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Want to eliminate welfare? Be careful what you wish for.
50 years from now, 99% of the population will be on welfare. Why? Because 99% of humans will be made obsolete by technology. Machines will be smarter than 99% of humans.
Machines have already become faster and better than humans in industries like manufacturing. You may have noticed. It's only a matter of time before computers begin to outsmart humans at more intellectual tasks.
Don't want welfare 50 years from now? The other option is genocide: the 1% who own all of the land, assets, and machines can simply exterminate the "worthless eaters." Maybe they could make a sport of it: how many peasants they can kill with drones or from helicopters in a certain amount of time. It'd be like a fun video game for them.
Want to eliminate welfare? Be careful what you wish for.
50 years from now, 99% of the population will be on welfare.
That presumption is based on money madness.
Socialism (welfare / compulsory charity) is the “obvious” solution to poverty, when poverty is believed to be insufficient money. Why else would intelligent people embrace slavery - even part time slavery?
The three ways to acquire money are : trade, charity, or predation. When trade is impaired (loss of jobs, closed businesses, inflation, etc), then charity must fill the gap. The fear is that if charity fails, then predation reigns, and the criminals take over.
However, the belief in money is a symptom of madness - money madness. No one is born with it. It usually requires a lifetime of indoctrination and socializing before “money” becomes more attractive and valuable than the actual goods and services it buys. Embracing an abstraction as having more value than reality takes a lot of brainwashing.
Remember the poor? Why are they poor? The money mad believe it is because they do not have enough money to buy their necessities. Okay, let’s give everyone equal riches - make them “set for life.” Does that really end poverty? Who is going to bother to labor, to produce, to transport and to sell to them? If everyone had “enough” money for life, the illusion of money madness would be exposed. Money has no function if there is NOTHING to buy. If the marketplace is empty, money has zero value. Whereas a full marketplace can function without money, as long as people can trade what they produce.
Prosperity is based on the production, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services. That is reality. Money is but a tool to facilitate trade. But seeking after money without first building prosperity is madness.
In other words, we're trained to NEED MONEY, as an incentive to BE PRODUCTIVE.
Can you perceive a different incentive to be prodigiously productive?
What salary do parents receive for caring for their children?
What salary do religious renunciants receive for a lifetime of service?
What remuneration does a community receive for a "barn raising" or "house raising"?
I've been reading another current thread on the subject of poverty: the one about giving out free hygienic pads and tampons to poor women. Supposedly without this free stuff they would be just walking around bleeding during their monthlies. Now, I am all for providing a safety net for the people who have been left in poverty by some personal tragedy, an illness, loss of job etc. But the condition is that these unfortunate people have retained at least a modicum of personal dignity, a basic desire to keep themselves together, if not to better themselves. People like the abovementioned women who would be walking around bleeding without the slightest regard to themselves because they simply do not care, have lost that dignity. They are not to be helped anymore, not by any amount of compassion. Too far gone. The same goes for drug users.
Nice of you to take a discussion from another thread out of context. That thread was about New York providing sanitary pads or tampons to women at:
Schools
Jails and prisons
homeless shelters
Those are places where the 'residents or attendees' probably do not have money with which to pay for those products, so it's hardly like showering all of the women in the US with "free stuff"
Someone earlier on tried to tell me that what I look around and see is anecdotal and doesn't matter. How can that be? To me what I look around and see is reality.
Do any of you avoid the supermarket the first few days of the month? Food stamps come out then and it is a different place and a different crowd than otherwise. Tell me its anecdotal and doesn't matter but the few times I've forgotten and gone to Winco the first week of the month there are plenty more people that look unclean reeking of cigarettes and carts full of tiny stair step kids. I see more tattoos then ever, which are expensive things. The topper one time was the guy trying to beg money off of me in the parking lot claiming his truck broke down and talking with fake Arkansas dialect.
Why these things bother me so much? Our second child was born with severe autism. I ask myself why all the time. The sad reality is this leaves us over extended and I think we made the responsible decision to not have any more children. It wasn't what I wanted but sometimes you just don't get everything you want. He really doesn't have the ability to take care of himself. Has no fault in it. Doesn't deserve to be put in a horrible work camp to die. He also isn't what the majority of people on welfare are like, but he should be. How different the world would be if we only took care of people that couldn't help being permanent children their whole life. There would be a lot fewer people getting welfare, they do really need it and a better job could be done of it taking care of them then is now. This is why if bothers me to see able bodied people taking. These families have far more children too. I don't see how this system can sustain itself.
I'm glad you clarified that about the EBT cards, thank you. But if you don't know that to begin with, what do you do? Say, "Excuse me, is that an EBT card you're using? May I ask why you're using it?" I mean, even doing that would probably get my hackles up because as far as I'm concerned, the state of Washington has already deemed me eleigible for an EBT card and as far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't have to prove my need to anyone else. Sort of like having to display papers from your doctor showing you're really disabled and are eligible to park in the Handicapped space when somebody challenges you on it.
And yes, I am happy now that you've clarified your position about both genders. Thank you for that, too.
One thing I should probably mention regarding people who have kids they can't afford and this is for everyone here.
Many, many moons ago, back in the 70s, I decided I didn't want to have kids simply because I knew I didn't want any, young as I was. You would not in any way believe the comments I got. From telling me I needed to fulfill myself to passing my genes on, the older women working there did everything they could to convince me how sorry I'd be if I didn't have kids. And of course, I had to get married ASAP so I could have kids before I got too old!
I had no intentions of getting married and at that point in my life, I still remember telling these women that even if I did, I couldn't afford to have children. Know what the standard response was? "If you wait till you can afford them, you'll never have them."
That was the view in those days. If you waited till you could afford to get married, have kids, buy a house, or anything else people were "supposed" to do, it would be too late when you finally could. What's worse, I don't think things have changed all that much. Think about a couple getting married today. How much pressure do you think is still on a newly married couple to have kids so their parents can be grandparents? A lot, believe me.
And look at how we push babies, even today. Pretend for a moment that babies are drugs. Suppose that the expectation from just about everyone is that a married couple will use drugs as soon as possible. A first time drug use is celebrated with a party. A common saying is "Drugs are our future". We are surrounded by drugs in magazines, in books, in ads to sell things. The act that leads to using drugs is in movies, on TV, and in magazines. The pressure to look a certain way so you can attract a mate in order to produce drugs is endemic in our society. Women, especially, are constantly bombarded with messages that show them the norm is using drugs when they are grown. NOT using drugs is frowned on and women who don't use drugs are called unnatural and unfeminine, among other things. Parents urge their children to take drugs as soon as they're married.
I ask you, if you were a girl growing up in this culture of constant drugs, maybe the question is why wouldn't you use them?
This is the culture of having kids that women in society face, even today. After all that immersion in a society that worships babies and kids, why wouldn't a woman not have kids if she has the opportunity?
This is a little off the topic, but we were talking about women not having kids until they could afford them. In this respect, we should be lauding the women who don't have kids they don't want as well. But this is what happens when you say something like that - and this was in the year 2015:
I'm not going to ask someone why they have an EBT card. However, when I see someone with a litter of kids in the store using one I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they don't have a disability. Either way I don't say a word to them. My dislike for people abusing the system came at a young age when I saw families of certain religions pooping out kids they couldn't afford and then crying and whining about being poor. In junior high I realized these people were irresponsible and leeching off the system.
And while I can see your point about the pressure to have kids, I don't buy it. Giving in to peer pressure is a **** poor excuse and taxpayers should not have to subsidize that.
I never called you heartless, you have either confused me with someone else, or that is your conscience talking because it's not something that I said. And once again, 37% of "your tax money" does not go toward 'social entitlement programs' Your 37% figure includes 27% for medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies. Medicare alone accounts for 2/3 of that money and is not an 'entitlement' and in my opinion neither are ACA subsidies which account for another 28 billion of the total, and the majority of the medicaid budget goes toward healthcare of the elderly and disabled- not non-working families with children (i.e. welfare families)
1) My figure does NOT include Medicare. Remember, when I got the raw spending numbers, I subtracted Medicare and Social Security out specifically? Because you asked me to? I am not getting my numbers from a right-wing article, I am getting my numbers from my calculator and the raw spending numbers from 2015. No bias.
2) The meaning of the term "welfare" has evolved over the years. Currently, it means cash handouts to the poor. However, welfare is only a small portion of what we now call "government assistance", or "social entitlement programs", or "handouts". What are those? Well, they are programs that have the following characteristics: a) money, goods, or services that are given to people by the government for "free", as in they are not in exchange for another good or service (this rules out teachers and soldiers and contractors and such who provide a service or good for exchange, etc) b) the money, goods, or services that are handed out are usually things that a normal person has to pay for by themselves, but the government gives it to the person for free, specifically because the person meets a threshold for being "too poor to provide it for themselves" (this rules out schools and roads and infrastructure etc).
Government assistance / social entitlement programs / handouts include:
cash handouts (TANF, EIC, etc)
food handouts (SNAP, WIC, etc)
healthcare handouts (Medicaid, CHIP, ACA subsidies, etc)
housing handouts (Section 8 etc)
daycare handouts
other various "means-tested" handouts
I also personally like to include in this list corporate and foreign aid handouts, but for the purposes of this discussion I did not include them so as to not pad the numbers.
You and I have had the debate in the past about whether Medicare and Social Security fall in this list, and admittedly it is a grey area, so for the basis of this discussion I am going to exclude them. (So quit saying that I'm counting them in my figures, because I've told you several times now that I'm not.)
3) The fact of the matter is that the government spends 37% of it's income on these government assistance / social entitlement / handout programs. I know this because I got the raw spending numbers and got out my calculator and Microsoft Excel. If you want to refute this, you would do better to quit posting articles written by political journalists, and just get out your own calculator and debate with unbiased facts. Unless you are trying to defend a political agenda instead of actually looking at facts.
4) Let me go through each article you posted here:
Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?: this article includes SS and Medicare (which we are not), and also discusses the budget, not spending. The graphic shows the budget, or what the government *wanted* to spend in 2015, but not what they *actually* spent. The actual spending numbers were quite a bit different.
A misleading chart on welfare spending: I disagree with some of this one, and agree with some of this one. I agree with Sessions that Medicaid spending on elderly and disabled still counts as a handout because it is means tested. The Medicare portion is not. And the fact that Medicaid has to be spent on healthcare is irrelevant, it is an expense that most people have to pay for (or their company pays for it as part of their total compensation package), that they are getting for free specifically because they are poor. But I agree with the article that the figure is misleading, because Sessions is comparing apples to oranges because he divides by the number of people below the poverty line to get his "daily income" number, which is highly inaccurate. I would estimate the actual figure to be closer to $20K a year in free benefits on average, as opposed to the $60K he postulates. It's still a lot though.
No, we don’t spend $1 trillion on welfare each year: The article was correct that it wasn't $1 trillion. It was actually $920.3 billion. Which is close to a trillion, yes, but not close enough to round up, in my opinion. However, the article is incorrect when it discounts every benefit that isn't straight cash. Come on. That's semantics. Who cares whether it's straight cash, food stamps, or a health insurance subsidy? It's still a handout to the poor, funded by taxes, that most people have to pay for themselves.
Everyone's a Queen: Again, I disagree with discounting a program because it's not cash. That's irrelevant. However, I do completely agree with this sentence from the article "Sessions’s padded welfare tab is still much smaller than the costs of Social Security and Medicare combined. Excessive spending on these two programs—open to all regardless of income—goes a long way toward explaining how the deficit got so big." Yes. Our biggest problem is Social Security and Medicare, they are growing too fast. Our SECOND biggest problem is means-tested handouts, they are also growing too fast, although not quite as fast as SS and Medicare. Our THIRD biggest problem is military spending, although in the past couple years military spending has been cut by a LOT, and so our military spending is currently shrinking. It angers me that in this time when we need to reduce our spending, the military are the only ones who actually bit the bullet and did so, while all of the entitlement spending is still growing, and people have the audacity to sit here and keep blaming the military, while not holding up their own side of the bargain.
Welfare Budget: This one is actually pretty good. They include a few things in defense that I don't (like aid to foreign countries), and they don't include some things in their "welfare" that I do (like unemployment), but all in all they are about right. They are even using the correct raw spending numbers from the same website I am using. Also check our their page Entitlement Spending - Federal Safety Net"Entitlement spending now makes up over half the federal budget, as shown below. Entitlement programs include Welfare Programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment ." This page is right on, and nails the problem on the head. And this page on the same site: http://federalsafetynet.com/poverty-...the-years.html"The United States has dramatically increased federal spending fighting poverty over the last 50 years. Total welfare costs have risen from $421 per person in poverty in 1960 to $14,194 per person in 2014. That totals $56,774 for a family of four even though the Poverty Threshold for such a family is $24,230. Total federal welfare costs include the expenditures of 13 large government programs (See the Safety Net Page) plus the Medicaid Program which supplies health care to low-income Americans....The U.S. Welfare System is ineffective at reducing poverty by its very design. Individual programs were created over a 50 year period with little coordination and no master plan. The combined benefits of the bifurcate system discourage both work and marriage which exacerbates poverty." You would do well to read this site.
How Much do we Spend on the Nonworking Poor? - This article discounts all benefits going to those who are "working". Okay, I'll go with you to the point where those who are working and still need benefits are at least trying to not be moochers. That's good. But they are still getting benefits, by point of fact. I mean, you can try and discount them for the feel good all you like, but we're still spending the money on them. The money is still going out. And we as a country are still broke. The fact that we are spending ourselves broke and worse does not magically go away because a portion of those getting benefits are working at Walmart.
The program you posted about is specifically for children. What should children do if thir parents are unable (for whatever reason) to feed them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by mishigas73
Is there are reason why you feel so strongly that school-age children should be going hungry?
There is little evidence that their parents are unable to feed their children -- it is a matter of choices. The real issue is what should we do when parents choose to prioritize other expenditures (smart phones, netflix subscriptions, 22" spinners on the Escalade, etc) over the health and welfare of their children.
Moreover, there is ample evidence that childhood obesity -- too many calories and of the wrong kind -- is a much, much larger problem than childhood hunger -- too few calories.
What do you propose we do regarding parents who choose to feed their children far too many twinkies, pizza, smoothies, pasta and Coke as diet staples?
"I was working as a CFO [head accountant] for a small oil and gas company and one day I visited the federal bookstore in downtown Denver. There it was, the 1993 federal budget in all its hefty glory. I couldn’t help myself. I bought it and thus started an unusual accounting hobby of tracking federal spending and trying to understand our government through numbers."
"I did the math and it showed me that we spent twice the amount on welfare that we needed to pull every poor person in America out of poverty. I was dumbfounded. How can that be? I checked my math, studied the budgets and still the relationship held true."
"It was revived in 2010 when I took an early and partial retirement. By then everything was on the internet, so I thought it would be easy to revisit. Still, it took me weeks of study to ascertain if the relationship was still true (see more information on the (Poverty Gap Page). It was. I was amazed that in many respects not much had changed."
1) My figure does NOT include Medicare. Remember, when I got the raw spending numbers, I subtracted Medicare and Social Security out specifically? Because you asked me to? I am not getting my numbers from a right-wing article, I am getting my numbers from my calculator and the raw spending numbers from 2015. No bias.
And what calculator might that be? How about just providing your "raw numbers" and a source for them, I did that for you.
Want to eliminate welfare? Be careful what you wish for.
50 years from now, 99% of the population will be on welfare. Why? Because 99% of humans will be made obsolete by technology. Machines will be smarter than 99% of humans.
Machines have already become faster and better than humans in industries like manufacturing. You may have noticed. It's only a matter of time before computers begin to outsmart humans at more intellectual tasks.
Don't want welfare 50 years from now? The other option is genocide: the 1% who own all of the land, assets, and machines can simply exterminate the "worthless eaters." Maybe they could make a sport of it: how many peasants they can kill with drones or from helicopters in a certain amount of time. It'd be like a fun video game for them.
You folks are aware that you can create legislation which retards the implementation of robotic adoption as well as the implementation of AI -right? This was partially proposed eons ago by Milton Freedman only in regard to trade. I.e. divided the word into trade zones and only each nation in a trade zone could freely trade with another nation in a zone, anyone outside the zone;s goods and services would be penalized to bring them to parity.
I think the concern is very valid, but I also think the solution is relatively easy AS LONG AS you get in fornt of it. The time is now to get in front of it.
But honestly when I click on a name and review previous postings(by the way I did not do this for the poster I am replying to) I note that most of those fretting so much about technological automation are the very same ones arguing for redistribution of wealth and more welfare before this topic ever emerged. So it seems to me, ya'll want widespread mechanization tied to a guaranteed living so ya'll can have money coming in without working ad this is just a convenient excuse or rallying point to get what you always wanted.
But once again if you are concerned, your legislative bodies are the appropriate ones to raise this to, but not in the form of a guaranteed paycheck, but in the form of restrictions on technological adoption and AI.
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