I’m not doubting you at all, I think there are a lot of people that would take that deal and not regret it one bit. Hell, if I could opt out of my job’s union and give up all the “benefits” they’ve fought for for me, I’d do it in a second.
However, I also believe that a lot of these teabagger assholes would bitch and moan the second they lost their job and didn’t get unemployment. I’d wager good money that most of them are whiny jackoffs and the ones who really do believe in standing on their own are a big minority.
1.) People being entirely self-reliant is insanely bad for society. You know what happens when people have no support outside of themselves? Any small setback is magnified entirely out of proportion because there’s no safety net. When everyone has their basic needs met, we all prosper as a society. Poverty, homelessness, ignorance, and crime adversely affect us all.
2.) An economy with 100% employment would also be insanely bad. Nobody wants to see it. So why shouldn’t we help support the people whose joblessness means that our economy can continue to function?
By those teabaggers’ (and by Bricker’s) reasoning. Ronald Reagan should have been tossed out in the streets after getting Alzheimer’s instead of getting all that free, socialist government health care we gave him for 20 years. Fucking leech.
Bullshit. Self reliance is good. But so is concern for the poor fucker who just happens to get laid off through no fault of his own, and sick at the same time, or the guy who needs a heart but isn’t a millionaire, or they guy whose insurance drops him just when he needs them (after paying in for his entire career)… or even that Parkinsons guy However, mocking some poor slob who is already fucked, and throwing dollar bills at him is fucking outrageous. If you can’t understand that then you are no better than they were.
Isn’t one of the basic reaons for a society, to enable people to help each other? To collective survive or collectively be stronger. or just to collectively beat the shit out of that other tribe? If there is no beneift to being in a society, then what’s the point? Let’s just drop the pretenses, we’re all out for ourselves, to hell with anyone else, dismantle the “society” and let the chaos begin.
I slam them because they are stupid, rude, selfish, self entitled, abusive assholes who don’t know how to act. I slam them for the way they acted, not for any fine philosophical dissertation about the costs/benefits of whatever. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on. Let something happen to them and see how quick they do an about face. To hell with them.
Bricker, are you seriously proposing that Social Security be ended completely, and all those people reliant on it should just be abandoned? Is that how you people really think?
Sure, but when Teabagger X gets his Medicaid/care it’ll be different. In that case, it’ll be “Well, I paid my share. The people I am complaining about are the loafers and wasters who didn’t actually pay in their share.”
See, it’s always okay for ME, because of [fill in rationalization here], but it’s not okay for THEM, because they didn’t earn it the way I did.
Heck, there are plenty of these sorts of trade-offs that most of us could probably make without ever regretting them. For example - I’d probably benefit from having the portion of my taxes that goes to the fire department refunded, in exchange for losing access to fire services. Odds are good that my house will never burn down, after all. And in the unlikely event it does, I’m well-enough paid that I can eat the cost of new possessions. Should I be allowed to “opt out” of the fire department’s coverage?
No, for two reasons. First, because if many people opted out, the fire department would lose the capacity to provide services to those people who do need them, and can’t afford alternatives (like renter’s insurance). Remember that poor people pay far fewer taxes than the middle-class and wealthy - if the latter two groups “opt out”, then the folks who’re left get very little from a cash-strapped fire department. And second - uncontrolled fires pose a threat to all of us. Fires spread, and so there is a public interest in containing them.
I’d argue that medicaid and medicare are similar in some respects. (Not a perfect analogy, granted, but bear with me.) The people likeliest to “opt out” of those systems would be the ones with the most money - hence, the ones paying the most taxes. Thus, their withdrawal from these systems would exert a disproportionately damaging effect. And, just as with fire prevention, I think we have a public interest in preventing sickness. Sick people are expensive, sometimes staggeringly so - and once they get sick, they either need to be treated in ER rooms or left to die in the gutter.
I think the reason that I, and many other liberals, have a hard time viewing the Teabagger argument that they want to be left to be “self-reliant” as a good-faith argument is that it is a fallacy. The consequences of that view - as applied to health care, or fire prevention, or education, or any other area you’d care to name, go far beyond “I don’t want the service, so I won’t pay for it.” The real-world consequences are more like, “I don’t want the service, so I won’t pay for it - and for want of my funds, several other people who need this government service won’t get it.” Teabaggers don’t want to be left alone to make decisions solely for themselves - they want to make decisions for much larger numbers of people.
No, he’s not proposing that. He’s saying he’d like it to be an optional program, and that anyone opting out now would be ineligable for benefits even if they’ve paid in previously. As I explained in my previous post, I don’t agree with this view, but it’s not nearly as disagreeable as you’re suggesting. (In fact, there’s a factor in Bricker’s proposal that redeems it somewhat - since the money he’s already put into the system would stay there, in the short term the withdrawal of him and people of like mind might not cause too great a budgetary shortfall. Eventually, of course, programs like SSI would draw the surplus down, so it’s still a bad proposal.)
In fairness, it’s more like, “Screw you guys, I’m going home - you can keep my ball, but I’m taking the air pump it uses.” And, Cartman doesn’t realize the ball has a slow leak.
His proposal would necessarily have the result of casting people off Social Security, though. I don’t se how he couldn’t. People are stupid, and selfish, and short-sighted and brutish. If they could opt out, they’d do it in droves. I don’t see how they could argue with a straight face that it wouldn’t hurt people.
What we SHOULD do is means test for Social Security benefits. If you’re already well-off, you don’t need to suck those benefits when you retire.
I’m a liberal and you know what Bricker? I agree with you (mostly) on Social Security. I believe that when it was created it was desperately needed but that it’s not so much now and we as a society shouldn’t rely on it for our retirement. I think that we as individuals should have sound fiscal planning and have created our own retirement funds over the 30-50 years we have collecting money in the workforce. I think Social Security should have an opt out and if you choose to opt out, you’re on your own come retirement time. All that’s pretty much another debate but I wanted to at least say that this liberal agrees with you on Social Security (with the knowledge that it’s never, ever gonna happen)
Here’s where the analogy breaks down between Social Security and Insurance. Social Security is designed to give you back what you paid in. In theory (hah!), it’s a break even proposition. Some people might live longer. Some might die two days before retirement (grizzled cops with rookie partners, for instance). But on average, each individual is supposed to earn back what they paid in.
Insurance is wildly different. For starters, there’s the profit motive of insurance companies but we’re just going to push that aside for now. The big point of insurance is that it’s INSURANCE. The entire principle of insurance in any form is that you really hope you never need to use it but, if you do, you are almost certainly going to be using a great deal more than you ever put in. Sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars more.
Same (to a lesser extent) with unemployment or disability or dozens more safety nets we wrap society up in.
You can plan for your retirement. It’s a known entity with a mostly known dollar figure some X number of years in the future.
You don’t know if you’re going to be laid off tomorrow. Or hit by a car next week. Or get cancer next month. There’s no planning for it save for a job that pays a half a million a year or a safety net set up by society in place. You simply cannot prepare for all of the twists and turns life may hand you as you round the corner. We can and should all be as fiscally conservative as possible but even that will not stop us from going broke if we lose our job tomorrow in an economy with 20% un- and underemployment rates unless we have benefits set up by the government to help us.
The only other option are shantytowns. Would you like DubyaVilles popping up in the middle of Central Park? Would you like soup kitchens to outnumber McDonalds? Would you like us to have to declare World War III to help stimulate the US Economy back from the brink?
You’re a smart guy, Bricker. You know your history. You should know I’m not just throwing in random partisan attacks but I’m telling you that without these safety nets that the government has and continues to create that that paragraph above would be reality right now.
That’s not a world I want to live in.
One man mocked him and said “If you’re looking for handouts you’ve come to the wrong place” and another man started throwing dollar bills at him. It wouldn’t have been an issue if he didn’t have Parkinson’s disease, but the point was they WERE mocking a man who allegedly has Parkinson’s disease because they claim he is looking for a hand-out.
I can’t speak for the man on the ground but I’m personally not looking for a hand-out. I’m looking for affordable basic health care for myself and many others who work for it (and have worked many years) but can’t get it. From what I’ve seen that’s what this “Obamacare Tyranny” is all about.
This would be incredibly foolish. What do you think this would do to incentives to save, for example? Capping Social Security benefits is one thing (and a good one), and there is a legitimate (thought IMHO flawed) argument for removing the upper cap on SS contributions annually. But SS is designed as an entitlement for those who pay in, not a government hand out. Your suggestion represents a direct transfer of wealth from savers to non-savers. It encourages people to be spendthrift as they know that putting that money away from retirement will simply reduce their SS payments, and they cannot reduce their SS contributions.
“Saving” is not an option for a lot of people who spend their working years living paycheck to paycheck.
I’m also not talking about any kind of graded reduction, I’m saying if you already have too much money, you should get jack shit back when you retire. Do you really think that millionaires are going to try to spend every cent they’ve got before retirement because they’d rather get in on that Social security gravy train?
Yes, I’m in favor of taking money away from rich people (most of whom never earned it anyway), and giving it to people who need it (and in most cases, are the ones who really did the work to make them rich in the first place). If we can’t do that as a society, then there isn’t any point to society.