Oh, Newt! Say it isn't so.

[Boxlicker101]

I guarantee you, Box, the reductions in the 'welfare state' only affected the people who needed its support.

Same thing happened here in Ontario. People like me got fucked up the ass. The cheats simply adapted and cheated the new system.

Maybe "welfare state" isn't the right term to use, but I think most Americans know what I mean. The changes affected people who were abusing the system, and making careers out of living on welfare. This was welfare in the United States, by the way, not Canada. People with disabilities weren't affected all that much, except they had to keep showing they actually had those disabilities. The most disliked and abused part of it was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was the part most changed.

Generally speaking, 15 or 16 year old girls would get pregnant, drop out of high school, have their babies, and start collecting welfare. Usually, they would never do a lick of work, except to the degree that taking care of chhildren was work. Even that, they did poorly, mostly ignoring them or passing them off to their own mothers. Usually, they would have several, because the more children they had, the more money they would get. Whatever work, legal or otherwise, they did would usually be paid for under the table, because earned income would reduce their welfare payments.

When the daughters got old enough, they would have children of their own, and start collecting welfare payments of their own, continuing the cycle. Sometimes, generation after generation lived off the taxpayers. They didn't live well, but it was a very relaxed life.

I don't want to imply that ALL single mothers followed this route, of course. There were many who saw the welfare trap for what it was, went back to school and to work, and became productivfe members of society. The Contract with America wanted everybody to do that, to the best of their ability.

 

[sophia jane]

Maybe "welfare state" isn't the right term to use, but I think most Americans know what I mean. The changes affected people who were abusing the system, and making careers out of living on welfare. This was welfare in the United States, by the way, not Canada. People with disabilities weren't affected all that much, except they had to keep showing they actually had those disabilities. The most disliked and abused part of it was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was the part most changed.

Generally speaking, 15 or 16 year old girls would get pregnant, drop out of high school, have their babies, and start collecting welfare. Usually, they would never do a lick of work, except to the degree that taking care of chhildren was work. Even that, they did poorly, mostly ignoring them or passing them off to their own mothers. Usually, they would have several, because the more children they had, the more money they would get. Whatever work, legal or otherwise, they did would usually be paid for under the table, because earned income would reduce their welfare payments.

When the daughters got old enough, they would have children of their own, and start collecting welfare payments of their own, continuing the cycle. Sometimes, generation after generation lived off the taxpayers. They didn't live well, but it was a very relaxed life.

I don't want to imply that ALL single mothers followed this route, of course. There were many who saw the welfare trap for what it was, went back to school and to work, and became productivfe members of society. The Contract with America wanted everybody to do that, to the best of their ability.

I wish I had the energy to debate this with you, but I just don't right now. I will say that while I am in total agreement that there was plenty of abuses of the welfare system (and there still are now), the stereotype you portray in your post is just that: a stereotype. The reality, and the research, shows that 1. women on welfare did not have more kids than women not on welfare 2. that welfare alone did not provide enough money to live a "relaxed" life and 3. most women on welfare were not trying to abuse the system.
Sure it happened, and I won't dispute that. But there's definitely been definitve research done, particularly about welfare moms having more kids, that show how wrong those stereotypes are.
And while we're talking about welfare reform (which you don't mention but which you imply helped fix the problems of welfare), let me just say this- pushing people to get off welfare is great. I applaud all efforts to help low-income women get jobs. But pushing welfare moms into low paying, no benefits work (which is all many of them are qualified for) doesn't really help. It particularly doesn't help all those kids living in poverty, who don't have enough food to eat or clothes that fit or any real stability. If we're going to really tackle the issue of getting people off welfare, these women need better access to education and job training and child care. (I know Roxanne is sooo not gonna like me saying that. ). In Virginia alone, there are over 10,000 people on the waiting list to get child care subsidies. These are women who want to work, who do not want to be on welfare, but they can't afford child care and pay rent.
So, if you want to applaud your friends in the GOP who pushed welfare reform and wanted these women to work, fine. But do it with the facts and realize that all those welfare reforms did not help reduce poverty. AFDC may not be around in the same fashion, but food stamps and Medicaid are growing because all those women who used to be on traditional welfare are now making minimum wage and barely scraping by.


(can y'all tell I just wrote a paper on welfare reform? )

 

[shereads]

Maybe "welfare state" isn't the right term to use, but I think most Americans know what I mean. The changes affected people who were abusing the system, and making careers out of living on welfare

and people whose careers were cut short by layoffs, who weren't able to find work before their unemployment compensation ran out; and people who were not able to hold down a job due to a mental incapacity like borderline retardation, an inability to learn new tasks, or simple laziness without the political connections necessary to be elected President.

There will always be a few tens of thousands of these exceptional cases: ordinary men and women with extraordinarily bad luck. For them, a 'career' on the welfare rolls was once an alternative to prostitution or homelessness. It's sad, in a way. But that's why God invented cardboard refrigerator boxes.

What's really shocking is that so many Americans still lack the foresight to be born with trust funds or get lucky in the stock market. With a hefty financial buffer or even a half-intelligent blackmail scheme, no American need ever find himself in need of a handout. Or a job, for that matter.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Until Reagan came along and made it okay to vilify the poor for their plight, the focus of public debate was over how best to help them.

Now, it seems, we stumble over ourselves to marginalize the poor, and we rationalize it by focusing on the few who misuse the system, at a fraction of the cost of a senseless war and tax breaks for people who don't need them.

Here's Matt Taibbi's take on our budget priorities, as articulated by BushCo. Highlights are mine (I gave up - read the whole article ). Sen. Bernie Sanders' (Soc., VT) remarks on the Senate floor that Matt refers to are here.

[snip] On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion. Or how about this: If the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

ESTATE TAX BENEFICIARY

Cox family (Cox cable TV): Receives $9.7 billion tax break

PROGRAM CUT

Education: $1.5 billion in cuts

ESTATE TAX BENEFICIARY

Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores): Receives $826.5 million tax break

PROGRAM CUT

Comm. Service Block Grant: Eliminated; $630 million cut

ESTATE TAX BENEFICIARY

Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines): Receives $468.4 million break

PROGRAM CUT

LIHEAP (heating oil to poor): $420 million cut

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks. Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the former CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged consumers, with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January of 2001. There is a direct correlation between the avarice of oil company executives and the increased demand for federal aid for heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and yet the federal government wants to reward these same executives for raising prices on the backs of consumers.

Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of budgets that Bush has sent to the Hill not only this year but this whole century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies and defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly benefit from those subsidies. Thus you're not cutting spending -- you're just cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be 1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is something different from traditional conservatism and something different from big-government liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the state into a huge, ever-expanding instrument for converting private savings into corporate profit.

That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain fucking offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour...I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.

I also don't remember reading much about this year's budget. It was a story for about half a minute when it came out two weeks ago. It barely made TV newscasts, and even when it did, only the broad strokes made it on air. There was some fuss about the Alternative Minimum Tax and a mild uproar over the fact that the 2008 budget failed to account for estimates of the costs for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But overall, the budget was a non-starter as a news story. As it does every year, it takes a back seat to hot-button issues like gay marriage, the latest election scandal, etc. Already, the 2008 election presidential campaign has gotten far more ink than the 2008 budget. As entertainment, bullshit politics always triumphs over real politics.

Here's the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If the Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune actually needed the news media to work better than it does now, believe me, it would work better. But they have no such need, because the system is working just fine for them as is. The people it's failing are the rest of us, and most of the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse or watch Britney Spears hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars are actually paying for.

Shit, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us? People that dumb don't deserve to have money.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Boxlicker101
Maybe "welfare state" isn't the right term to use, but I think most Americans know what I mean. The changes affected people who were abusing the system, and making careers out of living on welfare

and people whose careers were cut short by layoffs, who weren't able to find work before their unemployment compensation ran out; and people who were not able to hold down a job due to a mental incapacity like borderline retardation, an inability to learn new tasks, or simple laziness without the political connections necessary to be elected President.

There will always be a few tens of thousands of these exceptional cases: ordinary men and women with extraordinarily bad luck. For them, a 'career' on the welfare rolls was once an alternative to prostitution or homelessness. It's sad, in a way. But that's why God invented cardboard refrigerator boxes.

What's really shocking is that so many Americans still lack the foresight to be born with trust funds or get lucky in the stock market. With a hefty financial buffer or even a half-intelligent blackmail scheme, no American need ever find himself in need of a handout. Or a job, for that matter.

You are quoting me out of context, She. For anybody who is wondering, this is the rest of the first paragraph of my post.

This was welfare in the United States, by the way, not Canada. People with disabilities weren't affected all that much, except they had to keep showing they actually had those disabilities. The most disliked and abused part of it was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was the part most changed.

For the rest of what I said, which was about AFDC, you can read the post directly above yours. At one time, laziness was sometimes considered to be a disability, but I don't think it is anymore. It wouldn't have been called "laziness" of course. It would have been called a "psychological aversion to work" or something like that.

People who are laid off can USUALLY find some other job, maybe even some other kind of work. It may mean a drastic reduction in their standards of living, but it should be better than welfare.

 

[Huckleman2000]

...For the rest of what I said, which was about AFDC, you can read the post directly above yours. At one time, laziness was sometimes considered to be a disability, but I don't think it is anymore. It wouldn't have been called "laziness" of course. It would have been called a "psychological aversion to work" or something like that.

People who are laid off can USUALLY find some other job, maybe even some other kind of work. It may mean a drastic reduction in their standards of living, but it should be better than welfare.

You get Social Security to supplement your retirement, Box?
Assuming normal life expectancy, you'll get far more than you paid in, even allowing for a decent level of return on your contributions.
Careful where you're pointing that 'living off the government teat' finger.