Not crazy about it, but a consumer economy is what we got. And if the people who spend every dime they get don’t have enough to spend, we no longer have an economy. I wait with bated breath for the conservative plan to put more money in the hands of people who a) need it and b) will spend it.
I was simply referring to the fact that in my earlier post I did limit myself to just the Federal tax structure—not returning to that limitation.
Then it is my error. I had believed this to be a serious forum in which the posters were interested in a true exchange of ideas. Not necessarily to agree with them, but not to just view those with differing views as targets for indignant barbs.
My apologies for not conforming to the ideology of belittling anyone who disagrees with one’s own views.
I see this defense a lot but I think it is very disingenuous in terms of its proportion to the actual portions of taxes that get spent on social programs versus everything else.
Where do your federal taxes go?
To paint the argument differently with respect to proportional taxes…as a higher income earner, why are you not beaming with pride at the greater ability to fund the military, provide power infrastructure, build bridges, etc? Basing the power of your vote around “Mary” and the inconsequential sliver of your taxes that goes to that kind of aid or welfare seems like you are missing the forest for the trees (heck, for the individual pine needles).
I think the you perceived impact on your personal discretionary budget by ‘hand outs’ is vastly greater than the reality, and comparing it to a car is similarly vastly out of proportion.
Indignant? That was mild. I could get a lot sharper about supporting a candidate who will clearly say anything to get what he wants and avoid making serious policy statements like they were life-threatening, attempting to force religious views on others and enforce discrimination and control others’ activities based upon those views (the antithesis of the First Amendment, contrary to the arguments of some conservatives here), nonsensically and automatically opposing any federal legislation that comes from the other side of the aisle, blocking appointments without even a hearing…
That’s not even close to a complete list.
A thick skin is highly suggested in debate. I don’t avoid serious topics, nor do I mind a little entertainment in the process. So once again, deal with it.
Oh, please. Even if one were to assume you were correct, they still have what they do earn to spend. Plus there’s still a huge part of the populace earning middle and upper class incomes, and I’m sure our evil consumer economy, with its dastardly inclination to strive to give people what they want, would somehow manage to survive.
Here’s a novel idea: how 'bout they work for it! And if they’re at minimum wage level, then they need to apply themselves, develop better skills (and/or work habits if necessary) look for better opportunities, and climb their way to a better life.
This won’t fly with most Democrats, however, because they think it’s “mean” and insulting to tell someone to work harder. And perhaps even more importantly - albeit on a subliminal level - is the fact that the more poorly educated people with poor work habits and skills there are, and the more incapable they are of pulling their own weight and supporting themselves, the more votes there are for Democratic politicians and policies. Yes, no?
Many years ago when I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh, he made the claim that liberalism is the ideology for losers. It’s really hard to look at what’s going on in our schools (where kids are passed from grade to grade whether they learn anything or not), our eager acceptance of drug use, our defense and encouragement of single parenthood (often by girls who are young enough to have been big sisters rather than mothers), the ever-increasing number of and qualifications for government giveaways, etc., etc., and not come to the conclusion that Democrats for the last fifty years have literally been manufacturing losers (and therefore Democratic votes) as fast as they can. Once one realizes this, all the pieces start to fall in place and it becomes much easier to understand liberal policy making.
OK, what jobs should they work at? If you want to re-create something like FDR’s WPA, sure, that would be fine. And if you can somehow magically jump-start the economy to the point that private employers would be offering them jobs, well, that’ll work too, but be prepared to defend the notion that your magical jump-starting will actually work. But just telling someone “Get a job!” when there aren’t jobs to be had is silly.
Here we have the fundamental misconception espoused by the ‘personal responsibility’ argument: just work harder, and you’ll succeed. It is based on the fallacy that hard work is the only factor that determines success or failure.
The word I was thinking of was “cruel”, but also “silly”. Anyway, he’s sure our evil consumer economy would survive, so we can take comfort in that.
I’m not talking about how poor people can become successful, I’m talking about how they can get ahead. And hard work is pretty much a requisite. It’s hard to get ahead if you’re a slacker. Having said that, hard work encompasses more than just the expenditure of energy. One has to have a certain amount of ambition, to be courteous and helpful to bosses and customers, to keep an eye open for opportunities for better jobs or advancement, and one has to strive not only to learn their own job but as much as they can about how to do the job of their superior so when the time comes for advancement he or she will have not only the requisite understanding and capability to do the work, but to also be a step ahead of others who haven’t gone to the trouble.
Well, you know the standard comeback to that I’m sure, which is that the want ads in most major cities are full of jobs needing to be filled. But when a person can sit at home watching cable all day and get paid almost as much or more by the government, then why go out and go to work?
People can also create their own jobs. In my neck of the woods a person can make $30 an hour (or more) just mowing, edging and weedeating lawns. Floors for a variety of businesses need to be stripped and waxed on a regular basis, hair salons and barber shops chief among them, and can bring in a couple hundred or more for a night’s work. I knew a college student in the 80s who was making $25 an hour at that time cleaning windows for a chain of convenience stores. Houses need to be cleaned. Houses and driveways need power washing. Houses, and rooms within houses, need painting. People with trucks can offer hauling services, most people have tons of stuff in their homes and garages that they haven’t gotten rid of just because they don’t have a way to get it to the dump. Advertising flyers need to be passed out door-to-door, and and if offering the service oneself it pays quite a bit more than minimum wage.
Etc., etc., etc. There are plenty of ways for people to make fairly good money if they really want to. But the reality is most people just don’t have much ambition. To the degree they’re employed to begin with, they just want a comfortable job where once they learn the ropes they can just put in the hours on automatic pilot and then head home at the end of the day to drink beer and watch television. (This is actually an important consideration for those who do wish to get ahead, because competition is scarce for those who are willing to work hard and go the extra mile.)
As I just said, my take on it is that jobs and money making opportunities abound for those who’re willing to pursue them, and the claim that no jobs are to be had is not only silly but just an excuse. Witness studies which show that once unemployment benefits run out people magically start finding jobs, and the longer the period of time that benefits are granted, the longer it takes the recipients to find jobs. Funny how that works, eh?
And a poor black man, for instance, will have an equal chance to succeed as a rich white man, all other things being equal. Right.
Btw, that third quote was wrongly attributed. It was Chronos’ not mine.
of this fact , Trump may win am a libertarian and cannot bear
Clinton.
As Ronald Reagan famously said, there you go again.
You are quite the goalpost mover, aren’t you? I could have sworn I was talking about ‘poor people’, not black people. And I was talking about ways these generic poor people could become more successful and not have to live on government beneficence. I’m certain I said nothing whatsoever to address racial equality or lack of same. When come back please bring relevance.
You are correct, sir. I copied your names for attribution purposes in constructing the post and mistakenly thought I’d copied his again. My apologies.
Your original contention was more general than that. It made no distinctions on anything, poor or rich, black, white, brown, or other. But let me ‘replace the goalposts,’ if that makes you happy. Do you think a poor person has the same opportunities for success as a rich one, all else being equal?
More than half of people on food stamps work.
Ha, fuck no. The reason this won’t fly with most Democrats is because it’s fundamentally not the reality we live in any more. Upwards mobility is incredibly difficult. Even assuming you know what you have to do to move forward, doing so is, to quote one of my favorite columnists, “like trying to climb out of a dick pit but the ladder is also made of dicks”. The single most clear indicator for your wealth? How wealthy your parents were.
See, here’s the thing. Looking for better opportunities? This can be expensive. Some jobs will straight-up fire you if they find out you’ve been looking for other work. Furthering your education? Really expensive, and you’d better hope it pans out, otherwise you’re stuck with debt you can’t get rid of. And of course, there’s another key thing: we need people to work these minimum wage jobs. Someone needs to be flipping those burgers and mowing your lawn and servicing your yacht. We need those guys, but we also can’t afford to pay them well. There’s no way this equation really works.
By people like Rush Limbaugh… No, seriously, you think this is somehow indicative of “failure”? Paul Erdös did most of his (groundbreaking, extremely productive) work on mathematics while on amphetamines. I know quite a lot of people who smoke pot regularly, and most of them are responsible professionals. A great many noteworthy success stories, particularly in the IT field, involve casual LSD use. Nobody is “eagerly accepting” the heroin addict who can’t function in society. It’s just starting to come around that maybe we’re going about this whole “drug” issue wrong, because it’s hard to imagine a worse outcome than what we currently have.
I’m gonna have to ask for a cite - who has been encouraging single parents, exactly? Accepting, sure, demanding that they be treated with some basic dignity, all right, but encouraging? I don’t think anyone has actually been doing that.
And also get lucky. You forgot that part. You can do all these things, have a stellar record, and if you don’t find the right way forward, or you do poorly at the interview, or you come down with a fever on that day, or the person interviewing you is a racist, or any number of other things completely out of your control, well, you’re back to square one. Hope you like mopping up toilets. And of course, again, there’s the issue of “someone needs to do the shit jobs”. As David Wong so eloquently put it:
It’s like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, “Now fight for it!” Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, “Hey, you could have had it if you’d fought harder!” and that’s true on an individual level. But not collectively – you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren’t getting any hooch that night.
Not everyone is going to advance. A small handful might. Most people are just gonna be stuck. Or do you think that so many people want to be working dead-end, shit jobs? And all this is assuming they have the mental stability, wherewithal, business sense, and understanding of their skillset to even get to that point. All this advice is pretty darn worthless to someone suffering from chronic depression, or who doesn’t know how to get ahead.
Let’s just take this as an example. Let’s assume for the moment that you have the skills and tech needed to do this job well (if someone is paying you 30 bucks an hour to mow, weed, and edge their lawn, which I kinda doubt*, you’d better be a professional, because otherwise they aren’t employing you at that rate again). Let’s assume you are apt at it, you have the business sense to know how to get and retain customers… What do you do once those jobs are filled? Magically create more demand for well-paid service labor?
Look, my point here throughout all of this is simply this: It’s not that simple. Getting ahead in life is extremely hard, and often quite risky. The reason most people don’t do it is because they can’t take those risks, or tried and failed. Or do you really think that America’s abysmal economic mobility and the fact that the best indicator of your adult wealth is how wealthy your parents were comes down to people being lazy?
*My dad makes around that rate as a contractor, and what he does is closer to art than gardening. In an extremely wealthy neighborhood. 30 bucks an hour for mowing, edging, and weedeating? Yeah fucking right.
Anyone with the kind of mindset you just displayed is virtually guaranteed to stay stuck in poverty. To you it’s all luck, the odds are impossibly stacked against you, life sucks and then you die…unless of course the Democratic party comes calling, promising you other people’s money if you’ll vote for them. This is exactly the kind of attitude that keep so many people down.
It’s late and I have a busy day tomorrow so I’m not gonna respond to your post line by line. But I will say that I’m not talking about how the poor can become wealthy, I’m talking about ways they can lift themselves up out of a poverty level existence and achieve a comfortable life. And virtually anyone anywhere would be a hell of a lot better served to take my post to heart than yours, which virtually guarantees a life of helplessness and scarcity.
Further, I’d bet any amount of money you’d care to wager that I could take you around all day here in the midwestern city where I live and show you people all over town who are paying $30 (at least) for mowing, edging and weedeating work that can be completed in an hour or less. And believe me, professional mowing doesn’t take any particular skill or specialized knowledge. Anyone who’s ever mowed and trimmed their own lawn already knows most of what they’d need to know, and a rank beginner could figure it out in less than a day by mowing a few lawns for family or friends. Some lawn guys make enough money during six months of mowing to live on for the entire year. Again, your defeatist attitude is blinding you to opportunity.
Still, having said that I’m not advocating every poor person in the country should go out and start mowing lawns. The point is that there are a lot of relatively simple ways people can create their own jobs and make good money if they want to, and I listed a few as examples.
So the question becomes one not of opportunity but of desire, and most people simply don’t have the desire. They’d rather continue their meager existence, blaming everyone and everything for their plight, and looking to the government for benefits to help them out rather than getting out on their own and making good things happen. These people are called bread and butter by Democratic party politicians.
Is any of that actually in my post? At all?
Yeah, if you’re born poor, the odds are stacked against you, often to an absurd degree. Other countries often have better solutions for this - free advanced education, financial aid for families with children, educational systems that help teach the poor and ensure that they can actually focus on their education, apprenticeship systems that function as a combination of job and schooling, all kinds of useful ways for the poor to break out of the dick pit that is poverty.
Even in the USA, it’s possible. And I’m not saying to act like it is impossible. I’m not saying “give up”. You have to get lucky, but nobody ever simply lucks their way into success - you have to work hard to get that luck in the first place. There’s an awful lot outside of your control, but what is within your control you can typically do something about.
But you seem to have no understanding of the realities of poverty and economic mobility in 21st-century America. Your advice is not bad advice, it’s just shallow and not particularly applicable in a lot of situations.
Yeah, no shit. Just like the guy saying, “If you try hard enough, you can lose all that extra weight” is more helpful to me than the guy saying “It’s incredibly difficult to lose weight, to the point where statistically, less than 1% of people who try are actually able to lose weight and keep it off”. The attitude, while delusional and wrong, is helpful because actually recognizing how hard these things are on an individual level can lead to people becoming discouraged and giving up, and that’s the worst case scenario.
But on a societal level? No. On a societal level, you know what that advice translates to? My “good advice” on weight loss leads to the stigmatization of fat people and treating being fat like a moral failure. Your “good advice” on poverty leads to people losing the support they need because people make the erroneous assumption that they’re where they are because they’re lazy (i.e. turning “being poor” into a moral failing), and if we just set a fire underneath them, they’d shape right up. And what a surprise, we see exactly this in your post:
“So the question becomes one not of opportunity but of desire, and most people simply don’t have the desire. They’d rather continue their meager existence, blaming everyone and everything for their plight.”
Nice brush you got there. Good for painting entire neighborhoods in one go! And of course you follow it up with a baseless conspiracy theory I really have little interest in getting into.
Maybe it’s just substantially different where you are. On MDI, most professional-level gardeners don’t get paid anywhere near that much. In Germany, where I live currently, you need to get licensed in order to do that type of work, and it is very much a professional gig. I just find “go door to door offering odd jobs for far more than minimum wage” an… unrealistic suggestion, even assuming they have the tools they need to do the job.
I haven’t been a part of the US labor force for a while. Anyone here who is poor care to chime in on SA’s suggestions?
Or maybe we could talk about who Republicans will vote for, now that it looks like the race is between Clinton and Trump?
I think everyone in this thread defending the GOP perspective needs to cease and desist with statements of the form, “Liberals think ______” or “Democrats think _____.” These statements are almost always wrong, as most of what passes for conservative “thought” involves tending to the intricate leftist strawman they’ve constructed. Cite a quote or tell me what you think.
I think conservatives need to confront their delusions about handouts and government spending. The GOP got us into the Iraq war. It is debatable who is responsible for the economic crash, but it was under their watch that $787 billion was transferred from the treasury to the banks. They are the ones who are always in favor of handing what amounts to handouts to companies like Boeing and Raytheon in the form of ever escalating military contracts that we don’t need. Or the perpetual handouts to oil companies, or the warping of the tax code to always benefit corporations and the wealthy.
Things like food stamps and educational assistance are drops in the bucket compared to the waste the GOP inflicts on us in their attempt to drive the debt to such unsustainable levels that we are forced to cut Social Security and Medicare. <----- This is the GOP agenda, and I think conservatives are blind to it because they have been trained to get on their high horses and lecture everyone about handouts, always in a mode that does not quantify things or acknowledge what problems are actually facing the country. Keep railing against the losers in your heads, guys, while the GOP picks all of our pockets again.
Before I get attacked as a “liberal”, maybe I should share a few things about myself. I put myself through college and paid off the debt within a few years via working two jobs. I was poor all my life, but eventually I put myself in the position of owning a very nice home in a nice neighborhood. I made over 6 figures last year and continue to increase my income- currently I am up to 4 sources of income and hope to start acquiring a set of rental properties. I haven’t inherited anything, nor have I ever been on government assistance (unless you count public school). Go on, tell me what I think.
Wait, I have a better idea. I’ll tell you what I think! I think that attending to “the general welfare” is one of the missions of the US government- it is right there on the first page of the Constitution, you could look it up. I think if people in the country are starving, Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, give 'em some fucking food stamps! And spare me the lecture about responsibility- the poor are themselves our collective responsibility (I cite the “general welfare” provision of the Constitution). This is the wealthiest nation in the history of Earth, we aren’t going bust feeding the poor or making sure they can get inhalers and insulin. We are going bust because of the moronic military adventurism and math-challenged tax cutting by the GOP that is the product of government capture by wealthy special interests, for their own benefit, and painted as something else for the credulous (not that the dems are a bunch of saints, mind).
I think the board’s conservatives should stop talking about what liberals think just as soon as the board’s liberals stop talking about what conservatives think.