Something is happening to my former liberal feminist self (flfs)- I can feel the PC draining out of me year by year. Could have something to do with my now neighbourhood - filled with state housing and large Tongan famillies who crush into them and children running wild at all hours of the day with no parental supervision.
Just recently in our news was an article on large families (around 10 people) being forced to live in two bedroom state houses causing major health issues. The call was for larger and more plentiful state houses.
In my now flfs state, I just end up thinking, fuck them - if you can’t fucking afford to have children stop fucking having them. Teach your fucking teenage slutty girl and boy childs to use fucking condoms instead of rocking on to church every fucking Sunday and pretending or not seeing your fucking kids fucking their heads off and getting stoned and drunk.
Why should I fucking pay to house you in nice conditions when I don’t do things I can’t afford.
Yes, I understand poverty, lack of education and that I’m paying for their health care so in the long term larger houses benefits me - but fuck!
Seriously, the same conservatives who would literally laugh at a writer working at Wal-Mart complaining that his life sucks and tell him to take some responsibility for his decisions will get all misty-eyed and serious when confronted with some religious doorknob-sucker with 12 kids, i.,e., someone who’s made bad decisions for herself and 12 others. I’ve never understood how that works.
(OK, I know EXACTLY how it works, it’s called hypocrisy.)
It’s funny how these situations recreate themselves so consistently. But I constantly hear that a call to end the governmental incentives that encourage them would be “political suicide”. How so? Who’s pro-ghetto?
The problem I see with that laudable goal is that people wouldn’t consider the various public assistance programs ‘pro-ghetto.’ It would be political suicide to talk about just letting the children in these situations simply starve. Even trying to take the children into foster care isn’t going to be popular. And there are enough horror stories about foster care to make it even worse than simply not popular. Once the large families are there, there’s little that can be done by the government to affect things.
The two options I can see to prevent the situation both involve government control of reproduction. The first is some kind of means test before people on government assistance can get pregnant. Which would involve mandatory birth control for that population, at the very least. The second is to sterilize people who can be shown to be deliberately and irresponsibly creating children, because they can. Without a care for their subsequent health or well-being.
Neither one of these solutions is something I’d be comfortable with. I’ve seen one case locally that was similar to the second strategy I’d mentioned, but even there the potential for abuse gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just simply don’t trust the government enough to want to see them controlling something like that, for anyone as a general rule.
But back to the OP, just because there’s a safety net shouldn’t mean that you don’t think about the responsibilities you’re taking on with children!
What’s wrong with old-fashioned orphanages? The new trick failed (foster-care), so go back to what worked before (Dickens couldn’t have really ruined our view of orphanages single-handedly, could he?). Don’t the parents of these people have a bad enough image in the popular mind that we wouldn’t be too shaken up by having their meal-tickets rescued from them?
I hate being responsible for irresponsible fucks (hrm, pun intended!).
I hate the safety nets that these people fall in to that save them on my dollar.
Call me a heartless asshole but I want no business in being forced to support people who are too goddamn stupid to not do this sort of thing.
I spend a certain amount of my time at Walgreens ringing up mother-duck-and-baby-ducklings processionals of one mother with a line of three, four, or five kids trailing after her in stepping-stone sizes, one per year. And all of them in there buying junk food on their food stamps, god bless the taxpayers of the state of Illinois for obediently bending over with the jar of Vaseline still in their hands.
I was SO glad the one time I was tidying the store after closing and found an opened pack of condoms, shoplifted. I thought, “Yes! If you’re going to steal something, please steal condoms…”
It seems to me that a good, solid public education system goes a long way towards enabling kids to make better choices. Personally, I would rather have Bobby and Cindy graduate from high school and attend a community college than have them stealing my car and fucking in it.
Failing these kids in preschool & elementary school seems to set them up for a lifetime of really bad decisions.
Dear God, listen to me- I used to be so conservative. What the hell is happening to me?
First off, open bay barracks living sucks big donkey dick. And that’s experience as an adult, where I really didn’t have to worry about the bullies, petty theivery and other hazards of adolescent life. I’m not a bit fan of the foster care programs in the US. There are enough stories about bloopers getting through the system that I can’t say it’s working the way it should.
Having said that, I do believe it’s better than a return to general orphage life.
One of the important things about foster care is that it’s supposed to provide the children an example of family living that’s not dysfunctional, which many of the homes the children involved with came from will have been. Orphanages will fail that aspect of socialization for the children, I believe.
The biggest hit that foster care takes with the public is the perception that there are foster parents who use the system to get sexual toys. I do not believe that’s the case in any systemic manner, though there are enough horror stories to keep the perception alive. But with that perception, how can one be sure that the orphanage master won’t simply have tried for that position to have access to an even larger selection of victims?
Which completely ignores the difficulty of dealing with teenaged sexuality in a barracks situation.
I’m not trying to say that orphanages are the pit of Hell for the kids involved. But I do think that foster is, on average, better for them. And neither is perfect.
Oh, yeah. Don’t forget foster care is already stressed in most states in the US. Adding the larger populations this proposal would ential would be prohibitively expensive. Strictly speaking of dollars and cents, I think it’s cheaper to keep children with their birth parents, even if the parents are totally dependant on the gov’t for living costs - since foster parents get a stipend above that minimum for their work/efforts.
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enigm4tic, I have no real argument with that attitude towards the adults involved. The problem is that unless you’re willing to confiscate their children, the choice is to support the whole family, or let the kids starve first.
EJsGirl, FWIW, I agree with you 100%, and I’m another self-labelled conservative.
If we really care about reducing the number of children born into welfare, the first thing to do is to get real sex education in every public school (i.e. how to use different kinds of birth control, how well they work, how to avoid STDs, etc.) The second thing is to install free condom dispensers on every wall of every public school, starting in 6th grade. Make basic birth control so visible and accessible that you can’t avoid going through public school and knowing about it or having constant access to it.
For a very long time I’ve supported having a welfare system - I want it there for the time I might need it, however, I hate having to support people who take no care and responsibility for their own actions. So I’m stuck supporting the system but hating it at the same time.
Because they didn’t work before…they don’t work now in parts of the world that still have them. Moreover, pulling kids away from their parents because they can’t afford them sets a bad precedent - what if you lose your job - do your kids end up in an orphanage? What if the family goes bankrupt due to illness? Who makes the determination that someone should lose their kids due to poverty?
Its a rock and a hard place situation. Our solution isn’t very good, but its better than many of the alternatives. On the plus side, for most people on public assistance, it isn’t like its a sweet life.
(Here in Minnesota you can’t buy junk food with food stamps - only approved “nutritional” stuff.)
Well in NZ we have real sex education in every public school.
We don’t have free condom dispensers.
There is no reason at all that young school goers don’t understand how to not make babies. However, their behaviour especially around alcohol is that they do not use contraception.
It is also not just the teenagers - there are plenty of older people, especially amongst Indian and Pacific Island communities who want lots of children or refuse to use contraception too. It is also their culture to have large families - which is fine if you are not asking other people to support your large family.
Condoms are cheap enough. If they don’t have the foresight to figure out that a $12 box of condoms is cheaper than a child, giving them away for free won’t make any difference.
Can someone direct me toward any citations that indicate cutting back on welfare benefits reduces poverty in the long run? Is there any evidence to suggest this in U.S. history? Because I was under the impression that the vast numbers of homeless/impoverished people that exist have to do with cutting back on state sponsored aid in the 80’s. (ETA: Under the impression deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill in the 80’s contributes to homelessness/impoverishment today as well.) Anyone?
(Note to MelCthefirst: being a liberal doesn’t necessitate abandoning common sense or approving of the irresponsibility of others. Some conservative groups may try to convince you otherwise, but it’s not really the case.)
Yup - it’s lack in training in both long and short term planning that is the problem. It applies to both sex and money in some groups.
I say offer free permanent (reversible) birth control. Of course, you have to get away from the idiot religionists that insist that doing so will “encourage sex!”. Sex needs no encouragement. For those paying attention, that’s the damned problem.
Free nothing - how about not treating any “certain groups” like the mentally challenged who need to be coaxed into functional behaviors with subtle manipulation by enlightened members of society and let cold hard life do it instead. However short one’s foresight, a real threat of starvation and homelessness will eventually get through to anyone. And yes, actively offering contraception does tacitly say, “I expect you to be having sex”.
I agree with pizzabrat. Cut them off. I don’t say that because I don’t want to pay for welfare. I doubt I would ever notice a difference on my paycheck.
I recently pitted a currently pregnant in-law who is bringing just one child into the world without a pot to piss in and no prospect of getting said pot. “The more the merrier” is good for winning lottery tickets and Jake Gyllenhaal nude scenes, not kids.
I work with a guy who is educated (Ph.D. even) and perpetually whining about how little money’s left at the end of the month due to having two kids in college, five at home and an eighth on the way. He makes probably in the 50k range- very respectable salary for Alabama. His wife doesn’t work (keeping pregnant becomes more of a full-time job once you’re 40-ish). I smile and nod and say “I hear ya” all I can think is “THEN STOP HAVING **((@#&*(&# MORE OF 'EM!”.
I can totally understand how even on 50k per year you can’t support 10 people comfortably. What I can’t understand is why, when you realize that 6 people are hard to support on your salary, you add 4 more. Or how people who earn $20k per year support six people (that I’ll NEVER understand).
With the professor, he’s from a very conservative religion I won’t name that preaches against birth control. He’s always complaining how he hasn’t bought a new suit in 10 years or that his car’s on its last legs but he can’t afford a new one. Meanwhile, he gives 10% OF HIS INCOME TO SAID CHURCH!!!
Never thought I’d say it, but somewhere along the line as I became totally self-supporting (courtesy of an education I paid for myself without assistance from anyone, save for occasional free food from my mother and sleeping on her sofa once in a while when I couldn’t afford an apartment) and went from bombed out cars to nicer ones that I paid for without assistance and without an inheritance and I became progressively more middle-class and really started noticing “you know something- having to pay taxes sucks- I like refunds better” as I paid more in taxes and getting more and more old fartish about hearing kids playing loud music next door or seeing teenagers hanging out at Wal-Mart at 3 a.m. on schoolnights I realize that I’m in a race with myself to see which will cross my lips first: “GET OFF MY LAWN YOU ROTTEN KIDS!” or “AREN’T THERE ANY WORKHOUSES?”
Which kind of brings the conversation full circle, since we’ve now covered workhouses, Dickens and orphanages, and your neighbors are Tongan, and Dickens most famous orphan when he got hungry asked for Samoa.
I’d like to say that I believe part of the problem with homelessness today is due, in part, because of increases in patient rights for the mentally ill. This isn’t to say that the only homeless people are because of this, but in general the chronically homeless seem to come from that population.
But the push for deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill wasn’t something that was set up as a cost-cutting measure, I don’t think. I really do think it was a continuation of expanding civil rights to under-represented groups. It may have had the effect of cutting costs. But I don’t think it was planned, nor sold, that way.
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Oh, I’ve been seeing ETA around on the boards as a new board TLA, but I can’t figure it out. I can see it means something like, “On afterthought” but I want to know what the exact abbreviation might be. Please?