Hundreds scramble for Dallas County rental vouchers

Originally posted by whaaa

Originally posted by gncnew
Guys,
I'm not bashing the people running so much as the atmosphere we've created. We've got a welfare state that's out of control.

let me ask you guys - without section 8 housing... you really think all those people would be homeless?

Not a chance.

Your signature rings hollow as you bash the poor.

Originally posted by desert
reply to post by whaaa

 

Exactly, whaaa! And thanks for that CS Monitor link.

Americans must understand the extent of their working poor. In my life time I have never seen so many working poor or those living one unfortunate event (accident, medical, etc.) away from poverty.

With so much talk these days of taxation, it is interesting to note that our current system was based on "the abillity to pay". The wealthy were EXPECTED to pay more, based on ability to pay.

most low-income Southern and Western states endorsed federal taxation based on ``ability to pay'' and favored a graduated federal income tax differentially burdensome to wealthier states in the North and East.

source

Through three decades of demagoguery, the poor and the middle class (now shown to be ranking among the poor as far as dollars) became convinced that the wealth holders with the "ability to pay" are somehow being harmed. "Class warfare!" shouts the demagogue.

Such trickery, as those are the groups who lost their wealth to the have-mores. Your wealth and financial security is gone, yet some of you continue to either, 1) believe you still have it or will one day have it, or 2) the have-mores will somehow, benevolently give it back to you if you give them more.

A national sales tax?

Changing the current U.S. federal taxation from a progressive system to a national sales tax system could have a major social needs complication. Wealthy individuals and families may experience increased benefits through a national sales tax as they save or invest their money to avoid paying federal taxes. This increases the burden of paying for social needs to middle and lower-income individuals. If the government is unable to collect enough federal taxes to pay for the social needs of citizens, it may be forced to raise the national sales tax rate. This will usually increase the tax burden on lower income individuals.

source

Originally posted by spyder550
I did see some people make it, but damn I now know what that life is like, it is mean and it is hopeless and if you can get out of it you are a better person than I am. Many of the people were never going to acomplish anything in life. They lived on the left side of the bell shaped curve. Basically 1/2 of the population.

for all your posts. This line made me think about the idea of "culture of poverty"

Lewis gave some seventy characteristics (1996 [1966], 1998) that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes.

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. (Lewis 1998)

source

Originally posted by xuenchen

Originally posted by gncnew
Guys,
I'm not bashing the people running so much as the atmosphere we've created. We've got a welfare state that's out of control.

let me ask you guys - without section 8 housing... you really think all those people would be homeless?

Not a chance.

most likely not homeless....

rents are all market price.....

The cost of housing, whether homes or rental units is too high for one person and one income. I lived in section 8 housing for years even though I was gainfully employed and earning six to eight dollars an hour. Housing rents are not "market priced" when an average working person cannot afford to pay them. When I was first out of high school and working fast food, we had eight people in a three bedroom apartment with one guy living in the walk in closet.

Originally posted by gncnew

If you have an HDTV and an iPhone - you ARE NOT poor.

The "working poor" is a ridiculous figment of our societies imagination. When farmers used to live in mud dug-outs during the depression era ... THAT was working poor.

We don't even know the meaning of poor in this nation.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

Impact of the strategy

Cloward and Piven themselves, in papers published in 1971 and 1977, argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.[8] Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.

In his 2006 book Winning the Race, commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward-Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction."[9]

According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007, "Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired."[10]

Some commentators have blamed the Cloward-Piven strategy for the near-bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.[11][12]

Conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck has referred to the Cloward-Piven Strategy on his broadcast since 2009, stating that it forms part of the basis for President Barack Obama's economic policy. On February 18, 2010, he said, "you’ve got total destruction of wealth coming... It’s the final phase of the Cloward-Piven strategy, which is collapse the system."