Ooh, ooh, I’ve been cut to the quick!
I shall make a note to the effect that Mr Smashy is not only the king of ‘tough lovin’ but the ultimate arbiter of when it’s OK to inject personal stuff into a thread so as it can be made to go in only the direction he wants it to go.
If anyone else wants a copy of the note, email me. For just $4.95 I’ll mail you a copy printed on genuine 20-Lb Foolscap (216 × 343 mm).
Now, old fellow. 
Take into account that one had to point out how far you were getting into the jerk side so then you could show humanity.
Yes, personal examples may be dismissed or attempted to be minimized by people like you, but even if some are abusing the system that does not mean that then we should assume that all others deserve your [del]jerkiness[/del] kindness.
On a serious note, I hate making policy based on anecdotes or people’s individual circumstances. This is something both the left and right try to do. At risk of sounding like one of those “The mainstream media is an organ of the Democratic Party” types, it seems to happen in newspapers and online all the time - some sob story used as an argument for passing some kind of policy, usually more government help, even if our government cannot afford it budget-wise. I suspect that it’s not due to a political agenda but rather because David-vs-Goliath stories selll papers.
I only gave my personal experience because it thought it would help that poor woman. Obviously, form over function in that case; I’ll throttle back the arrogance, maybe dial down my Smugatron 2000 machine a bit.
It’s very easy to fall into that trap in my circumstances; in the interest of full disclosure, I make way too much money for what I do, live the life of, if not the idle rich, close to it.
Yes, it does matter. You claim that politicians are deliberately keeping people poor, but can find no evidence for that. Even evidence for trivial things that are important to your position. This suggests that you are wrong.
And no, I’m not accusing you of making things up, but I am suggesting you’re misremembering it.
You have said, repeatedly, that politicians want to get people on welfare indefinitely. This would suggest that you don’t understand that such a thing is impossible at the moment, and has been since unemployment came into being.
And 99 weeks sounds like a lot, but when you spread it out over an entire lifetime, it’s suddenly not so much.
Actually I didn’t have unemployment insurance in mind when I was talking about the politicians who like to keep a ready supply of those who depend on their programs, as a means of keeping them on the plantation. (And at the risk of covering this same ground 4 or 5 times, I’m not talking about all politicians; rather a subset of them).
If you think about it, there are so many other programs out there that fall into this category; certainly food stamps, but also health care (Medicare and medicaid, the under-consideration healthcare plan that we cannot afford, S-CHIP), FSA-support, public housing, Social Security, and of course AFDC or TANF or whatever the program is called where we pay women to have illegitimate kids, continuing the cycle of dependency into another generation.
There are other more subtle programs that also help to keep the underclass that way; 8(a) set-asides, Hubzone, affirmative action, EITC. Although I’m in favor of many, perhaps even most of these programs (as long as we balance the need to provide temp help with the danger of making citizens virtual wards of the State), a reasonable person cannot argue that it doesn’t make whole classes of people dependent on government, which is how many politicians want them.
I should worry about being the drone of a socialist state? Have I fared better being the thrall of the corporatist state? We should be terrified that the chains may be replaced with hand cuffs?
If I have to choose between trusting the mercy of government and the generosity of businessmen, my choice is pretty clear. At least with government I get a voice, perhaps things can be changed, adjustments made. The businessman who won’t ruthlessly exploit the people will soon be shoved aside by the businessman who does not suffer such scruple. Such is the Beast we have put above us.
Here endeth the preachy stuff.
In order:
Food Stamps: Food is essential to life. Without food, humans would starve. The alternative to food stamps is letting a substantial group of poor people starve. This would not help them. Furthermore, food stamps are barely enough to not starve. Anyone who is deliberately dependent on food stamps is expending more energy not working and dealing with the stress of those conditions than they would be if they found a job.
Health Care: If a person is disabled due to illness, they cannot* get a job. If a person is sick regularly due to a treatable condition, they cannot* get a job. If a person is dead due to an avoidable condition, they cannot get a job. A LACK of healthcare can keep someone permanently in the underclass. Furthermore, it is impossible to live on healthcare alone.
*Okay, they can get a job. But it is much more difficult for them, and the job they will get will likely be lower paying.
FSA Support: The way this was originally conceived, it was designed to compensate for fluctuations in crops. Because crops can be destroyed by nature alone, one drought can kill thousands of farmers; while those same farmers on FSA support would be able to WORK at their JOBS for years more to come. I will grant that with the advent of modern agribusiness, the FSA is helping less and less little guys. However, the few that are still out there rely on it, since prices for farm produce have gone down due to agribusiness. The removal of FSA would put people out of work, not give people jobs.
Public Housing: Without a home (not even a house, mind you!), it is much more difficult to hold down a job. Sleep is essential to good health, and without a home, it is difficult to sleep well (or at all). Furthermore, the homeless are exposed to diseases, the elements, and are frequently arrested for no or flimsy reasons. A home eliminates those threats, and allows people to focus on their JOBS or their SEARCH to FIND a JOB. Furthermore, public housing is only discounted, not free. Even people on public housing will become homeless if they stay unemployed too long.
The Money for Parents program whose name you can’t remember: Okay, I admit that the implementation of this program is flawed in some ways, but this program was originally designed to help children. The idea behind the program is to make sure that the households of children are equipped well enough that the child can be raised well. This (if it was implemented properly) would BREAK the cycle of poverty, in many cases, as many adults become or stay poor due to poor parenting.
Each of these programs are intended to REDUCE the number of poor unemployed people: food stamps and public housing are designed to help ensure that people don’t have to spend their days foraging or begging and can search for a job, health care helps to ensure that people won’t lose the capability to work just because they’ve gotten injured or sick, FSA keeps small farmers from dying (and thus, working in future years) during the lean years, and the forgotten name Money for Parents program is supposed to make sure that up-and-coming adults will have the tools they need to get jobs.
Of course, the more intelligent folks here understand that you have presented a false choice. Nobody forces you to trust either government or ‘businessmen’ (*whatever that means) for you to thrive in society; assuming you’re an American.
Pedescribe, you seem to want to talk intelligently about this, so I’ll answer what I can in the short amount of time I have tonight for this.
First of all, by FSA I mean Federal Student Aid, under ‘Big-Ed’ as we government contractors call it. Pell grants, other grants, government-backed loans (which are going down like Madonna on her honeymoon) and government-direct loans (increasing).
You mention some of the programs I ran down, saying that if implemented correctly, they help lift people out of poverty. I generally agree. But human nature being what it is, they will rarely be implemented properly. Give people an incentive to have more children, even when we all know they have no business doing so, and they will. And the system will be gamed. And the law of unintended consequences wreaks havoc. Provide more federal loans and people who shouldn’t go to college end up going, to too expensive schools and for too long. There are lots of examples where people are crushed under that burden.
So some politicians promise more aid, people accept it, now they are indentured servants for life. And gummint has now bent the cost curve upwards (much like easy mortgages fueled home price bubbles a couple years ago). Now those selfsame politicians will be called upon to forgive this debt by these constituents/surething voters next election year.
Just one example, we could tell a similar story for all of those programs.
My point is this: should those programs be wiped off the map? No. Should we try to wean people off of government as a means to lift them up? Absolutely. This means we must strike a balance between providing temporary help while maintaining an incentive to succeed on their own.
PS: The other thread, about Tom Delay, in the Pit has some interesting comments by people, saying that people turned down jobs and instead took the Unemploymentinsurance money. This was what I read in that MSNBC story, the one that simply *couldn’t *be true because I couldn’t find a link to it from 6 months ago.
Well when you put it that way, it sounds a lot less conspiracy theor-ish. I pretty much agree with all of that.
Edit: And this is why I’m a bad debater. 
Leaving aside your charmingly cheeky assertion of intellectual superiority, which is just about the cutest thing I ever did see…you have a point. Trust is not required, grudging obedience will do.
And “an American”? Hell, I’m a Texan, don’t get more American than that!
Years ago I was out of work. It was ONLY for three months but that was more than enough. Like you, I didn’t qualify for shit. Over-educated (hahahaha a BS degree), overqualified for most things (yeah right I actually heard that one), not poor enough, and (at the risk of sounding bigoted) too white for some charities.
Safety net? There was none for me. Fortunately, it turned out I had some contacts that I wasn’t even aware of and they came through. Otherwise, I’d have been screwed.
Oooo… I hurt the feelings of the church-goer! I am such a witch!
I base it on experience - last March I went to church-based food pantry and was explicitly told that unless I became a church-member I could not partake in their program. I was turned away from a give-away of winter clothing on one occasion because I wouldn’t profess a membership in the Jesus Club.
Do all churches do that? No - but a surprising number of them do. A surprising number do that despite being participants in programs that profess to be non-denominational. If your church is all warm-and-fuzzy to nonmembers good for you, but that is NOT the case around here. Unless you’re directly involved in these programs take a good hard look at the people who are, because it is not at all unusual for the people who claim to be helping the poor to be more interested in Bible-thumping than rendering aid.
Nor do I appreciate the way a lot of churches use the excuse of “helping people” to come knocking on my door early in the morning and waking me up, use my phone for proselytizing purposes (the fact I belong to a religion that forbids proselytizing just makes it even more offensive), or otherwise harass me. Of course, I’ll grit my teeth and put up with it if I have to in order to survive.
I will note that I have located a local church with a food pantry that aren’t Total Religious Assholes about things and if I get that desperate again that’s where I’m going for help, but I’m not going to swallow the line that all Christians are wonderful generous people and all churches want to help the disadvantaged because my personal experience is running more than 50% to the contrary.
It’s not that there aren’t churches doing the good work out that, it’s that they are a MINORITY of churches professing to do this. One again, people are assuming there’s a safety net out there that just doesn’t exist int he real world.
Yes, but Canadian drug prices are so much lower than those in the US! Low enough that one of my relatives near the Canadian border was seriously looking into hopping the line to buy my husband’s meds and mail them to us, but I found another solution before we had to resort to that.
It’s not just diabetes - he has several other medical problems too, and I don’t want to side-track this into healthcare by bringing them all up. Diabetes is what’s most likely to kill him quickly, but it’s not his only problem.
I’m not sure just how I’m supposed to maintain two separate households on one income… he is not able to work. Yes, we’ve applied for disability for him, but the social security administration is years behind in processing cases.
As I said, diabetes is but one of his problems. If it was JUST that you are correct, it wouldn’t be as insurmountable an obstacle.
I re-examine this issue periodically - laws/regs/rules change after all - but so far I haven’t found a solution there.
Why do you assume I don’t avail myself of “every possible avenue for assistance”? How do you know I don’t? If I show up to a church-run soup kitchen and they turn me aside for not being “saved” it is not ME who is the obstacle.
Seems to me that your assumption is that if I’m still poor I must not have asked or help or done everything possible to help myself. Wrap your head around the notion that I HAVE done all that and I am poor despite it. There is NOT hardly any help out there for most poor people in the US.
So… your experience trumps mine? Right - middle class guy’s experience MUST be more valid than mine. :rolleyes:
So… if that is your feeling then surely you support universal health care, expanded housing subsidies for those below the poverty line, and other social safety nets, right? Right? Or don’t you?
We’re not starving… but we really could become homeless. Where do you think the homeless come from? They aren’t all druggies or mentally ill, there are entire families that are homeless in the US, don’t you know that?
**If you want to help me offer me a JOB. That is the one thing I need. A JOB. **If you have any openings in your company at present PM me and we’ll discuss how I might fit in.
Again - you seem to think there is “government aid” out there. As I have said - there is nothing but food stamps for poor adults without children. Do you think the threat of homelessness and my husband’s need for medical care isn’t an incentive? From the government, outside of foodstamps, there is no help, not even temporary.
I should also note that the only reason foodstamps are adequate for us is because I have a large garden and I’m able to grow a substantial portion of the vegetables we eat in a year. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have such a garden, as most people who rent do not have landlords tolerant of them tearing up half a lot of grass and replacing it with vegetables. Regrettably, last summer some of my crop was stolen - animals do not neatly slice the rootballs off lettuce, for example, and leave it behind, nor do the same with carrot tops, nor do they peel the cucumbers before eating them. While I feel some sympathy for people reduced to stealing out of gardens in order to eat it’s minimal since I’m depending on that food to feed me and mine.
And the name of the Money for Parents Program is TANF - Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. I don’t qualify because I don’t have children. Really, if you’re going to bother to debate the subject and your Google-fu is all you claim you could have bothered to find out the actual name of the program.
A Texan! Why didn’t you say so! I take back half of the bad things I’ve ever said about you.
(PS probably the second best state in the country…after Virginia of course… I especially like: golf in February, driving to Winstar after a Dallas meeting and playing some poker and drinking Big Red, whatever the fuck that is, and going to some crazy barn of a steakhouse where these broads swing on trapezes to try to ring some bell. Crazy place)
PPS you think I like being the smartest guy in the room? You think I enjoy that? It’s such a burden!:o
Broom, too bad Indiana churches are that way. I’d suggest that it’s time to move to a place where there’s more jobs, but I suspect you’d say that you don’t have the money to move or there’s something else holding you back (the garden perhaps?).
So no family that can help, no charities that can help you, no churches willing to help because you picked the wrong religion evidently, no jobs in your area that will pay enough (none? didn’t you and Bricker go back and forth on that awhile back?), and a disabled husband who needs expensive medical care.
You haven’t said what your degree is in, or what jobs you are qualified to do, so beyond that, obviously it’s tough to provide anything meaningful. I know my company has thousands and thousands of CSRs, and their turnover is about 25%/year. A CSR job sucks but it’s one of the few non-menial labor jobs you can get in this country without a college degree (or a worthless degree, for those who got one in philosophy or English lit or something :rolleyes: ).
But I’m just some anonymous guy on the internet, I could be an axe murderer or a 14 yr old kid, etc.
I guess I should get a refund on my edjumdcation, only that old English lit degree was the first step that led to buckets of money, easy working hours, and a job that is a blast, so they probably would not give me my money back.