Before There Was Welfare There Was Charity

reply to post by sweetliberty

Actually that whole part of the thread was started when neo posted that because of technology and population growth there will be more people unemployed. I then replied that he had made a good argument for welfare. Despite agreeing, things went south from there.

Originally posted by sweetliberty

Originally posted by antonia

Originally posted by sweetliberty
reply to post by antonia

 

Its also a lack of trust in Americans, that we wouldn't care enough to help our neighbors.

No, i don't trust you would. I trust most of you would let others die if it increased the bottom line. I live in a country where a guy ate another guys face off. I don't have much faith in the inherent goodness of strangers.

Please, you can find stories about people selling their daughters for crack and you expect me to trust the inherent goodness of man? Laughable.

Well I hope you can deal with your supposed excuses for promoting the welfare state because it isn't going to be the same security blanket for much longer.
You sure could learn a lot from the women and children I worked with at a homeless shelter. They lived in there own type of hell from the hands of another person but I don't recall hearing them squalk like a brat, blaming everybody else for their hurts and pains!

How did Antonia act like a brat?

I didn't get that at all, Antonia is entitled to the perception she has just like you are to yours.

The Welfare entitlement state-of-mind reacts almost as extreme as the naked man who was wasted on drugs when he was eating the face of another man.

Welfare state of mind? So believing in ensuring that tens of millions of Americans can
eat and have shelter is a sociopathy?

That not an extreme view at all, I think believe America will be better with a shanty town under class
is extreme. I think trying to make society into a jungle of predatory instinct and law is extreme.

reply to post by sweetliberty

but progress creates many more jobs than it destroys.

I dont think so. Automatisation replaces human work. Sure, there are some more jobs created, but its generally far less than what has been replaced. The net effect is important.
Progress also increases barriers to entry, since it generally replaces unqualified work with jobs requiring higher education and higher initial investments.

Thats why job market situation in the 21st century is simply not comparable to the situation in the 19th century libertarians tend to romanticise. And it will only get "worse" with increasing progress.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

Philadelphia, that city of "brotherly love" has banned churches, charities, and individuals from feeding the poor. New York City has outlawed food donations to homeless shelters because they cannot assess the level of salt in that donated food. Food Not Bombs a charitable organization that specializes in feeding the poor points out that not just Philadelphia, but Huston and Orlando are also engaging in this unlawful legislation. One of the Food Not Bombs activist Brian Jenkins, claims he paid $1,000 in fines simply for feeding the homeless!

These are just some of the consequences of the rise of the "welfare" state, and of course, with more than $15 trillion in debts, the general welfare of the nation has been largely ignored in favor of the aggregation of power.

Yes, this is outrageous and such bans should be repealed.
Of course it has nothing to do with welfare state, thats a non-sequitur. I dont see any reason why welfare state should mandate banning feeding of the homeless. In most welfare states, feeding homeless is legal.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


I am in agreement with most everything you have said, but do you not think we are in uncharted territories right now? Would you agree that providing for oneself in today's modern culture is somewhat in the hands of another person? Sure I can move off, buy a piece of land and farm it. I might be able to sustain myself doing that without any help from anyone. But then comes the issue of paying taxes on that land I bought to farm for myself. If I do not have any method of producing income then I will lose my land. If I sell my vegetables to others I might get fined or imprisoned for farming without some license.

I guess my point is that while I do agree with your premises that welfare is unfair and people would be more charitable if they got to keep their money, I would argue that we have a system that promotes dependency on others for our own survival. In order to curtail this and provide for future generations, changes must occur on a massive scale. Either basic necessities of life should be a guaranteed right of all humans, and collectively we should fund or make available as not for profit basic food, water, healthcare, electricity, and shelter to everyone irregardless of income. Or we should reverse course and undo most of our societal structures deregulating any industry that provides these services, declaring them all as tax exempt, to ensure our collective survival in this modern age.

Your thoughts?

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


but they aren't doing it to "help the poor"!!!

they are doing it so that the business sector can pay crappy wages and still have content employees...
they are doing it so that the businesses can charge unrealistic prices for the basic necessities...
they did it so that the deterioration of the american economy would be allowed to continue on to this point without no one really getting upset about, or at least not enough to halt their agenda!!!

you want to end welfare???

you can start by providing true charity!!!

find a pathway where the workers can fend for themselves through their labor, like it's supposed to be...
till then, I am afraid, you will have to accept the welfare. since workers who are homeless, hungry, and sick ain't gonna be working for crap wages for long!!!

that's the starting point in this....give the workers fair wages, bring back the jobs that were outsourced to india and china and other countries....where by the way, we can still see the real bite of proverty and the results of no or very little regulations!
I have little faith in a society that won't even see the value of taking care of those who are contributing 40 or more hours a week as being equal to the cost of keeping said worker alive and functioning, bring that one to reality, then we can discuss trusting that society enough to be charitable with the ones who can't work because of old age or physical problems.

we are not china, or india, we will not accept the idea that we should be like china or india, living in polluted cesspools and working for next to nothing while our families go hungry! and begging another ten or so hours for the food our families need!

Originally posted by sweetliberty

This is the post I was referring to. If I'm reading this right, there seems to be an assumpion that unemployment, welfare will increase due to invention. The opposite is true. Sure, people will have to attend some training classes and there could be the elimation of some jobs but progress creates many more jobs than it destroys.
When people aren't harnessed, their imagination is allowed to thrive. These are the job creators.

No it doesn't. In the past this was true because the technology didn't entirely replace human labor. The technologies coming online today will replace human labor not simply augment it. You assume this group of people displaced by the technology is going to be young enough and smart enough to take on more skilled work. Now, you mention retraining. And where are they going to get the money to do that?

Originally posted by neo96

Money spent that every person benefits from is general welfare meaning the prosperity of the nation and provide safety and security so that they can live, and work and prosper.

And that is precisely what Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and Family and Children assistance programs do...benefit the prosperity of the nation.

This is not an idealogical claim, nor a moral one, it is a historical and statistical fact that any economist (absent a paycheck from an idealogical organization) will attest to.

When a family or an individual encounters sickness, disease or economic hardship or loses thier job...we can either allow that family to spiral into bankruptcey, destitution, homelesness, despair or we can catch them as they fall and help them recover and once again contribute to our national economy. It is PROFITABLE to help those people return to the workforce, PROFITABLE to have those children healthy and secure and grow up to contribute to our economy to their full potential.

"Welfare" dollars are SPENT...not saved...and stimulate the economy more so than any other mechanism.

Here is a chart showing what one dollar given by the Federal Government returns to the economy in GDP...which have the biggest return??



THINK....RATHER THAN SIMPLY APE YOUR PARTY LINE...APPROPRIATE WELFARE SPENDING INCREASES GDP MOE THAN TAX BREAKS OR ANY OTHER "STIMULAS"

When you give $1 to people who have lost their jobs and they have run out of savings, those dollars get spent. So Mary gives it to Mike down the street to buy some of his fruits and vegetables. Mike, who relies on customers like Mary, might put 25 cents in the bank but use the rest to buy seed and fertilizer from Tom's store in town. Tom might save a dime of the 75 cents he got from Mike but use the remaining 60 cents for a new pair of glasses.

When economists calculate the gross domestic product, they add up all those transactions (excluding the amount set aside in savings and money that ends up overseas if you buy foreign goods). In this limited example, Mary's $1 has added $2.35 ($1 plus 75 cents plus 60 cents) to the gross domestic product. Yes, it's still just $1, but by passing it along it has helped three people.

This may seem like a strange way of looking at things until you imagine the opposite situation, where the economy goes bad and we stop paying unemployment benefits.

When Mary can't afford to buy anything, Mike loses business, which affects his ability to pay Tom. As the impact ripples through the economy on a larger scale, unemployment spreads. Tax revenues evaporate. Governments must cut services, raise taxes and/or borrow money. That can mean more unemployment, less non-tax money for people to spend and higher government debt, like the kind you would incur if you decided to pay more unemployment benefits.

The Congressional Budget Office report looked at a variety of strategies to boost the economy -- or to keep things from getting worse -- such as investing in infrastructure, reducing income taxes in 2011 or cutting payroll taxes for companies that hire new people. Increasing aid to the unemployed offered the biggest bang for the buck, according to its estimates.

www.politifact.com...

Indigo5 - Thank you for showing these people a very small portion of what I have been trying to say. In our current society welfare IS needed and cannot be eliminated. However, when considering the people participating in this thread, your source means nothing. First we must consider that it is indeed a very true fact ( that even I, a man in "support" of welfare has yet to deny) that many people receiving welfare benefits are not reentering the workforce, and some never enter. Thus "welfare" becomes a form of "life support for those people." BUT these people only represent a portion of people receiving welfare benefits. The anti welfare people, much like any "successful" member of the conservative party, do not seem to grasp that tiny little fact. Most of them believe that damn near everybody that gets any help from "welfare" are leeches trying to live off of others "hard earned" money. Which is simply NOT the truth.

Like I have said many times, there are indeed worthless people leeching off of the system, hell even I think its very fair to claim that there are A LOT of them. Though when acting as if we possess a human brain and not that of a monkey and actually using our human brain, common sense will point any sane man in the direction of believing that when considering everyone that is a recipient of some kind of welfare assistance in one form or another, the "leeches" only represent a fairly small portion. The problem here is that people are not using logical reasoning and jump to the conclusion that the majority of the "welfare money" is going toward providing for other people who are too damn lazy to provide for themselves. I never once said there isn't any money being wasted in such a manner and I've ALWAYS argued that we really do need to do something about that. Yet myself as well as many others who "support" welfare in any way are being thought of as "supporters" of the scumbags, when most of us are no such thing.

So maybe we should "assume" that removing taxes will somehow change our entire society and many of the people requiring welfare assistance will no longer have any need for such assistance. IF we are going to be going under such an "assumption" then we must also understand that any "assumed" results are also just "assumptions" as well.

People aren't paying taxes so they can now use that money in other ways. That's great in theory. How much does the "average" American pay in "taxes," it differs from state to state, as does the cost of living. I made As in both micro and macro economics courses in my university and even I still don't have a very good understanding of this particular topic, so I can't honestly make any claims to what an "average" American is paying each year in taxes these days. I'm betting it isn't very much when compared to their total "before taxes" income though. Meh, let me correct myself, it probably would be a significant amount of money which I'm sure would be very helpful to them had they actually gotten it but in the bigger picture I'm doubting its very much on an individual level. Considering that the "average" American actually is in debt, I'm guessing the money could be used to pay some of that debt but considering how "responsible" the "average" American is, something tells me most of them wouldn't owe that debt had they made "responsible" decisions in the first place. So I'm on the side that doubts those people would be much better off with that little bit of extra money, hell its certainly safe to "assume" that the "average" American would continue to spend that money in the way that they have always done, rather than "save" or "invest" in their future. I'm not saying that some wouldn't be using the extra money more "wisely", I'm simply saying that the "average" "probably" wouldn't. Good luck proving that wrong...

So "maybe" the "average" person isn't going to be spending the money they're supposedly "saving" wisely. Well surely the upper class would have much more money now available to them that they "might" be able to put into creating jobs and helping those in need. Wait a second, where do we live again? I live in America, also known to some as a nation of greed. I suppose it isn't fair to judge on a hypothetical situation of which none of us is able to provide sufficient evidence to properly support or oppose, so both sides have to either "assume" or base opinions on this merely on faith. It can certainly be argued that faith and assumptions are more or less the same thing in this kind of debate and neither offer irrefutable "evidence" to support the claim. Irrefutable evidence, something none of us can provide for or against an opinion on how the upper class would use the money they are saving from not having to pay all of those taxes. ------------------------

Running outta words/time, will pick up when I complete these real world responsibilities. Please refrain from commenting as I am unfinished with an incomplete opinion.

reply to post by Indigo5

And that is precisely what Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and Family and Children assistance programs do...benefit the prosperity of the nation.

No they do not they are funded through theft Social Secuirty is taking from someone else to fund their retirement considering a person is only paying 6% and someone else is paying the other 6% and then that person who receives it only get's paid after age 65 til however long they live, which means people are paying 40,50 years before they ever get any benefit.

Then Medicare is automatically deducted from that social security check which means one government program is paying for another one

Unemployment is stolen from the employer who is already paying for that other persons social security and then gets hit with another tax to pay for that free money for 99 weeks.

Theft is theft and it does nothing for the general welfare of the nation it does not/

HINK....RATHER THAN SIMPLY APE YOUR PARTY LINE...APPROPRIATE WELFARE SPENDING INCREASES GDP MOE THAN TAX BREAKS OR ANY OTHER "STIMULAS"

Yeah how about thinking with common sense instead of political ideology that has proven that more people are consuming the welfare of others instead of generating their own that has become a detriment to the general welfare of this country considering a 16 trillion deficits and those unfunded liablilties now account for over 120 trillion and will continually go up with age progression.

reply to post by neo96


You just responded to historical facts and data...with ranting opinion about "theft".

That kind of disconnect leaves little room for discussion.

reply to post by Indigo5


I responded to the current state of the union with facts welfare in any form is theft and do not work

It does not work.

reply to post by doomedtoday


As to fraud estimates...
Foodstamps

The national rate of fraud dropped from about 4 cents per dollar in 1993 to about 1 cent per dollar in 2008, the USDA estimated.

abcnews.go.com...

Unemployment fraud? Less than 2% in 2002.
waysandmeans.house.gov...

Fraud when compared to benefit to GDP? Fraud could be 10 times as prevelant and we still would get a better return on "Welfare" than tax breaks to GDP. As it stands less people cheat on "welfare" than they do on thier taxes.

Fraud is an exagerration that affords cover to those folks who are making a social darwinian/idealogical argument that doesn't sit well with some of thier more honest Christian base...a little BS helps the hypocracy go down.

Originally posted by neo96
reply to post by Indigo5

 

I responded to the current state of the union with facts welfare in any form is theft and do not work

It does not work.

Paying business management huge sums from tax payer bailouts is not theft?

I guess it is only theft if you want your cake and eat it to.........

The level of greed in america is mind-boggling!

Someone insults me, I insult them back and the mods delete my post.

I guess only right wing extremism is tolerated under the cloak of "freedom and liberty"

Conservatives astroturfing as libertarians. True libertarians are fiscal conservatives and social liberals. This is the truth!

reply to post by EarthCitizen07

Paying business management huge sums from tax payer bailouts is not theft? I guess it is only theft if you want your cake and eat it to......... The level of greed in america is mind-boggling!

Go on and quote just where i said that and just because one side does it that means the justification of the welfare state.

Right the level of America level of greed is mind boggling.

Originally posted by neo96

Yeah how about thinking with common sense instead of political ideology that has proven that more people are consuming the welfare of others instead of generating their own that has become a detriment to the general welfare of this country considering a 16 trillion deficits and those unfunded liablilties now account for over 120 trillion and will continually go up with age progression.

edit on 31-5-2012 by neo96 because: (no reason given)

Yeah. You keep blaming welfare while I keep blaming business and the military. Fair enough? We can go till next year doing this. I really have no problem!!

Originally posted by neo96
reply to post by EarthCitizen07

 

Paying business management huge sums from tax payer bailouts is not theft? I guess it is only theft if you want your cake and eat it to......... The level of greed in america is mind-boggling!

Go on and quote just where i said that and just because one side does it that means the justification of the welfare state.

Right the level of America level of greed is mind boggling.

When people don't make enough to live a decent life that is what happens. They need the welfare state because business fails. The jobs are going overseas. There is too much automation.

Why is this difficult for people to comprehend? Honest question even if hate the poor..........

reply to post by Maslo

Yes, this is outrageous and such bans should be repealed. Of course it has nothing to do with welfare state, thats a non-sequitur. I dont see any reason why welfare state should mandate banning feeding of the homeless. In most welfare states, feeding homeless is legal.

It is no where near a non-sequitur! How can you logically come to the conclusion that government criminalizing charities for feeding the poor, while they're simultaneously doling out food stamps and cash assistance in the form of a welfare state is non related?

Feeding homeless, by the way, needs no legality, as it is a right to do and not a civil right, but an unalienable right to help others. Only an advocate for the welfare state would declare that in "most welfare states feeding the homeless is legal".

reply to post by ExPostFacto


I not only agree that our own ability to provide for oneself is in the hands of others in this modern culture, I would go further and say it always has been. I've made the point, perhaps even in this thread, that our use of the internet was not accomplished by our own provisions, but from the collective effort of many. Technological advance does not change the fundamentals of life, they only enhance them. Humans are a social creature and humanities survival thus far has been because of our ability to rely on each other in times of need.

Governments, however, cannot provide the basic necessities of life without dramatically curtailing liberty and at that will inevitably fail. It is demonstrably so that all closed systems tend towards entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics declares this so in relation to the chemical reactions of heat systems, but one only look at any closed system for a while in order to recognize the tendency towards entropy, if not all ready entropic. The welfare state is a closed system, and it is clearly headed towards entropy. Another word for entropy is chaos.

In terms of regulation of industry, the rise of coporatism has shown that certainly corporations must be regulated. Indeed, their very nature demands it. Corporations are chartered entities and exist by the good graces of the state, and that there begins the regulatory process of corporations. That Congress would jump in on the act and define corporations as a person - contrary to dumbed down popular belief the SCOTUS did not grant corporations personhood, Congress did that - only makes sense because corporations require regulation. However, regulation should not be equated with collusion.

Conversely, the individual sole proprietor should only fall under the purview of regulatory schemes if there is a compelling reason to regulate that individual's commerce. A sole proprietor delivering toxic materials across state lines quite clearly is under Congress' purview, and arguably even under the states of which that sole proprietor resides. An attorney practicing law? I see no compelling reason to regulate an attorney, but I can certainly see the damage caused by regulating that attorney. A doctor? There might be compelling reasons to regulate a doctor, but such regulation doesn't make that doctors patients any safer from that doctors incompetence. Architects and construction? Again, there may be compelling reasons to regulate the home builder or builder of buildings, but to what end? If that end is simply ensuring that a home builder or building builder is acting ethically and doing their best to build the safest home or building possible, then this regulation is good, but once we've granted government this authority how do we keep them from abusing it and using their granted authority to close the market and keep individuals from competing with corporations?

I wholeheartedly disagree that we have to undo social structures in order to limit the authority government holds over the governed. In fact, there is indeed a correlation between the rise of big government and the decline of communities and a change in social structures, but even in the face of that, basic social structures that have existed sine time immemorial continue to survive. Reducing governments authority and limiting their actions will not harm people nearly as much as the harm caused by allowing government to grow to the untenable size it has.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

It is no where near a non-sequitur! How can you logically come to the conclusion that government criminalizing charities for feeding the poor, while they're simultaneously doling out food stamps and cash assistance in the form of a welfare state is non related?

How are they logically related? Is there some logical contradiction in having welfare, and allowing feeding homeless at the same time? No. So they are not related. Its perfectly possible to have a welfare state where feeding homeless is allowed. Most are like that.

Besides, if you research the motivations behind such laws, you find out its intended to simply discourage homeless people from congregating in larger numbers and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods. Not some grand conspiracy to keep them on welfare and dependant on the state. As I said, thats a non-sequitur, not supported by any theoretical arguments or evidence.