As I said before…J.K. Rowling was at one point getting the “handout” from your Brit. govt…It’s true that there are people that just wont work or contribute in any way to the society…Still, I still think we should pay for their lodging and the food they put in their kids mouths. We do this for the criminals, so why not for the lazy too. And Why? Because we can. Because we have made a model of society in which giving a few percent more of our wealth into the social safety net makes it possible to make 10 or 20 % more …NO ONE misses a few percent if they take an actual step back and look at the larger picture.
[QUOTE=“bobmaninc;489128”]
I can vouch for this. My brother has been on unemployment for ever. It is required in FL to look for 5 jobs a week and he dont. He gets money from the government, food stamps and I dont even want to know what else.
I was laid off in the end of febuary and was approved for unemployment. I have done my work searches and everything uncle sam asks. Do you know how much I have got in umemployment? 0 zip nothing. They tell me oh dont worry we will back pay you. Lol yeah when hell freezes over. Good thing I dont have debt and can survive. But damn its not right. I have had to cut back lower bills. Hell I dont even have a phone right now as its a luxury and when its comes to paying a mortgage I get it. A phone or a roof over my head. But I see others go buy crack and want the government to buy there phone and mortgage and hell they hungry to so might as well get them something to eat to.[/QUOTE]
I know that feeling bob,my girlfriend as just started horse riding lessons along with her old school friend and of course would love a horse but despite working our butts off for the last twenty years including having 2 businesses we just can’t do it without sacrificing other things like food and the car,now her friend who as never worked since school and claims to be unfit for work and as to go for medicals for a fictitious stomach or back pain(not really sure what she is claiming is her condition because she knows how my girlfriend feels on this subject and doesn’t reveal much)has (after 5 riding lessons)gone and bought a pony for £500,rent a paddock for it (£80 per month) spent approx £500 on boots ,hats and other sh*t for her and her 2 daughters ( also having riding lessons at £20 a pop). The pony she bought for £500 is too young/small to ride yet so she is looking to buy another to ride while this one grows .now you think that’s bad ,throw In that she smokes at least 30 a day ,has a car,as a disabled parking permit to park anywhere free ( apparently you have to prove you can’t walk approx 50 yards).she as a house rent free,6 dogs to feed, runs 3 mobile phones,laptop ,Internet,paying for her daughter to go abroad this summer( 3 years since our last vacation to Florida).she don’t have a boyfriend or rich parents,she don’t sell drugs or her ass or anything else to scrape an income ,but she is very capable of almost anything ,I know she as plastered the majority of her house,she is very skillful at sewing and creating things,helped my girlfriend decorating,basically she would be an asset to most employers but why bother when she gets f**k knows how much from the govt.
It makes my blood boil.
Rant over
I’m all for my taxes helping out people and communities in need. However, where I draw that line is when you see teenagers thinking that all they’ve got to do is get pregnant and the state will look after them for the next 16 years with housing and child benefits. It has a knock on effect, these kids are often dragged up, no role model, no daddy, no social responsibility which leads to a reoccurring problem. Yes, it’s not the kids fault in the early days, we take a lot from our parents, until it becomes our own responsibility to know right from wrong. So if we must feed them and house them, ok, but these people often walk around in nice clothes, updating their facebook statuses with how they’ve had a great time Mexico! So tell me if that few few percent (which is actually 40% of my wage) is not being abused in completely the wrong way?
The lazy should be left with no disposable income and their food obtained from a food bank so they don’t go spending it on cigarettes and alcohol.
Criminals again, within the prison walls should only have access to food and drink, unless actually doing some paid work within the compounds.
There we go. 100 % agreed!
Had to pop my head in to see what konan had agreed too! Impossible they said… IMPOSSIBLE!!!
As I said before - Am not a liberal but a pragmatist really…
That makes two of us.
Was only a joke, I enjoy many of the opinions on this thread, yours included. If I could subscribe to people rather than threads, I would.
Wow, that mean I achieved something, haha.
Comment reconsidered after Hogarste drank coffee.
Your damn right I did. Have I not paid for them for the last 12 years. Would you not try since you should qualify. Principles are feeding my family are 2 different things. If anything it reenforces those principles. As the people that qualify are pretty much worthless. I dont qualify because I have a mortgage payment and not rent. Whats the difference if you dont pay you will still be out on the street. Oh yeah thats right I also decided not to pay for my phone so I could pay by more important bills. Yeah that disqualifies me to. In the end they can keep there money. I have never needed it and dont know. It would help but it wont stop me from doing what I have to do.
And please leave the Jesus bit out of a political thread. I have been saved so not need to try to preach some crap to me.
Oh, I see, “other people are worthless” ,it’s only you that’s the one who should be reaping govt. benefits! Thank you for summing up the whole “conservative” movement in this one sentence.
Forget about Jesus words then, since you’re saved and all…It’s the “Golden rule” that we should all strive to go by: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself!
Also, it’s strange that you haven’t found a job so far…Strange because there seem to be so many, according to you guys, that the “lazy” people pass on…You’re not lazy, are you bob?!
Jesus also said “It’s the game of life. Do I win or do I lose? One day they’re gonna shut the game down. I gotta have as much fun and go around the board as many times as I can before it’s my turn to leave.”
Lawl Jesus
It’s the black Jesus …So don’t laugh!
[QUOTE=“konan;489213”]
As I said before…J.K. Rowling was at one point getting the “handout” from your Brit. govt…It’s true that there are people that just wont work or contribute in any way to the society…Still, I still think we should pay for their lodging and the food they put in their kids mouths. We do this for the criminals, so why not for the lazy too. And Why? Because we can. Because we have made a model of society in which giving a few percent more of our wealth into the social safety net makes it possible to make 10 or 20 % more …NO ONE misses a few percent if they take an actual step back and look at the larger picture.[/QUOTE]
This post provides a lot of insight to your philosophy of government.
You seem to have an inherent distrust of the government when it comes to foreign policy, yet you somehow think the govt is trustworthy at home?
Have you ever wondered if giving people a social Safety net perpetuates their dependence on govt and keeps them locked into a certain way of life? What incentive do you have to be a productive member of society if you can just sit around at home and play Xbox, with enough EBT and welfare to get by?
And who the heck are you to utile the coercion of govt to steal money from one group and hand it out to another group? That’s theft. Why not get rid of the middleman and have poor people take money from the rich directly?
Lets not forget that 70% of welfare money doesn’t even go to the poor. The majority of welfare money gets lost to bureaucracy. Makes sense that bureaucrats would always tout more welfare when their employment is dependent on it.
A federal social safety net is not constitutional, but I’m not going to argue about the law because clearly a lot of people here think the rules should be ignored when the rules don’t conform to their personal bias. I don’t. I think most forms of socialism are full on retarded, yet I have clearly states on numerous occasions that individual states and communities can constitutionally enact socialist policies as per the 10th amendment.
That said, all these social programs and entitlements that you are stumping for are not only unfounded, they are bleeding wealth and productivity. You could fleece the rich and take every dime from every producer and these programs would still be in dire shape.
Even if they were moral, (they aren’t) there is no money for these immense amounts of entitlements and welfare. None. We have MASSIVE ufounded liabilities that we will NEVER be able to afford.
Right now my parents and practically all their friends are discussing how excited they are to finally be able to take social security. They bring up friends and friends of friends who are getting on it. The entire freaking baby boom generation is about to poor onto these systems and guess what, thanks to govt distortions and the consumerist lifestyles they have been living, they don’t have much retirement. My parents have no retirement. My mom cashed out her tiny 401k during the recession. They are pretty much dependent on me becoming affluent or social security now.
The money they spent on the social security tax is gone.
My parents don’t have much wealth. They are under accumulators of wealth. They don’t have nearly as much as they should. Same with most baby boomers. And these people are about to overwhelm a system that is already broke. They could have accumulated plenty of wealth, but they spent most of it on a lifestyle that was not sustainable and didn’t have their future in perspective. And why would they? The government’s got your back right? “We paid into the system” lol…
This entire Safety net is predicated on the governments ability to borrow money at cheap rates. The social security trust fund is empty. Its filled with bonds and bernanke dollars. That can’t last forever and it would be foolish to think so.
We are living on borrowed time. An entire generation of people, like sheep to the slaughter, assumed they didn’t need to worry about the future because they would get benefits and retirement in their elder years from the government. The government has made a lot of promises that it can’t possibly cash and THAT is morally wrong.
They are thoroughly dependent on the government now. Guess what’s going to happen to them when the govt can’t borrow money to pay for their entitlements? They are in deep ****.
What can possibly be done?
Print money? How could that possibly work? They are already changing the way they measure the CPI so cost of living adjustments aren’t as high and the government doesn’t have to adjust social security checks and other entitlements for inflation. Elders are already getting screwed.
Tax the rich more? Lol… Perhaps that would work if the US govt could tax every rich person in the world. That is entirely unrealistic.
Make everybody who isn’t on social security become wage slaves for all the elders?
Big government can seem like a good thing to people who are oblivious to the unintended consequences. It’s not.
Lol Warren Buffet and all these other rich liberals are sooo heroic…
Wanting their taxes raised, how patriotic… (The patriots actually fought the British because they wanted more taxes!)
Warren buffet and these other “patriots” that want our taxes raised sure don’t practice what they preach. They could easily allow the government to take more of their money by writing a check to the treasury as a gift… But they don’t because they’re a bunch of hypocrites.
Warren buffet wants his taxes raised… So then why is he fighting the IRS over 1 billion dollars? Why not just let them have it? He will still have what…? Like $49 billion dollars?
It’s so easy to claim you want higher taxes when you have already made all your wealth.
And it’s funny how people think “Oh, how noble of them!”
Ignorance abounds.
[QUOTE=“konan;489009”] For your country? Just go back to the most prosperous time in your history and calculate what everyone paid in taxes…[/QUOTE]
The rich paid no income tax at the time when we were creating the most prosperity…lol. The rich didn’t pay an income tax until 1913 and when it was created, the top rate was 7% and the amendment was sold to the public as a tax that would only soak the rich, but it didn’t take long for the government to make the middle class pay taxes that were even higher than the 7% that was only supposed to affect the rich.
The 91% income tax rate of the 1950s was basically symbolic… Nobody who was sane paid that. The average millionaire from the 1950s had lower marginal income tax rates than the average millionaire of today. If we were really going to go back to the effective tax rates of the 1950s, there would have to be a large tax cut for the rich. There were so many deductions and loopholes back then, that they paid less than they do today.
In the 1980s most of those deductions and exemptions were removed, so now there aren’t as many ways to avoid the taxes. The economy of the 1950s wasn’t good because of high taxes, it was good because those taxes were easily avoidable and the government was significantly smaller.
Now we have all this government and nobody is paying for it entirely. The rich are pulling plenty of weight. They are already paying more than their “fair share”. ("Fair Share is such a retarded buzzword that is often touted by A: people who want to be charitable with other people’s money or B: People who already have made their millions and tout it to be popular in their liberal circles)
The middle class and the working poor are getting a lot of government for basically nothing. What has to happen is the middle class needs to start paying significantly more to fund it, or we eliminate it and shrink the government back into it’s constitutional bounds.
In 1958 the top 3% paid 29% of all federal taxes. Today the top 3% pay 51% of all federal taxes. And you say that isn’t fair…lmao. You know what really isn’t fair? Having your wealth confiscated to win the votes of people who want to confiscate even more of your wealth. And think about it for a second. What did those “evil” rich people do to accumulate their wealth? They created things or provides services that make our lives better.
I have a laptop. I’d say it has made my life better.
The process of assembling that laptop made people wealthy. The LCD screen on that laptop made people wealthy. The internal parts of that laptop made people wealthy.
Computer chips for example. Selling and manufacturing computer chips has made people wealthy. Providing the silicone used in those computer chips made people wealthy. Transporting the silicone to the company that manufactures the chips has made people wealthy. The tools used to extract the silicone made people wealthy. The parts and materials of those tools made people wealthy. The parts and materials of the parts in the tools made people wealthy. The tools and materials used to make the tools and machines that made those parts, made people wealthy.
And that’s just for the computer chips. I haven’t talked about the hard drive, Power Supply, Cooling system and all the other parts inside laptops.
All that for one brand of laptop… There are plenty of different brands of computers and computer internals that have made other people wealthy.
These people have paid their fair share by making the world a better place and adding value to my life and the lives of others. All the people that became wealthy in the process of making my life better have paid their fair share.
I could care less what they do with their money, they freaking earned it and they should be able to keep it, without having the government stealing it to bomb goat herders in Afghanistan, bail out companies in bed with the government, dish out to bureaucrats or give to some lazy fool who, instead of trying to better himself, spends the majority of his time playing Call of Duty while receiving a plethora of money that other people earned. The money that is inflated erodes the wealth of other people. All debt is, is future taxes or inflation so that will be coming from the productive class as well.
Oh, and the majority of “evil millionaires” don’t flaunt their wealth, not that it matters.
Only 25% of millionaires own a current year vehicle. Only 25% of millionaires own luxury brand cars.
Most millionaires are very frugal. Most people living in lavish houses and driving the latest model BMWs are not millionaires. Those are usually just people with nice jobs who chose to live a hyper consumption, lifestyle. If they were to lose their jobs, they would be screwed because of their lack of savings. And this can partially be blamed on the government discouraging savings.
It seems like the type of millionaire that flaunts their wealth is the Hollywood elites… It’s ironic because these people are generally the ones who support the most socialist policies… While wearing $5,000 clothes and sporting millions of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery when they get out of their private http for the interview… Not that I have a problem with that, I just find it disgustingly hypocritical.
Meanwhile, the dear leader of our country is a multimillionaire and what has he produced? Umm, he has produced a lot of civilian deaths in places like Pakistan, he has helped produced a lot of debt… He’s produced a few birdies while golfing his a** off. He hasn’t produced any wealth though… Although he sure has transferred a lot of it… Whether it be from producers to welfare leaches, or to bureaucrats or to his lobbyist buddies.
The same story can be said of most of our elect officials who you are so greatly in love with and think should run the most minute aspects of our lives when they aren’t shearing our wealth like we are a bunch of tax sheep, while acting as if that somehow makes you a charitable individual.
Actually I suppose you are charitable… With other people’s money. And your favorite place to donate money is to the bank accounts of bureaucrats, lobbyists and people who refuse to work.
jolly you should rant more often i enjoy reading it. And quoting you on my facebook status’
Looks like a whole chapter of a book for me to examine… :34: I will try to respond to it point by point though! I just wish you added sources of this info. Would have certainly made it easier for me to give a rebuttal.