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lets give kids all A's in school..... no b's or less..
if a kid studied for a test and got an A and his friend played video games didn't study and flunked a test...…. they "deserve" the same grade??? you are punishing effort and rewarding uselessness.. and this is socialism..
profit motive and competition are pillars of innovation and efficiency …
this is the private sector.... which is the engine of the economy …. government employees don't have to worry about this...they have it made
my friend dropped out of high school...a dope head.....his senior year.... the following year he cleaned himself up and started his own landscaping business with one lawmower and rake....he worked and worked …..got more and more jobs bought more/better equipment and eventually hired his own employees...which he paid well ….. he worked weekends and it was hard physical work ….at times..
he now has a very nice house and a boat - snowmobile and 5 employees that do well....he also plows snow in the winter now and builds rock walls.
this is an example of the American dream...you can come from nothing and thru hard work...pull yourself out of poverty and make something of yourself..
government should get the hell out of the way of businesses...….stop choking them up with taxes and regulations.
socialism kills incentive... socialism dumbs down people...
Poverty is complex and has a lot more going on than just money management. For instance if you are uneducated your job choices are limited.
Why are they uneducated?
Education is free. You just have to show up, pay attention and learn.
Are you talking about post-secondary education?
That's free, too.
Around here Cincinnati State is $158/credit hour. $3,792 for one year. Everyone in poverty automatically qualifies for a combined Pell Grant/Ohio Educational Opportunity Grant of $6,095/year.
Do the math:
$6,095
$3,792 less
--------
$2,303 per year for books and anything else, and they never have to pay that money back.
So, what apologetic excuses are you going to make for them now?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TwoByFour
And if you are a single parent, you cannot share child-rearing responsibilities.
Oh, yes, you can.
You can live with one or both parents. You can live with grandparents. Or siblings. Or you can share housing with another similarly situated adult.
There are options, but they refuse to explore or take advantage of those options.
What apologetic excuse are you going to make for them now?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TwoByFour
If you are mentally unstable or a substance abuser, money is not going to fix your problems.
Taking your medication will go along toward creating stability.
There are plenty of free substance abuse programs, many of them operated by the federal, State, county or municipal government or by private non-profit groups.
Around here, there's even housing for them.
You can't live in that housing, unless you are a substance abuser, and there's a house-manager who ensures all persons living there are in daily contact with their sponsors from AA or NA or both, and who assists them in securing employment and other things.
What apologetic excuse are you going to make for them now?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TwoByFour
When wealth redistribution is talked about, it may involve some money transfer but a lot of it is paying for programs that will give poor people an opportunity to do better, like assistance with child-care so a single mom can hold down a full time job.
There are already plenty of federal, State, county and municipal programs, plus private non-profit programs available for the poor.
There's free primary and secondary education, free post-secondary education, free job-training, free substance abuse programs and a variety of other free programs. There's even free food.
What the hell freaking more do you want?
What part of "free" do you not understand?
A single mom needs to move her ass in with mommy and daddy or another relative. She's not entitled to free independent housing at tax-payer expense, simply because she thought she was in love, or she was too stupid to use birth control.
We need to stop coddling them and hold their feet to the fire, if that's what it takes to motivate them.
What do you think would happen if all money was redistributed equally amongst everyone?
If the poor were suddenly put on an equal playing field, would the thrive? Or would they find themselves poor again?
Thoughts?
I personally think that within a short time, the rich would be wealthy again and the poor would be poor again. It is not what you make, but how you manage the money you have. So unless they had a crash course, they would continue making the same choices that put them in the poor house previously.
WRONG.
History.
What would happen? Russia 1917. Russia 1920s. Russia 1937.
Venezuela.
In about ten years...
it would be distributed UN-evenly again.
10 Days, maybe even 10 minutes really.
I'm putting my distribution to work back in the stock market right away so it will go to work for me and make more $$'s. Others are gonna go get their new tattoos and shiny body piercings.
What do you think would happen if all money was redistributed equally amongst everyone? If the poor were suddenly put on an equal playing field, would the thrive? Or would they find themselves poor again? Thoughts?
I personally think that within a short time, the rich would be wealthy again and the poor would be poor again. It is not what you make, but how you manage the money you have. So unless they had a crash course, they would continue making the same choices that put them in the poor house previously.
It's complicated, and the result depends on exactly what you're talking about doing. First of all, there is income wealth versus assets/savings/investments.
As for income wealth, if you don't give a doctor his $500K annual salary, he'll just stop working (or only work a day a week)--as will everyone else who makes a decent salary in a field that requires extensive educational investment and work experience. And while many of those jobs are better off gone, society does need things like the electric power grid and the engineers that keep it functioning.
Regarding assets/savings/investment wealth, if you confiscate & redistribute that money equally, what happens to the huge number of retirees who worked their whole lives and scrimped and saved to pay for "retirement" aka living expenses & health care costs? Because those are the only ones whose life savings you'll be confiscating--they have no power, and can't do anything about it when their savings are confiscated, as we saw when the Financials Sector stole a huge portion of their wealth in 2008.
Did the ultra-wealthy Ruling Class, who CAUSED the 2008 economic collapse, lose anything in the crash of 2008? Nope! The working class paid for Big Finance's "losses" via federal income tax, while the little guy who saved all his life just lost. So you won't get to confiscate a penny of the REAL wealth to redistribute, when all the rules are made by people like Nancy Pelosi--who only got 275,292 votes --about 1/10th of 1% of the nation's 325 million population-but still somehow rules Washington and therefore the entire nation.
It's true that the infinitesimally small Ruling Class will keep their stranglehold on most of the wealth in the nation (barring bloody revolution), even though they contribute nothing but corruption to society. It's also true that we have a VERY large group of people who live off the government dole without ever having contributed to the society that supports them, and no matter how much you give them, they'll have wasted it, with nothing to show for it, in a year or two.
I remember a low-class guy who won a $300 million lawsuit in Florida, when an live electric line fell on his family's trailer. All 12 of his family members fled the trailer and got electrocuted while he was passed out drunk on the couch. The Palm Beach Post reported that he was working as a migrant farm worker to feed himself 2 years later, after squandering away the entire amount.
Education is free. You just have to show up, pay attention and learn.
Are you talking about post-secondary education?
That's free, too.
Around here Cincinnati State is $158/credit hour. $3,792 for one year. Everyone in poverty automatically qualifies for a combined Pell Grant/Ohio Educational Opportunity Grant of $6,095/year.
Do the math:
$6,095
$3,792 less
--------
$2,303 per year for books and anything else, and they never have to pay that money back.
So, what apologetic excuses are you going to make for them now?
Oh, yes, you can.
You can live with one or both parents. You can live with grandparents. Or siblings. Or you can share housing with another similarly situated adult.
There are options, but they refuse to explore or take advantage of those options.
What apologetic excuse are you going to make for them now?
Taking your medication will go along toward creating stability.
There are plenty of free substance abuse programs, many of them operated by the federal, State, county or municipal government or by private non-profit groups.
Around here, there's even housing for them.
You can't live in that housing, unless you are a substance abuser, and there's a house-manager who ensures all persons living there are in daily contact with their sponsors from AA or NA or both, and who assists them in securing employment and other things.
What apologetic excuse are you going to make for them now?
There are already plenty of federal, State, county and municipal programs, plus private non-profit programs available for the poor.
There's free primary and secondary education, free post-secondary education, free job-training, free substance abuse programs and a variety of other free programs. There's even free food.
What the hell freaking more do you want?
What part of "free" do you not understand?
A single mom needs to move her ass in with mommy and daddy or another relative. She's not entitled to free independent housing at tax-payer expense, simply because she thought she was in love, or she was too stupid to use birth control.
We need to stop coddling them and hold their feet to the fire, if that's what it takes to motivate them.
You said a mouthful. I'm not a Republican, nor a conservative. But people who want to make excuses just annoy the crap out of me.
I had a consulting project about ten years ago for a public housing authority. They were ramping up to get public support for their new Hope VI project. Part of my assignment was to interview 100 residents to measure their attitudes, how they utilized the alphabet soup of programs, and understand how they used public housing to better their lives.
The interviewees were divided roughly 50/50 into two separate camps:
1) The ones who really had some major reverses in life and needed a place to land. There was the family who lost everything in an apartment fire the same week as the father's manufacturing job evaporated due to mass layoffs. The guy who was on permanent disability. You get the picture.
2) The ones who were gaming the system. I was astonished at how open they were about it. One woman simply talked about how she could watch television all day and not worked. Another guy bragged about how he could mow a couple of lawns and do odd jobs for cash, and wait on the government checks. These were people who never took advantage of the educational programs, the job training programs, or anything else.
I'll do anything possible to help the first group. The second group? I just couldn't give a damn.
The people who have it all now would get it back again, the same way they got it in the first place: Diligence, determination, guile, and outright theft. The people who want wealth and power the most will give up everything, even principles, to get it.
This basically happened in Russia., in our lifetime. In 1990, it suddenly became a free market economy, productive capacity in place, in which everyone had the same wealth. An instant Mafia-like system formed, and the wealth was distributed according to their rules, and then a few people had it all. Americans stood by and watched and said "Isn't this grand!"
Economics is not a difficult science at all.
Exactamundo. I was going to mention Russia but was beaten to it. They went from communism where basically everyone was on a level playing field to outright capitalism in an instant and it didn't take more than a few years for the wealth to become concentrated amongst a few. Human nature is human nature and I see no reason to believe it would be that much different anywhere else in the absence of laws to protect against it. This is why both extreme right and extreme left governments never work. There has to be a middle ground and a system of protections in place.
maybe there's not more than 1.3T cold hard cash. but 16 US corps have 1T all by themselves
Yeah, my numbers were off. It's actually 3.75T in money per government figures so around $12,500 per capita. Money is money. Corporations hold a lot of assets that aren't money.
Yes, I agree with you. It would take maybe 5 years at the most before everything would be back to the way it was before leveling the playing field. The same rich individuals would be rich and the same poor ones would be poor.
Some would do well, some would do poorly. It wouldn't necessarily be the same people as before.
Exactamundo. I was going to mention Russia but was beaten to it. They went from communism where basically everyone was on a level playing field to outright capitalism in an instant and it didn't take more than a few years for the wealth to become concentrated amongst a few. Human nature is human nature and I see no reason to believe it would be that much different anywhere else in the absence of laws to protect against it. This is why both extreme right and extreme left governments never work. There has to be a middle ground and a system of protections in place.
Actually, Russia is a terrible example, for the apparatchiks basically used their power and influence to get cozy, inside deals to take over the state enterprises. As a result, Russia is not a capitalist state with well-defined laws that protect property rights, but rather a kleptocracy as befitting what has historically been a wildly dysfunctional country. If you'd like a more constructive example, try that of Poland. Economic Boom: Poland Is Europe's New High-Flyer - SPIEGEL ONLINE
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