Can You Picture an America Without Any Entitlements? (unemployment, healthcare, death)
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Try to imagine an America without SS, healthcare, unemployment and disability benefits. All this on top of an America whose middle class has been decimated. I can only imagine the former, but Elizabeth Warren does a good job of imagining the latter for us in her latest article, "America Without a Middle Class". Read it and weep.
Right now, if the entitlements were to be taken away, it would be a disaster. If they were never instituted in the first place, well, I don't know, could be great, could be awful.
The key to that article, I think, is where it says
Quote:
Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.
There is a saying, don't give a sucker an even break, and the banks have lived by that. Whle the article says that the banks get far more entitlements than the average middle class person, and I don't think that is right, you also have to blame those who live on credit, who have more than they need because thay can afford it, in monthly payments. Saving seems to be a thing of the past, or, another entitlement that the average worker doesn't have to worry about.
I was watching the show intervention the other night and one of the people said something that struck a chord with me. He said that since his parents came from a country where they have seen destruction, corruption, bad .gov and war take everything away, they now don't spend their money on frivolous things, they save, in case it happens again. We, in the U.S. don't think that way, we think about what we can get, then how to pay for it, rarely thinking about what will happen if things go south.
EDIT to clarify, when I say I don't think it is right, I am not saying the article is wrong, rather the practice of giving banks entitlements over people.
I cannot see a future where entitlements continue in America. The leaders will have dropped hints continuously that entitlements had to be cut to the bone in favor of funding the security of our country. Within 10 years at the most I see the Feds gradually cutting back on SS, Medicare, Disability food-stamps & Medicaid. At the state level I see government gradually reducing unemployment and disability. At local levels I see cutbacks for schools, healthcare, welfare. I see a world in America where 95% of the people have been so neutered that they have absolutely no fight left in them---that these things will have come on so slowly and insidiously that the masses won't be able to point to one thing that brought them down, just here and there one by one these things were reduced until they no longer existed. Little by little people by the tens, then hundreds of thousands each day will fall into oblivion---lose their jobs, then their homes, not able to afford apartments, ending up in RV's or their cars, in park encampments, rummaging through trashcans, many on foot wandering aimlessly on streets, a lucky few driving to their well-fortified condos. Everywhere an air of quiet desperation at not knowing where their next meal is going to come from, yet no spirit of protest left. I'm seeing signs of this already in So Cal. It won't be a pretty sight.
Exactly. No IRS, no entitlements, nothing like that for quite awhile in this country. Afterall, without a federal income tax, how could the government provide entitlements, subsidies, keep the UN running, blackmail states if they don't "go along" by not providing "funding", give money to other countries in the form of "aid" which ends up in dictators pockets, keep massive bases up and running in countries all over the globe etc. When people were allowed to keep all they earned, I just don't know how they were able to make it in 1861, you know, with about 30% more to spend and all.
So true with government involvement we would have had vaccines in 1861.
I don't quite follow your sarcasm. I'm just saying, who wants to go back to 1861? The country was still mostly rural, people died young of communicable diseases, if you fell on hard times for the most part you just had to starve to death, and so on. What was so great about it?
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