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I thank my Lord for having enabled me to be a provider. I provide gladly for those who are unable to provide for themselves.
I believe that is a true statement in general. What I wonder is when will it get to a point that you will have to decide between providing more for you and your family or more for the recipient. The major issue in this question is that the way this and past administrations have pi$$ed money away on entitlement programs and free give aways. There will come a day, and soon, that the amount of money promised out weights the amount coming in..
This has already happened with SS, Medicare and other programs and it keeps getting worse. When the dealer calls in the chips either you and I will be required to pay the ante or we go bankrupt.
It's not an issue of who wants to help who. It's a matter of a sustainable level of which we passed years ago. It just hasn't caught up to us yet and when it does it's going to be very very very ugly. Those recipients who are complaining now are going to think the current situation was the glory days because in the end. I'm here to provide for my family and I will do whatever it takes to make sure they have the basic's to get by. I don't give to $hit's what any administration says.
I believe that is a true statement in general. What I wonder is when will it get to a point that you will have to decide between providing more for you and your family or more for the recipient. The major issue in this question is that the way this and past administrations have pi$$ed money away on entitlement programs and free give aways. There will come a day, and soon, that the amount of money promised out weights the amount coming in..
This has already happened with SS, Medicare and other programs and it keeps getting worse. When the dealer calls in the chips either you and I will be required to pay the ante or we go bankrupt.
It's not an issue of who wants to help who. It's a matter of a sustainable level of which we passed years ago. It just hasn't caught up to us yet and when it does it's going to be very very very ugly. Those recipients who are complaining now are going to think the current situation was the glory days because in the end. I'm here to provide for my family and I will do whatever it takes to make sure they have the basic's to get by. I don't give to $hit's what any administration says.
If you make sure you won't be dependent on SS when you retire, then you won't have to worry about it running dry.
Sadly, a lot of well-meaning but clueless people think of themselves as being in the "provider" class, not realizing they are often a job loss or medical emergency away from sliding quickly into the "recipient" class ... and all the while, the 1% (and none of them are on C-D) are defecating on the rest of us.
I love the 1% and plan on becoming one.
I started out dirt poor and learned a skill which at first put me solidly in the lower middle class and into the top 5% twenty five years later.
The typical leftie statement is "wait until it happens to you!!"
We conservative minded people realize that life is what happens when we make plans.
Life's a journey....enjoy the ride. Don't pick up hitch hikers, like the recipient class!
SS insurance is sustainable if we apply the tax to all income from all sources and adjust the rate to only cover current expenses and not put any money into "trust funds". We could also limit payment to only those people with retirement incomes below the mean. Then the fund would be solvent but some of the top 1% might complain about income redistribution. Too bad income redistribution via a rigged system is how they got their money in the first place.
So.
Everyone should pay in, but only some get the benefit?
I probably pay more in Taxes than you make, so much for your provider class being made up of righties. Oh, you do know that good righties also use government assistance at times of need also don't ya, or is your mind not capable of admitting that FACT.
Pretty much everything since you can't name a single "class" that is not a direct or indirect recipient of government largesse, be they a CEO of a pharmaceutical company that benefits from government funded research and certification of their products, or the working poor who can only afford to serve the uber rich because their income is supplemented by the "welfare".
There are 18 enumerated powers of the congress as far as what they are legally responsible for providing.
Infrastructure and common defense are two of them.
Nowhere is the a power to take from those who have to give to another.
The sooner that people get that through their thick skulls the better.
BTW....i like being served stuff by middle class people....I tend to stay away from the recipient class!
I'm not buying your explanation of being a provider by virtue of being a customer.
Man, when I can walk into any grocery store and select the most useful products to me from among thousands of offerings from many lands, I definitely want the goods more than I want the money I pay. I win.
The fact that the store also wins (they want the money more than they want the merchandise) does not make me poorer.
If the store is making "too much money" then another store will pop up down the street and get all the business. In fact, the whole history of human enterprise can be summed up in two words: declining margins. Innovative people and companies figure out how to deliver increasing value for decreasing cost, ramp up volumes as they win in the marketplace, and benefit the rest of society via lower costs. I'd hate to know the gross profit of the little 24-foot wide corner grocery of my childhood compared to the volume providers of today.
And the icing on the cake is, I can be a percentage owner of the store and receive a pro-rata share of the distributed earnings as dividends.
The alternative to running things this way is to have the government run all the stores. Have you ever read of visitors to the US from Russia back in the 1960's, upon seeing one of our supermarkets, not believing it was anything other than a scam showplace set up for the sole purpose of impressing him? That's because people lined up for hours to buy flour and sugar (and look at empty shelves) back home in the USSR.
Very well stated!
Unfortunately, it will go right over the heads of many on here.
They like the idea of government agents distributing everything even.
I agree with the basic sentiment that there is a class of people taking whatever assistance they can get for nothing but meeting some government defined eligibility criteria, but I don't think it's as simple as the above quote.
The retail store owner is at least part recipient of whoever manufactured the goods he is reselling as a middleman; he is also dependent on customers to buy the goods from him, just as the manufacturer is dependent on the retailer to purchase them. This is basically just another way (maybe not perfectly analogous, but similar) of thinking about supply and demand.
What I'm saying is, I don't think anyone is 100% provider or 100% recipient in all circumstances across the board because there are bound to be situations where people have varying degrees of mutually dependence (for instance, Colt would probably not be the same company if it lost its military contracts, so it is a provider it also depends on having a recipient - DOD - and if the recipient were to disappear, then their prominence as a provider would be severely diminished...not to mention the provider Colt depends on to supply materials of which Colt is a recipient). Plus, there is the question of what is being provided: some form of labor, or cash capital?
I bet a nice provider/recipient model could be constructed by someone willing to invest the time in devising one, so that a person or entities net contribution to the financial system could be calculated and assigned a rating. A high rating, say, 100, would be like "the great provider" and 0 would be "total leach".
Given interdependency, I don't see what could actually be a 100 or 0 in all circumstances (maybe like, the sun is 100 compared to earth being 0 in that it provides light and energy without any dependence onthe earth to contribute to the solar system...but the sun is composed of helium etc...it's big regression if you're not careful).
More relevant to the conversation about the economic system, though, there are surely people out there who would score very low on such a scale.
The main recipient class is stock investors and bond holders. They get their money from other people's work, they don't themselves work. They do provide a needed way for businesses or govts to expand, but still by and large the wealthy are the recipient class. Generally speaking, they don't work hard and save their pennies to get wealthy, but are born into it.
What we need to do is shift some of the burden from middle and low income workers, and place it where it belongs - the idle but healthy recipient class (as opposed to idle but disabled "welfare" cases, who use fewer resources) but it's hard to say exactly how. Perhaps a larger tax on unearned income would work, especially if given to fund necessary social programs such as universal health care, and also infrastructure improvements. Also we could look to Australia for guidance on increasing the minimum wage to a living wage ..... after all, their economy with its higher wages is booming.
You play the hand you're dealt.
Didn't you people have fathers that taught you these things?
I can't speak for freemkt, but I would say that cheap labor provided by low wage workers provides profit margins for business owners (and middle class consumers by keeping prices low) and the taxes low wage workers pay help fund welfare programs for those who don't work at all. That is not a controversial statement, unless we are throwing standard free market economic theory out the window and inventing some sort of new system complete with new definitions.
That is the most backwards thinking post of the day.
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