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Old 12-17-2015, 08:35 PM
 
11,337 posts, read 11,054,626 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lvoc View Post
Again these are settled issues. If you are not happy with the way they are settled you can leave...though I have no idea where you think it would be better.
Nothing is ever settled. That's a silly statement. Collectivism can and will be changed. We only need better people, and people improve with every generation. The Internet improves this also. 748 people read your post and resolved never to make such a silly mistake like that in their lives. Thanks for helping!
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Old 12-17-2015, 10:54 PM
 
Location: Washington state
7,030 posts, read 4,908,593 times
Reputation: 21913
Thought I'd post this about the Irish potato famine here:

"The British government’s efforts to relieve the famine were inadequate. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel did what he could to provide relief in 1845 and early 1846, but under the Liberal cabinet of Lord John Russell, which assumed power in June 1846, the emphasis shifted to reliance on Irish resources and the free market, which made disaster inevitable. Much of the financial burden of providing for the starving Irish peasantry was thrown upon the Irish landowners themselves (through local poor relief). But because the peasantry was unable to pay its rents, the landlords soon ran out of funds with which to support them. British assistance was limited to loans, helping to fund soup kitchens, and providing employment on road building and other public works. Cornmeal imported from the United States helped avert some starvation, but it was disliked by the Irish, and reliance on it led to nutritional deficiencies. Despite these shortcomings, by August 1847 as many as three million people were receiving rations at soup kitchens.

All in all, the British government spent about £8 million on relief, and some private relief funds were raised as well. Throughout the famine, many Irish farms continued to export grain, meat, and other high-quality foods to Britain because the Irish peasantry lacked the money to purchase them. The government’s grudging and ineffective measures to relieve the famine’s distress intensified the resentment of British rule among the Irish people.The famine proved to be a watershed in the demographic history of Ireland. As a direct consequence of the famine, Ireland’s population of almost 8.4 million in 1844 had fallen to 6.6 million by 1851. The number of agricultural laborers and smallholders in the western and southwestern counties underwent an especially drastic decline.

About one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases."


What I'm trying to point out here is during the potato famine, there wasn't welfare, WIC, or food stamps for these people. There was some attempt at relief, there were soup kitchens, and there was some sort of attempt to provide employment for wages. There were still 1 million people that died of starvation and/or disease.

What I'm asking is, for those of you who want people to work or starve here in the US, are you willing to have 1 million people in the US (who will primarily be children) starve to death? Is this how you want the US to be defined, as a nation with the strongest military in the world and where 1 million people starved to death?

And one more question: if you want people to work, where are the jobs? The fastest growing job sector today is in service jobs - that is, jobs that pay minimum wage. Say these mythical freeloaders all get a minimum wage job. We already know that a minimum wage job will not pay for a place to live in the US, and especially won't pay for a place to live AND let people eat. So now what? Do you think all the problems of homelessness and welfare are solved by just getting that job? And if not, why not? What else do you want people to do? Where do we go from here?
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Old 12-18-2015, 12:14 AM
 
11,337 posts, read 11,054,626 times
Reputation: 14993
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser View Post
Thought I'd post this about the Irish potato famine here:

"The British government’s efforts to relieve the famine were inadequate. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel did what he could to provide relief in 1845 and early 1846, but under the Liberal cabinet of Lord John Russell, which assumed power in June 1846, the emphasis shifted to reliance on Irish resources and the free market, which made disaster inevitable. Much of the financial burden of providing for the starving Irish peasantry was thrown upon the Irish landowners themselves (through local poor relief). But because the peasantry was unable to pay its rents, the landlords soon ran out of funds with which to support them. British assistance was limited to loans, helping to fund soup kitchens, and providing employment on road building and other public works. Cornmeal imported from the United States helped avert some starvation, but it was disliked by the Irish, and reliance on it led to nutritional deficiencies. Despite these shortcomings, by August 1847 as many as three million people were receiving rations at soup kitchens.

All in all, the British government spent about £8 million on relief, and some private relief funds were raised as well. Throughout the famine, many Irish farms continued to export grain, meat, and other high-quality foods to Britain because the Irish peasantry lacked the money to purchase them. The government’s grudging and ineffective measures to relieve the famine’s distress intensified the resentment of British rule among the Irish people.The famine proved to be a watershed in the demographic history of Ireland. As a direct consequence of the famine, Ireland’s population of almost 8.4 million in 1844 had fallen to 6.6 million by 1851. The number of agricultural laborers and smallholders in the western and southwestern counties underwent an especially drastic decline.

About one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases."


What I'm trying to point out here is during the potato famine, there wasn't welfare, WIC, or food stamps for these people. There was some attempt at relief, there were soup kitchens, and there was some sort of attempt to provide employment for wages. There were still 1 million people that died of starvation and/or disease.

What I'm asking is, for those of you who want people to work or starve here in the US, are you willing to have 1 million people in the US (who will primarily be children) starve to death? Is this how you want the US to be defined, as a nation with the strongest military in the world and where 1 million people starved to death?

And one more question: if you want people to work, where are the jobs? The fastest growing job sector today is in service jobs - that is, jobs that pay minimum wage. Say these mythical freeloaders all get a minimum wage job. We already know that a minimum wage job will not pay for a place to live in the US, and especially won't pay for a place to live AND let people eat. So now what? Do you think all the problems of homelessness and welfare are solved by just getting that job? And if not, why not? What else do you want people to do? Where do we go from here?
The myth that there are no high paying jobs is such BS and an example of the big lie. Repeat it often enough and it is assumed to be true. There are many high paying jobs for people who make themselves worthy and qualified to hold them. If there were nothing but minimum wage and low paying jobs for the vast majority of the population, you would see insurrection, starvation, tumult, rioting, and panic. What do we see instead? A smoothly running economy, low unemployment, lovely cities growing and building new office towers, residential buildings, and shopping districts, highways crammed with nicely paid people going to work and doing their thing and affording lovely and expensive housing in the cities and suburbs, new car sales humming along strongly for the last 5 years, people buying all kinds of luxuries, i-phones and i-pads and tablets, construction cranes everywhere, low energy prices, more fun things to do that cost an arm and a leg, and people paying it happily.

There are plenty of good jobs, and people are doing them and getting paid and funding college educations and going to expensive concerts and shows and buying houses left and right.

Things are going well. And in the future? Guess what? There will still be jobs, and everything will still be humming. All kinds of new and undreamed of jobs that will require new skills and new talent. As long as we avoid collectivistic leftist defeatism and malaise, things will be just fine.

In the final analysis, if we are going to embrace the welfare nanny state, and the tyranny and slavery that inevitably accompany it, we are better off nuking ourselves with 350,000,000 dead citizens in charred cinders. So make up any scenario you want, it does not matter. If we are not free, we need not be here.
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Old 12-18-2015, 07:36 AM
 
1,006 posts, read 1,514,734 times
Reputation: 922
1. Encourage saving great amounts of money. In too many places saving is not encouraged,spending is.

2. Encourage working. Right now it's simply easier to sit back and take from other folks who do work.



And someone mentioned giving people a free $20,000 a year would make them more lazy/careless. I think the opposite would happen meaning many would use it to improve their lives, save it in the bank, ect. Sure some people would mess it up but the majority of people would do positive things with a extra $20,000 a year.
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Old 12-18-2015, 10:13 AM
 
12,973 posts, read 15,816,792 times
Reputation: 5478
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Paolella View Post
Focus. At least post badly to the correct threads.
Here let me help you remember what you wrote. Bolding by me.

Quote:
There is no "we can all choose". You can't morally choose to have someone else sacrifice their life for you. You can't morally demand that others sacrifice for arbitrary people you choose as worthy of whatever you arbitrarily define as help. No system is worth considering or discussing if it based on human sacrifice and slavery. The only correct and moral system is where people ask for help, and others may say yes, or no. We are better off dead than in a redistributive welfare state where the citizens are born into bondage and duty.
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Old 12-18-2015, 11:41 AM
 
5,719 posts, read 6,453,620 times
Reputation: 3647
Quote:
Originally Posted by Europeanflava View Post
1. Encourage saving great amounts of money. In too many places saving is not encouraged,spending is.

2. Encourage working. Right now it's simply easier to sit back and take from other folks who do work.



And someone mentioned giving people a free $20,000 a year would make them more lazy/careless. I think the opposite would happen meaning many would use it to improve their lives, save it in the bank, ect. Sure some people would mess it up but the majority of people would do positive things with a extra $20,000 a year.
Problem is spending drives our economy, not saving. If you save your money while everyone else spends, it helps you. But if everybody started doing it, it would cause a deep recession and a deflationary spiral.
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Old 12-18-2015, 03:35 PM
 
Location: Washington state
7,030 posts, read 4,908,593 times
Reputation: 21913
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Paolella View Post
The myth that there are no high paying jobs is such BS and an example of the big lie. Repeat it often enough and it is assumed to be true. There are many high paying jobs for people who make themselves worthy and qualified to hold them. If there were nothing but minimum wage and low paying jobs for the vast majority of the population, you would see insurrection, starvation, tumult, rioting, and panic. What do we see instead? A smoothly running economy, low unemployment, lovely cities growing and building new office towers, residential buildings, and shopping districts, highways crammed with nicely paid people going to work and doing their thing and affording lovely and expensive housing in the cities and suburbs, new car sales humming along strongly for the last 5 years, people buying all kinds of luxuries, i-phones and i-pads and tablets, construction cranes everywhere, low energy prices, more fun things to do that cost an arm and a leg, and people paying it happily.

There are plenty of good jobs, and people are doing them and getting paid and funding college educations and going to expensive concerts and shows and buying houses left and right.

Things are going well. And in the future? Guess what? There will still be jobs, and everything will still be humming. All kinds of new and undreamed of jobs that will require new skills and new talent. As long as we avoid collectivistic leftist defeatism and malaise, things will be just fine.

In the final analysis, if we are going to embrace the welfare nanny state, and the tyranny and slavery that inevitably accompany it, we are better off nuking ourselves with 350,000,000 dead citizens in charred cinders. So make up any scenario you want, it does not matter. If we are not free, we need not be here.
Where did I say there were NO high paying jobs? I said, and I quote: "The fastest growing job sector today is in service jobs - that is, jobs that pay minimum wage".

That was in response to everyone's mantra "Just Get A Job" and everything will be peachy cool. Well, guess what? As I pointed out, as many, many people have pointed out, a minimum wage job will not get you out of poverty, will not, in fact, even allow you to rent an apartment anywhere in the US.

Of course, then, the next mantra is "Work Your Way Up The Ladder" or "Get An Education That Allows You To Get a High Paying Job".

I'm going to ignore the "Work Your Way Up The Ladder" for now and focus on the education. First, not everyone can afford to go to college or a trade school. Not everyone can physically do the jobs that are in demand and pay well. Not every company will hire someone who is over a certain age. Not everyone is young enough to go into the Armed Services. And not everyone has the luxury of taking 4 years out of their lives (8 to 10 years if you're going to college part-time) to attend college.

The days of working your way through college are long gone (I don't care what you did back in 1976 when you were 19). Only so many people can get Pell grants and scholarships. Loans have proven to be crippling to people who graduate.

You may think I'm talking about a limited number of people here, but I assure you, the number of people who fit into these categories are in the millions, and they far outnumber the people who have help in attaining these goals, parents who help pay for living expenses or college, or being naturally gifted in athletics or math or something similar.

If you, as a teenager, had a house to come home to after school, food to eat, heat in the winter, parents who supported you, a quiet place to do your homework, a summer job that you were able to work at for the sole purpose of saving your wages, a school that was in a middle-class neighborhood where there was no violence and where teachers and students didn't get assaulted, then when you graduated from that high school, you were already a couple hundred light years ahead of a lot of other people. And that had nothing to do with how wonderful you think you are. It was luck and nothing but luck for you.

Why you persist in acting like you yourself are responsible for all these things and it's the fault of other people because they were unlucky enough to not have some or all of them, I have no idea.

You didn't pick your parents, buy the house you grew up in, choose your high school, provide the food you ate as a teenager, or any of the other things I mentioned, but you somehow expect other people to have done that for themselves as they were growing up, and if they didn't and they don't have the advantages you had, then you consider them losers because they can't achieve what you did.

Sure some people can work their way out a bad start and achieve success. Some people can swim on their own, too, when they're thrown into deep water. But most of us need to be taught how to swim. And so I'm not worried about a few natural swimmers. I'm worried about the millions of others who need some help getting an education, instead of just nattering on about their lack of ability and their loser status.

Don't get me started on "Working Your Way Up The Ladder".
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Old 12-18-2015, 10:02 PM
 
11,337 posts, read 11,054,626 times
Reputation: 14993
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser View Post
Where did I say there were NO high paying jobs? I said, and I quote: "The fastest growing job sector today is in service jobs - that is, jobs that pay minimum wage".

That was in response to everyone's mantra "Just Get A Job" and everything will be peachy cool. Well, guess what? As I pointed out, as many, many people have pointed out, a minimum wage job will not get you out of poverty, will not, in fact, even allow you to rent an apartment anywhere in the US.

Of course, then, the next mantra is "Work Your Way Up The Ladder" or "Get An Education That Allows You To Get a High Paying Job".

I'm going to ignore the "Work Your Way Up The Ladder" for now and focus on the education. First, not everyone can afford to go to college or a trade school. Not everyone can physically do the jobs that are in demand and pay well. Not every company will hire someone who is over a certain age. Not everyone is young enough to go into the Armed Services. And not everyone has the luxury of taking 4 years out of their lives (8 to 10 years if you're going to college part-time) to attend college.

The days of working your way through college are long gone (I don't care what you did back in 1976 when you were 19). Only so many people can get Pell grants and scholarships. Loans have proven to be crippling to people who graduate.

You may think I'm talking about a limited number of people here, but I assure you, the number of people who fit into these categories are in the millions, and they far outnumber the people who have help in attaining these goals, parents who help pay for living expenses or college, or being naturally gifted in athletics or math or something similar.

If you, as a teenager, had a house to come home to after school, food to eat, heat in the winter, parents who supported you, a quiet place to do your homework, a summer job that you were able to work at for the sole purpose of saving your wages, a school that was in a middle-class neighborhood where there was no violence and where teachers and students didn't get assaulted, then when you graduated from that high school, you were already a couple hundred light years ahead of a lot of other people. And that had nothing to do with how wonderful you think you are. It was luck and nothing but luck for you.

Why you persist in acting like you yourself are responsible for all these things and it's the fault of other people because they were unlucky enough to not have some or all of them, I have no idea.

You didn't pick your parents, buy the house you grew up in, choose your high school, provide the food you ate as a teenager, or any of the other things I mentioned, but you somehow expect other people to have done that for themselves as they were growing up, and if they didn't and they don't have the advantages you had, then you consider them losers because they can't achieve what you did.

Sure some people can work their way out a bad start and achieve success. Some people can swim on their own, too, when they're thrown into deep water. But most of us need to be taught how to swim. And so I'm not worried about a few natural swimmers. I'm worried about the millions of others who need some help getting an education, instead of just nattering on about their lack of ability and their loser status.

Don't get me started on "Working Your Way Up The Ladder".
There is no luck, there is reality. You are born however you are born, with lots of free stuff or nothing at all. Your job is to play the hand you are dealt, good or bad, without complaint and without making victims of others. Bad luck does not give you rights, nor does it create an account payable with your name on it. People keep bringing up the phony nonsense of "privilege". There is no privilege. There is reality. If you are born with rich parents and never have to work, you owe nobody anything. Nothing. Nada. If you are born with nothing, you are not then entitled to take from others. You have to work and scrape and struggle while others may not have to. TOO DAMNED BAD. That's REALITY. Bad luck DOES NOT CREATE RIGHTS OR LIABILITIES OR A METAPHYSICAL GREEN LIGHT TO ENSLAVE OTHERS.

You play the hand you are dealt, good or bad. You deserve nothing for being born with nothing. And you are not born into bondage if your parents have stuff to give you where others do not.

Freedom means just that. You are born free, the rest is up to you. Good or bad. Rich or poor. Talented or useless. Healthy or diseased. Good parents or crack addict parents. None of it matters a whit, and we should do NOTHING TO MAKE PEOPLE EQUAL. They are not, and they never will be. There is no equality. Nor should there be. Nor will there ever be. It should not even be a goal, because it is not a worthy or good idea. EQUALITY IS EVIL!
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Old 12-21-2015, 06:16 AM
 
8,924 posts, read 5,636,855 times
Reputation: 12560
Corporate welfare costs us much more than social welfare. Big oil subsidies, sugar, pharmaceuticals, just to name a few.....
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Old 12-21-2015, 08:28 AM
 
Location: Living rent free in your head
42,864 posts, read 26,338,151 times
Reputation: 34068
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tominftl View Post
Corporate welfare costs us much more than social welfare. Big oil subsidies, sugar, pharmaceuticals, just to name a few.....
yep, and look what just got hidden in the budget bill

There’s enough corporate tax breaks to provide free college to everyone for 9 years
"One of the major provisions of the spending bill was the “Tax Extenders” package, which makes a vast number of tax breaks permanent. While some of the tax breaks will help working families, like the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, 60 percent, or roughly $350 billion of the tax breaks are for corporations. This includes a tax break called “active financing” which helps corporations keep money made in the US stashed in overseas tax havens. The $622 billion in tax breaks is enough to fund tuition-free public college for 9 years.

Corporations don’t have to disclose political activity to shareholders
On page 1,982 of the budget bill, Republicans concealed language that prevents the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring corporations disclose their political activity to shareholders. This is likely a response to grassroots mobilization among shareholders demanding the companies they invest in dicslose how they spent their vast reserves to influence elections. With the passage of this bill, there’s no way the federal government can require disclosure.

Wall Street deregulation
In addition to all of the new provisions in this year’s budget bill, one of the worst riders from the 2014 “cromnibus” bill that deregulated derivatives trading on Wall Street will remain in effect. The deregulation bill reverses portions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010, and allows big banks to get away with the same high-risk gambling on complex financial instruments that caused the 2008 financial crisis. Wall Street lobbyists actually wrote most of the language in the bill that was snuck into last year’s budget bill.

9 Items in the Budget Bill Congress Hopes You'll Never See"
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