Sure I did. You can’t call it a non-answer when your question is of the form “Have you stopped beating your wife?” and I answer “I have never beaten my wife.”
You asked why I prioritized people undeservedly receiving welfare above you, and I answered: the prioritization is irrelevant, because I don’t believe there are enough of those people to appreciably affect you. Should you ever bother to show data for that, I’d be in a place to reconsider.
Regarding your cites:
Local cites are not particularly useful for discussing systemic problems–for example, the fact that New York City has rising poor-children rates doesn’t mean anything more in a national context than the fact that my own town has falling poverty rates.
Knowing that 32% of the poor stay poor means that 68% of children born into poverty DON’T stay poor. That’s a recipe for poverty decreasing. Additionally, that cite is orthogonal to the idea of welfare, since only 28% of children below the poverty line are on federal welfare.
Put the brush down, dude. I may think curlcoat is being somewhere between disingenuous and outright dumb in this thread, myself, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s not to my knowledge a typical Republican, if she’s even a Republican or religious at all, and it’s not only pointless but ineffective to paint her as though she is.
Restating the questions incorrectly and then sidestepping by telling me you don’t think it’s important or not “appreciably” affecting me is not answering the questions. You do this constantly, which makes me think you aren’t really that secure in your stated beliefs on the subject.
I realize that but two things - 1) there don’t seem to be national studies, and 2) I live in a state that mirrors New York City. Simply because you happen to live some place where most of the poor folk are responsible and apparently able to climb out to a better life doesn’t mean that those of us living in areas of higher density and/or more recent immigrants and/or more third generation welfare families are not paying a hefty tax bite to support irresponsibly produced children.
You have to look at the whole picture - where are those 32%? How many of them are second and third generation? How many of the 68% just happened to be born during a brief bad time in their parents lives?
I’m neither Republican nor religious. However, it appears that akrako1 is responding to the OP, not to me. Nice try at turning the focus away from your lack of answers tho.
Dammit, I just hit a bad button after typing out a bunch of numbers. Blast. I’m not doing that again. Anyway, curlcoat, I did provide a link. And I was wrong; welfare accounts for less than 4% of the total federal spending, and health care for less than 6%. Medicare accounts for 56% of health care spending, and worker’s comp and unemployment account for 29% of welfare spending. The rest is stuff like housing, earned income credits, and so on. So welfare, as in not the stuff you pre-pay into, accounts for a grand total of 5.5% of the budget. Meanwhile, the pre-pay stuff, which benefits workers and seniors for the most part (assuming that no welfare recipients work or have ever worked, which is dumb), are around the same. So my point still holds: the social safety net is not ignoring seniors, and we won’t let you starve. Hell, you should be thanking me anyway, as I do pay into SS and will for at least another 35 years, knock on wood.
Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it, how little economic mobility there is in this country? I tend to think there are a few other factors playing into this beyond how poor people have kids. The fact is, there will always be poor people, even if the current crop stop having children. That’s kind of how capitalism works.
Yeah, I’m not going to argue about my mother’s personality traits with you. You don’t know her, and she’s my mom. Besides, you’ll always think she’s horribly selfish, and I’ll always think that she did the best she could with the cards she was dealt. Neither of us will change our minds, so all that discussing her actions will do is to piss me off.
What I am really trying to get at here is: what on Earth do you think should be done? Adoption will only go so far, because there are only so many families that want to adopt. My brother and I might’ve made out okay in the system, but those who are not cute, white, and healthy probably wouldn’t. So what do we do? Forced abortions or sterilization? Let the kids die? You can’t think that telling people to stop having sex will work, can you? Because that’s never worked, even back when they stoned people to death. I’m just curious about how you want this to work in the real world, and what real-world consequences you are willing to accept for your beliefs. It’s something I’ve noticed about arguments with people like you: you don’t actually think about what consequences your beliefs have beyond you having lower taxes. (at any rate, if ~10% of your monthly tax bill is $150, then I don’t get why you get so worked up about it. money is money, yeah, but that is peanuts to anyone with that high of a tax bill. hell, that much wouldn’t significantly change my standard of living, and, as a student, I don’t even qualify for taxes)
Sure it is. "As phrased, your question assumes that I hold a position I don’t, therefore answering it in any way but ‘this whole question is irrelevant’ " is a perfectly valid answer. I don’t feel like they should be more important to you than your retirement savings. I’m saying that you caring about this issue at all in the context of your income and the current political/budget situation is, and I struggle for an analogy, trying to avoid getting cut by worrying about a closed pocketknife while there’s a foot-thick layer of broken glass covering your entire floor.
Show me some stats either way.
Perhaps you believe that, but it seems far more likely to me (as far into the thread as we are) that you just don’t realize that you’re coming across as the most over-steeped of the tea partiers in this particular thread.
Worker’s comp is federally funded??? That’s news to me…In California, I’ve been paying it as an employer for the last 19 years, and also the unemployment portion too, in payroll taxes.
I don’t know, I just found the website. Maybe it’s what the government pays for its employees? That’s got to be a fairly sizable chunk, considering what kind of workers they employ. I had to use it once to get a tetanus shot, and the computer system was asking me if an airplane was involved in my injury.
Okay, so I’ve done some thinking about this and I think I have a better idea of why curlcoat’s ideas bother me so much. I don’t really care what she thinks about my family. What bothers me is that either she’s completely unaware of the realities of life or she wants to create a permanent underclass. This is worrisome, because I think a few too many people in this country have the same attitude she does, and it’s eroding the middle class and moving wealth to the top. The minimum wage is too low for most people to live on, even though it’s technically above poverty line for a single person. You certainly would not be able to buy a house or save for retirement or go to school on it. You couldn’t afford student loans so your children can get a proper education and move ahead. Also, minimum wage workers qualify for food stamps. There was a New England state a few years back that got a litigate-y mad at Wal-mart when they realized how much they were spending on food stamps for Wal-mart employees. But curlcoat doesn’t see this as an injustice. She sees a system where some people are just lazy (thus proving she’s never worked a low-income job - being a well-paid boss-lady was less stressful than any of my crappy jobs) and don’t want to get ahead because it’s so damn easy to live on welfare (ha!). But her (and everyone else’s) current economic status depends on the exploitation of low income workers. A lot of that comes from overseas, of course, with cheap Chinese goods and so on. There are migrant farmers here, as well as your Wal-mart and McDonald’s employees, who are certainly not all high school and college kids.
So basically we can all have our current standard of living because our goods are low priced thanks to the low wages of the people who produce and sell them. There’s a reason that fair trade coffee and no sweat shop clothing is pricier. curlcoat and her ilk want to yank away what little we give back to the poorest among us so that they are even less likely to move out of poverty, and then she blames them for their economic situation and wants to deny them basic things like food and family. You’re the selfish one, curlcoat. You sound just like those robber barons who insist that they made it their own way, ignoring that they could never get as rich as they did without the hard work of their underpaid employees. It’s bullshit. Marx was misguided and didn’t really understand human nature, but he was right about one thing: the bosses depend on workers underselling their labor in order to make a profit. The least those of us in higher economic strata can do is recognize this and provide ways for those people to, you know, feed themselves.
I have never said that anyone is going to let me starve - if nothing else, barring Zeriel’s doom and gloom scenario, we should have enough in non-government retirement funds to carry us thru. The question is, why is it that you all feel that children of strangers, who in many cases were born when the woman had to know she couldn’t afford to raise the baby, should be more important to me than the things that I want as much as these women claim they wanted those babies? I am responding to the demand that I make myself uncomfortable/insecure/whathaveyou to support women and children whose only qualification for aid is the selfishness of the women.
I don’t need to “thank” you for paying into SS any more than my grandparents generation needed to thank me for doing so. The government forces you to pay into that retirement fund so it’s not like you are doing it out of the goodness of your heart. Plus, you should get a benefit from it yourself when you qualify.
I’m not sure how little there is - well, right now there probably isn’t much but prior to the current recession? I do know when I was extremely poor, all that was needed was half a brain and the ability to deny myself anything other than the essentials, plus being willing to work two and three jobs.
Well, yes, but do we have to keep moving towards the way it works in places like Mexico, where the poor are all destitute and the rich have everything? There is very little what one would call middle class there, and our middle class is shrinking all the time.
Yes, other factors play into being or becoming poor other than children, but it’s still a fact that children are freaking expensive, it’s the only major selfish choice that the government will give you money for, and there isn’t a tiny window of time when one needs to have them. Indeed, if one is willing to adopt instead of selfishly needing to have a baby(ies) of one’s “own”, then there is really no time when one can’t have children. But, not only do people feel they “have” to have biological children, they also feel they “have” to have babies. The world is endlessly fascinated by babies, and to a lesser extent, toddlers. Older kids? Not so much.
People seem to feel they have the right to have as many babies as they want, whether they can afford them or not, and even any mention of waiting until their finances improve is met with hysterical wailing. I even get the “why should I wait just because you don’t want to pay taxes”, as if the possibility of ending up raising ones kids on welfare isn’t a problem.
Um, OK, then why did you bring her up?
Well, I personally wouldn’t mind China’s law of one kid only, but I know that would never fly here. In reality, for starters I’d like the government to actually LOOK at the issue instead of just throwing money at it. I’ve never been able to find any studies done on any of this other than just numbers of kids on welfare and stuff like that. Then, I would like serious consideration of the revival of orphanages, except they would be more like boarding schools. People freak out about this idea too because I guess their ideas of these institutions come from movies like Oliver, but really - would it be worse to live in one of these or in a home where the mother was on welfare when the baby was born? Perhaps these folks don’t know anything about areas like South Central?
I see four advantages to establishing these boarding schools - 1) It’s got to be cheaper to raise the children that way than paying for food, shelter, health care, etc to individuals. 2) It would be far more likely that these children would grow up with a decent education and graduate college, instead of joining a gang and selling drugs until they either get killed or end up pregnant at 14. 3) It would eliminate our less than wonderful foster care, and 4) I imagine it would act as a severe disincentive for women to have babies they can’t afford to raise.
It seems to me this would go a long ways toward breaking the cycle of poverty, drug abuse and teen pregnancy, plus it should save money.
That was of my income tax bill, not my total tax bite, which also includes a hefty property tax bite. And if an extra $150 a month wouldn’t significantly change anything for you, I’d say someone else must be paying your bills. $150 isn’t chump change!
Actually, it is, but then I’m one of those crayon sharing socialists who believes in being self-supporting and in contributing to society, as opposed to being a bum such as yourself.
I brought my family up to make an argument about poor children, not to discuss my mother’s decisions. I had to talk about her to give you an idea of what I was born into, but it was me and my brother, and our health problems and where we’ve manage to get to, that I was using as an example.
Okay, I have multiple objections to your idea of institutionalizing poor children. The one that really gets me, though, is the sheer cost of it. I just don’t understand how you think it’ll save money. You obviously would have put me and my brother into one of these group homes, so I’ll use us an example. I don’t really know when we finally got off public assistance, but it was, at latest, by the time I was nine. My brother would’ve been six. Even before that, my mother did work, and she also did childcare, housework, helped us with homework, and did all the other childrearing and maintenance tasks you would expect. My jackass father even paid child support every once in a while, and other family members bought us Christmas and birthday gifts, which were often necessities like clothing. So, for those nine years, while the government helped us, it did not pay for everything necessary to keep us alive and healthy.
According to your plan, however, the government would be fully responsible for my welfare, and for a full 18 years, instead of the partial care for nine years. That’s twice as long, and more overall money. My brother’s case is even worse, because he’d be in that group home for three times as long as he was a beneficiary of the government’s social services. Now, you seem to think that poverty looks like Reagan’s worst nightmare times two. However, your own numbers prove that my family are not special snowflakes, but rather the norm. 68% of kids born into poverty leave it, just like we did. So, rather than helping families for a few years or so until they can take care of themselves, you want to take children away for up to 18 years and have the government pay for all of their care, rather than some smaller fraction of it. How does this save money? Hell, it’d probably be cheaper just to pay the child’s caretaker a reasonable wage for their services. At least then they’d use their paycheck to take care of those same kids. You couldn’t expect that of the staff of your government-run homes.
Also, your one child policy idea would not work for very long. First of all, because, under our current system, there will always be poor people. With a one child policy, we might be reducing overall numbers of poor folks, but there’s no indication that it would decrease the percentage of people leaving under poverty. Secondly, that policy was a radical answer to a very real, immediate problem of overpopulation in China. We don’t have that problem, at least not nearly to that scale. While, overall, the world’s population should decline, the US simply is not that crowded. The problems that decreasing population growth to that extent would incur are much worse than anything they’d solve, at least for my lifetime, and probably those of my children and grandchildren. Our birth rate is already too low to replace our numbers; immigration is the only reason the population of the US is growing. Countries that have negative population growth are experiencing serious crises with their social security and Medicare-like programs, because there are not enough young folks paying into the system to take care of all the people who collect benefits. So a one child policy in the US would actually be shooting yourself in the foot, curlcoat.
Man, have you ever actually thought through the consequences of your preferred policies?
Say what? You just want to keep throwing more money at this issue and I’m the one ignoring the broken glass? Plus, I have been very clear that I am talking about the long run, and previous history, not just the current economic situation. I certainly hope that your suggestion that we pay even more taxes was not meant to apply to the current economic situation…
I just got done saying that no one is bothering to look into it. The government just throws money at it and hopes it will go away, and then apparently is surprised when it doesn’t.
I wouldn’t know since I don’t know what the Tea Party is all about. However, since akrako1 just got done saying s/he was responding to the OP…
Except that you’ve been shown that welfare enrollment is steadily decreasing over the last decade and a half, and shows no signs of reversal even BEFORE you normalize for economic conditions.
Wait a minute - do you know what one of the big reasons for the erosion of the middle class is? Taxes - the rich get out of them and the poor don’t make enough to pay much so it falls to the middle class to pick up the slack. I don’t know what makes you think I want to create a permanent underclass when most of my posts have included the concept that if people would just wait to have kids, buy a house, run up credit card debt until they can actually afford it, it’s likely we’d have far fewer poor, working poor and middle class teetering on the edge.
Minimum wage isn’t meant to cover any of those things. It is an entry level wage, for teens, college students, retirees who want to supplement their pensions. It’s for someone who doesn’t have an education beyond some high school. Do you really think that people working at McDonalds should be raising children, buying houses, etc?
Honey, I was born poor. When I was about 10, our financial situation improved and we probably got to lower middle class, but since my father was abusive I left home the day I turned 18 and was right back into dirt poor. I worked whatever jobs I could, two and three at a time, to keep my head above water and then get a little savings laid by. I finally got into a training program for a trade and got my first decent job at 25 and started approaching middle class again when I was about 30. I have never been “well paid” nor a “boss lady”, but I did see and live next to many people who lived off of welfare because for them, it was better than working. Of course, many of them were supplementing their incomes thru illegal means as well.
None of this adds up to anything I’ve said, particularly the minimum wage. My whole point is that people need to start becoming responsible for themselves again - get an education, take whatever jobs (generic) you can and fercrissakes quit taking on debt before you can realistically afford it! Learn to live on a budget, practice delayed gratification, quit trying to pretend you have more money than you do, never sneer at any sum of money. Become one of those “underpaid” (I don’t know how you get to this conclusion) employees and work your way up.
The safety nets are there to catch people that trip on their way up, not something to count on using while you take chances with your life.
This thread was ridiculous during the first page, and is nothing more than a trainwreck now.
There is nothing wrong with sharing your crayons, and I shared mine at Easter with the son of my sister’s friend. The teacher who would not take a pencil out of the supply closet for a student who contributed supplies is dead wrong, and she neeeds to be slapped.
This is just simply not true. It wasn’t true the first time you tried to trot it out in a thread two years ago and it’s not true now.
You can’t prove it, it’s just your take on a bad and disproven economic theory, you love to try to use this concept to prop up your bad ideas, not unlike a Republican politician, but in fact, there is just no evidence for it.
