I Miss Bush

[Shawnee123]

http://www.cellar.org/showpost.php?p...postcount=6205

It's OK. kero's hubby found a job!

[kerosene]

It's true, he has found a good paying job. Thanks, Shaw.

But in May, we were pretty desperate. My cleaning business was not paying the bills. Labor Ready appears to be private. I think we found out that they receive some kind of funding from the govt or maybe just that their projects are usually govt projects? He did apply at many temp agencies. We live in Western Weld County, though and there is a glut of labor in this area, it seems.

His new job is as a consultant for a state agency.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

What you think is necessary to survival, and what can be shown/proved to be necessary to your survival are very different matters. As Sam pointed out: it is not government's job to provide each individual with a car. It is government's job to ensure that there is a functioning public transport system, accessible to all and with routes that aren't profitable given subsidies to make sure no one community is left unserved.

For every person served there will be an equal or greater number who think they are not being served. It is a snake eating it's tail.

It is also not government's job to ensure that I personally have a PC in my house and a broadband connection. It is however, in my opinion, government's job to ensure that there are public terminals, in libraries for example, available to all.

Paid for by whom?

It is also government's job to ensure that all schoolchildren are given access to such technology in order that they are not disadvantaged by a lack of computer literacy.

Paid for by whom, and who should be responsible to ensure that they are all computer literate?

To me, it seems obvious that it is in my nation's interest for as many people as possible to be able to participate in society and the economy.

Which is why I believe that in order for them to be invested they should all pay taxes at a the same percentage as everyone else, because if they are not invested they will treat such benefits as a right.

It is of social value that even the least resourced of us has a standard of living above and beyond abject and hopeless poverty. It is of economic value that those people who are at risk of being excluded from the economy altogether, be helped to retain an economic presence. So, for example, foodstamps make a lot less sense to me than a cash benefit payment which allows the recipient to 'spend' within the economy, without being effectively coralled into a closed and deeply uncompetetive, separate tier of that economy.

So they can spend it on cigs or alcohol or drugs?

As a socialist, I believe in a very basic premise: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

With that statement alone you could not support wealth redistribution than, because if my ability to pay for my needs exceeds yours than I really have no obligation to make sure that you have nappies.

Now obviously, in practice life is not that simple. People are not that simple. People do not always do what is best for themselves, or the rest of us. And without an impetus to work, or contribute, good intentions eventually dissolve into selfishness. Badly handled, assistance can exacerbate distress, or sanction selfishness to the detriment of the whole.

Which is a great argument for the continuation of controlled support in the form of food stamps and other directed support.

At the end of the day it is a matter of balance and judegement. Weighing up the social and economic harm of having large swathes of underclass alienated from the mainstream of the economy and engaged instead in a kind of sub-economy, from which are drawn few or no taxes, and which carry little or no consumer weight. Essentially, weighing up the harm of allowing people and families to fail to such an extent that they are no longer able to function as effective members of society.

Yes, they are Zero Liability Voters.

At the same time, weighing up the social and economic harm of giving assistance, of sanctioning a self-selected exclusion from the active economy, by a few, in order to prevent the unwanted exclusion of a much greater group (imo).

And further supporting a class of people who have no incentive to move ahead, move forward, or take responsibility for themselves, as long as the umbrella of the Government will always be there for them they don't have any incentive to do better by themselves. Right?

Most western countries, the US included, have got a handle on the idea that they don't actually want large numbers of people starving on the streets. It is not desirable that we have children chasing tourists in the train stations, begging for coin. So, to varying degrees we implement safety nets. But because we wish to deter as many people as possible from seeking those safety nets, we make the assistance offered unpalatable and humiliating.

Agreed. A good start to get people off the public dole.

This seems a retrograde step to me. If the assistance on offer is unpalatable and humliating, then those who have no choice but to seek it for long periods can become psychologically damaged by the experience. Not only have they become excluded by circumstance from the economy, but they have also become excluded from mainstream society and culture. Far from encouraging greater levels of effort on their part, this is actually more likely to compound the problem: their life becomes demotivating, depressing, and deskilling. The ritual humilliations involved in accessing such assistance serve to damage self-confidence, increase the social gaps, and entrench the individual (and even whole families) in inactivty. It makes them less likely to get through an interview successfully, both because they are less able to finance jobsearch, travel, interview clothes and so on, but also because a lack of self-confidence and self-worth do not make for good interviews.

Oh this is rich. So now it is no longer their fault and they have no responsibility for their own lives or predicament now it is the fault of and a failure of the government because they did not dig them out of the holes they put themselves in. BS. This where your, and the other socialists, thinking fails IMHO. It is not the role of government to do this. It is the responsibility of the individual.

You said at one point in this discussion ( I think) that the answer is not to throw money at the problem. I see things a little differently. I see the past twenty-five years as a race to the bottom. Lower and lower benefits, harsher and harsher conditions, greater and greater levels of approbation. We have long since dispensed with the carrot and have been using bigger and bigger sticks. Yet, no matter how harsh we make life on welfare; no matter how humiliating we make the process; no matter how pitful the sum given; no matter how many people we exclude from assistance, the need has not diminished.

And I see it differently. We have given more and more money to deal with the issues and they have not improved. The only place that I see a major failure in our society (the US) is that our mental health system has collapsed for the most seriously ill. Why? Because our inpatient mental health facilities have close and moved to a significantly underfunded out-patient system. This has been a dismal failure. The prison population is populated by an untreated group of mentally ill patients who lack the support to get treatment in the utopian model of out-patient care. Hence an increase in homelessness and a never ending cycle of movement into and out of the prison system and a life on the streets. This needs funding and attention to make a small but significant dent in the system of and cycle of dependence.