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I misread your quote. Exhibit 5 states that 16% of children on SNAP are considered obese. While 15% were considered overweight. Neither of which addresses the underlying reason for that obesity being attributed to a cycle of starvation / bodily defenses.
Obesity ≠ starvation. Not in this world, or any other.
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You would likely cut funding for nutrition to children because you see a runaway gravytrain and I would increase the spending to make nutritional food more available to these same people.
Nope. I said to eliminate Food Stamps but keep WIC with further restrictions on what can be purchased with WIC benefits.
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I prefer my way.
I prefer to NOT enable obesity and its consequent lifelong health problems, which taxpayers must then also pay to treat.
A large portion of Americans seem to be against social programs even though it may be for the common good. When there is talk of the (on average) much better social programs in many European countries the general response is "well, they have to spend more on taxes". To which I ask.....so? If it meant far better health care, far better maternity leave, etc. isn't that worth it? Do not the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?
Because the more social programs you have the poorer and more dependent everyone becomes.
If more socialism is better how about Cuba? Free healthcare, free college education very little income inequality. Same freebies in Venezuela, a social program utopia. Well not anymore.
Look at the EU. 508 million people compared to 319 million Americans. Both have about the same size economies. Yet it takes a population almost 1 1/2 times larger with Europe to equal us. Higher taxes and bloated social programs stunt growth in Europe. We don't need to copy their mistakes.
I'm convinced that some people will just never get it. They make decisions based on emotion alone and simply can't understand the rational and principled point of view.
Either that, or they create a strawman and imply that the people against government social programs only care about themselves, as if that's the only possible reason to be against them.
I've been watching Jordan Peterson's personality lectures and he talks about how people with high openness and low conscientiousness will almost always be liberals, and people who are the opposite will be conservatives - the liberals are more artistic/open to new things but unstructured - idea people, and conservatives tend to be less creative but good with structure and keeping things in order - implementation people.
Looking at it that way, it makes sense that those on the left have these grand plans of helping everyone, but people on the right see sustainability issues, as well as moral inconsistencies.
I have a lot of liberal characteristics, but I tend to side with the more logical and rational approach - high openness and high conscientiousness. I'm curious if that's common for libertarians...I would think so.
Everyone does not have insurance now. ERs only treat emergencies. Given a choice between that hospital ward room or get no care and die, it's a no brainer.
Emotional, baseless nonsense. Everyone is supposed to have insurance, or pay a stiff penalty if they don't. That penalty goes back into the ACA to underwrite the costs associated with those without insurance. Show me where people in the U.S. have been refused care and died.
Poor and middle income Americans welcome social programs. However wealthy Americans don't care about poor people. They have a platform to make their voice heard so only they are.
The myth is that if "you work hard enough, you can be anything you want to be". That might have been the case when half of the professions we have today didn't exist, there was free/cheap land available, large global corporations didn't exist, companies actually respected their employees, and having a higher education degree was somewhat rare (meaning everyone was on an equal playing field).
Yeah, that's a great response to some young person who aims high. "Forget about it kid, you ain't going anywhere so stop dreaming."
Do you have any idea how stupid and counterproductive that is?
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Originally Posted by maat55
I did say it. I provided the order at which welfare/charity should be followed. We have 50 state governments for a reason. Does it not make sense that individuals needs be addressed as close to home as possible, having 50 states experimenting solutions on balanced budgets?
I hate to be the one to tell you, but the federal government is not god, you can stop worshipping it.
Sometimes the Feds DO need to intervene, as they are way ahead of the curve on some issues than a lot of states are. Civil Rights racial and orientation minorities is the most dramatic example, but environmental issues also are another important example. If State A enacts more "regulations that cost money and tax dollars" but State B doesn't, but State A gets better results or otherwise a higher quality of life because of those "regulations", then the Feds will look to them as a role model about how to improve the quality of life of all Americans. Thus local standards don't automatically mean the right standards.
Part of having personal responsibility - with whom small government promoters have considerable overlap with - is looking to the best practices of states that have strong quality of life (low poverty, low pollution, low crime, low police brutality, tax and regulatory and education policies that produce numerous high-paying jobs, etc).
So if some states fall way behind the curve while the Feds are ahead of it, then perhaps the Feds need to intervene after all - even if it means its citizens or government do confuse freedom with "doing whatever the hell with my money and life that I want", and even if the Feds new "rules and regulations" do clash with local definitions of "(ab)normal behavior" or "(dis)respect-worthy person".
Vast generalizations like this are worthless. I support the idea of programs to help others but you have to take each program alone to decide whether they are good or not. Many times the programs do not do what they say they do.
Take the Homeowners Foreclosure relief program. The idea was a very good one and one that would have been a correct approach to the mess the government and the banks caused and I supported the idea. The problem was it was all a fraud.
That politicians have their own agenda's behind many of these programs is why so many trust none of them. This is not the fault of those who have learned to distrust these programs but rather it is the fault of those of us that support helping others but then refuse to condemn politicians that lie to us.
I've said it before and will again. The bankers would have been helped if the program were set up to give people, who demonstrated the need for it, enough money to pay off a significant portion of their mortgage, if not all, and forced them to pay it to the banks. That way everybody would have been helped.
Notice how the people in favor of government social programs always frame others as greedy, selfish, or uncaring. It's just pure emotion and sentimentality.
"I want to help ALL the puppies in the world"
"Well you can't realistically help all of them..."
"So you're saying you just want them to die??"
"I don't want them to die, but.."
"I can't believe you don't want to help! What kind of person doesn't want to help puppies??"
You have to be rational. Of course if there was no downside to giving people stuff unconditionally we'd be in favor of it, but it isn't that simple.
Not to mention the most important part - you're using the government to force it on everyone else. *Politicians know it won't be sustainable, but they make it the law that you must help all the puppies, and then they're seen as heroes...they'll be long gone by the time problems arise*
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