about it at that age. They know perfectly well what they are doing. My best friends girlfriend got intentionally pregnant in high school and dropped out. My best friend was a grandfather at 36 which is pretty impressive. The only good thing about it was that they were never poor but it would have worked out horribly for everyone if they didn’t have the cash to support such a low-class lifestyle.
How is a standing army a threat to our freedom?
Almost none of which pay for national defense.
So Broomstick doesn’t have her facts straight? Unsurprising.
Here is what the Founders had in mind when they deemed standing armies a threat to freedom. Lest you think that such attitudes are out of date, there are plenty of rather recent examples that attest to the wisdom of such a stance. Actually, an even better case is provided by the enormous conflict whose centenary we’re currently amidst.
Which is beside the point, which is that sneering at low-income people as a bunch of moochers is ignorant and cruel, when the real moochers occupy much more privileged positions. Besides, genuine defense would not cost all that much, comparatively speaking.
Believe it or not, some of us realize that ‘moochers’ and low-lifes exist at the bottom, the top and everything in between. I don’t support any of them and absolutely love to see everyone give a good faith effort to pay their own way and set up a legacy for their family and causes they care about no matter how large or small. Unfortunately, some liberal groups reject the idea that any poor people are anything less than victims of circumstances beyond their control while some conservatives do everything they can to pool wealth among the most influential people. Both are wrong.
As long as we can get enough rational people to acknowledge that fact then we will have the genesis of a solution to this complex problem. The extreme viewpoints on both sides have done an atrocious job of even describing the problem accurately let alone addressing it in any significant way.
I suspect some false equivalency here, but in any event I get your point.
This is the United States. Not Greece. How does a standing army threaten our freedom? Be specific.
What difference does it make? Standing armies very easily and very often become tools of political oppression, for more than one reason. For one thing, a large body of armed and trained men who see themselves as embodying a nation’s very essence and charged with protecting said essence against threats (as they perceive them) foreign and domestic is not exactly the sort of organization I would trust with restraint.
For another, and this is what the Founders had in mind, standing militaries make it very easy to whip up a war with others (or even, with good intentions, get drawn into one, and I am being charitable by including this parenthetical), and war always entails a loss of freedoms at home… for reasons of national security, you understand.
So, being very specifically American in my examples, we can look at the First World War, a massive imperialist slugfest with millions of workers and peasants killing one another, rather than turning their guns on their exploiters. Keep in mind that this was actually before the US had much of a standing military, so it took quite a bit of work for Woodrow Wilson and his cronies to whip up war fever in the United States, and subsequently his administration’s goons violently repressed the domestic anti-war movement, which has domestic political consequences we’re still dealing with. That’s a threat to freedom if ever there was one, and I’m not even specifically referring to the grievous and ongoing consequences of US entry into that conflict.
Now, in recent memory, the US has had a large standing military since the beginning of the Cold War, since apparently allowing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves in the clueless pursuit of “expansion” and empire just made too much sense, as did taking a look at the apocalyptic suffering of the Soviet people in WWII (and their recent Civil War, featuring foreign intervention by the US, among others) in order to understand why feeding Moscow’s paranoia was a bad idea. Just as in the immediate post-WWI years, “Red-Baiting” was a ready-made excuse and rationale for domestic political repression, at times quite violent.
The US national “security” apparatus has thus gotten involved in the internal politics of the Middle East for decades (we can blame Wilson here, too), leading to actions like supporting (and installing) numerous dictatorships, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia among other places, giving mind-boggling levels of support (not just financial!) to the Israelis (no matter how much their actions harm US interests, besides being generally vile), and, perhaps most importantly of all, but inseparable from the above, killing about a million people in Iraq through years and years of sanctions and bombing-every-few-days.
Now, if some of those complaints and grievances sound familiar, they should, as they were the sort of thing that motivated Osama Bin Laden and company, in their own words. Never mind how many people tried to warn about this sort of thing. And then came the attacks of 11 September, which led to more war abroad, and, starting with the PATRIOT Act, a bipartisan assault on our domestic freedoms that continues to this very day.
By the way, the Founders (who are hardly worthy of worship, but were possessed of much wisdom) included a provision in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) in order to battle an enemy who was less than a state. These are called “letters of marque and reprisal”, and everyone should read up on them.
Now, in contrast, can you imagine a US that had demobilized after WWII, like it had after previous conflicts? Would we have a massive domestic espionage state, and an increasingly militarized domestic police force, both of which are threats to freedom like little else?
There was a time when a person was considered to be one of the following:
- Good
- Bad
- Mentally handicap
Sometime in the late 20th Century it was decided that there was no such thing as a “bad person.” You see, a bad person was really a good person with mental problems! So today we have no bad people, and a person is considered to be one of the following:
- Good
- Mentally handicap
Political correctness has consequences…