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Fine. I don't pay my taxes. I get a nice letter, and I ignore it. I get increasingly less nice letters, and I ignore them. If I ignore them long enough, they'll either try to repossess my property or put me in jail, in which case I'll forcefully protect myself and my property, and they'll shoot me. If I'm lucky they'll take me out non-lethally so they can put me in jail.
Point is, they'll bring out the guns if you ignore or resist them long enough.
I choose to submit to their guns, in the same way that I'd give a mugger my wallet. It isn't because I believe they have the right to do it, I just prefer to pay them off to leave me alone.
I don't care what you call it. Millions understand that nothing gets done unless people pool their money together. I've covered this endlessly recently.
They contribute not because a gun is held to their head but because they want roads and bridges that no, people are NOT going to build locally.
Theory is great in a classroom. Rarely does it work in real life. Your dreams of "hey, let's all pitch in and build a bridge" is never going to work.
I've covered it endlessly too. People can pool their resources willingly rather than by force. You said so in your 2nd sentence.
I also said in the past that if people want the roads and bridges, they'll figure out a way to pay for it. If they aren't willing to do it, oh well, they don't get them. Pretty simple. Literally any solution is acceptable except forcing others to participate in some plan they never agreed to.
Lastly, that's fine if they want to pay taxes. My point is that whether they want to or not, they're forced to pay, and the penalty for not paying is not very nice...as I explained in my last post above.
So how many people are keeping their homes free from any future foreclosure or forced payment? I am talking individual homeowners, not Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae.
Because I don't want to pay for people to have kids out of wedlock. It isn't good for the people doing it--or for the taxpayers. And even liberal leaning social scientists from think tanks like the Brookings Institution are starting to agree our 40% out of wedlock birth rate is a serious problem.
...a wealth of research strongly suggests that marriage is good for children. Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. Meanwhile, children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.
......no government program is likely to reduce child poverty as much as bringing back marriage as the preferable way of raising children.
And the other thing is, liberals always assume spending more money = better outcomes. Health care is a perfect example of how spending more money isn't working. So are schools. America spends about as much on K-12 education as other 1st World countries, but we get crappier results. Our spending on health care is similar. Even if you just look at spending on publicly funded health care, you'd think the government would work harder trying to prevent people from getting totally preventable diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease, etc.....but it doesn't.
If we want better health care, the answer has very little to do with more spending. It turns out the world's healthiest populations spend little on health care. It's the unhealthy eating and other lifestyle issues that we must address. This video is a great starting point for that discussion:
I'd be more supportive of increasing social programs, but it seems like most people in the "middle class" don't even benefit from them because they "make too much". For example, the new free college in New York is only for students from parents with a combined income of 100-125k, which is a pretty low threshold for a northern state where the cost of living is more expensive. The system is set up so that poor income families can have tons of children because they will get financial support from the government, and the wealthiest families are all set. As someone who will be part of the lingering middle class in a few years when I'm done with my training, I don't even know if I'll be able to afford even just one kid. I won't get financial help, and after all the necessary expenses are paid for, there isn't much left over.
The state tuition in NY is incredibly low. It's about $5,000 per year. And if you get good grades you can qualify for even lower than that (they wanted to let me go for $1,000 per year. But I was young and wasn't thinking about student loans then and turned it down to go to private school. Wish I could take that one back.) So the means testing in New York makes sense because tuition was already affordable if you made more than that.
But I do have many friends who've lived in various European and Scandinavian countries for years. Several of them still live there and are raising their families in their new home countries.
I've heard nothing but praise for these countries' social benefit systems. People that I've spoken with at length praise the systems for (a) providing basic services such as healthcare access at a reasonable cost and (b) alleviating the financial stressors associated with more capitalistic routes of paying for services.
Additionally, I consider myself well read on social benefits and have read numerous books either by economists or sociologists who have convinced me that these systems are sorely needed in today's world. I've also read many books by Europeans and Scandinavians who've told of their own accounts of living in such a system. They acknowledge the systems they lived under weren't perfect (what is?) but say its vastly preferable to living in a country like the US which is behind the times.
Right, they can all sit in their 400sq. ft. rental and eat their State provided bread.
Good riddance to them, and don't let the door hit you in the azz!
This is a myth....
Americans are not against social programs.
Most Americans would help people like the elderly, permanently disabled, and military veterans. What we're against is giving away freebies to people who could provide for themselves, but would rather leech off the system.
People pay taxes when they work and those same workers often need help in the form of food stamps or WIC. They are wrong but she was not. Hypocrite.
She wasn't working when she took those benefits just the same as some poor did work but currently are not and need benefits. They are wrong but she was not. Hypocrite.
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