Apart from that, our welfare systems are full of so much fraud that people who have valid cause to use them are often left behind while the louder, false claims get taken care of.

Yes, there are valid cases of human need, and I personally would direct them to local charities and churches. It's not the government's job to make people help them.

Yeah! And screw moms who have kids and maternity leave! They should suck it up and get back to work the next day!

Did I miss something, are you just soliloquy-ing for your own benefit?

Lets get rid of publicly funded schools and hospitals while we are at it. Those leeches to the system (children and the sick) should be finally left on their own like they deserve.

Wow, how obnoxious

..don't get me started on senior citizens. As soon as they are too adult to work, what use are they to a conservative - I mean to 'society'?

Oh I see. Conservatives don't hate the poor and downtrodden, you just think they're lazy, irresponsible and stupid. That's so much better than hating them.

It's because you think the rich should be given every benefit, every tax break, every dime of public assistance, even while they continually defraud the government at a pace far far greater than anything the people supposedly ripping off unemployment checks can do. Conservatives coddle business with all sorts of undeserved inducements, telling us that we need to give them special treatment else they're fire tens of thousands of people, while slashing assistance for everyone else.

Conservatives sold their souls to the highest bidder, and pretend it's out of some kind of principle. The "principle" is to kiss the boots of their rich friends, while heaping abuse of the poor, claiming that either A) the poor aren't really suffering or B) they're poor because they're not as talented or hardworking as the well dressed jackasses who sit in corporate offices all day.

@ WardenDresden All sarcasm aside, I'm so tired of hearing variations on the "personal responsibility" argument for conservatism, which is basically what this is. It always seems to involve everyone else taking personal responsibility for things but not you. So let me lay some responsibility on you. Your prosperity, and your relative wealth, has consequences for other people. Are you going to take responsibility for that? All the advantages you have for being (I'm guessing) a heterosexual, white, probably christian, man, come at the expense of people who don't fit that description. Are you going to take responsibility for that?

@Warden

Everyone, including the wealthy, rely on the government every day. They use the roads built by the government, many of them attended schools funded by the government. Their companies are profitable in large part because of tax breaks and incentives supplied by the government.

Are you arguing that the government should help no one at all? That's an argument you can make. An argument you can't make is that it's OK for the government to help those who are well off but not those who aren't, which is exactly what you're doing.

Don't bother asking. All these conservatives to a man claim they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, even if that in actuality means working for mommy and daddy's business, which probably got big tax breaks or subsidies from the government. He probably got student loans from the govt too, and he probably has done nothing but work cushy jobs while he condemns unemployed coalminers, construction workers, etc for not "acting like adults".

Don't bother asking how personal responsibility apparently means not needing to have social responsibility, to hold any which way a regard for having made your living within a structure which you are now, in turn, indebted to. No one made a million by being the only inhabitant of a desert island.

@Mafia Advantages don't have to come at the expense of others. That idea assumes a zero-sum game, something that fails to accurately describe the capitalist system. As for me personally, I'm a college student interning at a computer company to pay bills while my parents support a portion of college bills while loans do the rest.


@Putin No, I don't think the "rich" deserve special benefits and tax breaks, but it's a fact that they pay more in taxes than makes sense. Aside from income tax, there's an additional corperate income tax, and capital gains tax, all on money that's already been taxed as income.


@Noise I'm sure you could go on all day about your selective groups, but it simply isn't possible to fix every problem in a society through governmental regulations and programs, and unless you're going to contribute something that hasn't been chanted by marching thugs, I'd appreciate you coming up with something at least original to mock me with.

Give me example of specific corperations that do "evil" things and I'll probably agree with you, but the way the current taxation structure works hurts businesses that actually contribute to the economy. People with high incomes as related to taxes, are actually the ones that are working 50+ hours a week to try and improve their lives while the uber rich have most of their income in capital gains.
Now I think I've gone comepletely away from what I meant to have this thread for, simply about social programs/laws, but there's my post.

@Warden

But, on an unrelated note, you may be interested to learn that I purchased a mighty fine Duster today.

And suppose those adults need help?

Suppose they HAVE acted like adults and, perhaps, the sum of their sufferings is not their fault?

JFK once said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

And he might as well have said "countrymen."

If I, as an American, am not moved by the plight of other, down-trodden Americans, harmed through no fault of their own...if I have the resources and ability to help my fellow Americans, but lack only the will to do so, and so ultimately turn my back to them...

What right have *I* to dare call myself their countrymen or, indeed, American at all?

@Abge I'm not at all making the argument that the government should only help those who are well off. I'm of a pretty Libertarian persuasion myself, in that I think the government should pretty much stay out of my life as much as possible.
Mostly I wanted to make this thread to take the argument out of the Troy Davis thread and into one where it actually makes sense looking at the thread title.

@Putin's more recent post than the one in my last reply
No, I didn't "pull myself up by my bootstraps" but I also didn't wait for someone else to give me my chance to succeed, I took the initiative. I understand that many people can't get work right now too, until very recently I was one of them. But there are companies hiring, and there is oppurtunity to work if you take it.

"Give me example of specific corperations that do "evil" things and I'll probably agree with you, but the way the current taxation structure works hurts businesses that actually contribute to the economy"

Numerous corporations pay absolutely nothing in taxes. General Electric got a rebate in addition to paying zero in taxes. How is that hurting businesses? Businesses have gotten nothing but tax cuts and yet they still whine for more more more. The wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed upward while the rest of our society has stagnated or declined in income. Yet still you people whine for more breaks, more benefits.
Capital gains is nothing but coupon clipping. People who live off dividends do absolutely nothing for society. They contribute nothing. They're leeches and parasites. Yet you want to cut their tax rates. Meanwhile conservatives are all over the media declaring that they want to raise taxes on the unemployed, the retired, the working poor, etc, under the guise of "broadening the tax base". They declare it "unfair" that the poor, retired, and unemployed don't pay income taxes, even though they pay or have paid innumerable other regressive taxes.

Corporate income is not the same as personal income, anyway. So what on earth are you talking about. Just another lie in order to get more breaks for the rich. If corporations are people, they need to be taxed like people. Instead they're taxed nothing. We can't even get supposedly "patriotic" conservatives to support repatriation taxes.

"No, I didn't "pull myself up by my bootstraps" but I also didn't wait for someone else to give me my chance to succeed, I took the initiative."

You took the i initiative by having your parents and federal government pay give you handouts, while you advocate cutting social programs for people who can't get loans or have parents who pay their bills.

I swear every libertarian is a 20something year old computer technician of some sort .

It's always nice to see people argue against income, corporation and capital gains taxes yet support any consumption tax (VATs, GSTs, etc). Indeed, taxing the poor to feed the rich.

@Warden

I know where you're going to school and I know what you're studying. You would not have been able to make those choices if your parents worked for minimum wage in a sweat shop. Your parents were direct beneficiaries of the governments good grace and so, too, have you been.

People who start with less need more to compensate; that just makes sense. What they lack is not only tangible things like food and clothes; it's the intangible such as guidance and education that they really need and is much harder to provide.

That is not to say WardenDresden supports one, but I have seen it here before.

@obiwan I'm not saying that ALL social programs should be removed, I honestly haven't studied the issue enough to know what can and should be kept VS what needs to be cut out as a wasteful program. I'm just tired of the constant demonization of anyone who says that certain programs are not fulfilling a valid role and should be removed.
In response to your last sentence, I like the idea of being able to opt out of specific programs; social security for instance. If you decided not to contribute, you would have no claim on the services. And if you ended up spending all your money and being broke at age 65, homeless, sick, unemployed, then it's too bad; you opted out.

If you aren't moved to help, then I would argue that you have no right to be called their countryman. Call it callous, cold, or whatever, informed decisions need consequences, for the richest as well as the poorest, however, you shouldn'thave to give any excess you have over to others, or inevitably, many of those others will never grow, and you will forever be paying for someone who by all rights should be able to support themselves.

@ largeham Just to get it out there, I oppose any kind of VAT, and i have no clue what a GST stands for.

"I swear every libertarian is a 20something year old computer technician of some sort ."

You give some of us too much credit. 19-year-old history student =>

@Warden

I don't think you understand what you're saying.

There's a difference between arguing that a service is ineffective and arguing that people don't deserve services because it's their fault.

I'll fully agree that a lot of our services are piss-poor and require drastic overhaul. But, I'd like to see them improved, not eliminated. And I don't think that (for a majority of recipients) people using these services are to blame. Yeah, there will always be some people who take advantage of the system, but that's not a valid reason for shutting it down.

GST = Goods and Services Tax. I think that's what largeham was referring to. It's the nationwide value added tax in Canada.

"then it's too bad; you opted out. "

And too bad that doesn't work, since Social Security is like a bank. It uses people's current deposits to pay off benefits. If you "opt out", that means benefits must be reduced. Rightwingers never think through the implications of their simple minded policies.

I think you're the same type of person that runs one of those advance fee usury scams. "Desperate for cash? You can have money now...oh, you didn't realize it was 900% interest? Too bad".

Ah yes, relying on charity instead of government. We can't bother to inconvenience millionaires and billionaires to contribute to society, we have to rely on cash strapped NGOs and volunteer work by people already working 60+ hours a week trying to get by, if they're lucky enough to have a job. And nevermind that charities spend a huge portion of their budget on advertising, and are grossly wasteful in their spending when compared to anything government does. Also, you do realize that charities rely on public funding? That's what the Tories found out when they implemented their "Big Society" bs while slashing social services.

I don't think they nessecarily need to be eliminated either, but if improvement is impossible to ever be cost-effective, then we might need to re-evaluate whether or not it's actually needed. We need to allow people to research and audit these programs so we can cut out waste and fraud.

@Warden

This is an example of a reasonable view to hold:

"I don't think they nessecarily need to be eliminated either, but if improvement is impossible to ever be cost-effective, then we might need to re-evaluate whether or not it's actually needed. We need to allow people to research and audit these programs so we can cut out waste and fraud."

This is an example of a right-wing nut-job view to hold:

"It's not that we hate the poor, downtrodded, abused people. It's one simple thing; we expect adults to act like adults. If that is too much for us to ask, then maybe we need to re-evaluate the direction our society is headed."


Do you understand how these two paragraphs say completely different things? Do you understand why it's incredibly confusing when you say both of these things?