This would only be true if the value that you receive is equal to the money that you paid. This is something that is almost never true in transactions, otherwise, why would people participate in them? For instance, what value do you place on not being invaded by Canada? Is it more or less than your taxes? Unless you really don’t mind oppression under a maple rule, you would be willing to pay more than your currently do to keep Canada out of your backyard, therefore, you are getting more value in services than you are paying, just on that alone.
If I have a widget that cost me $0.25 to make, and that you would be willing to pay $1.00 to own for your own use, and I sell it to you for $0.50, then who got more out of the transaction?
This really is basic economics here. Do you really think that a few seconds thought on your part is going to disprove over a hundred years of economic theory?
And of those taxes, are you willing to pay more, or do you advocate for and elect politicians that would have you pay less? If the former, then great, we’re on the same side, for the most part. I suspect, however, you are of the latter, and you would rather pay less to support your community than you currently do.
Is this a proper assumption on my part, that you would support paying less in taxes?
ETA:Also, you do get out more than you put in in pure dollars because we are currently running a pretty massive deficit, meaning that your grandchildren are currently the ones that are paying for you to receive tax breaks.
The point is that you had LOTS of help caring for your children. This is in stark contrast to the “nothing” that you claimed that others did to help.
That makes them “hired help”. Not “no help”. People who did lots of things to help you care for your children in exchange for money, not people who did “nothing” to help you care for your children.
I point this out because the “I did all this all by myself” is a shitty attitude that has no purpose but to devalue other human beings, and make it OK for those people to suffer because they aren’t as “self sufficient” as you imagine yourself to be.
Of course, you’re not arguing that we shouldn’t have morality or compassion, you’ll just argue that it’s unnecessary and really should you have compassion and give of the fruits of your labor to people who “did not provide any value”?
Goodness, what should we do with these valueless people?
OK, for a more serious answer : you’re barking up the wrong tree, pilgrim. Quoth Clint Eastwood, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it”. It’s not about who’s entitled to what. It’s about if you don’t provide a safety net, if you don’t provide help to the people who need it, you’re hurting **yourself **and your own kids in the long run (nevermind hurting them in the shortest of runs, I surmise you don’t give a shit).
Your “no abortion but I won’t pay shit for SHIT !” ideas inevitably result in a) more healthcare costs b) more crime c) more drug use d) more crime as a result of drug use. Dysfunctional homes result in dysfunctional children, and antisocial politics harm the fabric of society. I know, weird, right ? Who woulda thunk. And since anti-abortion policies demonstrably saddle poor families with more, long term, unmitigatable financial burdens (because the historical practice of exposure isn’t OK any more ; and foster care is its own brand of hell… but not free hell) then they must, perforce, also result in higher social expenditures. That is, if you’re at all invested in keeping a functional society long term. I know that’s falling out of fashion compared to “fuck it, I want all the money now and après moi le déluge”. But then again that’s why I’m heavily investing in guillotine futures.
Or, in other words, no man is an island yadda yadda.
Does caring for children not provide any value to society?
Hint: a society that doesn’t care for its children won’t last any longer than it takes its currently youngest adult members to die out. And the end of their lives (as well as probably much of the rest of their lives) will be nasty.
We sometimes make the mistake, as we look around at our allies and see that we all want to create a better society and a better world, that our political opponents do too.
We think that because we have disagreements with others who want to make a better world as to what that world would look like and how to get there, that the people on the other side of the aisle share in our desire to make a better world, and it is simply honest disagreement in how to get there.
Or rather, our views on what is a better world are so far apart that they cannot be reconciled. They want hell on earth for those they deem as sinners. They are not willing to leave it to their god to punish those who go against their moral desires, they want to see them suffer in this world right here and now. They are willing to reduce their own quality of life to ensure that those who “deserve it” will live in dehumanizing conditions. They are willing to let actual babies who have been born suffer and even die horribly to act a punishment to their wanton sinful mothers. And they want the cycle to continue, for if all sinners were “reformed”, then to whom would they glower down upon in smug self righteousness?
Would you like to say what I got wrong there, or are you just going to leave it at a mindless and idiotic quip and act self satisfied in your self perceived prowess?
You did say that that was the reason that you hate Hillary Clinton, so that’s not wrong.
You make claims to being self made, to being independent, to having earned everything you have on your own, so that’s right on point.
And you get very upset when someone points out that those claims are ludicrous.
It’s not a caricature, it is a painstaking portrait of your positions, and I wish it was funny, but knowing that there are those who would work towards the destruction of everything that others have built just so that they can have the largest share of the ashes that are left only gives me the laughter you hear at the gallows.
OK, bur remember your justification is that it’s supposedly a person from the moment the sperm bonks into the egg. So you’re pro-fetal-life because you’re supposedly pro-human-person-life.
How about white evangelical voters? They vote anti-abortion, and they vote anti-any government programs to help their fellow human beings in material ways. Other than maybe tax cuts, which don’t do much good for people in need.
And the Catholic vote is gradually solidifying as Republican as well.
They are pro-fetal life until it costs them some money. A well-respected conservative economist could estimate that 50% of abortions could be prevented if everyone paid an extra dollar in income taxes to support social welfare programs, and those “pro-fetal-life” people would be marching in the streets in their tea party costumes to protest such a “scheme”.
They just want to have another excuse to build more prisons. That and the military are the only government expenditures they gladly embrace. And oh yeah, welfare for farmers is totally fine too. Welfare for babies is bad, though.
There’s the obvious rebuttal that if a parent decides they don’t want to be responsible for their two-year-old child, they can dump them off at an orphanage. A two-year-old has an independent life.
A fetus does not. Saying you want to keep a fetus alive means you have to compel a woman to allow her body to be used for that purpose.
Let me offer you a batter analogy. Suppose somebody says they are opposed to capital punishment. That doesn’t mean they are willing to accept the responsibility of taking custody of a maximum security prisoner. The fact that they are unwilling to do the latter doesn’t mean their commitment to the former is insincere or hypocritical.
Thanks, that is indeed a better analogy. Just because someone objects to Thing X, doesn’t mean they are obligated to shoulder the costs or responsibility of what happens if Thing X is prevented or banned.
This. My standard phrasing is something like, “I’ll know whether to take seriously your claims of compassion for the unborn by your regard for the well-being of those already born.”
There are anti-choice types who pass that test, but by and large they majorly flunk.
A few years ago - and this should be an easy one for them - white evangelical voters at least gave lip service to being for taking in refugees from other countries. In the era of Trump, of course, that’s now ancient history.
That is a deeply, seriously flawed argument, because prohibitions on abortion and child and family health and welfare are very closely interlinked social policy issues, and the former has direct implications for the latter. The blatant hypocrisy among so-called pro-lifers is that the “life” they are so zealously “pro” about is, at best, a highly contentious matter of faith that a zygote or something non-sentient the size of a pomegranate seed is “human life” requiring legal protection, while the absolutely uncontroversial life of an actual human child or its mother is somebody else’s problem.
That’s also a bad analogy, because the presumed consequence is completely unrealistic and never happens. The appropriate analogy illustrating the hypocrisy of irrationally opposed views on related social policies would be opposing capital punishment while refusing to provide funding for any necessary prison expansion or other remediation of overcrowding issues.
Another analogy would be opposing prisons altogether while shrugging one’s shoulders over the inevitable uptick in crime.
Or opposing mental hospitals while being blasé over all the severely disturbed people who will inevitably become burdens on family and the criminal justice system.
54 percent believe either “Abortion should not be permitted” or “Abortion should be available, but under stricter limits than it is now.” This was even after the recent abortion “heartbeat laws” were passed: Abortion
These kinds of views are nowhere near as mutually exclusive as many people seem to imagine. And the sizable group that holds these views simultaneously is disproportionately likely to be decisive in battleground elections.
Those kinds of statistics kind of miss the point. Those states like Georgia with outrageous abortion prohibitions – what is the political ideology of the ruling party? What’s the political ideology of those other states hoping that the legal challenges to their madness make it to the Supreme Court and overturn Roe v Wade? Those states that refused Medicaid expansion even when the feds were paying – what was the political ideology in charge there? What was the political ideology recently pulling all the stops to kill the ACA, and replace it with … nothing? What’s the political ideology that even now is making major cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, even as politically like-minded states pass draconian anti-abortion laws?
This is the hypocrisy that absolutely pervades the Republican party, even if positions on some of these issues sometimes cross party lines.