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However, as far as Food Stamps and Welfare in general, there should be a time limit. I've read in the news some people have been on FS for over 15 years. It is outrageous. Welfare should not be a e lifestyle. It is something that is there to help you when you hit a rough patch financially. I have used it when times were hard and there were job losses in my family...but it was only for 2 months until we got back on our feet.
As a mostly liberal, I'm all for ending all forms of welfare for people who are able-bodied. "Ending" means that it disappears in say 6 years or so. One cannot expect instant miracles; the poor will need time to adjust to being self-sufficient. To help in this regard, all foreign workers must leave the country. All jobs go to our citizens first. We need to insure that we are all working together which means our corporations must use us citizens as a resource instead of relying on cheap labor abroad. If they don't like it, they can take their company elsewhere, forfeit or sell all US properties including those of the top 10% of the company's staff, and be closed to the US market for 50 years. If a company complains they can't find the talent, they are free to educate us to fit their needs, to fill their jobs. Note, I'm for gutting most of welfare, not Social Security, as that is something we individually pay into. And I'm also for single-payer health care.
For the nth time, Social Security and Medicare are not entitlements. We pay for it during our working years, and reap the benefits later, just like any other deferred benefit plan.
My DIL's mum lost her husband in an industrial oil field accident in 1996, leaving her with two children. She had never worked outside the home and had no marketable skills. She got SS for her two children left at home but she also got $1000 a month in "childcare expenses". In other words, she was paid for babysitting her own children. That one always stuck in my throat.
We should be investing in education programs. Instead of handing out money in redistributive programs, we should be looking into ways to get people working. Getting them enough money to survive, feed kids, etc, while also getting them into education, simple 2-year or vocational programs, would be a tremendous boon to unemployment. We have jobs in the U.S. that aren't filled because there are not skilled people to fill them--that's a problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GuyNTexas
The first step in reforming the system starts with minimizing waste and non-productivity, as any well run operation knows. A country is no different than a company, in that the profitability and efficiency of that company is important to all of it's employees .... if the company fails, everyone loses their livelihoods. And this happens when companies get bloated and greedy (at the top), with non-productive layers of those living off the efforts of the productive elements underneath. When this happens, the successful reform attacks the bloat at the top, rather than cutting from the more productive bottom.
...
Socialism won't fix that .... only free markets can provide the opportunity for everyone to participate and be productive and successful. The more successful the majority, the less individual burden we have in helping those who for whatever reason, aren't.
You have a lot of hot air in your post, but the bolded part I have to ask questions about.
Why is it government must be profitable? What parts of the government need to make money?
However, as far as Food Stamps and Welfare in general, there should be a time limit. I've read in the news some people have been on FS for over 15 years. It is outrageous. Welfare should not be a e lifestyle. It is something that is there to help you when you hit a rough patch financially. I have used it when times were hard and there were job losses in my family...but it was only for 2 months until we got back on our feet.
I'm totally fine with a welfare limit, myself. There's a difference between helping the poor and enabling.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
For the nth time, Social Security and Medicare are not entitlements. We pay for it during our working years, and reap the benefits later, just like any other deferred benefit plan.
So if you pay into the system, then you are "entitled" to reap that money later. No need to get bent out of shape with the wording. "Entitlement" is the colloquial word for Medicare and Social Security. Oh well.
For the nth time, Social Security and Medicare are not entitlements. We pay for it during our working years, and reap the benefits later, just like any other deferred benefit plan.
Government takes in payroll taxes.
Government writes loan to another branch of itself.
Government spends those tax receipts.
Government then has a bunch of IOUs to itself.
This does not a solvent benefit plan make.
That's just social security. Medicare pays out literally 4x what you pay in. There is no way to maintain that in the long term. None. Even the big guns (raising taxes and cutting military spending) can't raise the required money. It is in the most literal sense of the word unsustainable.
Then there are medicaid/welfare/section 8 which reward people who make bad life decisions (no savings, kids out of marriage) while your average hard working, responsible (aka saves a portion of their paycheck) citizen down on their luck is out of luck and for the most part on their own.
Entitlements shouldn't be eliminated because the simple fact of the matter is that they exist, people depend on them, and the human cost of too abrupt change would be excessive, but, they are in desperate need of drastic (if gradual) reform.
I think the key thing to remember is what life was like before and after entitlements. There is simply no record of anyone starving or huge homeless amounts or people dying in the streets prior to the 1964 Food Stamp Act or Medicare/Medicaid which both came out at the same time.
After they came out we began a debt which has never stopped increasing in every year since. But the bigger damage is in the social fabric with people more dependent on goverment they look less to themselves or in desperate cases to voluntary charity. The number of single mothers greatly increased in the 60's as many find they no longer need a man to provide for them and have governement to do enough for them instead.
Crime also started having much larger yearly increases right at that time: United States Crime Rates 1960 - 2009
So I would eliminate them gradually and I think we would do better in nearly every way if we did.
Dependence breeds more dependence, after those entitlement programs came the pill bill and now Obamacare, in other countries they propose universal daycare. It never ends, not even with crushing debt and obvious societal degradation and never will until we simply say that people are responsible for themselves and mean it.
If there is one thing that defines my beliefs and why I became a Conservative it's that I simply realized that though the left have good intentions it simply is not possible for people ever to become more self-dependent and responsible by continually making them more dependent on the responsibility of government.
Are you trying to link the incarceration rate with social programs ??
Are you trying to link the incarceration rate with social programs ??
You can make a pretty strong argument that the current structure of social programs encourages single-motherhood which then increases crime rates which then increase incarceration rates. Given, any argument with that many causal links starts to get a bit shaky because if any link collapses, then the whole argument does.
Of course, the flipside of the suggested (either stated or implied) policy implications of pointing this out (stop giving so many benefits to single mothers) is that giving the huge assortment of such benefits to everyone (which would require an absolutely massive expansion of the state) would achieve the same social effect.
For the nth time, Social Security and Medicare are not entitlements. We pay for it during our working years, and reap the benefits later, just like any other deferred benefit plan.
You are absolutely correct to point out the critical difference between welfare programs (which are funded by various local, State and Federal taxes) and Social Security/Medicare--which is funded by a specific mandatory tax of totaling 15.3% on every dollar you earn, even if you are very poor. You must pay a certain level of taxes to qualify for benefits, and how much you put in has some minor relation to what you receive in return. In that way it has the same effect on the payer as a deferred benefit plan.
The difference is that government has absolutely no legal obligation to pay you anything back, while a private company that held your retirement savings would be required to do.
The program might have worked, and might still be solvent--if government had been unable to control, and therefore steal, the money. The ethical thing would have been to set up PERSONAL retirement accounts, under the ownership of the individual, with tax breaks for participation. Instead, by allowing the program to be set up as a government program, where government taxed the individual, we lost all ownership of our retirement money. The government has ZERO legal obligation to give us one penny back in benefits under these programs, no matter how much they confiscated from us in taxes.
By 1983, it was recognized that someday the Baby Boom would retire, and place a huge burden on the Social Security and Medicare systems. To address this, massive reforms were passed, which raised the retirement age for the majority of the citizenry, and increased SS and Medicare taxes on everyone. The purpose was to not only pay for everyone currently in the system (as previous SS/Medicare taxes had), but also create a Social Security "Trust Fund" or "Lock Box" to cover the future retirement of the Baby Boom. Eventually, over $2.6 trillion surplus dollars (income over expenses) was collected in Social Security and Medicare taxes, until the programs began running a deficit in 2010.
But was the surplus money invested, to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boom, or even saved in CDs or T-bills or Treasury Bonds? No, it wasn't. As soon as it was received, government spent it on other things, like wars. When politicians today want to avoid touching that political "third rail," they pretend that Social Security is solvent until 2035--that the hypothetical $2.6 trillion dollars supposedly in the SS Trust Fund actually exists, and can be sold to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boom. But educated people now know that there is no money or assets in the Trust Fund, and the retirement of the Baby Boom must be addressed with either tax increases or benefits cuts, or both.
So here we are today: there is not a single penny in the SS Trust Fund, Social Security/Medicare now cost more than those taxes bring in, and the costs of both SS and Medicare continue to explode. At the same time, demographics increasingly reduces the number of workers supporting each retiree (soon to reach 2.1 workers supporting each retiree), and our collapsed job market, along with the stagnation of wages since the late 1970s, makes an impossible situation worse. And the legal system has ruled that the government owes us NOTHING in benefits for all those taxes it confiscated.
There is one way to save Social Security and Medicare, and that is to give those programs total precedence over the Defense/Offense budget. Major cuts MUST be made, and these three are the biggest portions of the federal budget. Since our Defense Budget totally ignores actually defending our nation, and instead wastes trillions to wage senseless foreign wars simply to fatten the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex, I say ALL the cuts can come from our ridiculously oversized "Defense" budget, which has no reason to be larger than all the other nations' military budgets combined.
Of course, the citizens don't rule in our country anymore; Big Money tells Big Government what to do. And I'll bet our Presidents will continue happily wasting trillions on yet more senseless foreign wars, all while my generation is told the current taxpayer "can't afford" to pay for my retirement, like we paid for so many others' retirements before us (as well as our own, in the stolen SS Trust Fund). Too bad the lousy economy didn't allow me to save enough for my own retirement, after 15.3% Social Security and Medicare taxes, another 30% in federal income tax, and a good 15% to state and local government.
Lesson learned: the bigger government gets, the more it costs, and the less you will get in return.
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