The latter will feed more hungry kids more reliably.
There is just one thing about the Tea Partiers giving on their own, they seldom do, because there is little difference in giving through taxes or just donating to others, some people (not just Tea Partiers) think a dollar in the collection plate is doing enough. If it were true that people were helping others that truly need help,there would be no need for taxes. I have noticed as an example: when people win the lottery the first thing most seem to do is try to get out of paying as much taxes as possible.
This is an example of a false dichotomy argument.
If all you do is reach into your own pocket to give to someone in need, you’re not solving the cause of the problem and they’ll continue to be in need. You’re just spinning your wheels at this point. If all you do is reach into someone else’s pockets to give to someone in need, you’ve achieved the same useless result.
This is akin to asking whether you should throw your own bucket of water on a 3-alarm blaze, or snatching a bucket from your neighbor. Neither solution works worth a darn.
The proper solution is a combination of things:
- Reach into everyone’s pocket to give to someone in need when it is necessary in order to save their life or health, and then
- Implement a long term solution to enable said people to take care of themselves.
This is akin to sending out the fire department (wielding the equivalent of a whole LOT of buckets of water) to put out a full-on 3 alarm blaze and then cutting down on the likelihood of another fire by either punishing the arsonist, dealing with the person who accidentally started the fire, or updating the building safety laws.
Nonsense. First, that long “term solution” is going to take money too. Second, some problems aren’t fixable; severed limbs and broken backs don’t regenerate. Third, there’s always more people in need. Fourth, keeping people from starving to death is certainly “worth a damn”, despite the sociopathic values of the Right that claim it isn’t. And fifth, trying to have “people to take care of themselves” is neither practical nor admirable for a great many problems; we live in societies in the first place because we are weak as individuals. There’s no such thing as a “rugged individualist”; only weak ones.
I never said it would not. I even opened up on my optimal solution suggestion with reaching into EVERYONE’s pockets to solve the problem.
I do not buy into the “spend money” or “do not spend money” false dichotomy. I take the “spend the money wisely” approach - which, mind you, is the more complex path. I have zero problems with spending mine AND other people’s money to achieve a long term solution to an urgent problem. That is how a society works. No society works but with solutions similar to that.
Stephen Hawking worked his way past similarly crippling problems. Besides, we have solutions such as prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs, as well as disabled parking, disabled access ramps, etc. While some problems are indeed not at all fixable, broken backs and severed limbs are not necessarily among them; and a fix can manifest in many different ways. (A fix meaning a means to restoring these people to some modicum of a productive and meaningful life.)
Been that way since before they started complaining about it in ancient Rome. (I forgot the exact quote.)
This does not invalidate the need to be vigilant about understanding why these people are in need and the need to address the systemic problems that lead to a majority of these cases. (As opposed to the odd miscreant who just doesn’t WANT to be self-sufficient; and this group represents a smaller percentage of people than the Right would have us believe.)
I do not believe in the idea that we can get rid of ALL hunger. Nor do I believe that we should just set the disadvantaged adrift to sink or swim. And I especially do not believe in the sentiment behind “there’s only so much you can do with other people’s money”. If it were not for the working class “other people’s money” would not even exist. *
I never said it wasn’t. My analogy of bringing in the fire department was aimed at the emergency task of keeping people from starving to death when starvation is imminent. However the solution that lies outside the false dichotomy of “my pockets vs other people’s pockets” involves creating programs that address and try to solve the systemic problem that caused the threat of starvation in the first place.
I am very much against letting people starve to death, and I have never seen any substantiation of there being a large number of people who are too lazy to feed themselves or who prefer to live on welfare instead of going to work. (I do, however, know of corporations who behave like this, but that’s off-topic.)
I admit the devil lies in the details of that point. Some situations are beyond one’s ability to take care of themselves; such as certain devastating injuries or long term disabilities. Rugged individualism is very much a fantasy, that I agree with; and yes, we are relatively weak as individuals.
What I meant was, if you are a person with a debilitating illness and you have the ability to sit up and do computer-based work, and you really want to do this rather than collect money from a social safety net, you may not be a pure rugged individualist, but you are definitely a courageous person fighting your limitations. When I said “have people take care of themselves” I meant to add “as best as they can”. I am thinking of Stephen Hawking and those people in the Wheelchair Olympics when I say this.
- My biases are quite open. I favor the working class over the industrialists and investor class. 2008 showed the world what happens when the working class falters and stops spending money. I do not favor the poor who live off welfare and won’t get off their butts and work - however, the Right so far has been unable to substantiate their claims that this “lazy poor” group is of any substantial size.
Hawking lives in a country which has socialized health care.
… a system which which enabled him to become a more (many, many times over) productive member of society.
As opposed to America, where we let many potentially great minds go to waste at the hands of social Darwinism.
Not according to Investor’s Business Daily 
At least more non -white kids.
The Tea Partiers (nor I) have the solution to our social problems.life is not that simple!
I lived during the great Depression, we were not exposed to fear mongers like there are today. We got food from the government that helped us sustain our lives, but my father had to work digging ditches and my older brothers had to go to CCC camps. People were not given a hand out, it was a hand up! We lived cramped up but we did have food in our bellies and a place out of the rain and other elements.
Sadly we have become a culture of things, many people are deeply in debt because they bought things they could have lived with out until they could pay for them, some took trips to Europe and all over the world because they were led to believe they could pay a credit card company just the minimum amount, I have seen some in front of me in line at a restaurant that had a stack of cards about an inch or more thick, and searched through them to find one that wasn’t maxed out! They never seemed to look ahead and thought about what would happen if they should lose their job, or had some thing that would happen so they couldn’t pay.
Some were led to belive by Mortgage companies etc. that it was a good thing to go into debt. I just hope that they can somehow find work now, and will accept any kind of job that will pay something, even if it is not the kind of work they would like. I and my husband had a lot of jobs that we took to keep our head above water.We lived by the old adage"take it in, let it out make it do or do with out".
The American dream of working hard,saving and getting a head little by little seems to have gone by the wayside, and has become one that people hope to get rich by gambling, winning the lottery, or suing someone!
There were no fearmongers in the 1930s?! I thought there were screaming RWs denouncing the New Deal as “socialism” from Day One. And what about Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith?
The few people who were fear mongers were not accepted by most people. People knew things were hard,but we willing to go with out when necessary. Many people’s radio’s were battery operated,charged by a wind charger on top of the house). You could only use them for a few( hours, it was not like now when people are bombarded with a lot of bad news all day long. The news papers were our main way of getting information and not many were persuaded by that. Most news papers just printed the news as news and there was very little comments about it. Father Coughlin was on radio and didn’t do much in persuading people to his ideas. At least non that my parents were aware of, we heard our parents discuss him but they thought their own thoughts about what was going on and in many cases were too busy trying to keep our own family afloat to be too concerned with radical ideas.
Matt Taibbi has just published a brilliant article on the Teahadist movement :
My favourite line among many :
A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.
You do realize that they’ll whine about George Soros in response, right? Then in the next breath they’ll call liberals poor and lazy. 
the “Tree of Revolution.” The tree, which Beck illustrated on his ever-present chalkboard, looked to be a sturdy oak. Buried where the trunk sat was Wilson. To the left of Wilson, also in the roots, was Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary. To the right of Wilson was Saul Alinsky, the late social radical. Farther up the trunk was SDS – Students for a Democratic Society, a group that protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Above SDS were the words “Cloward and Piven,” an obscure reference to two Columbia University academics who in 1966 wrote a Nation magazine article proposing a radical anti-poverty strategy that Beck believes is the basis of an enduring leftist conspiracy to destroy the American economy.
On the left branch of the tree were the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the ACORN community group. On the right branch of the tree were Bill Ayers, Obama’s “terrorist” pal; Van Jones, an Obama adviser Beck had just driven to resign; and something called “the Apollo Alliance.” Beneath that – a low-hanging fruit? – was Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Then it started getting complicated. Jeff Jones, who with Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, is an adviser to Apollo – where Van Jones used to work! And Jeff and Van have the same last name – Jones!
Dollar bills were pasted to the branches on the chalkboard, forming leaves. “All these places where there are dollar bills, George Soros has his hands in it,” Beck explained.
He then unveiled more elements of the arboreal conspiracy: The Apollo Alliance, funded by Soros, wrote Obama’s stimulus bill! Apollo’s Jeff Jones, along with Obama friend Ayers, “came right from SDS,” which is “code language for Marxism,” and formed the Weather Underground, responsible for “blowing up the Pentagon”! (Actually, the group blew up a bathroom, but still . . .) ACORN founder Wade Rathke is connected to SEIU because “his brother Dale is at SEIU, we think.” (SEIU denies this, and there is no evidence for it.) The whole bunch was inspired by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who wanted to “get everyone on welfare, just start racking up the bills so the American financial system would eventually collapse.”
Woodrow Wilson?
Woodrow fucking Wilson?
I’ve read a lot about the arch-conservatives of the 1950s who wanted to roll back the New Deal, suspected Eisenhower of being a Communist, and laid the groundwork for the later success of movement conservatism. (See Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein.)
But not even they were obsessed with Woodrow Wilson. He played no part in their narrative.
Is this a new thing? Is Beck unique in this regard?
Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Woodrow Wilson-Che Guevara-ACORN plot to destroy America.
My guess would be, Beck blames Wilson for expanding the economic role and power of the federal government by introducing the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and progressive income tax.
But that’s just a guess. Maybe what he’s really hung up over is that Satanic-NWO League of Nations thing.
Probably not Wilson’s racial segregation policies.
Bumping this thread because it takes on increased relevance with the Tea Party’s electoral success – and because we still don’t seem to know the answers. Right up to eday, I did not hear a single Tea Party candidate address the issues of the GWOT, immigration, or economic globalization.
The TPs had a rally in downtown Houston some months ago–in Discovery Park, (mostly) paid for by our tax dollars. They had their area fenced in, but I walked around the perimeter. It was a blindingly lily white group for such a diverse city.
I overheard at least one speech about immigration & saw some signs. They are against it. Definitely against “illegal” immigration–but even the legal kind was regarded with suspicion.
This was not a scientific survey. I began feeling queasy & went to The Grove for Happy Hour.