What to do with losers?

[Kimstu]

@msmith537

However, if I understand the OP correctly, he is asking what kind of system we should have in place for people who simply don’t want to work, or a normal job just “isn’t for them”.

I don’t think you understood the OP correctly. He stated very clearly that people who “simply don’t want to work” are excluded from this category:

@Lumpy

Let’s say further that you weed out the truly lazy- that is, those who hate working but who will work if they have no other choice.

[Rand_Rover]

@Kalhoun

And what should a government do? Just let them die?

Well, yes. You might want to read the OP again to remind yourself of the exact group of people we are talking about. If they die, they are committing suicide.

[Sage_Rat]

@Lumpy

So what do you do with these losers? Do you punish them forever, hoping if you just put them under enough pressure they’ll straighten up and fly right? (Despite the fact that that’s never worked in their entire lives?) Do you let them perish, or do you enable them?

Most of them end up sorting themselves out sometime in their mid-30s, statistically speaking. Until then, there’s not much to do but give them the bare minimum to stay alive.

Mangetout’s suggestion of a workhouse could also be good, but this becomes difficult in separating from prison. People who are truly incapable of doing thing usually have substance abuse problems, so you’re going to have to keep them under watch pretty much 24/7 and limit their access to the outside world.

But prison has a date on which you are released to your own recognizance. With something like this, you’d essentially need to keep them in until a “parole board” released them. That could lead to issues with people being kept in forever simply for being an asshole or what-have-you. But on the other hand, you can’t just let people leave whenever they want. So in the end you might want to do something where everyone is automatically released once a year and then rounded back up if they haven’t achieved employment and good marks from the new job x months later.

[control-z]

@Kalhoun

This is how the Section 8 housing program works (or DID work when I was on it). They review your financial situation yearly and adjust the benefit accordingly. I was on it for a year, and dropped off the program cold turkey after that. Not everyone can do that; particularly older people who go on assistance programs.

This girl was only on the program for a month or so when she started working full time. Within a week they found out and raised her rent.

I told her not to get into that situation, there are all sorts of conditions and restrictions she has to live under. But I guess if you have no other choice you’ll do it for a while, and hopefully be able to dig yourself out.

[Kalhoun]

@control-z

This girl was only on the program for a month or so when she started working full time. Within a week they found out and raised her rent.

I told her not to get into that situation, there are all sorts of conditions and restrictions she has to live under. But I guess if you have no other choice you’ll do it for a while, and hopefully be able to dig yourself out.

It must have changed drastically from the mid-70s. We had no restrictions whatsoever. They inspected the residence for proper health and safety requirements (working fan in a windowless bathroom, locks on the doors, no holes in the walls, etc.). And we had to get the landlord to accept Section 8, which was a non-issue. That was it.

[Bear_Nenno]

Give them a message board in which to gather and share stories of what big losers they are and how much the rest of the world sucks.

[Annie-Xmas]

I work in rental property management and have dealings with many of these people. The ones I knew felt they should not have to work for anything in their life. Their mindset was “I deserve everything for doing nothing but existing.”

These people have NO sense of responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault.

I’d say over 50% are working off the books and/or have people supporting them.

[erislover]

Do you punish them forever, hoping if you just put them under enough pressure they’ll straighten up and fly right? (Despite the fact that that’s never worked in their entire lives?) Do you let them perish, or do you enable them?

I don’t know a way to choose between these alternatives. Each of them have problems. I would like to see an incremental cost associated with pushing out the next loser. I mean, let’s assume we’ve decided, for whatever reason, that there should be some kind of social safety net. Let’s assume we’ve also decided that we don’t want losers treating the net like a hammock. I want to see what is more expensive: chasing out the (n+1)th loser or just dealing with the fact that no system is perfect. This would answer the question completely for me.

[Annie-Xmas]

I would give them a room where the rent is paid directly to the landlord, and give them $50 a week in credit at the nearest grocery store. Nothing Else. They could have a place to stay and food but nothing else they did not work for. Clothes would be second hand donations.

Any evidence of any other money or anyone living with them and they would be tossed out on their butts.

[msmith537]

@Kimstu

I don’t think you understood the OP correctly. He stated very clearly that people who “simply don’t want to work” are excluded from this category:

I guess I don’t know what “people who won’t, or can’t, get their lives in order” means. People who will work, but suck at it or can’t hold a job once they have one?

[control-z]

@Kalhoun

It must have changed drastically from the mid-70s. We had no restrictions whatsoever. They inspected the residence for proper health and safety requirements (working fan in a windowless bathroom, locks on the doors, no holes in the walls, etc.). And we had to get the landlord to accept Section 8, which was a non-issue. That was it.

I’m sure it varies by state and county. Plus now with computers different agencies share data and they can keep closer track of you.

[Annie-Xmas]

I know from a recent experience that if a tenant on Section 8 is evicted for non-payment of their portion of the rent, their name and social security number go onto a master list of every Housing Authority in the US of A, effectively keeping them from ever getting any rental assistance anywhere in the entire country.

Boy was one of our ex-tenants pissed to find that out the hard way.

[Alan_Smithee]

@msmith537

I guess I don’t know what “people who won’t, or can’t, get their lives in order” means. People who will work, but suck at it or can’t hold a job once they have one?

I work with felons right now and I’ve worked with homelessness before. I see a lot of people like that. People with mild to severe substance problems, people with low but not disabling IQs, people who habitually make bad decisions because they never learned to plan or balance priorities. These are people who could get a job at McDonalds but would get fired the first time they had transportation or medical or childcare problems because they wouldn’t have dealt with these issues in a job before and wouldn’t know how to handle them responsibly. And really, do you want these people serving your food? It seems that whenever the economy picks up the service at fast-food places goes down because all the employable people get better jobs.

Most of the ones I’m talking about can learn good work habits, but not without lots of help. Some of them never learn because they aren’t smart enough or their bad habits are too ingrained. Some of them are too screwed up because their parents started giving them meth when they were 7, even though they might have managed to clean themselves up now. Almost any of these people could become a productive member of society if they had someone guiding them 24-hrs a day and basically acting as a parent (to replace the terrible parents they had growing up). Many of them can and will become productive on their own. It’s hard to tell how much help each one needs.

If they don’t get whatever level of suppport is needed, they will turn to crime, begging, or they will die on your doorstep and you’ll have to call the coroner to come take them away. And someone will still have to pay for the people to haul the body.

At the same time, there is no level of service that will not encourage some people to rely on it. Any program that helps people will necessarily increase dependence. There is a obviously a local maximum for benefit minus harm, but it is impossible to know what it is.

[erislover]

@Alan_Smithee

If they don’t get whatever level of suppport is needed, they will turn to crime, begging, or they will die on your doorstep and you’ll have to call the coroner to come take them away. And someone will still have to pay for the people to haul the body.

Hey, I don’t want my tax dollars going to clean up after people who are too lazy to die in the proper way. What kind of nanny state are you promoting, anyway?!

[Orr_G]

@Annie-Xmas

I work in rental property management and have dealings with many of these people. The ones I knew felt they should not have to work for anything in their life. Their mindset was “I deserve everything for doing nothing but existing.”

These people have NO sense of responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault.

I’d say over 50% are working off the books and/or have people supporting them.

Interesting. I worked as a manager of an apartment building that accepted Section 8. Almost all of the tenants on Section 8 were very careful to say “the right things” to me regarding their status, telling me that they were working hard to get an education and get better employment.

Some of them actually did this, and went from being tenants with rental assistance to tenants who paid full rent, or even bought their first home.

The ones who had a spouse/boyfriend supporting them off the record seemed to do this faster. I would have no way of knowing if any of them worked off the books.

[Kalhoun]

@control-z

I’m sure it varies by state and county. Plus now with computers different agencies share data and they can keep closer track of you.

I’m not sure what you mean…keep track of what? Section 8 is housing assistance. THey don’t require you to go to school, better yourself, look for a job, or anything. They provide housing at a reduced cost to the tenant until the tenant makes more money and no longer needs the assistance.

[control-z]

@Kalhoun

I’m not sure what you mean…keep track of what? Section 8 is housing assistance. THey don’t require you to go to school, better yourself, look for a job, or anything. They provide housing at a reduced cost to the tenant until the tenant makes more money and no longer needs the assistance.

I was speaking more in general about government agencies sharing data with each other. But somehow the housing assistance people found out about her making more money, maybe they require the employer to keep them up to date.

[msmith537]

@erislover

Hey, I don’t want my tax dollars going to clean up after people who are too lazy to die in the proper way. What kind of nanny state are you promoting, anyway?!

Seriously. We don’t let wild dogs feed on corpses anymore?

[Sunspace]

@Fear_Itself

It is not in the public interest to ignore a persistent underclass who use resources despite best efforts to deny them access. They burden emergency rooms where they show up for primary medical care, they burden public schools with special needs, they often drift into antisocial and criminal behavior. All of these outcomes cost money, so you are paying for them whether you like it or not. Ignoring them is a luxury we cannot afford. If your goal is to not pay for them, you must take some sort of proactive effort to make them productive citizens, or just admit the only alternative is to shoot them in the back of the head. You are paying for them already, one way or another. A little investment now will often pay off in reduced costs later.

I’ll add that the investment should also go into changing conditions so that no more of them are created: in other words, so that no more people are damaged so that they end up this way. This is what things like anti-bullying programs and shelters for abused spouses and homeless shelters try to do. Ultimately, the real goal, I suspect, is to make sure that the children of the affected people are less affected, and their children even less so, until the problem disappears.

Ideally, such intervention should be on a very personal, long-term basis, starting in early childhood. This is where support should be going: to the family level. Unfortunately, it seems that large, bureaucratic state organisations cannot manage such detailed knowledge and long-term relationships with each ‘at-risk’ person (that’s the term used around here) for such programs to always work very well.

And these programs are for situations where a person of otherwise ‘normal’ capability is knocked back into a hole. People who are born in that hole may not be able to be helped out of it.

If we spent a generation away from other projects, and intensively dealing with the conditions that lead to kids leaving home and becoming beggars in the streets, or getting murdered by their parent because of a disagreement over clothing, or deciding that carrying an illegal gun is a wise thing to do, then it might not be a bad thing.

[bubba_jr]

You guys are talking about reasons and causes. I dealt with one of these LOSERS lately. Son of a girlfriend. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, and I finally figured it out.

Part of an intro to a book.

Or let us imagine the opposite extreme: You have no interest in power. To the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of anything. Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by. You do not want to work like everyone else does. Without a conscience, you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day long. Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely. People may whisper to one another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case, or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy. When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way, your very mind is not the same as theirs.

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job.

You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be “depressed” or “troubled.” As a matter of fact, to you further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person. If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person - who does not suspect what you are really like - may feel particularly obligated. And since all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially rich, just relatively conscience-bound.

From here. Inside the Mind of a Sociopath

Anyways this excerpt describes this person as if the author was sitting there watching him day to day. The guy wouldn’t work, wouldn’t do anything ever.

BTW, did I mention that this person also was also convicted of raping a 7 year old boy, plead to 2 counts of first degree criminal sexual penetration. Got two whole years of probation. The court shrinks even diagnosed him as “antisocial”, a fricken sociopath. And then the probation officer is pulling strings to try and get this guy on SS. I can’t even begin to describe in how many ways this is wrong.

Once again the government awarding failure.

Get fired: Free check.

Refuse to work : Free check

Won’t work much: Food stamps

Have an unwanted child : free check

Have another unwanted child : bigger free check

Have yet another unwanted to child to get a free check : biggest free check ever.

Commit a crime : free room and board, plus an education, and you don’t have to work.

Run the economy into the ground: get bailed out

Run up a whole bunch of credit cards, go bankrupt : debt wiped away, do it again.

Have a job, pay your bills, start a business: Get penalized with TAXES to pay for all the losers that won’t work or pay their bills.

Its really easy, stop rewarding failure. When failure doesn’t pay, there won’t be so many losers (losers being defined as people that feel they are “entitled”)

I’m not a cold heartless bastard, I’m all for giving people a leg up, bad things do happen to good people. But they better get up and get going and get the hell out of my wallet. I’ll gladly pay up to have less poor people running around stealing my stuff, but I get really aggravated when it becomes a lifestyle.

Let them die on my doorstep, I have no problem with that. Its called evolution.