It’s probably fair to say that free-ish (it often stops being free once you have the ability to pay) housing is more available in the UK than it is in the USA. But it isn’t freely available to anyone who can’t be bothered working. I’d need to ask my sister along to explain (it’s her field), but basically it’s possible to get housing assistance if you can’t work for health (or family) reasons, or if you are looking for work. You may be offered a house or flat owned by the local authority, or you may be able to get rent assistance in cash.
You can’t just show up at an office and say “Yo! Government! I can’t be assed working! Give me a house!”
Believe me, it’s more work than actually getting a paying job. Also unless you’re a one legged black muslim lesbian single mother asylum seeker expect to go to the bottom of a very loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong waiting list.
Aw, come in, Illum–you’re spoiling it for all the conservatives who get hardons imagining all the lazy layabouts whose dream it is to live in public housing on the dole, using their food stamps to buy beer and drugs and cackling at all the poor working stiffs supporting their life of leisure.
Take that away from them, and what do they have left?
Oh, yeah, sorry. Forgot what I said. In fact about once year I quit my job and sit naked in front of the TV smoking pot for several weeks in public housing just because I can. Getting the place only requires me to walk into a local housing and say “I’m lazy - gimme!”. They even fill the form out for me!
The problem I’ve seen is once programs to offer a safety net to the poor have been around long enough people tend to think it’s their right as an American to be taken care of. Helping folks is a good thing but the programs need to be designed to encourage people or even insist, they do all they are able to do. Programs need to require something of the person receiving help other than just being in need.
I don’t know that I buy this any more. Rather than have large pockets of abandoned and dangerous locales that get the back of the gummint’s hand (except as places to make numerous daily arrests), I sometimes would prefer to offer minimal subsistence housing and food at taxpayers’ expense (and keep careful track of who’s getting it, with punishment for fraud built in) attached to education, job training, workfare, etc. The lifestyle might attract some lazy layabouts, sure, but I would rather work than live on rice and spam with basic cable and domestic vacations. I’d prefer to work at least ten times as hard to make only three times the money that welfare pays, and I accept that some unenlightened slobs would not. Still, I’d rather they were paid to sit around and waste their lives than make them feel that the only way they had to live was to mug me and sell drugs to my kids. But I understand the principle that you’re responding to–this difference is one of the traits that distinguishes liberals from conservatives, I think. We both are sad that some people lack ambition, but we have different solutions for preventing their lack of ambition from poisoning our lives.
Even if it were true that “someone will always be willing to lend it”, who thinks perpetual debt is a *good *idea? Oh right… crazy people, children, and my mom.
cosmodan, I have no experience with welfare for the past fifteen years or so, so I don’t know how it works after reforms, but I was on AFDC for a while after my daughter was born, and I can tell you that at the time it was profoundly fucked up. I wasn’t allowed to work. If I did, no matter how little money I made, I forfeited my AFDC. Applying for AFDC, one of the first things they told me was that if I owned a car worth more than $2K, I’d have to get rid of it. There was more, but just these two things blew my mind.
How is it better to pay everyone the same amount for doing nothing? Why not offer graduated benefits based on income? Why not a program that specifically pays for daycare? After all, there are a whole lot of people who could make enough money that they could feed their families just fine, if they didn’t have daycare expenses. And how does it make sense to make people get rid of their cars, especially over such small amounts of money? Not a big deal for me personally, because I live in the city and don’t drive, but for most people, good luck trying to do your grocery shoppng with three kids, let alone GET A JOB with no car.
Again, no idea how it works not, I assume it’s improved. But back then, it was like the system was *designed *to encourage complete helplessness and dependency on the goverment. IMO, it’s not that people felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything to help themselves. It’s that the simply weren’t allowed to do anything to help themselves. It was the ultimate rock and hard place situation.
I’m really trying to think of an example. I’ve only become more liberal as I get older. Bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend. I guess I’ve developed a more nuanced view on the Second Amendment. (I don’t like guns, but I’ve got a real hardon for the Bill of Rights.)
Though I’m not even sure what’s “conservative”. I see the term used for some ideas that seem pretty radical to me.
As a result of my experiences arguing on the Dope, I no longer am all that opposed to gun ownership, though I still think this would be a safer society overall if every criminal halfwit was somehow prevented from buying a gun with the same ease he can buy a newspaper. Call me crazy.
I used to like the notion of personal responsibility, but seeing how it is practiced by conservatives has led me to absolutely despise it. It’s just a cheap, sleazy excuse to avoid tackling social problems in a responsible manner. Every time questions like “How shall we reduce the incidence of rape, armed robbery and murder in our society?” pops up the conservatives cry “Squawk! Personal responsibility! Lock 'em up!” Or “How can we reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies?” the conservatives cry “Squawk! Personal responsibiility! Ban abortions!”
I wold like to see some calm, objective thought given to these issues, but the conservatives have used the “personal responsibility” meme to prevent that time and again. I spit on the conservative notion of personal responsibility.
Look, we have been nice by complying with your wishes as stated in the OP that conservatives stay out of this. Do you think that that gives you license to fire insults at us?
Where’s the insult, Doors? Are you disputing that it’s a standard, totally unexceptionable hard-core conservative position that welfare recipients jack up everyone’s taxes needlessly by preferring the easy and lucrative dole to honest labor?
If you’d do think that’s an unfair characterization of the conservative critique of the welfare system, could you please open a separate thread to discuss it? Thanks.
If you are for fiscal conservatism is that a rightie policy? They talk it and then run up huge deficits. Reagan and Bush have talked the talk and then did the opposite. Yet the wild spending dems have shown more fiscal restraint. So if I say we should control our spending ,am I being lefty or righty?
I think that your point might be more accurately described as suggesting the conservative position is based upon sexual gratification from imagining particularly hyperbolic boogeymen, and then rhetorically asked what would be left if said gratification were taken away.
So I suppose the insult might be in the part you failed to copy into your question. Or was that also rhetorical?
Oh. You think **Doors **thought I was implying that conservatives literally got erections from perceived welfare abuse rather than implying that the subject got them all hot and bothered for ideological reasons? I guess I thought that was so clearly figurative it could be taken for granted as a rhetorical flourish, but maybe not.
This is actually the problem I’m having with this thread. I’ve never been anti-gun. I was raised around them. They were a major part of my life, and while gun control might have once been a major part of the liberal platform, it’s never been a major part of my liberal platform. Republicans talk a lot about “fiscal responsibility” but in my lifetime, I’ve seen the economy boom under a Democratic president, and then get run into the ground with a Republican administration until people are talking seriously about the possibility of a major Depression. I have always been in favor of personal responsibility, but I see Republicans argue that birth control should be taken out of the schools and severely limited, thus rendering it impossible to be personally responsible for your own sexuality (one example of many that makes me think “personal responsibility” it utterly meaningless to Republicans). I’ve always been in favor of the government staying out of personal lives, but Republicans seem to argue that they have a right in invade people’s bedrooms and their bodies.
So…I would be able to answer the OP if I had a clear idea of what Republican supposedly stood for. But I don’t have any real idea. It all seems (to me) to be a nebulous “We hate Liberals, atheists, and fags” philosophy.
Well, when people say to each other “Fuck you!” (which i’m not, to be clear), they aren’t literally indicating their desire to have sex with them. Calling someone an asshole doesn’t really mean you think they’re a particular bodily part. And suggesting conservatives have a hardon from imagining welfare abuse does not literally mean you think they’re sitting back and going to town. It is obvious all are not being literal. Nevertheless, all three are insults.
Moreover, even in the figurative sense that conservatives get “hot and bothered” from it for idealogical reasons is insulting.
