If you want less poverty, raise the minimum wage and give workers the effective right to organise and bargain collectively.
Your solution to reduce poverty: make inferior workers too expensive too employ, thus sending them into poverty when they're fired. And give them the right to organize into obnoxious gangs immune from RICO law, and have them bargain as a group so that individual effort and ability can't bring advancement. Yup, that'll work.
When the consequence of unemployment is certain starvation, there no no incentive for any job to be better than slavery
That doesn't even begin to make sense. For starters, a job is not an animal, it can't have incentives. There's more than one employer in the world, and anyone with something worthwhile to provide can choose to provide it to the employer who pays the most in return. That's the free market, and that's what drives up wages.
If government didn't make employing people so expensive, employees could be paid more and wouldn't need food stamps. Almost all new jobs are part time, and many previously full time jobs are being cut back to part time to get around government regulations, particularly Obamacare. Obamacare alone costs an employer in the neighborhood of $6000 a year per full time employee. $120 a week removes the need for food stamps, removes the inefficiency of sending the money through the leaky hose of government, and removes the need for federal inspectors, further increasing either wages or profits.
If mama accepts AFDC, she gets sterilized. Nobody has the right to impose a burden on others.
If YOU want to support extremely poor children I won't try to stop you. Don't come to my house and point a gun at me and demand that I support such children, and don't have your representatives in the government do it either.
If you can manage the skills to eat with a fork, you can do some sort of work, no matter how pitiful. The number of people who can legitimately not work due to medical conditions is vanishingly small.
On humanitarian grounds, there is no question that the money must be allocated.
NO. On humanitarian grounds, the money must not be allocated. You are destroying the lives of those you're feeding, insuring that they will never be capable of feeding themselves, and removing any motivation to enter the productive class where they will be stolen from.
I'll assume that "no place to store food in my room" means no refrigeration; it's hard to believe that you couldn't store peanut butter (about $2 for 1400 calories). Most fruits will last a week unless the temperature is high. Wendy's is not a particularly economical fast food chain. Pop and candy are expensive ways of consuming sugar, which is cheap. You could have done better, particularly if you cultivated some friends and asked for a bit of help.
How does your post respond to his question "What will it do to everybody's health once the economy is destroyed?", which is the crux of his argument?
Fascism is government control of business with nominal ownership of business remaining in private hands. Fascism does not help the economy, and he would seem to be arguing against it.
[insults]...he resides in Canada and enjoys their universal health care, extensive social safety net and strong labor laws.
It doesn't sound like he's enjoying it if he criticizes it. I live in the US, and I hate seeing the auto-erotic strangulation our society is engaging in.
The idea that democracy is a good thing is a lie spread by the sort of people who can effectively persuade large masses of people, with the help of those who have been so persuaded.
The proper function of government is the protection of the rights of its inhabitants. All governments eventually abuse their power, and it is the ability of some aspects of a democratic form of government to curb those abuses. But democracy alone does not protect freedom or any other right.
"Here, they pay so little that you can't afford to better yourself while on welfare."
If you're not working, you can spend your whole day in the nonfiction section of your library.
There's something bogus in your statement. Peas are an excellent source of vitamin C, and a cup a day provides the RDA. Were you using canned peas and boiling the hell out of them?
Soda calories are in the sugar. Sugar by itself is cheaper by far, dollar per calorie, than soda (and marginally more healthy unless you're dehydrated.) I'm not recommending eating sugar, just undermining your argument.
If your concern is the wellbeing of the bulk of the population, or the wellbeing of those of low income, any mention of the rich is misleading and dishonest. If a person is capable of producing enough to be worthy of his own life, you should be focusing on removing restrictions that keep him from working and keeping him free from thieves who steal what he earns.
Loan companies aren't banks, but they sold the loans to the banks before the ink on the paper was dry. One way to limit the damage of this type of irresponsibility is to make the sale of mortgage indebtedness illegal.
The CRA was the root. Follow-on legislation and the gradual drying out of the worthy creditors in the low-income pool made the system more fragile in later years. This was exacerbated by short-period loans with balloon payments expiring shortly before the collapse, requiring refinancing at higher rates, and also by adjustable rate loans ratcheting up.
Saying $2800 makes it sound like very little, but that's $2800 a month, or $33,600 a year. If you can't raise a family of 4 on that, you're either living in a pricey neighborhood, someone has significant medical expenses, or you're doing it wrong.
Partially, good for you. But not all poor people choose to put in the effort to leave poverty.
You figure if the "free handouts" would end, and the people taking the "free handouts" made enough money they didn't need the "free handouts" they would insist on them anyhow?
Some of them, yes. I've known such people. I've read news stories of people working at good jobs and receiving welfare payments under several names.
For some poor, it's not so much that they choose to be poor, it's that they choose not to work. If they can live well enough without working, they see no reason to work. It is not uncommon for someone to be able to get much more money from government programs than from work, and that is a huge problem, a perverse incentive. Additionally, it is frequently the case that government interference is what makes a job low-paying, by making the overhead of keeping an employee too high.
It is everyone's responsibility to do the very best they can to avoid hurting others, and if you're receiving money from the government in exchange for nothing, you are hurting others. No adult by right can live off the efforts of another, nor is it moral to act as the third party stealing from Tom to pay Harry.
Yes, there are people who cannot create enough value to support their lives, but if they are to continue living it should be from the generosity of others, not theft.
Some of the evil in power use it to enrichen their buddies (Michelle Obama's friends getting the no-bid Obamacare website contract), often either as payback for campaign donations or as a bribe to ensure a job after leaving office. Others enjoy having power because they love to abuse it: think of the recent George Washington Bridge scandal, or the guy who was jailed for an anti-Muslin video and blamed for the Benghazi riots/murder.
Power means you don't get speeding tickets. Power can mean that work-release prisoners mow your lawn. Power can mean not getting charged with rape (Bill Clinton.) Power can mean not getting charged with murder (Benghazi, B.O. and H.C.). Power means having government lawyers and prosecutors and bureaucrats to persecute people who you don't like and people who criticize you. Power means having someone available to beat up and jail your neighbor. Power means being able to condemn and seize a piece of property you'd like to own. Power means being paid for no-show jobs, being paid million dollar advances for ghost-written autobiographies, and when the book doesn't sell, the debt is forgiven. Power means being paid $75,000 for a one-hour lecture. Power means taxpayer-paid bodyguards to protect you from people who justifiably want to see you dead. Get the picture?
Enough money can mean the success of most political campaigns. Corrupt rich people give money, and persuade other people to give money, to political campaigns of corrupt politicians. The easiest people to sway are the stupidest, and the stupidest are the poorest, and they are the target and the prey of the politicians and the campaigns. Post-campaign, government contracts go to the donors. The suckered voters do not really benefit from the campaign promises even if they are enacted, but that involves economic knowledge far beyond their mental grasp. The suckered voters are just the hydraulic fluid (car analogy) through which the advertising pressures act, transferring money to electoral success to political power, back to more money for the donors.
Ethics aside, the inefficiency of the process and the damage of the side effects is astonishing. A $100,000 political contribution might result in a $100,000,000 contract yielding the donor $5,000,000 dollars in profit. The contract will probably be fulfilled in a manner costing $20,000,000 more than from a good company, and may well do actual damage to the economy of billions of dollars, and damage to people's lives that is incalculable. Of course, if your goal is to be like George Soros and do as much damage as possible, the process is remarkably efficient.
Milk has 50% more calories than soda, and has actual nutritional value beyond calories. If you insist on cheap fluids, tap water is the only reasonable choice, and it's far healthier than soda unless your problem is literal starvation.
Slashdot Mirror
That works really well until the combined military might of Monaco and Lichtenstein defeats an unarmed United States.
Your solution to reduce poverty: make inferior workers too expensive too employ, thus sending them into poverty when they're fired. And give them the right to organize into obnoxious gangs immune from RICO law, and have them bargain as a group so that individual effort and ability can't bring advancement. Yup, that'll work.
Sugar is about 55 cents a pound, 940 calories. Sugary soda at 60 cents per 2 quarts contains about 700 calories, and that's damn cheap soda.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. For starters, a job is not an animal, it can't have incentives. There's more than one employer in the world, and anyone with something worthwhile to provide can choose to provide it to the employer who pays the most in return. That's the free market, and that's what drives up wages.
If government didn't make employing people so expensive, employees could be paid more and wouldn't need food stamps. Almost all new jobs are part time, and many previously full time jobs are being cut back to part time to get around government regulations, particularly Obamacare. Obamacare alone costs an employer in the neighborhood of $6000 a year per full time employee. $120 a week removes the need for food stamps, removes the inefficiency of sending the money through the leaky hose of government, and removes the need for federal inspectors, further increasing either wages or profits.
If mama accepts AFDC, she gets sterilized. Nobody has the right to impose a burden on others.
If YOU want to support extremely poor children I won't try to stop you. Don't come to my house and point a gun at me and demand that I support such children, and don't have your representatives in the government do it either.
If you can manage the skills to eat with a fork, you can do some sort of work, no matter how pitiful. The number of people who can legitimately not work due to medical conditions is vanishingly small.
And therein lies the self-contradiction of your argument, because the taxpayers must be forced in order to support the stubborn layabouts.
NO. On humanitarian grounds, the money must not be allocated. You are destroying the lives of those you're feeding, insuring that they will never be capable of feeding themselves, and removing any motivation to enter the productive class where they will be stolen from.
It's only been about a year since a local lady was fired for refusing to sell cigarettes for food stamps.
I'll assume that "no place to store food in my room" means no refrigeration; it's hard to believe that you couldn't store peanut butter (about $2 for 1400 calories). Most fruits will last a week unless the temperature is high. Wendy's is not a particularly economical fast food chain. Pop and candy are expensive ways of consuming sugar, which is cheap. You could have done better, particularly if you cultivated some friends and asked for a bit of help.
How does your post respond to his question "What will it do to everybody's health once the economy is destroyed?", which is the crux of his argument?
Fascism is government control of business with nominal ownership of business remaining in private hands. Fascism does not help the economy, and he would seem to be arguing against it.
It doesn't sound like he's enjoying it if he criticizes it. I live in the US, and I hate seeing the auto-erotic strangulation our society is engaging in.
The idea that democracy is a good thing is a lie spread by the sort of people who can effectively persuade large masses of people, with the help of those who have been so persuaded.
The proper function of government is the protection of the rights of its inhabitants. All governments eventually abuse their power, and it is the ability of some aspects of a democratic form of government to curb those abuses. But democracy alone does not protect freedom or any other right.
"Here, they pay so little that you can't afford to better yourself while on welfare."
If you're not working, you can spend your whole day in the nonfiction section of your library.
There's something bogus in your statement. Peas are an excellent source of vitamin C, and a cup a day provides the RDA. Were you using canned peas and boiling the hell out of them?
Soda calories are in the sugar. Sugar by itself is cheaper by far, dollar per calorie, than soda (and marginally more healthy unless you're dehydrated.) I'm not recommending eating sugar, just undermining your argument.
If you cook frozen vegetables, a microwave over is your friend. No added water to leach out the vitamins.
If you don't have a microwave, make vegetable soup. If the vitamins go into the water, they still go into you.
If your concern is the wellbeing of the bulk of the population, or the wellbeing of those of low income, any mention of the rich is misleading and dishonest. If a person is capable of producing enough to be worthy of his own life, you should be focusing on removing restrictions that keep him from working and keeping him free from thieves who steal what he earns.
Loan companies aren't banks, but they sold the loans to the banks before the ink on the paper was dry. One way to limit the damage of this type of irresponsibility is to make the sale of mortgage indebtedness illegal.
The CRA was the root. Follow-on legislation and the gradual drying out of the worthy creditors in the low-income pool made the system more fragile in later years. This was exacerbated by short-period loans with balloon payments expiring shortly before the collapse, requiring refinancing at higher rates, and also by adjustable rate loans ratcheting up.
Saying $2800 makes it sound like very little, but that's $2800 a month, or $33,600 a year. If you can't raise a family of 4 on that, you're either living in a pricey neighborhood, someone has significant medical expenses, or you're doing it wrong.
Some of them, yes. I've known such people. I've read news stories of people working at good jobs and receiving welfare payments under several names.
For some poor, it's not so much that they choose to be poor, it's that they choose not to work. If they can live well enough without working, they see no reason to work. It is not uncommon for someone to be able to get much more money from government programs than from work, and that is a huge problem, a perverse incentive. Additionally, it is frequently the case that government interference is what makes a job low-paying, by making the overhead of keeping an employee too high.
It is everyone's responsibility to do the very best they can to avoid hurting others, and if you're receiving money from the government in exchange for nothing, you are hurting others. No adult by right can live off the efforts of another, nor is it moral to act as the third party stealing from Tom to pay Harry.
Yes, there are people who cannot create enough value to support their lives, but if they are to continue living it should be from the generosity of others, not theft.
Some of the evil in power use it to enrichen their buddies (Michelle Obama's friends getting the no-bid Obamacare website contract), often either as payback for campaign donations or as a bribe to ensure a job after leaving office. Others enjoy having power because they love to abuse it: think of the recent George Washington Bridge scandal, or the guy who was jailed for an anti-Muslin video and blamed for the Benghazi riots/murder.
Power means you don't get speeding tickets. Power can mean that work-release prisoners mow your lawn. Power can mean not getting charged with rape (Bill Clinton.) Power can mean not getting charged with murder (Benghazi, B.O. and H.C.). Power means having government lawyers and prosecutors and bureaucrats to persecute people who you don't like and people who criticize you. Power means having someone available to beat up and jail your neighbor. Power means being able to condemn and seize a piece of property you'd like to own. Power means being paid for no-show jobs, being paid million dollar advances for ghost-written autobiographies, and when the book doesn't sell, the debt is forgiven. Power means being paid $75,000 for a one-hour lecture. Power means taxpayer-paid bodyguards to protect you from people who justifiably want to see you dead. Get the picture?
Enough money can mean the success of most political campaigns. Corrupt rich people give money, and persuade other people to give money, to political campaigns of corrupt politicians. The easiest people to sway are the stupidest, and the stupidest are the poorest, and they are the target and the prey of the politicians and the campaigns. Post-campaign, government contracts go to the donors. The suckered voters do not really benefit from the campaign promises even if they are enacted, but that involves economic knowledge far beyond their mental grasp. The suckered voters are just the hydraulic fluid (car analogy) through which the advertising pressures act, transferring money to electoral success to political power, back to more money for the donors.
Ethics aside, the inefficiency of the process and the damage of the side effects is astonishing. A $100,000 political contribution might result in a $100,000,000 contract yielding the donor $5,000,000 dollars in profit. The contract will probably be fulfilled in a manner costing $20,000,000 more than from a good company, and may well do actual damage to the economy of billions of dollars, and damage to people's lives that is incalculable. Of course, if your goal is to be like George Soros and do as much damage as possible, the process is remarkably efficient.
Milk has 50% more calories than soda, and has actual nutritional value beyond calories. If you insist on cheap fluids, tap water is the only reasonable choice, and it's far healthier than soda unless your problem is literal starvation.