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BUSINESSMEN ARE EATING BABIES

3 (7%)

I'm a socialist

5 (11.6%)

Businesses need heavier regulation, and social programs should be expanded

12 (27.9%)

Businesses need heavier regulation, but current social programs are too expensive

1 (2.3%)

Regulation is stifling growth, but we should expand social programs

1 (2.3%)

Regulation is stifling growth, and current social programs are too expensive.

4 (9.3%)

Regulation is stifling growth, but current social programs are working well.

0 (0%)

Current regulation is fine, but we should expand social programs.

0 (0%)

Current regulation is fine, but current social programs are too expensive.

2 (4.7%)

Businesses need heavier regulation, but current social programs are working well.

0 (0%)

Both current regulation and social programs are working fine.

2 (4.7%)

I'm a libertarian.

4 (9.3%)

I'm heavily conservative.

1 (2.3%)

LIBERALS ARE EATING BABIES

1 (2.3%)

I'm a communist

3 (7%)

I'm a fascist

4 (9.3%)

Total Members Voted: 43

[Nikov]

Apples can be red.

I have a green apple, thus your claim is false.

[RedKing]

Losing income by switching from unemployment is generally only going to happen if you're taking a major downgrade in your position, since unemployment is based on prior salary. But regardless, the unemployment runs out eventually anyways (although in really bad times, politicians will extend benefits beyond their normal expiration. Wish I had had that back in 2006 when my ass was laid off.)

If I had taken a minimum wage job, it would have been only marginally more money than my unemployment, and once you factor in the cost of gas, lunch, and especially *day care* it would have been a major step down. The problem there isn't laziness or wanting to mooch off the system, it's simple economics. And the solution isn't to starve people into working, it's making it reasonable and affordable to go to work. Daycare is a monumental cost for people with children. My wife and I are both working professionals with middle-class incomes. We still wind up essentially paying a quarter of our total income just on day care. It would almost be financially prudent for one of us to stop working and stay at home with the kids--except that doing so would kill the potential to earn better salary down the road once the kids are in school. Staying out of the work force for more than a year or so is a huge blackmark on your resume to overcome. My brother-in-law (a self-described libertarian, mind you) has been out of work for about SEVEN years now. He pretty much gave up looking 3 or 4 years ago. He lost his home because he refused to draw unemployment (despite having paid in while he was working), moved back in with his parents, and has basically turned into an unproductive lump that reads fanfic all day. He's not mooching off the government, he's mooching off his family.

My grandfather, before he died, was burning through his savings because medicare premiums ate about 2/3 of his Social Security check each month, before food, utilities, etc. He had a pension, but it was laughably small. He busted his ass his whole life and he saved his whole life, but the simple fact is that the cost of living and inflation made his savings pitiably small in comparison to his costs. And he was in pretty damn good health!

My in-laws are pretty much screwed because my father-in-law was a career worker at IBM. For decades, he had been told that the company would take care of him, that the pension would be there. Then in the late 90's IBM restructured their pension plan, gave a lump sum payout to everybody (which he used to pay off debts), and started forcing many of their older workers into early retirement so that they couldn't even get their full chunk of what little pension was left. They had no long-term savings, not because they were lazy or short-sighted or parasites, but because they had been told for 40+ years that "This is how you make a secure living--you work for a blue-chip like IBM or GM or GE or Ford, and they'll take care of you right when you retire". Then greedy sons of bitches in boardrooms decided to renege on decades of those promises, just as millions of Baby Boomers were preparing to cash out and retire.

People who complain about Social Security beneficiaries as "parasites" and "lazy" can suck my left nut. 

[ed boy]

I call bullshit on this. As I said numerous times, I can prove it. Either by example (watch France) or by a VERY simple reasoning.
If you can have say 900$ a month without working, won't you try to earn 1800$? If a job that would pay 1800$ only pay 1700$ taxes deduced, will you choose to earn only 900$ by stopping work?
The invective to work come from the desire to earn money, if taxes reduce your income, you won't want to work less.
You could even want to work more, to spend your money on what you want while having your health-care and retirement granted, and won't be able to choose the easy solution and spend everything without saving.

It's not as simple as "work and get more money". There are lots of other factors that affect whether someone will want to take a job. Firstly, you fail to account for lots of other costs, such as commuting.

Secondly, time is a big thing. When unemployed, you have all the time in the world. When employed, you are spending a large portion of your time somewhere else, which means that you have less time available for your own interests and activities.

Thirdly, lots of people find their own time more enjoyable than working. They would need to be quite a bit better off working before it outweights the appeal of doing what they want all day long.

[Svarte Troner]

lol Who else voted for fascism?

Dictators get shit done.

[Taricus]

Yes they do. So either facism or communism works on that note.

[Phmcw]

It's not as simple as "work and get more money". There are lots of other factors that affect whether someone will want to take a job. Firstly, you fail to account for lots of other costs, such as commuting.

Secondly, time is a big thing. When unemployed, you have all the time in the world. When employed, you are spending a large portion of your time somewhere else, which means that you have less time available for your own interests and activities.

Thirdly, lots of people find their own time more enjoyable than working. They would need to be quite a bit better off working before it outweights the appeal of doing what they want all day long.

Ok, ok, we have control for that, too. If you don't shearch for a job, you loose unemployment benefits, and they lower over time.

But there are few poeple that wouldn't want a job, and they would make lousy workers anyway.

But with a tax rate over 50% and hight unemployment benefits, people in  Belgium still want to work.

[knaveofstaves]

There's a lot of different programs being discussed, and unfortunately the distinctions between them are being blurred.

The main component of Social Security is "OASDI", or Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. The big banana is the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI), or retirement, program. Your tax dollars go into a trust fund that buys government bonds. These are "special-issue" bonds, shiny ones that you can't buy, which can be redeemed for cash at any time, with all accrued interest up to that point paid out. The 2011 figures (PDF) show that this program could keep going the way it is until 2036.

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) will go broke much sooner, probably 2018. That's soon enough that it's in effect insolvent now. This isn't a problem for two reasons: for right now the "D" bit of "OASDI" is small as a portion of the whole (DI borrows from OASI); and over the medium-term (next twenty years) Disability Insurance will take in much more than it spends and actually delay the insolvency of OASI (see above PDF, OASI borrows from DI).

OASDI has nothing to do with our current budget problems, though in twenty-five years or so we'll hit a brick wall. OASDI is not borrowing from the government. The reverse is true: the OASDI trust funds are in special-issue bonds, convertible for cash at will but bonds nonetheless. The government is borrowing from OASDI.

There's also some discussion of "unemployment" in this thread. That word does not mean "a check you get from the government when you aren't working". Unemployment insurance is a state program, available only to those who earned eligibility through work, providing short-term benefits to bridge the gap between jobs in good economic times, and extended in recessions when there are no jobs to be found. Unemployment used to be handled by the Social Security Administration, but these days it's entirely administered by the states. It is paid for in part by the same federal payroll taxes that pay for Social Security, but that money is handed over to the states. And unemployment is a good use of your tax dollars, don't hate on it.

Medicare is aid for the elderly, disabled, and seriously ill. It only applies to medical costs, and covers at most eighty percent of those costs. It's a program of the federal government. Medicaid is medical assistance for low-income people. It's a joint program of the states and the federal government, and all fifty states have it, though it may be provided under a different name. These programs are seeing massively increased costs, for a number of reasons. Bruce Bartlett recently gave a good nuts-and-bolts summary of the issues. The baby boomers are getting old enough to be eligible for Medicare, the recession has created more working families eligible for Medicaid, health care in general is getting more expensive, and in 2003 the Republicans expanded Medicare without raising taxes or fees to pay for it. And the Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care plan? It will reduce the deficit, repealing it will increase the deficit. And the recent Republican plan proposed by Paul Ryan? Yes, it saves money, but by shifting costs onto seniors: they project 25 percent of health-care costs would be paid out-of-pocket by seniors in 2030, but 68 percent under Ryan's plan.

So, when you're watching the talking heads on the news, keep this in mind: anyone who says socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid in one breath as if they were the same thing is misleading you, and may have a political agenda in doing so. If they include "unemployment" in that breath, they are moon men, and you should ignore everything they say. I think Paul Krugman puts the emphasis on the right syllable: OASDI insolvency is an easy problem compared to Medicare and Medicaid.

tl;dr: Social Security is fine. Unemployment insurance is excellent, and we should provide more of it. And Medicare/Medicaid is a serious problem, which the Republicans have made and continue to make worse, while the Democrats spend every last dollar of political capital to repair it.

[scriver]

Secondly, time is a big thing. When unemployed, you have all the time in the world. When employed, you are spending a large portion of your time somewhere else, which means that you have less time available for your own interests and activities.

Thirdly, lots of people find their own time more enjoyable than working. They would need to be quite a bit better off working before it outweights the appeal of doing what they want all day long.

Unfortunately, most hobbies and interests cost a lot of money. You need a work's pay to afford them. Same with number three. Not much point "doing what they want all day" when they don't have enough money to pay for what they want to do, whatever it might be. Unless staying at home day in and day out doing nothing is considered enjoyable, I guess. All other shit cost money.

[Virex]

I find the whole idea of talking about jobs as if they're hard to find pretty laughable, at least in the case of Holland, when here the fruit farmers are hiring Bulgarians and Hungarans to pick the fruit at the same wages as the Dutch would get. Involuntary unemployment my ass.

[Taricus]

I find the whole idea of talking about jobs as if they're hard to find pretty laughable, at least in the case of Holland, when here the fruit farmers are hiring Bulgarians and Hungarans to pick the fruit at the same wages as the Dutch would get. Involuntary unemployment my ass.

In that case most people actually try and get a desk job or something like that. Either way, if it weren't those immigrants doing it, no one would.

[Virex]

That just means people are refusing to do available work, no? I don't see why I should have to pay for people who don't want to pick fruit?

[ChairmanPoo]

Would you work picking fruit Virex? Insofar as I recall, you are studying chemistry, and intend to work in that field. Would you settle for a lifelong career of picking fruit for minimum wage?

[Phmcw]

That just means people are refusing to do available work, no? I don't see why I should have to pay for people who don't want to pick fruit?

And they could not afford to pay minimum wage.

[Virex]

The farmers can afford paying a minimum wage because foreigners get as much as non-foreigners here (unless you're suggesting they're cheating a bit?). Not to mention that most foreigners are over 24 and thus more expensive then hiring a young student or something (at least twice as expensive if not more)

Would you work picking fruit Virex? Insofar as I recall, you are studying chemistry, and intend to work in that field. Would you settle for a lifelong career of picking fruit for minimum wage?

If I'd have to chose between picking fruit and being unemployed the choice would go to the fruit,. I've worked in a furniture store for minimum wage for about 2 years before I got work at our lab. Mind you, what I made was significantly less then what I would've gotten if I'd have quit my job and my study (I could only make 12 hours a week due to poor compatibility between store hours and university times, plus even with study allowance I was short 300 a year on the universities admission fee, not counting the price of books   and students get a flat rate of roughly 300 euros a month instead of the full unemployment benefit  ), yet I kept on working. Around here you can survive on 500 Euro's a month if necessary (300 euro's for a room, which you can cover with your allowance and 500 for monthly expenses, books and admission fees), and the minimum wage for my age category is about 5 Euro's an hour (5,32 to be precise). 100 hours a month is roughly 25 hours per week (assuming 4 weeks a month for the moment). Combined with 40 hours of study (excluding homework), that's roughly 65 hours a week, which is slightly over what I consider a normal working week (6 days of 10 hours each, plus 2 hours a day home study) and easily manageable. So yeah, if I had no other choice, then  I'd go for picking fruit over doing noting.


But all this is irrelevant. When disaster strikes and one is forced into unemployment, it's not the time to think about following grand dreams. First you'll have to get your things sorted out, get a job and get back in the rythem of the rest of the world. Once you have a job, getting a better one is much easier,

[Nadaka]

The choice isn't between picking fruit and doing nothing. It is between picking fruit while going ever further into debt and doing everything you can to get a job that matches your skills and meets your needs.

Also, where you live is drastically less expensive than just about everywhere in the US, particularly when you account for education. A BS degree typically costs 30 to 50 thousand dollars at an average school, not counting living expenses.