Uhhhh... Any other country is doing better than the Soviet Union, more or less. Except for such charming places as North Korea and Burma and other hellholes.
Where do you live that property tax is calculated based on value of possessions? Where do you live that owning a (1) car disqualifies you for assistance programs? When did property value start being equal to net worth? When did net worth start going up when you get up-side down in a terrible auto loan?
But none of that has any relevance to how I feel about Bob. I hold no grudge against people who accept government assistance and happen to have a decent, reliable used car. If it goes fast and gets fast fast too, that's cool. It really has no bearing on me or my situation. Do I suddenly pay less in taxes if Bob buys a hybrid sedan? Or a minivan? What level of crappy car is appropriate for a poor person to own?
The truth of the matter is we could completely abolish 100% of entitlement programs and it wouldn't come close to fixing the deficit we are in. (Unless you count tax breaks for corporations as entitlement programs.) Even with 100% of entitlement programs off-the-books the economy would still suck right now. Entitlement spending is not an issue except in the minds of angry, little, petty, people who insist on finding someone to scapegoat their problems on.
Double bonus points if the person you find is working, getting paid under the table somewhere (so the owner of that business can avoid paying their share of income tax and overtime) busting their ass to make ends meet but having to deal with paying for medical bills, and diapers, and car repairs, and $4 gasoline, spouse's community college, all on top of rent/bills/tithe; because the important part is that person is stealing from you by having a job at the same time they are drawing SNAP benefits.
QUADRUPLE AWESOMEY QUATLOO CAPTAIN POPETASTIC POINTS if that person likes to drink a 6 pack of of domestic-sub premium beer in the 36 hours they call a weekend. That makes them a true drain on society. F!$!ing bastards.
They're called Asset Tests. Here's a site that answers your questions:
Owning a car does not automatically disqualify... it's the VALUE of that car. My state is very strict. Some are not. What's the limit? Check the site.
My state also charges 4% property tax for each car owned every year. New 100K Jag would be $4000 a year... 10K economy car would be $400. State values the car based on the previous year's KBB listing. They charge more for owned homes... boats... etc.
What are each state's policy on asset taxes? There's sites for that too. Here's one:
Tangible Personal Property Tax
***EDIT***
Major Disclaimer: I'm using these linked sites because it's convenient. NOT because I may or may not believe in their political stance/message. Just wanna get that out of the way, in case someone starts digging through them.
"better place to live and work" than the social democracies above? Well, during the height of the social democrats in Sweden, we had no private health care, no alternatives to public health care, which was nominally free, but there were queues that meant it could take you years to get surgery, for example. There was no private child care, and if you made over a certain amount per month, you didn't get public child care. We had queues over decades for apartments and we had social democrats and children of social democrats that bypassed the queues. Now, since the nineties, the social democrats have not been able to stop alternatives, they got their perks taxed, and things are better. So, perhaps it is not enough to call the nordic countries social democracies, hmmm?
It is very much an open question whether taxes and more government control makes wealth concentration go away or grow bigger.
Sure, but that's not what I was interested in. At least, not for the purposes of this conversation. I highly doubt any agreement will ever be reached between a Trotskyist, a devotee of the Austrian school, a bunch of liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats and the occasional American social democrat or two.
What I was interested in was your statement that the figures of U.S. inequality don't come anywhere near inequality in the Soviet Union at its height. Which doesn't seem to be supported by any empirical evidence thus far provided.
As was stated, it is difficult to compare. That doesn't mean the direction of the error is obvious, gobbo. I believe it quite clearly buffs up the coefficient. You probably do not. But the thing is... corruption makes for a very few very wealthy people, no matter where you look. Someone once told me that if you have money to handle the bribes and similar expenses, Greece would be the absolute best country to live in because of the options it gets you. A friend of mine visited China before the recent economic boom, and after visiting a number of highly placed people in their offices, his impression was that it was a luxury beyond anything Westerners could think possible. I know a number of people from the east bloc, and they say the same things. Luxury, luxury, luxury. I saw a romanian woman when she saw the filming of what Ceaucescu had in his castle - again, her reaction was "this is just not possible".
Given that the Gini coefficient gives us the level of wealth distribution, from "everyone has exactly the same" at 0 to "one guy has everything" at 1, this style of corruption would focus the wealth to the absolute richest and thus give us a very high number. If the value of their perks was known.
As was stated, it is difficult to compare. That doesn't mean the direction of the error is obvious, gobbo.
I didn't say the error was obvious. In fact, you may be right.
However, there don't appear to be any figures proving that Soviet inequality at its height was much higher than in the United States as you previously claimed.
That's all I was interested in.
|
Look... I can think of a dozen ways I could use SNAP or TANF to buy crack or street girls... but all of them are illegal and require knowing someone in the system who can work the corruption (a clerk or desk jokey for example). Or using the criminal blackmarket and illegal sites. It DOES happen, but most of them fail or are discovered fairly quick... usually after $100 is stolen."We" have provided lots of links to this before (in other threads), proving that the vast majority of fraud being committed is actually being done by the businesses in the program, not the welfare recipients as a whole. And also that the total amount of fraud is in the very low percentage (I believe it's less than 2%, but that's just off the top of my head). Andrew has been provided with this evidence several times.
Apparently none of it sticks and it's easier to continue with preconceived notions. The "Welfare Queens" are a Reagan myth.
I know, I know, I could now link to the studies showing that facts seldom change strongly held beliefs. :-pSNAP and TANF, at the cashier to customer level, is fairly tight. Not only is there a camera recording the cashier, but there's papers that need to be signed. It's easier to pull off a regular credit card scam, than trying to rip off SNAP and TANF. I hate to admit it, but I used to HATE seeing people using either welfare program and having a lot of items in their cart, because it meant it would be a loooooong boring process. You have to check what they're buying, and see if there's a cheaper substitute or allowed. Moreover... it's kinda heartless. I remember telling people they couldn't buy a certain food item, because it was considered "premium brand" and they had to swap it with the cheap (often nastier tasting) stuff. I knew why they didn't want the garbage brand -- I sure has hell wouldn't eat it myself -- but rules are rules and they either got that or nothing at all.
***EDIT***
And yes... I know poor people...
Don't know where you are but it is nothing like that here in MI. The only program with any real restrictions on it here is WIC. There is no paperwork for cash assistance use, they get cash out of an ATM and spend it how they want. We had laws talked about (not sure if passed) to restrict ATM "assistance" withdrawals and casinos and strip clubs
|
|
This whole conversation reminds me of a book called "the Losers" cannot remember who wrote it. It is told from the perspective of a comfortably middle class small town guy that ends up disabled and forced to move to the crappy side of a large town and his observations of the people living there. It paints them as more victims than creators of their own problems but still a good read for people with no idea of what so many poor are like. I had little idea of what urban poor were like before working where i do
I highly doubt any agreement will ever be reached between a Trotskyist, a devotee of the Austrian school, a bunch of liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats and the occasional American social democrat or two.
Man, I got totally left out. >-P
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Man, I got totally left out. >-P
Because we;re not allowed to use that kind of language on the boards :)
|
|
From David Eddings? The author of the Belgariad and those series?
Interesting I had read his fantasy work there is a story on his wiki page which states he wrote a book called "The Losers" in (1992).
Yeah i think that is it, borrowed it from a friend and i remember him saying the guy did fantasy books mostly
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
This whole conversation reminds me of a book called "the Losers" cannot remember who wrote it. It is told from the perspective of a comfortably middle class small town guy that ends up disabled and forced to move to the crappy side of a large town and his observations of the people living there. It paints them as more victims than creators of their own problems but still a good read for people with no idea of what so many poor are like. I had little idea of what urban poor were like before working where i do
i think you are focusing on the examples that back up your beliefs and ignoring the others. I am also having a hard time believing your stories about life being so amazingly different in Michigan - both me and the supermarket guy live in different states, but our experiences with welfare, tanf and other such systems are strikingly similar while yours are the odd one out.
I highly doubt any agreement will ever be reached between a Trotskyist, a devotee of the Austrian school, a bunch of liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats and the occasional American social democrat or two.Man, I got totally left out. >-P
IIRC, and I may not, you were considering voting for Huntsman.
Any particular insight into this creeping socialism in the Beehive State?
|
|
This whole conversation reminds me of a book called "the Losers" cannot remember who wrote it. It is told from the perspective of a comfortably middle class small town guy that ends up disabled and forced to move to the crappy side of a large town and his observations of the people living there. It paints them as more victims than creators of their own problems but still a good read for people with no idea of what so many poor are like. I had little idea of what urban poor were like before working where i doi think you are focusing on the examples that back up your beliefs and ignoring the others. I am also having a hard time believing your stories about life being so amazingly different in Michigan - both me and the supermarket guy live in different states, but our experiences with welfare, tanf and other such systems are strikingly similar while yours are the odd one out.
maybe not all states are as screwed up as MI but that is how it is here. States are different you know. Hell half of what pisses me off is on the state website like the fact that energy drinks and cookies are "food"
Cookies aren't food?
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Cookies aren't food?they are a luxury, no one starves without cookies.
They're pretty hand for hypoglycemic people or diabetics who accidentally get their insulin dose too high.
Edit: And being poor shouldn't require taking a Vow of Suffering and Denial. Sometimes that candybar or couple cookies is the only thing to look forward to in/after a long shift at a shitty job(s) in a generally unfulfilling life with no chance of economic upward-mobility.
You could say that about any food item.
Anyway, I'm sorry, did I miss you coming out as being against poor children eating cookies?
EDIT: On second thought, never mind.
|
|
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers. if they are so poor they have to take from others you are damn right they have an obligation to use that money right
On children and cookies. If obama and his wife are so against obesity maybe they should be on the front lines of wanting to restrict welfare snackfoods as that is one thing the gov could help on
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers
And you think this could be solved by not listing cookies as food on the Michigan state welfare website?
|
|
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayersAnd you think this could be solved by not listing cookies as food on the Michigan state welfare website?
Making the cars only cover actual nutritious foods would do wonders to stop abuse and make sure those on it are not hurting their kids with a junk diet. IF they actually earn money and want to buy a pack of cookies now and then it is fine but right now they have a blank check that they are happy to squander and not give a damn what theat does to the kids.
|
|
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers. if they are so poor they have to take from others you are damn right they have an obligation to use that money right
On children and cookies. If obama and his wife are so against obesity maybe they should be on the front lines of wanting to restrict welfare snackfoods as that is one thing the gov could help on
Best ban sales of flour and sugar...
IF they actually earn money and want to buy a pack of cookies now and then it is fine
I knew you weren't entirely heartless, Citizen R.
|
|
IF they actually earn money and want to buy a pack of cookies now and then it is fineI knew you weren't entirely heartless, Citizen R.
I do not want anyone to suffer but we do not owe anyone luxury either. We as a society have an obligation to help our countrymen, our countrymen have an obligation to use it right
|
|
Best ban sales of flour and sugar...Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers. if they are so poor they have to take from others you are damn right they have an obligation to use that money right
On children and cookies. If obama and his wife are so against obesity maybe they should be on the front lines of wanting to restrict welfare snackfoods as that is one thing the gov could help on
people won't waste near as much to make them themselves (and it would be cheaper) than if they can just grab them off a shelf and stuff their faces. A good chunk of the horrid food choices people make is out of laziness, even those not in the system
I do not want anyone to suffer but we do not owe anyone luxury either. We as a society have an obligation to help our countrymen, our countrymen have an obligation to use it rightIF they actually earn money and want to buy a pack of cookies now and then it is fineI knew you weren't entirely heartless, Citizen R.
Others may say you are some mutant hybrid of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Travis Bickle, but I always say that deep down inside, you're good people.
I highly doubt any agreement will ever be reached between a Trotskyist, a devotee of the Austrian school, a bunch of liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats and the occasional American social democrat or two.
Any room for a Scandinavian atheist-humanist-socialist in there? ;-)
|
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayersAnd you think this could be solved by not listing cookies as food on the Michigan state welfare website?
You just had to ask, didn't you?
I am disappoint, goblin.
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers. if they are so poor they have to take from others you are damn right they have an obligation to use that money right
On children and cookies. If obama and his wife are so against obesity maybe they should be on the front lines of wanting to restrict welfare snackfoods as that is one thing the gov could help on
Andrew you seem strangely familiar to me, have I seen you on Fox News?
Oh wait, that was food stamps spent on seafood they were upset by, not cookies, my apologies.
Still, your opinions seem pretty similar.
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayersAnd you think this could be solved by not listing cookies as food on the Michigan state welfare website?You just had to ask, didn't you?
I am disappoint, goblin.
Actually, I think it was kind of worth it if it provoked CitizenTsFloatingHead's response.
Btw, cats and kittens, one day a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets. Junkies, pimps, cookie-eaters...[whole bunch of anti-gay stuff, nevermind]
I highly doubt any agreement will ever be reached between a Trotskyist, a devotee of the Austrian school, a bunch of liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats and the occasional American social democrat or two.Any room for a Scandinavian atheist-humanist-socialist in there? ;-)
Of course, there is room for all here in the OTD!
Wait a minute. You don't eat cookies on welfare, do you?
It wash raining in the shity by the bay. A hard rain. Hard enough to wash the shlime out of the shtreetsh and back into the holesh they crawled out of.
C.H.U.D.s for everyone!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You really shouldn't eat cookies on welfare. It isn't the cookies' fault that they had to seek welfare.
Having a cookie now and then is one thing, the ones i see DAILY buying $20 plus in snackfoods are a burden on the system we do not need and an insult to taxpayers. if they are so poor they have to take from others you are damn right they have an obligation to use that money right
On children and cookies. If obama and his wife are so against obesity maybe they should be on the front lines of wanting to restrict welfare snackfoods as that is one thing the gov could help on
please. You'd start screeching about government overreach in a second.
|
|
You just had to ask, didn't you?I am disappoint, goblin.
Actually, I think it was kind of worth it if it provoked CitizenTsFloatingHead's response.
Btw, cats and kittens, one day a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets. Junkies, pimps, cookie-eaters...[whole bunch of anti-gay stuff, nevermind]
Fair point. Full of facts and other good stuff. I especially liked the nod to individually determined benefit optimization in a free market! My Corporate Masters would approve. :)
Cheers, FloatingHead.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In exchange for what the society give you, you must in turn give things to society. When your society has a government, that generally means money. It isn't your money. You owe it to society.
*Alarm bells*
The government didn't take your money. It was never yours. The government lets you use their money to facilitate financial transactions. At the end of the day, the government gets it's money back. How much it gets back it a product of many factors, but the money is the government's to take.
Hmm...
If money was the government's property, what would that look like? Wouldn't it mean that the government could repossess its property at a moment's notice? I don't recall signing any agreements, contracts, or EULAs, so the government has more freedom to raid my bank account than Microsoft has to terminate my Xbox Live account.And wouldn't the government be under no obligations to use that property responsibly? Million dollar salaries and posh gosdachas for bureaucrats would be totally justified.
No one gives a flip what you think. Nor does it matter, because the money being spent isn't yours anyway.
What a horrible, horrible philosophy.
I remember a program on Swedish TV a number of years ago. The social democrats had been in power since forever with only a few years not as ruling party. Taxes were uniformly massive. One of the up and coming fat cats of the administration, one of the top names in the social democratic party was answering questions from callers. One old man called in and gave an account of a miserable economic situation with barely enough pension to survive despite forty years of hard work full time. A tax raise was coming. He asked the guy what he should do, and why there weren't any money for him despite his having paid large amounts to the pension funds from his salary all his life.
The answer? "When you connect the money you have paid to the pension funds and the money you get from them, I think you have a very problematic way of looking at why people contribute to society."
The answer? "When you connect the money you have paid to the pension funds and the money you get from them, I think you have a very problematic way of looking at why people contribute to society."
So is the problem there too much socialism or not enough?
The problem was too much socialism, absolutely. With different government came the right to choose in health care, schools, nursing homes and so on. There are alternatives now, and the public sector is slowly shaping up now that there is competition. If you fight for it, you CAN get somewhere, where before the taxes simply made that impossible. Of course, the socialists here today are trying to spin the idea that choice in services is itself terrible. They can good luck with that, however. It wasn't that long since, and people still remember when you didn't have choice.
|
|
Making the cars only cover actual nutritious foods would do wonders to stop abuse and make sure those on it are not hurting their kids with a junk diet. IF they actually earn money and want to buy a pack of cookies now and then it is fine but right now they have a blank check that they are happy to squander and not give a damn what theat does to the kids.Wow, you are so catastrophically wrong that Neil deGrasse Tyson could do a 12 part mini-series chronicling the epic scope and grandeur of your error.
First of all, your continued insistence that poor people don't DESERVE "cookies" (here basically a code word for "nice things") strikes me as a sign of just how prejudicial and ungenerous your worldview really is. Shocking news for you, but poor people are actually still PEOPLE, not some alien, foreign species that must necessarily be deserving of their fate, given their chronic inability to escape it. Point blank, you are NOT BETTER than the people you are criticizing, and you really need to examine the part of yourself that seems to need to convince yourself that the people you write off as losers "deserve" their fate.
Second, you utterly fail at understanding the economics of food. Here's a tip - poor people aren't actually especially stupid. They may be uneducated, but again, they are still PEOPLE, and so in terms of actual intelligence (as in, the capacity, realized or not, to learn and reason), there is no reason to suspect that the impoverished, as a population, are uniquely challenged (unless you want to argue in favor of some kind of genetic determinism RE poverty, in which case good luck with that). My point is that there are actually very, very good reasons for the purchasing patterns of the poor, your incredulous disbelief notwithstanding.
Most importantly, the kind of processed junk food that you are decrying is CHEAP. In fact, it tends to be cheaper per calorie than the healthy produce you are advocating, especially in many urban areas where grocery...
Wow that was a lengthy load of BULL. No you do not deserve endless luxuries, be thankful other people are paying for you to not starve. yes, people that do not refuse to work and do not wallow in drugs and drink are better people. Canned fruits and veg are cheap and store for years and are actually food as opposed to doritos and redbull, and cheaper so you fail again.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And now Doritos aren't food.