I'm a liberal and I am against welfare not for the same reason(s) as conservatives (interview, generation)

[Freak80]

Originally Posted by victimofGM

The welfare system has become a legal form of vote buying.

Billionaires and corporations have been buying votes for decades. Where’s your outrage about that? How much does it cost to run a political campaign these days? Who do you think pays for those campaigns? Hint: it isn’t welfare people.

The welfare recipient costs me a penny for every $100 that corporate America costs me in the form of long working hours, low pay, environmental damage, dangerous products, corruption of our democracy, etc.

[T-310]

Originally Posted by MetroWord

I know that most liberals nowadays automatically associates being against welfare with angry conservatives. I ask that you guys hold off your angry responses and hear me out.


Recently, I have come to understand something that my parents have tried to tell me all my life. It is a very simple concept that is quite hard to understand for many people. The concept is this: No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own money.

Again, please hear me out before you start typing up your angry responses. I am not an angry conservative. I am not angry at the poor. In fact, I love them. I love the poor enough to try to find a real solution to poverty. See, giving the poor money is an easy thing to do. All you have to do is occasionally give the guy with the cardboard message $5 and you feel good about yourself. The gods will surely smile on you. But after years helping the homeless, I've come to realize that giving money to the poor is like pouring water on someone's hand. It's not very helpful. All it does is make you feel good about yourself. It does next to nothing to help the poor.

But why doesn't giving money to the poor help them? Because of the concept I said above: No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own money.

I know people here hate anecdotal experiences. But allow me to tell you a couple out of many I've had.

From the time I started dating my husband up to when we were serious, he was always liberal with how much money we would spend on, say, hotel rooms and other pleasures in life. He would insist that we get the better hotel when we went somewhere, go to the better restaurants, etc. Then one day I started noticing him being a lot more careful with how he spent money. When I asked, he said "it's my money, too".

Here is another example. My husband came from an inter-generational poor family. They have always been on food stamps. Both his sisters got pregnant before they finished high school. The only saving grace for him was they kicked him out because he was gay. I pretty much assimilated him into my family's ways and sent him to college. As far as we know, he's the first person in his extended family to have graduated from college and actually work in a professional career and not a low wage job like everyone else in his family. Anyway, every time we have his sisters come over, I have always noticed they are very wasteful with our food. They would take a bite of a chicken and not finish it before picking up another piece while leaving a huge chunk of the meat still in the first piece. Fill up their plates and only eat parts before throwing away the rest. And before you try to make excuses like our food sucked, I have observed the exact same behaviors from them at restaurants and their own home. It took me years to come to the realization of why they are so wasteful. They grew up on food stamps! AKA someone else's money!

It's human nature. I have observed this over and over throughout my life. No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he does with his own money. No one.

And if you're not convinced that giving money to the poor is not very helpful, consider this. 50 years of welfare has done nothing to curb poverty. Giving money to the poor does not help them.

Einstein said (not exact wording) the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. But isn't that what we've been doing with the welfare state? We keep providing public assistance to the intergenerational poor over and over expecting a different result. Isn't it time we take a different approach already?


I have an answer. Why not model after immigrant groups that came to this country with nothing and ended up with great success? Take my family, for example. We came from extreme poverty in another part of the world. When I was little, I remember there were days when our parents told us to go back to sleep because there wasn't anything to eat that day. The 7 of us came to this country with nothing. Our parents worked minimum wage jobs while they sent us to school. And now 20 years later every single one of us have successful careers and is part of the upper middle class. Our parents are retired comfortably in their own house that they bought back in the 90s while working their minimum wage jobs.

The thing is this. Our story isn't even that unique. It is quite common, actually. Here are a few things off the top of my head that we did differently than the typical intergenerational poor. Pursue higher education. Career before marriage. Marriage before pregnancy. Raise children in 2 parents household. Financial responsibilities. Spend money wisely. That 50-60 inch newest TV model can wait. That newest model smartphone can wait. NOT rely on public assistance. In fact, our parents got off of food stamps ASAP once they found out what it really was. No drugs. Etc. Very common sense stuff.

So, instead of keep giving money to the poor, why not use the same amount of money and teach them how to be self sufficient? I'm talking about skills and financial training. Teach them to not breed like rabbits. Single motherhood is the single best predictor of perpetual poverty.

I'm about to go to bed, so I'll write some more later. But I really hope that you really read what I wrote above and think about what I said. Please try not to have knee-jerk reactions. If we really want to help uplift people out of poverty, we need to stop giving them food stamps, section 8 housing, welfare checks, etc. and actually come up with programs to help them help themselves. I firmly believe welfare is a poverty trap. We ought to do better than this!

Excellent well thought out post. Too bad the deadbeats you want to target will say GTFO, gimme money.

[Fifty Seven]

Originally Posted by MetroWord

LOL and this is why I don't describe myself as a conservative.

The poor have always existed regardless of whether there is welfare or not. Welfare was created from a noble objective. And I believe in this objective. I believe we as a society ought to continue to find a solution to solve poverty. I just don't believe the current welfare system is a solution at all.

It was not created from a moral objective. It was created by President Johnson to create a dependent class that would consistently vote for democrats. Some voters may have supported it for noble reasons but modern welfare was implemented for cynical and devious ones.

[leebeemi]

If I'm making around $9/hr, full time @40hrs/week, I'm earning less than $20K a year. If I have a child to support and don't have subsidized child care, I'm paying around $10K a year (for one child). If I can find a 2br place to rent for $800, and share it with another renter, I will pay $4600 (there is a 2br for rent around the corner from me for $800 a month). But I'm left with less than $5K for utilities, food, car, clothing, etc. What about healthcare? There's no room for improving one's options, because college would be out of the question.



You can yowl all you want about "choices" and paying the price of making the wrong ones, but in the end, we'll be left with a hungry child, and that is not okay. I'm a liberal, and I would love to end the dependence on welfare. Truly. But then we have to look at wages, at the cost of healthcare, at the cost of higher ed, at the cost of insurance.

[ohhwanderlust]

Originally Posted by leebeemi

If I'm making around $9/hr, full time @40hrs/week, I'm earning less than $20K a year. If I have a child to support and don't have subsidized child care, I'm paying around $10K a year (for one child). If I can find a 2br place to rent for $800, and share it with another renter, I will pay $4600 (there is a 2br for rent around the corner from me for $800 a month). But I'm left with less than $5K for utilities, food, car, clothing, etc. What about healthcare? There's no room for improving one's options, because college would be out of the question.



You can yowl all you want about "choices" and paying the price of making the wrong ones, but in the end, we'll be left with a hungry child, and that is not okay. I'm a liberal, and I would love to end the dependence on welfare. Truly. But then we have to look at wages, at the cost of healthcare, at the cost of higher ed, at the cost of insurance.

Yeah, I had to laugh at the part where his parents bought a house while working on minimum wage. That's fantastic for them, but it ain't happening nowadays

[victimofGM]

Originally Posted by Freak80

Billionaires and corporations have been buying votes for decades. Where’s your outrage about that? How much does it cost to run a political campaign these days? Who do you think pays for those campaigns? Hint: it isn’t welfare people.

The welfare recipient costs me a penny for every $100 that corporate America costs me in the form of long working hours, low pay, environmental damage, dangerous products, corruption of our democracy, etc.

When corporations or wealthy individuals spend money on politicians, they’re spending their own personal money to try to influence a politician to support a measure that would benefit their company or industry. I recognize this as legalized form of bribery and consider it wrong. Every time congress makes a law or regulation with the stated goal of cleaning it up, they always include loopholes to allow the practice to continue. In the case of welfare programs it is politicians spending tax money on a particular economic class of people making them dependent upon the system so they will continue to vote for politicians of a certain party in the hopes of not only keeping the system going, but also to expand the system for their personal benefit. I don’t believe either is right. Just because one goes on and benefits the rich doesn’t mean the other side of the spectrum is right and just. Both sides are wrong.

[NY_refugee87]

Originally Posted by MetroWord

Do you consider allowing industries to dump toxic waste into rivers and hunt animals to extinction "conserve"?

Hunting animals to extinction is not allowed...

Hunting animals ensures balance within an ecosystem.
I'll give you an example where I lived in NY, it was a rural sparsely populated town, tons of fields and forests.

Many folks fed their families by hunting.
I bought a house at age 20 on the side of a lake. The lake was pristine. Absolutely picture perfect.

When cityiots migrated north, they bought up vacant land to develop and put up $500k+ weekend/summer houses up. Between deforestation and developing on the lake 3 things happened.

1. Cityiots hate hunting. Their fear was being shot by a hunter while jogging or dressing up like Lance Armstrong and cycling down back roads. I don't recall ever seeing deer dressed in bright spandex riding a bike nor wearing skin tight Under Armour and jogging down the sides of roads. By getting on the town board, they banned hunting friday-sunday. When most would hunt deer.

Result: wasting disorder in deer. Malnourished from over population and no food sources through the winter months due to over population. Deer used to be a good healthy size. Average buck would weigh in depending upon age between 150 and 220lbs. Alot of good meat on a buck that size.

They turned to farms and orchards and would do quite a number on crops.
This wasn't an issue when farmers would complain. It only became an issue when cityiots well groomed and landscaped yards were ravaged and shrubs/bushes etc were decimated.
Other result. More car accidents involving hitting a deer took place especially at night Friday night the most frequent, due to cityiots driving upstate to their weekend home.
Car insurance rates skyrocketed as a result.

What happened after the cityiots were effected? Just like we told them so?
They worked with ENCON and DEC to go to Vermont and capture mountain lions and bring them in to thin the herd.
Mountain lions are apex predators. They won't target just deer. Anything and everything is open season for them. Those mountain lions descended on farms. They would jump fences grab a colt, a calf, chickens, alpacas, goats, sheep, whatever was on the farm for the picking. They didn't target deer like what was thought.
Farmers spoke out against it before hand when they had the town hall meeting discussing it. Nobody listened. They rolled their eyes and figured it was just an excuse to get hunting brought back on weekends... as a result of wasting disorder the bucks would fight each other to the death, be it from starvation or competing for a doe. It became quite common to venture into fields or the woods and find dead bucks laying on the ground with antlers tangled. The stronger of the bucks would break the weaker ones neck, but due to being tangled would be stuck and try dragging dead weight and eventually due to not being able to eat, would starve to death.

That's what happens when you emote out and due to short sighted ignorance as a part of being ignorant, unintended consequences occur.

2. The lake I lived on.
Before the area was re-zoned as a residential area, it was pristine. We could hunt water foul, fish, the works. No issue. Due to rezoning, you can not discharge a firearm in a residential area.
Beforehand you would see beautiful mallards on the lake, few geese, and fish jump. Not afterwards.
Canadian geese are a scourge. They're territorial pricks. Worthless birds, greasy gamey meat. They're smart though... they wouldn't hang around an area where hunting flourished.

Eventually, due to being territorial, they would chase mallards off the lake. No more ducks present that helped to keep the lake pristine.
The geese would use the lake and surrounding area as a toilet.
These worthless birds would honk all hours of the night. So unless you had a well insulated house you'd hear it all night long. They proliferated to the point you couldn't see water, you'd see with no exaggeration thousands of them. The cityiots who complained about the noise went to the town again.
This go around the brainiacs being ignorant not listening to locals again, decided to install propane cannons to blast off every 3 hours after sun down november-mid april. At first it would shut them up and cause them to fly off the lake... after a while they ignored it.

Result.
Due to increase in bacteria levels, people swimming in the lake getting very sick, the board of health, ENCON and DEC tested the water and placed signs all along the lake to not go in the water with open wounds/sores, not to eat the fish caught in the lake and not to drink the water... There were some cases of really nasty parasites getting into kids especially kids who would run around barefoot on the lawn... get a small cut, step on goose droppings...

Algae developed on the water as a result of the increase in bacteria. The cityiots who would sit by the lake, their small toy breed dogs would be attacked by geese. Geese are territorial. They perceive any threat they will peck at whatever they feel threatens them. So you'd see those 1000 dollar+ designer toy breed dogs get the crap kicked out of them.

3. As mentioned before with deer ravaging local farms and orchards, smaller orchards ended up having to close down due to raspberry bushes being devoured, fruit bearing trees being decimated, the works.
Other farms that grew corn to feed their dairy or beef cattle, ended up having to buy feed for their cattle. Price of milk and beef that used to be sourced locally skyrocketed. Stewarts, a chain of NY convenience stores/gas stations, sourced milk locally from upstate NY farms for their milk and ice cream. The cost of a gallon of milk went from no joke 1.25 to 3.50
Beef, sourced locally by Price Chopper used to be at most 2.25 per pound up to 3.50-5 dollars per pound. Whether it was hamburger or rib eye.
Even hay fields were ravaged raising the cost for those who had horses in the area. Many folks had horses too.

Why? Because conservation efforts from hunting were banned. If the deer population is not regulated and allowed to flourish you get unintended consequences as a result. Add in deforestation from urban sprawl, you wind up with deer taking to what is left in higher concentration/population to compete for what resources remain.
Same with the Canadian geese issue with the lake. They didn't just stick to that lake, they'd take any standing body of water over.

So is hunting a species to the point of extinction a problem? No not at all.
It was a long long time ago. That is why you, as a hunter, purchase from the State a license to hunt, and tags for the animal you intend to hunt. Before hunting was banned on the weekends, you could get 5 doe tags and between 8 and 12 buck tags.
I'm sure if hunting were allowed again where I used to live, you could get 10-15 doe tags, and 15-20 buck tags, as for geese, they could be ruled an invasive species and hunters could take as many as they can possibly shoot. Just like in southern states where feral hogs flourish. Open season. No license or tags required.

That's why I travel to rural Florida on weekends when there isn't a shooting competition, with my girlfriend, sister and brother in law with ARs/AKs. We dispatch feral nuisance hogs that ravage citrus groves and encroach on cattle ranches.
Most of the beef cattle according to the owners, are antibiotic and hormone free, and when the feral hogs come they will attack cattle to establish dominance. They have nasty bacteria in their tusks and if they bite the cattle the cattle has to be put down. Thus driving the cost of beef up on free range beef.
They're not dumb animals either. They're very cunning. They'll trench through under fences. They'll dig up around the base of fruit trees and gnaw on the roots to kill the tree and get the trees to drop the fruit on them for them to eat when it hits the ground. Be it mangos, grape fruit, oranges, whatever. There is no bag limit on those feral hogs either. All you need is the land owners signed permission, keep the business end aimed away from houses, roads, and you can take as many hogs as you like, all hours of the day and night if you have the optics for it.
Feral hogs could be totally eradicated and not one person would mind.
How so?
1. Cheaper fruit and fruit juices.
2. Cheaper natural free range beef devoid of hormones and antibiotics.
3. Less property damage.

Some species do not contribute to an ecosystem, rather take what they can and make other species extinct. Those that do are called invasive species.
Same thing happened in the everglades with people getting bored with pet snakes and releasing them out in the everglades. They became an invasive species. To encourage and restore the balance there, they hold competitions out there to see who can kill the biggest snake with a cash prize. Why? Because those snakes were not native to that environment and pushed species that were native to that environment out. Be it birds or mamals.
Hunting is a conservation effort. Not an eradication of entire species. That happens when people poach. Poaching is illegal.

[rbohm]

Originally Posted by MetroWord

LOL and this is why I don't describe myself as a conservative.

The poor have always existed regardless of whether there is welfare or not. Welfare was created from a noble objective. And I believe in this objective. I believe we as a society ought to continue to find a solution to solve poverty. I just don't believe the current welfare system is a solution at all.

the reality is that unless we change society completely, we will never get rid of poverty. the problem is that poor people do the things that keep them poor. they always try to keep up with the jones. they keep buying things they dont need, or they buy things that are far too expensive for what they need.

[leebeemi]

Originally Posted by ohhwanderlust

Yeah, I had to laugh at the part where his parents bought a house while working on minimum wage. That's fantastic for them, but it ain't happening nowadays

Exactly. Fun fact: I earn slightly less now than my mother did at retirement. My husband earns slightly more than my father did at retirement. Their house cost $15K. Our house cost $115K. We've got a huge disconnect.

[Chowhound]

The problem is is that the word liberal has been hijacked. The wacky far left progressives have sorta taken the world liberal and destroyed it. Textbook classical liberalism is a good thing see the snippet here.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty and equality.[1][2][3] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support civil rights, democracy, secularism, gender and race equality, internationalism and the freedoms of speech, the press, religion and markets.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

I think that a lot of people if they are honest and fair minded realizes that some cases of welfare are legit and people sometimes need a hand up. This generational thing of being on the dole forever was never part of the deal that most people would agree to. I thought back in the 90's Clinton did do some welfare reform as far as I can remember.