Is welfare pointless

Why would an unmarried women with six children ("animals") be given a fertility drug? There is something odd going on here! In any case this carnival side show event is not something you'd want to base policy on. This instance does, however, have some entertainment value in a perverse way. This will be excellent fodder for the tabloids, Fox News, and CNN.

 

US Administration, Congress and Judiciary have failed to lead Americans.
They should cut 50% of their salaries and other entitlements.

 

"If you want to be taken seriously, you might want to actually know the distinction between a liberal and a communist. In fact, during the Soviet revolution, the russian liberals opposed fiercely the communists and were ones of the first to sound the alarm bells. They were both however, political opposition groups to the Tsar."

Renegen

Since you didn't give your definition to help us out, I will give you mine.

Liberals - Tax and spend
Socialists - Spend and spend.
Communists - The socialist equivalent to facism

The nature of politics is opposing but that doesn't necessarily mean they will not do the same thing when they get in. Politics make strange bedfellows.

 

They would still be overpaid.

 

jueco2005

Registered: Jan 2009
Posts: 903



07-08-11 01:24 PM

Quote from zdreg:

the poor need more "pressure" to get them to go to work.


EXPLAIN PLZ


if people get paid enough to do nothing,whether welfare or unemployment benefits, they will do nothing.

 

http://www.suntimes.com/6397110-417/the-disappearing-black-middle-class.html

Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”

Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”

In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median net worth for black households had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the institute.

Austin described the wealth gap this way: “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.”

Austin thinks more black people than ever before could fall out of the middle class because the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks recently peaked and blacks are overrepresented in state and local government jobs. Those are jobs that are being eliminated because of massive budget shortfalls.

Since the end of the recession, which lasted from 2007 to 2009, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Last April, black male unemployment hit the highest rate since the government began keeping track in 1972. Only 56.9 percent of black men over 20 were working, compared with 68.1 percent of white men.

Even college-educated blacks fared worse than their white counterparts in the recession. In 2007, unemployment for college-educated whites was 1.8 percent; for college-educated blacks it was 2.7 percent. Now, the college-educated unemployment rate is 3.9 percent for whites and 7 percent for blacks.

Nearly 8 percent of African Americans who bought homes from 2005 to 2008 have lost them to foreclosure, compared with 4.5 percent of whites, according to an estimate by the Center for Responsible Lending.

Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.

“I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone,” Princeton Professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.

West said Obama sold out the poor to become “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. . . . I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama.”

Wiley said Obama should be applauded for several initiatives that have helped the black middle class, such as programs to modify certain mortgages and prevent foreclosure because of job loss. But she would like Obama to aggressively counter the suggestion that first black president would be showing favoritism if he specifically helped black people.

“It’s the right thing to do for the nation,” she said. “Black people are a huge segment of the population, they’re especially hard-hit, and the country cannot recover if the black community — as well as the white community and others — does not recover.”

 

This is typical Malthusian talk and lacks a clear understanding of what wealth is and how it is made. Thomas Malthus ( who plagiarized almost word for word the work of Giammaria Ortes the Venetian charlatan) made popular the idea of a carrying capacity of earth. Based on his calculations around 3 billion would be it. This calculation was made on how much food could be produced at the time on available land. So were did Malthus go wrong? He forgot to calculate the unknown advances that occur in science and technology. Even before his time agriculture went from a hunting and gathering to managed land techniques. How much food could be created today if all the tillable lands were managed with the most advanced western techniques. According to a Russian scientist at the World Food Conference in the 1970s 55 billion. Take that what it's worth but its obviously a lot higher then our current population.

Real wealth is man's ability to exploit nature. Not man's ability to exploit each other. Think about of all that things that make your standard of living what it is . A car , lights, heat, AC, electronic gadgets. All the natural resources to make them have been here since man has. So why didn't the cave man have these things? A lack of science and technological advances. In fact it is man's advances that make earth's resources valuable. What would the price of oil be if the combustion engine wasn't invented? What about copper if electricity wasn't? Well you get the idea.

As mankind's understanding of science developed. So did the carrying capacity of the earth. It would be hard to quantify how much just electricity added to the carrying capacity not to mention oil, refrigeration etc. This is the core of the forgotten school of American Political Economy. While modern economists fight over Marx and Ricardo. American economists like Henry Clay , Frederich List, Stephen Caldwell, Siman Patten and a host of others in 19 century America understood were wealth came from and how to create it.

Creating a high wage economy would lead to the advances that create wealth. Higher income people are on average more educated and thus creates the advances. Also high wages force companies to mechanize creating huge leaps in technology and lower production costs. Modern Agriculture machinery would never had happened if the slaves of the south were never freed.
Robotics would be an infant industry if auto unions weren't getting high wages. Remember the fruit pickers in California debate. Jobs Americans don't want to do (or wages Americans can't afford to work). If there were no immigrant workers The high wages of the American worker would force them to mechanize the harvest process. In the short run this would lead to extreme high prices.= but in the long run would decrease the cost of production way under the migrant works cost.The amount of technology that has been lost to low wages in china and others well be unfortunately felt for years.Low wages make technology stagnant.

Think of all the money we waste on wars,fashion and other non production things. We seem to be able to use unlimited resources when we feel immediate danger. Take the Manhattan Project we threw almost all the nations intellectual resources at it when most thought that it was pipe dream. But it resulted in nuclear energy. The same can be done today if we put our intellectual resources into it. take a look at these and tell me there not within reach.

http://www.terrapower.com/home.aspx

http://cleantechnica.com/2009/09/04...electricity-drinking-water-valuable-minerals/

http://marshallhydrothermal.com/

these two alone could replace oil in the next decade if we thew everything we had at it.
Since these are massive investment with not an immediate payout the corporate capitalist structure well put there money int default swaps and other non productive, non wealth creating things instead of the long term investment and planning needed for an expanding population. This is the undeniable fatal flaw in the capitalist for profit system long term investment is traded for short term gain.Of course the radicals and fanatics will call me Marxist but it just shows they are ideologically based and not concerned about reality. The wealthiest nations have always been a mixed economy (including the US).

Taxes , Debt and other things the left and right argue about are merely things of the financial system and not the wealth creation system. That is the uter stupidity of the whole thing. You're arguing about the financial system which does not create wealth, just financial claims on wealth.

Don't take the Malthusian, Anti human, Anti Science and technology line. just because we failed at creating wealth through the current system for the current population doesn't mean we can't.

 

I loved your comments "antitrust". I will answer them in my own thread and I hope you will respond in this thread.

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showt...993#post3234993

 

My apologies. The thread is called:

What does the new society organizing pattern for the world look like?

 

A "Bad Attitude" ?? As for your example, yea, she does have a bad attitude--- towards herself, which is a shame. We all carry self defeating beliefs to one degree or another. We change when we get so tired of the bad belief that we do something about it.
Gov't is the same...we'll hang on to a self-destructive Gov't until we get tired enough of it to change it at the ballot box.
Only allowing land owners to vote would help a lot.
Like that's gonna happen.