Question for Republicans: If Trump wins the Nomination...

[Starving_Artist]

Oops, wrong thread. Belay my last.

[Northern_Piper]

@Czarcasm

Or maybe we could talk about who Republicans will vote for, now that it looks like the race is between Clinton and Trump?

That’s what I thought this thread was about, based on the title and your OP. I guess my reading comprehension is poor.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@Commander_Benson

[really long post]

I uh… Completely missed this one. Like, didn’t notice you made it. Sorry. :o I’ll try to get on that later today.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@Commander_Benson

You eschewed my comment that the Democrats push for “fairness”. I would disagree. On the surface at least, Democrat politicians constantly refer to the things they want the government to hand out to the disadvantaged as “leveling the playing field” or “giving everybody a fair chance”. (What the more liberal Democrats won’t say, but what they mean is “wealth re-distribution”.) The Democrats claim fairness is the objective; I simply held them to it.

I know they use this rhetoric in various places, but does it apply to most of the “handouts”? Even if that’s how they discuss it, it doesn’t reduce this:

But you’re right. In many ways, it is about survival. But it’s also about why has it come to that for a given individual. You stated (boldface mine):

You do realize that most Food Stamps recipients actually have jobs, right? Crappy jobs, jobs that don’t pay enough to support themselves or their families, but it’s generally not for lack of trying.

I emphasised those particular words because it goes to my belief that a person is responsible for his own actions and the consequences thereof. I’m guessing that right now, as you read that sentence, you’re mentally agreeing with it. And one of those responsibilities is the matter of children.

No parent—rich or poor, single or having a significant other—has the right to complain about the disadvantages having children visits upon him. There’s no validity to moaning and groaning about the cost of raising them, or the travails of rearing a disabled child, or the inability to go to a nice restaurant, or anything else.

That’s because those parents chose to have children. Those kids just didn’t materialise like a disease; the parents opted to have children. And that means taking responsibility for every problem and inconvenience that goes along with it. So you and the wife can’t go on vacation this year because you just found out your twelve-year-old needs braces? Don’t come crying to me about it; that’s on you.

Now, I took this deviation to underscore the concept of “bad life decisions” that I mentioned. I don’t know any statistics regarding people who require food stamps, but I’d be willing to bet that most people who need them aren’t single. After all, for years I worked a minimum-wage job, put food on my table, a roof over my head, and still managed to pay for college. I imagine that most households that rely on food stamps are those with children. And people who opt to have children when they are financially unprepared for it—or if the possibility of being unprepared for it exists—have no business having them. This is one of those bad life decisions that my extra tax money is being asked to remedy.

Discussions of this sort always come down to the single parent—usually, the mother—who is stuck with raising the children alone. Let’s go with the mother. Again, those children didn’t magically appear. Mom had to willingly partake in the actions which led to her being pregnant. (Naturally, this excludes the very, very small number of women who become pregnant due to rape.) She willingly carried each child; she willingly gave birth to it (and, yes, maybe she had a religious or moral objection to abortion, but it was still her decision), and she willingly kept it.

Now let’s say the man who fathered the child runs out on her. Yes, he’s a bastard who should be caught and made to pay for his responsibility in the matter. But the hard fact is, biology sticks the mother with the child. And some women don’t stop at one child or two. And even if the father isn’t a louse, maybe he’s a good guy who stands by the mother, maybe he gets run over by a bus or falls off a ladder. The risk of the loss of one of the parents is there in every family.

So again I say, why should I be compelled to pay for someone’s decision to have children when (1) it goes south due to misfortune; or (2) it was a bad idea in the first place?

Around 2-3% of food stamp recipients are able-bodied adults without dependents, as far as I can tell. Their access to aid is extremely limited if they cannot show that they are working. The rest either have dependents (such as children), are disabled, or are too old to work.

As for why people get to that point in the first place… Well, there’s a very firm correlation between the wealth of the parents and the wealth of the child. You can argue that this is about the money itself, or about the skills those parents teach, or the environment the kids come up in, but the fact is that the cycle is incredibly self-enforcing. It may be bad life decisions, but at a certain point you have to wonder how to get out of that cycle. How do you deal with that? Certainly not by moralizing about how these folks would be so much better off if they stopped making bad decisions like…

Uh…

Having kids?

Yeah, that’s totally going to work. Because sex isn’t a fundamental human drive, contraception is always available, and women all over the country have no trouble taking the time and money needed to have an abortion (particularly poor women). Actually, let’s focus on that one for a second. Leaving aside the rather horrible implications of “you made a mistake by getting pregnant”. For many people, getting an abortion is a matter of driving hundreds of miles, spending up to three nights overnight or driving there and back again, and then actually paying for the procedure. For those who aren’t adults, in many places their parents can actively prevent them from undergoing the procedure. It’s… really not that simple. Treating having a child when you “can’t afford them” like a moral failing is wrong on a whole lot of levels beyond this one, but I figured I might as well outline this one.

Oh, added bonus? Republicans - the guys you’re voting for because of handouts - want to ensure that “have an abortion” is not an option any more.

As for why you should be compelled? Because no man is an island, we exist in a cooperative society, you have the means to help, and a great many people need help. We’re not talking “communist utopia” here, we’re talking spending a tiny amount of your overall taxes (most of which goes towards other things, I’ll come back to this). Why should I be compelled to pay for wars overseas? At least when we compel people to pay their taxes for the sake of helping those in poverty, it serves a reasonable humanitarian goal. Oh, and, you know, prevents uprisings and riots. That’s nice.

Now, you brushed away my criticism of lack of hard work and surplus of bad decision-making by emphasising that many people find themselves in financial straits due to bad luck. I’ve heard this argument before, and it’s true—some people get snakebit through no fault of their own and find themselves in financial trouble. But what that sort of situation doesn’t do is wipe away every instance where the distressed person is such because of his lack of effort or his making stupid life choices or both. I would contend that most of the people who find themselves in trouble like that are there because of their own actions (or inactions), and not because they got hit by a bucket-load of bad luck out of the blue.

This transcends the issue of me paying more taxes (proportionately) than other folks. I shouldn’t be paying any tax at all that goes to providing hand-outs for those who won’t work or created their own problems.

So how do we tell the difference? And how do we know that their poverty isn’t, itself, exacerbating the problem? In more ways than one?*

Poverty is a gigantic clusterfuck. Even assuming one got there explicitly by making bad decisions that were easily avoided (as opposed to being born poor, getting screwed by a bad market swing, having a condom break and being unable or unwilling to get an abortion at the age most of us don’t have to make decisions more consequential than “what extracurriculars do I want to take?”, living at your means without building up much in savings under the misled assumption that you wouldn’t lose your job, investing in a business venture that doesn’t work out for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious, and so on and so on), the mere reality of poverty and needing to constantly worry where the next meal is coming from destroys people.

I’m not sure we should be drawing this moralizing distinction. The plight of the man who is in poverty because his field was innovated out of existence and he couldn’t find work anywhere else is not substantially different than the plight of the man who lost his money gambling. The cause at the beginning may be the same and should be addressed, but the cycle keeping them poor remains the same.

Leave aside the whole issue of “do they deserve my money”. For one, it’s not your money after it’s taxed, and for two, the moral aspect here confuses the issue. Poverty sucks. It doesn’t just suck for those who are poor (whether they “deserve” to be poor or not, and I’m kind of curious how you make that distinction), it sucks for everyone. Poverty correlates with crime - there’s a reason for that. Large amounts of inequality are really bad for society. Doing something about these issues is important, and contrary to popular belief, welfare and food stamps make a difference. There are non-trivial reasons to combat poverty, particularly extreme poverty.

If we really want to talk about moral issues, here’s one for you: a first world country can come up with a limitless amount of money to bomb Iraq back to the stone age, but can’t come up with money to help feed its most impoverished citizens and their children. Again, I’m not sure why a slight increase in your taxes is the more serious evil here.

*BTW, remember what I said earlier about sex being a fundamental human drive? Check out this passage:

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

…Yeah…

So what about times when employment is difficult to come by? You have a point there. The recession of 2008 created a huge unemployment problem, and while I grant you, my knee-jerk reaction is to insist that a person who wants to work can get a job even in a recession, my brain tells me that’s just not so. I’m not sure how to handle that situation fairly and I’m willing to entertain the idea of hand-outs then without prejudice.

But speaking of the 2008 recession, I want to point something out: that was 2008; this is 2016. The wife and I watch Restaurant Impossible and Kitchen Nightmares, and even now, when the owner of the failing restaurant is asked why he was doing so well when he opened his place up, but now is losing tons of money, most often than not, he’ll reply “We’ll, it’s the economy.” No, it’s not. It was true in 2008, and '09, and probably '10. But not now.

There’s no recession, now. And whatever I would have blessed giving to the unemployed in 2008, I would argue bitterly against, now. If one can’t get a job now, it’s not a recession; it’s because he didn’t finish school, or he committed a crime, or he didn’t pass a drug test, or because his previous work record stinks—and all of those things are on him. Again, bad life decisions.

A republican who accepts that the last few years have actually not been abysmal for the economy? Be still my beating heart.

That said, again, most of the able-bodied people on food stamps have jobs. Something like 80% of the people on food stamps who aren’t disabled or retirement-age work. People who don’t work tend to either have a damn good excuse or extremely limited access to food stamps. Poverty is considerably higher than it was before the recession. We’ve made it very hard for people to just “mooch on by”. Instead, most of them work really shitty jobs that don’t pay a living wage.

As for college loans, no, they aren’t hand-outs—yet. You’re right again when you alluded to some rigourous terms attached to those loans. They can’t be divulged in a bankruptcy and they have non-transferable and non-amendable terms. Nevertheless, folks accepted them as fast as they could sign their names (and get someone to co-sign). Understand, these persons willingly accepted the loans.

Now, there’s a huge surge from people having to pay off those loans now. They’ve discovered the strict terms of those loans and, guess what, they don’t think it’s fair. They’ve gone whining to their governmental representatives, and there’s a couple of Democrat-sponsored bills in Congress, at some level of the process, intended forgive these loans or lift the restrictions to the point where most of them would be reduced to paying only a fraction of what was leant.

I have no idea what kind of viability either of these bills has, but even if they die on the vine, it goes to the fact that a great many people, instead of working to get ahead, simply want the government to give them stuff.

Many of these signers took these loans on at age 18. Often before having any real understanding of what college is like, or knowledge of whether they’re actually apt in the field they want to enter. And it’s not like this is a normal loan - the terms are actually far stricter. Realizing that you took the wrong college course should not be a mistake on par with killing four people in a DUI. It shouldn’t follow you your whole life and be a constant pressure making your life worse.

But I’m a little surprised you still see this one as a “handout”. Higher education is a major deciding factor when it comes to ability to avoid poverty. It ensures a well-educated workforce. Other countries pull it off with no problems. There’s not really any discussion here in Germany whether it’s a “handout” or not for tuition at TU Munich to cost 0€, because that’s fundamentally the wrong way of framing the issue. You might as well call the national highway system a “handout”. It’s an investment. Or do you think about primary education the same way?

Now, let’s go to my complaint about having to pay (proportionately) more in Federal income taxes. Besides the fact that the Democrats would send a lot of my money to people who don’t deserve to get it. You implied that my “marginally” higher tax rate only means that I can’t buy a new Jag this year. How I wish that was true.

Yes, to the rich and the über-wealthy, a few per cent more in taxes doesn’t hurt them all that much. But, you see, my wife and I fall into that income bracket in which we make too much to be considered middle-class income, but not enough to be considered rich. At our level, a “marginally” higher tax bracket means paying an extra three or four thousand dollars a year in taxes. Survivable, yeah, but it leaves a dent, one deeper than “Damn, we won’t be able to vacation in the Bahamas this year!”

I intended no such implication, and I apologize if it came across as such.

But okay. What percentage of that extra few thousand goes towards things like SNAP, TANF, and the like? See, this is where this whole issue goes from “iffy” to “bizarre” for me. You seem single-mindedly focused on this one issue, to the exclusion of all others. “The democrats want to spend my money on help for the needy.” Never mind all that money spent on the military (which the republicans want to make even larger), never mind the government subsidies handed out to businesses that dwarf food stamps and welfare (which only democrats are really saying anything about), never mind the countless social issues that have been the functional core of their platform for the last 16 years (I guarantee you, Bush did not win in 2004 due to his fiscal conservatism!), never mind that the person most clearly responsible for large-scale welfare reform (essentially ensuring that fewer people who “don’t deserve it” get welfare) was Bill Clinton, never mind that Trump is running almost entirely on charisma and social issues. Never mind all of that. All of it is dwarfed by the moral outrage you feel becaues you have to pay slightly higher taxes so that, say, my friend Linda can afford to eat something other than dog food every once in a while.

So, yes, I resent any Democratic effort to increase government spending for hand-outs when it costs me. I’m being penalised for a lifetime of hard work.

No, you’re not.

Dude, before we continue, you really ought to read this article:

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying (Update)

Because a lot of what you say? Well-meaning or not, it’s on that list. And this one in particular is as well. I might not put it in terms quite as incendiary as David Wong does, but he does get the point across fairly clearly:

But the second part is this idea that asking the rich to pitch in is “punishing” them.

[…]

Do you still think mom made you clean up your room because she was mean? In the adult world, we get asked to do things because shit needs to get done. It has nothing to do with fairness, it has nothing to do with judging you. It has nothing to do with you at all. There’s a whole world out there, with people who need helping and projects that need accomplishing.

You’re only being asked to pitch in because you have the resources. You’re not a tall person who us dwarfs are jealously trying to cut down to size. You’re a tall person being asked to get something down from a very tall shelf because nobody else can fucking reach it.

You’re being asked to pitch in your fair share, to give back to the society that offered you the standard of living you enjoy, to pay it forward in the same way countless others before you paid it forward. Some of that comes in the form of protecting our borders and building our roads, some of it comes in the form of ensuring that the son of a 15-year-old single mother who refused to get an abortion, doesn’t end up missing meals, and that his mother can afford to keep a roof over their heads.

You justify this by saying the disadvantaged person needs the money more than I do. You strike me as an honest man, so let me put to you a hypothetical situation.

We have two cars, for my wife and myself, and let’s say they’re reliable, serviceable cars, but nothing really special. And figuring it would be nice to have a really nice car for road trips, I go out and buy a third car, a nice luxury job.

Now, on the other side of the city lives Mary, a single mother with three children, who are subsisting on Mary’s minimum-wage job and food stamps. Now, Mary has been offered a better job, almost double the minimum wage with better benefits, but the job is in the next city, thirty miles away. There’s no public transportation to get her there, and she cannot afford to buy a car. Without the ability to get there, she cannot take the job.

Under these circumstances, do you feel it would be morally right for the government to say to me, “Sorry, Commander Benson, but Mary needs a car and you really don’t need three cars, so you have to give one of them to Mary. And, no, you won’t get compensated for what you spent on the car you give her.”

This is the essence of the discussion.

I don’t really have a good answer for this hypothetical, beyond pointing out that you could take almost any government program funded by our taxes, make it this granular and personalized, and end up with a similarly absurd situation. Maybe it’s the military taking your car (or, if we want to keep things proportional, your car, all your electronics, and the wiring and piping in your house, because holy shit the military is so much bigger than welfare) to strip it for parts for use in a drone to run security missions over Bagdhad. Maybe it’s a scientist taking your car as part of a government grant to research the effects of high-speed collisions. No matter what policy you lambast like this, it’s more or less the same situation.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

Nice post, Budget Player Cadet! Thanks for taking the trouble.

@Starving_Artist

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.

I think the difference is that some people cite quotes of what conservatives themselves say, while other people just sort of invent “what liberals think”, or repeat tired tropes they heard on the radio or TV, which are usually delivered in angry tones that match the audience’s generalized feelings of anger and/or disappointment, except that these messages are designed to shape that anger and give it a direction, and in that way provide some emotional relief to the audience by providing a target on which to discharge these feelings regardless of whether this targeting has any basis in fact because, of course, harnessing people’s feelings in this way can serve the interests of the broadcaster (or more likely, its sponsors), interests which usually have nothing whatsoever to do with the message they are delivering to said audience beyond drumming up support on the basis of perceived solidarity or some sense of shared understanding rooted in the temporary discharging of said feelings. Of course this solidarity is an illusion- note that GOP voters get whipped up time and time again about “moochers” and “freeloaders” stealing your lunch and driving up the deficit with their handouts, yet contemporary GOP governments find a way to dramatically jack up the deficit and debt Every Single Time, since their strategy is to make the debt so large that we are forced to cut or eliminate Social Security and Medicare, because that benefits wealthy people who have nothing in common whatsoever with their jerked-around audience.

@Starving_Artist

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.

This is a good example of what I am talking about. I think the 'dope needs a better way to present such lines other than the simple quote function. I have in mind something like this:

[Measure_for_Measure]

Greetings Commander Benson and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board! If you are familiar with the writings of Cecil Adams, you will understand that humor is part of his presentation. So expect wisecracks here. It’s best not to take them too personally.

@Commander_Benson

What the Republican party was formed to represent, and the only thing for which it should stand now, is (1) the reduction of government spending; and (2) the restraint (and, as things are now, the redaction) of government influence in the lives of its citizens. These are the two things which are important to me. And it’s why I am so diametrically opposed to the Democratic party.

The Democratic party is the party of the hand-out. You can dress “hand-out” up with any replacement term you want but, I’m sorry, they’re still hand-outs. The idea, they say, is to make life fairer for people.

This is a common perception of a lot of conservatives. Above folks have pointed out that the Federal government is basically a huge pension plan that happens to have an army. Welfare spending (tightened during the 1990s) isn’t exactly trivial, but it isn’t large either at least when you set aside federal spending on elderly medical care.

But you seem to think that Democrats are really concerned about poverty. You could argue that during the 1960s. But that isn’t really their emphasis anymore. Union membership has declined, and they are no longer the Democrat’s cornerstone. Meanwhile the professional class has been trending Democratic. And what activists in their group care about is climate science, economic stabilization and infrastructure.

Want evidence? Consider this: “Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton debated 9 times — and moderators never asked about poverty”. Furthermore, there was no uproar. Admittedly the candidates themselves mentioned poverty. Radical firebrand Bernie Sanders mentioned it… about once every debate. Clinton mentioned it every other debate.

That doesn’t sound like the party of the handout. I would respectfully suggest that Commander Benson review his information sources. I don’t blame him for forming this impression - it isn’t uncommon actually. But I honestly don’t think it captures matters.