I'm from the South. I'm also a high school dropout. I won't go into the various vices I've had over the years since, but suffice to say there have been many. After dropping out and putzing around my hometown for a few years, I did a few years in the Army, then a couple of years as a contractor. I traveled the world for a while, and when the money ran out, I decided to go back to school and to get serious about it. For the last few years, I've busted my ass working and going to school full time. I started in remedial math, and last semester, i finished the last of the core math/science classes necessary to be awarded a degree in engineering. I have a very high GPA as a result of all of my hard work, and I'll be transferring to a top ten school next fall to finish up the last few years.
I have an old friend, one I used to share vices with back during our high school days. While I was doing time in the Army, he was learning a trade. After spending a few years in that trade, he felt that he'd become good enough at it to strike out for himself. He focused on making the customer happy, and did the best job he possibly could, every time. Fast forward to today, and he now makes six figures a year.
In five years, I'll be making six figures too. We took different paths to get there, but we will both move up at least one layer on the socioeconomic strata within our lifetimes. Neither of us were lucky. We were both born poor. He's half black, half native American. My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a single-parent household in a bad neighborhood. The common thread between us is that we were both willing to work hard to move up. The American Dream is alive, but you have to work for it. People just don't want to work for it.
I have a few other friends, people I've also known since high school. They're good people, but they have almost zero ambition. One guy still lives with his father, in the ghetto. Another lives in the house his grandfather left him, which is falling down around him due to lack of maintenance. The former has been unemployed for years and plays online poker all day. The latter works and has a decent job, but he spends it all on premium beer, video games, and movies. Neither are likely to move up very far in life. Both are very intelligent, white males. They're just lazy. They just choose to be lazy.
Economists (and others) tend to think that given the opportunity, people will choose to work hard, to get out of poverty, to move up in life, rather than to stay poor and be lazy. Well, I grew up in the ghetto - I still live there, in fact - and my experience tells me otherwise. Most people aren't there because they lack opportunity, they're there because availing themselves of the opportunities they do have is hard work.
I have another friend. She's the mother of some of my old friends. She still lives in the same house, which is near where I live now. I visit her regularly, and she's always telling me about her financial woes. She doesn't have any skills to speak of, but she's worked all of her life. Her husband left her when her kids were young, and she put in a solid 20 years raising them (and still helps them today). She never had much of a chance to move up in life because she was busy with kids, and now that she's older, she's wondering how she's going to be able to afford to retire. She deserves help, in my opinion, and if I ever strike it rich, I'm going to be sure that she doesn't have to worry any more.
The problem is that a government agency cannot separate the people who are or have been willfully lazy their entire lives from those who have legitimately tried, so it ends up having to treat everyone the same. This is the ultimate problem with welfare, and no matter how you reform it, it will always be a problem. In order to help the few who do deserve help, you're going to have to help the many who don't. Such is life.
>In the late 1920s a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian union of companies (the North European Luma Co-op Society) began planning an independent manufacturing centre. Economic and legal threats by Phoebus did not achieve the desired effect, and in 1931 the Scandinavians produced and sold lamps at a considerably lower price than Phoebus.
They are, in fact, difficult to maintain. That doesn't mean impossible, but your chances of maintaining a cartel in a free market drop drastically within the first few years, if not the first few months.
And let's not fail to consider the fact that the economy back then was much less globalized, and therefore much easier to cartelize then it is today.
Better to overengineer at a cost of an extra ten or twenty million and get many more years out of your rover than to underengineer, have the program fail, and have to face not only the failure to gather the data you wanted, but the political fallout from your failure as well.
No matter how you interpret it, Bill Gates is an American citizen, and people will associate what he does with America on some level, as they would do with anyone.
I bought a Lumia 620 for $70 on Amazon and hooked it up through Straight Talk on their $45/unlimited plan, and frankly, it's pretty great. The O/S is fluid and pretty, the phone works fine, the battery life's really good, it does everything I need to. Really, I have no complaints.
The welfare system in Sweden IS seen as a massive success because it HAS been a massive success, and didn't have many serious problems because people respected it as a temporary thing, and receiving welfare came with a social stigma.
That is changing as a direct result of increasing immigration, and welfare reform is on the horizon across Europe, not just in Sweden.
Instead of asking them a loaded question in order to receive the answer that you want to receive, why not try asking them an unloaded question? Something like: do immigrants treat the welfare system differently than do native Swedes? Obvious answer is obvious.
But you've already said enough to refute your own argument: the immigration problem. It's a problem, is it not? And it's a problem because those people respect the system less than Swedes do, thus necessitating reform. It's not a major problem because the Swedes are proud of their system which has worked so well, with so little abuse, until just recently, and they're certain that they can figure this problem out as well before it gets too bad. But it is a problem nonetheless because, well, I'll just let you go back and read my original assertion.
How the fuck is it that a forum of supposedly intelligent people have such a massive problem with basic fucking logic?
The right thing to do would be to test the idea before shoving it down voters' throats.
It would not only be morally correct, it would provide great ammunition for fighting against those who would be against it.
But that's not going to happen, because despite the rhetoric of the left, no one knows whether it would work or not, and a failure would be catastrophic for the left politically.
So we'll trudge on, doing the same shit, implementing the same policies not to fix actual problems, but to appease our consciences and to feel like we've won some kind of political victory against that evil other side.
Is it a shocker that I misread that table? Obviously, you meant that facetiously, suggesting that you believe that someone who espouses views contrary to popular liberal ideology is necessarily a stupid person. But the fact that I made a mistake no more means that I'm stupid than does the fact that I disagree with liberal ideology on many points; on the contrary, the fact that you believe it does says much more about you than it does me.
At any rate, the rest of my points stand. Now that you've pointed out my mistake, maybe you'd like to follow up with a quick 1-2 punch and knock the moron out of the ring, eh? Come on, it should be easy, right?!
Do you know what the Swedes didn't have a problem with a decade ago? Welfare abuse. All of a sudden, they have a problem with it now. Do you know who are the ones abusing the system? Hint: it's not the Swedes.
Every other country which has accepted middle eastern immigrants in the last decade are experiencing the same problems.
If a population does not respect your system, they will abuse it, period.
If you can get over yourself for a second, I'm sure you'll be able to figure out why.
Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success. It doesn't matter whether those below the poverty line are 65% or 5% white - it's the minorities that they're concerned with. That's just the political reality of the situation.
And while we're on the subject of statistics, I may as well go ahead and ask about yours: where did you get that figure from? Because I found something much different:
According to this, only about 25% of people living in poverty were white, and that includes the somewhat dubious category 'white, not hispanic.' (It's near the bottom, Table B)
That also includes white retirees, which inflates the figure as you're taking the number of retirees from a large category and sticking them into a smaller category, which means they will be over-represented in the smaller category.
And that's not even mentioning the rate of poverty or welfare participation, which is where the common perception that blacks and latinos abuse the welfare system comes from in the first place. It's much higher than it is or other races. When you dig into the data, it usually turns out that stereotypes exist for a reason, and this appears to be no exception.
Correction: this is what happens when poor Cherokee receive a stipend, but let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here. There are differences between the subcultures, and those differences almost certainly extend to how they treat money.
Furthermore, the psychological and social difference between receiving money from a source which a population would consider to be 'theirs' cannot be overstated. If you're a poor black person (or latino, or Cherokee, or whatever), and you're living in a land that's dominated by a group that's not like you, you are less likely to respect that money than if a) that money came from a source that was yours, and b) you knew that if that source believed that you were disrespecting that money, they would cut it off.
Both stipulations apply here. Giving a small band of Cherokee profits from one of their own casinos =/= giving poor blacks and latinos federal assistance. They aren't even close.
Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a few times would go a long ways towards convincing the skeptical that free money for the majority of the poor is actually a good idea.
Anything else, as I said in another thread, is half-measures.
The withering of mechanisms to effect change follows directly from apathy. Conversely, those mechanisms flourish with the existence of an engaged, informed citizenry.
We have no one to blame for the current state of affairs but ourselves. To attempt to pin the blame on anything else is to fail to accept that responsibility, which is tantamount to failing to recognizing the problem. And of course, if we fail to recognize the problem, nothing will ever change.
I have an old friend, one I used to share vices with back during our high school days. While I was doing time in the Army, he was learning a trade. After spending a few years in that trade, he felt that he'd become good enough at it to strike out for himself. He focused on making the customer happy, and did the best job he possibly could, every time. Fast forward to today, and he now makes six figures a year.
In five years, I'll be making six figures too. We took different paths to get there, but we will both move up at least one layer on the socioeconomic strata within our lifetimes. Neither of us were lucky. We were both born poor. He's half black, half native American. My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a single-parent household in a bad neighborhood. The common thread between us is that we were both willing to work hard to move up. The American Dream is alive, but you have to work for it. People just don't want to work for it.
I have a few other friends, people I've also known since high school. They're good people, but they have almost zero ambition. One guy still lives with his father, in the ghetto. Another lives in the house his grandfather left him, which is falling down around him due to lack of maintenance. The former has been unemployed for years and plays online poker all day. The latter works and has a decent job, but he spends it all on premium beer, video games, and movies. Neither are likely to move up very far in life. Both are very intelligent, white males. They're just lazy. They just choose to be lazy.
Economists (and others) tend to think that given the opportunity, people will choose to work hard, to get out of poverty, to move up in life, rather than to stay poor and be lazy. Well, I grew up in the ghetto - I still live there, in fact - and my experience tells me otherwise. Most people aren't there because they lack opportunity, they're there because availing themselves of the opportunities they do have is hard work.
I have another friend. She's the mother of some of my old friends. She still lives in the same house, which is near where I live now. I visit her regularly, and she's always telling me about her financial woes. She doesn't have any skills to speak of, but she's worked all of her life. Her husband left her when her kids were young, and she put in a solid 20 years raising them (and still helps them today). She never had much of a chance to move up in life because she was busy with kids, and now that she's older, she's wondering how she's going to be able to afford to retire. She deserves help, in my opinion, and if I ever strike it rich, I'm going to be sure that she doesn't have to worry any more.
The problem is that a government agency cannot separate the people who are or have been willfully lazy their entire lives from those who have legitimately tried, so it ends up having to treat everyone the same. This is the ultimate problem with welfare, and no matter how you reform it, it will always be a problem. In order to help the few who do deserve help, you're going to have to help the many who don't. Such is life.