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Just to be absolutely clear, LePage’s statistic is completely wrong. Currently, around 65% of Mainers over the age of 15 are working or are unemployed and actively seeking work. Of the remaining 35%, almost all are retired, are caring for children or other family members, are pursuing education or training or have a disability that prevents them from working. Only a tiny fraction aren’t working for other reasons. The conservative Heritage Foundation, using U.S. Census data, puts this number at 1.1% nationally.
The Bangor Daily News article includes an audio recording of Gov. LePage's comments. And then he quickly retracted his comments - see below.
In addition to GreenGene's post, Maine has an incredibly seasonal population. While a lot of the coastal jobs are summer jobs, if you lose your year-round job in Bar Harbor in November, good luck finding anything until the next summer. If you're young and can move - great! If you own a home, have a spouse who works, whatever - not so great.
Does Maine really have that sick an economy? Perhaps a higher percentage of retirees who don't even care if there is any work. Are they counting children as able bodied?
Conservatives, do you believe this statement by Republican Governor Paul LePage? Or was his misinformed, or even worse, lying?
You have to understand, that for conservatives reality is irrelevant. They just don't care what's real statistically speaking.
This is the elected Governor of a state who doesn't know reality about the state he was elected to serve.
I think I read somewhere that 65% of adults over 18 are working in the state of Maine. But that doesn't mean the rest of those citizens are lazy bums, some of that 35% are retirees, are stay at home moms and dads, are disabled people, are college students, are people taking care of sick relatives, etc and so on.
This sick view that conservatives have of their fellow Americans that we are lazy and takers and etc, just shows you the demented minds of conservatives.
I have this co-worker, he seems like a nice guy.
I was helping to train him for this position, so we spent a lot of time together, so one day he tells me he has ADD and is taking these drugs, which I have no judgment about, but he relayed this story of him standing in line at a grocery store behind some woman who had on expensive clothes and an expensive purse, and who used a Link card/foodstamp card to pay for food.
According to him, witnessing this bothered him a lot for a week until he saw his doctor, who upon hearing his continued anger over this situation prescribed him stronger meds.
This was the first time I had actually had a conversation with someone who claimed to have witnessed food stamp fraud, so I asked him a simple question, is it possible that this woman was shopping for some else?
I don't know why this thought never enters the minds of conservatives, but you don't need ID in the state of IL to use a Link card, I know people who have gone shopping for people who don't have access to a car, who are sick, who are old, who are disabled and they take that person's Link card and go to the store for them to buy food.
Or could it be that at one point the person he saw was doing well financially but has since fallen on hard economic times, but it doesn't make sense to get rid of their clothes.
He said, I had never thought of that and in my mind I am thinking nah because you were too busy being an ignorant jerk towards complete strangers.
I just don't understand how the mind of conservatives work.
Why they seem to hate so many other Americans? Why they seem to think the absolute worst about other Americans not giving a second thought to all the possibilities that don't require someone being an immoral/lazy/cheater, but it just doesn't seem to register.
I just don't understand how the mind of conservatives work.
Why they seem to hate so many other Americans? Why they seem to think the absolute worst about other Americans not giving a second thought to all the possibilities that don't require someone being an immoral/lazy/cheater, but it just doesn't seem to register.
This is the problem, you are ignorant of what your federal government spends money on.
List the government programs that you believe are supporting the leeches.
Ok...let's start with free breakfast for all at the government schools. Then of course there's free lunch, designed to give children the illusion that there IS such a thing as a free lunch. Then those same kids have parents getting a variety of leech-money in the form of welfare, food stamps (just to make sure that they pay NOTHING for food), pubic housing or rent assistance, 'aid' for schooling that never results in their employment, and then there's the wonderful child tax credit, where ass-sitters have taxpayers pay them for having little bastards. Then there's 'free' child care in the form of 'head start', shown to be totally ineffective except for giving the mother of the little bastards more free ****.
And now I'm paying for all of their medical and dental care.
And that's just scratching the surface of the leechfest.
I think he was misinformed, or not equating the statistics correctly. He'd have to investigate, and then repeat this later to make it to the lying stage.
But if this is such a problem...where are the jobs for these people? Seriously. Show us the jobs!
Does Maine really have that sick an economy? Perhaps a higher percentage of retirees who don't even care if there is any work. Are they counting children as able bodied?
It sounds like welfare handouts are bringing in millions of federal dollars. Without all the welfare handouts, the economy would be bad -- but I'm sure grocery stores are really bustling, the hospitals are filled with welfare mothers giving births. Welfare is the economy when half the people are living off it.
Most welfare recipients are able-bodied. A very small portion of the population is actually truly disabled.
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