In re: Frumple:
If there's something I've missed, please remind me.
I've cut out the rest to save some space.
Here's something really frakking illuminating. It's set for florida, but you can back up a bit and see other states. Neither that income nor welfare is going to keep you alive if shit goes south. As Barb says, there's not many people that actually want to be on welfare. Most people would seriously, seriously rather have work and a livable paycheck. One of the things that homeless and poverty numbers doesn't tell you is that even more millions of people in the US aren't actually getting enough money to genuinely survive. Minimum wage is enough to keep one person going, by themselves, if nothing disastrous occurs.
Also, that John? He doesn't have two jobs. He doesn't have one job. There is no job for John. Also, house? No. Renting a place, maybe. Or, to be more precise, the John you're talking about is seriously bloody lucky, and not representative of what the problem is. He's also, as you note, screwed. And stuff like 5k for medical? Ha, no. Screwed. He won't have a house for very long, he probably won't have kids for very long, unless the bloody heavens smile upon him and grasp him to their bosom.
You want the government to start providing jobs? We're going to need a tax increase. Good luck with that Getting the upper crust to actually pay taxes would help, though.
Also, the job programs the government provides, right now? There's a lot of areas in the US that they don't really do much for, or are saturated. Good bloody luck getting work when there's a few hundred other people applying for the job (And trust, when I say few hundred, I am not frakking kidding. We've been getting literally hundreds of applications to freaking waitress jobs in the area I'm in.). Even more bloody luck if the job's actually going to be able to feed you, never mind if you have family.
Basically, the situation on the ground is worse than you're portraying, and is going to take more than just 'weaning today's culture off welfare.' The majority (absolute, total, majority) of today's culture is completely off wanting to be on welfare. Anyone, and I stress this, that tells you that America has a 'welfare culture' is either seriously g'damn blind or effectively pissing in your face. These people do not want to be where they are, most of the bloody time. They want jobs, they want a living wage, problem is, shit's not there.
Yes, there's exceptions. Yes, there's people abusing the welfare system and trying to coast on it. They are not the majority of people on welfare. Full stop. They're not even a large minority. People who say they are... they're trying to sell you a proverbial bridge.
First of all Frumple, you get a gold star for this and you've saved me a shitload of time by doing so. Thank you.
____________________________________________________________________
In re: GGamer formatting:GGamer, even forgetting the tag fails.... Man I'm sorry, but your posting style format is making it rather difficult to respond to your points, which often consist of one liners. This is why people are having trouble quoting you. It makes it harder to respond and your one liners aren't as funny as you might think they are.
Take this as an example:
Let's forget the overly pious "Christians" TM forcing their religion on people while pretending to be persecuted, who ask What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) and then openly mock that by going against the poor when that guy was all about helping the poor. (WTF? -5 points, lack of sources. see me after class.)
Imagine you're an outsider looking at this for the first time, can you tell who said what easily? Maybe you can cause you wrote it, but this is a public board. It's difficult to deal with for me too in formatting any reply, because there are lots of things like this. Additionally what are you talking about lacking sources here for? Which part specifically? That Jesus was all for helping the poor or that a lot of Christians TM are hypocritical in calling the poor lazy, not wanting to pay taxes and/or cutting social services? Dude, I've spent time lacing my recent posts concerning you with tons of links and sources.... You're gonna say Jesus wasn't all about helping the poor or that cutting social services to the poor isn't a WWJD thing?
Moreover, none of your replies have sources which is what you're on me about:
As they say, the french are only good at two things: surrenderin', and kissin' (also a joke). And LOL, no, we lost because we rigidly applied the old rules of warfare against an army that couldn't even be called an army. Once more, I suggest The Ugly American, it sums the whole situation up quite well.
You, my good friend, seem to be mixed up. We SHOULDN'T have been there, but some sort of Liberal Angel Squad didn't apply god's wrath upon the UN because we were THERE.
I believe you are referring to Social Security here, which is fundamentally broken.
These aren't substantive answers.
I don't see a single source in any of that and its a far more controversial set of points than "Jesus was all about helping poor people and today we're screwing them over." I'm not sure anyone knows what the heck you're talking about with the "Liberal Angel Squad, [not applying] "god's wrath upon the UN," and how do you expect anyone to respond to that? You're just using soundbites without sources while demanding that I source my material, which I largely have.
I don't know if it's a thing you have with tags or what exactly but really, please try to make your posts a little easier format-wise to respond to.
In re: Work program for the Poor instead of welfare: C.) THERE IS NO C. LOLNO
Yeah, the reason there is no Option C, whether you like it or not:
You asked if there was something you were missing: Your idea, government work programs, would cost at least
$1,015,040,000,000.00/ year in direct wages alone and that doesn't include raw materials, transportation costs, etc. That's even assuming you could effectively use any kind of the labor you'd have to, which would be more difficult than building the great wall of China. yeah, sure some of those 45 or 46 million aren't labor productive adults, which is a whole 'nother problem, but let's say it all washes out given the under-reporting and fact that there are tens of millions of people just barely above the level of food stamps to more than make up for it. That doesn't count manager pay being higher because with millions upon millions, somebody's gonna have to do that too.... Details, details....
([$10/hour] x [2080/hours in a year]) = $20800/year (which is not a great salary at all)
$20,800 x 48,800,000 =$1,015,040,000,000.00 (Yeah I built in about 3 Million extra, because there will be far, far more than that applying). It'd be $952,640,000,000.00 with 45.8 Million.
$10/hour sucks and it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to raise a family of four on that. If you want both mom and dad to work, then you're going to have to provide tons of child care, which is an additional cost. Also, that's just for the labor. Let's talk materials, enough for 45.8 Million people to work with, plus equipment for that many people, plus maintaining and transporting it all. That's just the direct costs. So if you're talking about nearly a $Trillion if you're paying the people shit wages of $10/hour (WITH NO BENEFITS) then you're easily looking at another $trillion or $two trillion when you really add up all the costs. (Buy them each a $10 shovel and we've got $10x 45.8 Million = $458 Million!) We're talking cement for roads, electrical power lines, sewer works, water works, landscaping, dam construction,etc, and a whole shit ton of it plus moving it all around with gas at nearly $4/gallon plus buying equipment to move it all around.
I meant it when I said there was no C.
Have you wondered why they haven't done this? Has it crossed your mind that this has already been thought of and that perhaps there was a reason why they haven't done it? Modern day construction projects do not employ Millions and Millions of people. Where once we had dozens and dozens of people, we now have one person on a machine. Additionally, in today's congressional environment, they nearly shut down the government this summer over just keeping what we already have going. There's no way in hell we're going to be able to pass this in congress when we're talking at absolute minimum $2 Trillion and probably more like $3 to employ 45.8 Million people....
Did you ever stop to think about what it would really take to employ tens of millions of people? Dear God, half of them wouldn't even know what to do in what would have to be massive construction projects?
Fact, whether we like it or not, and we don't, tens of millions of people..... We don't know what on earth to do with them.... We can't afford to hire them and what would we hire them to do anyhow?
There is no C.... Unless of course, we can tax the rich to pay for it.... O noes, we can't do that.... They're job creators.... Wait, wouldn't we be ... taxing them... to ... create ... jobs...? Isn't that what they're not doing?
There is no C....