Sky Cake-Patton Oswalt!!

Welfare and initiative decline

When Welfare Undermines Work Ethic

Michael Tanner is a fellow at the Cato Institute. He recently co-edited “Replacing Obamacare: The Cato Institute on Health Care Reform.”

UPDATED MAY 5, 2013, 7:00 PM

There is nothing to suggest that people on welfare are lazy. But there is also nothing to suggest that they are stupid. If you pay someone as much for not working as you do for working, it should come as no surprise that many take advantage of the offer.

We know that one of the most important long-term steps toward avoiding or getting out of poverty is a job. Even a low-wage job can be the first step on the road to self-sufficiency.

Around the world, welfare states provide benefits well in excess of the entry level wages that an individual with limited skills can expect to earn.

Yet, around the world, welfare states provide benefits well in excess of the entry level wages that an individual with limited skills can expect to earn. The case of “Carina,” earning $2,700 per month on welfare, is not unique, or limited to Denmark.

In the United States, a person who receives a full package of welfare benefits (T.A.N.F., food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, W.I.C. and free commodities) can receive more in every state than they would earn from a minimum wage job, according to a forthcoming Cato study.

This discourages recipients from moving from welfare to work, especially if, as the Congressional Research Service points out: “Leisure is believed to be a “normal good.” That is, with a rise in income, people will “purchase” more leisure by reducing their work effort.” In other words, an increase in benefits could encourage people to reduce their work hours.

We’ve seen this with unemployment benefits, which increase both the rate and duration of joblessness.

In the aftermath of the British riots during the summer of 2011, it was noted that “the welfare state really has left a generation of young people feeling both dependent on government handouts and entitled to more.”

Even President Obama has acknowledged, “as somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time their motivation started to diminish.”

The welfare state may well help make poverty more comfortable, and some government programs that target literacy and educational achievement or prevent unwanted pregnancies may have a positive impact. But when it undermines the work ethic, the welfare state does little to help people rise above poverty and escape the underclass.

-FROM THE BLOGMEISTER. I have done pretty good research on this subject AND have grown up in gut-wrentching poverty, so I believe that I have a frame of reference in which to expound upon the subject of welfare vs. initiative decline. Extreme liberals and one of my family members who is constantly excusing being a total financial failure, seem to think that sociological statistics are totally wrong and refuse to even research evidence that will assuage their cognitive dissonance. Never should anyone go back to the basic animal studies that show a positive correlation between giving an animal everything that it needs to survive vs. having it forage for food. This would just prove the outcome which is denied! Basic experiments have proven that this is fact and it is now accepted as an eventual outcome that if provisions are provided for an experimental population without expectation of toil, the given population will begin to expect the provisions.

I do not vilify the welfare population as much as the supposedly civilized system that doesn’t provide socialized college education. Graduating with a huge debt over your head is pure insanity in a world where stupid knee-jerk liberal assholes want to totally fund meth addict fucktools in the medical system. Why assist these assholes to live over funding the college education of people who are busting their fucking asses to get ahead? This is liberal insanity! Assist poor struggling students to get into a market that needs them and leave drug addicts and lazy assholes to fend for themselves.

If the drug addict actually WANTS to get clean then fuck yeah! If its a court order, then defer to education, fuck the addict. Get firm tariffs on foreign goods, enact penalty laws on job exporters and get the minimum wage to a point where starving students can live on it! The minimum wage was NOT meant to raise a family on and should NOT be raised as such. People should not be encouraged to work on minimum wage to raise kids, but should be given the ability to get a college degree, an employable college degree, on it, period! The colleges and the businesses should be working in tandem to assist graduates to transition into the workforce as legitimate wage earners with the ability to work their way up the ladder.

The system is broken and in favor of the 1% who rape the shit out of us on a regular basis. There are restraints that we should be putting on our Supreme Court and upon capitalism itself. We are being a host nation to a vampire 1% that will suck us into a husk and leave us as a trivial nation on the field of their conquests. We are asleep at the switch and feel lucky to have the scraps from ‘Longshanks’ table, and we villify the person who got fucked in the recession or who works at Starbucks with his pHD. This is truly fucked! As in Captain America 2, Rodgers found that his own government was the villain in the whole scheme. Is government to be trusted or reviled? Do we just accept that its every person for themselves and say to Hell with community effort? Government was created by the people to prevent this, do we just give up and blindly vilify a system that we put in place to protect us or do we prosecute it’s villains and replace them with trustworthy people? WTF folks, really? You created this monster and now you want to oppose it and act like you didn’t help create it? Get in the fight you milquetoast assholes and take back your own creation, take back your rights and stop marginalizing the very poor that you yourself created by apathy!!

Hitchens EASILY owns Dinesh D’Souza, did anyone expect otherwise??

The shit thru the fog.

Well, dear reader, we have been assailed,yet again, by superfluous shit straight from the mouth of the very people who have nothing but corporate interest in mind! We have assholes on the border in Murietta, CA. hurling insults at children in busses, accomplishing nothing in an issue meant to distract us from the important bullshit that is benefitting the 1% of those that actually control politics! Yeah, fuckers! This is coming from me, the one person who still refers to illegal immigrants as such and doesn’t give a shit who cares. Yes, I know that the microeconomic impact of this problem is immense, but I also recognize that the powers that be are using this problem to distract people from the most important of social problems.
Today we have a version of socialized medicine placed before us, but don’t realize that the real problem was, in fact, socialized education. We had forsaken this for medicine, not realizing that education would have lead us to this and would have put us back in the innovation forefront, but this was not the intention of the handlers of the assholes that we put in office to represent the billionaires over us, the general public. The 1% have been carefully dismantling the public education system for the last 30 years in an effort to create the second class nation that we have today. We bitch and moan and pass bond measures that end in school closures anyway and blame the opposing political party for the failures. The truth of the matter is that if the general public used skeptical thinking, critical thought and logic to analyze what was transpiring, they would have come to the conclusion that they were being duped by a higher entity, and they would have worked to thwart this divisive bullshit. Instead they choose to fight each other and tie the answers up in the partisan politics of the Left and Right!
The divide of Left and Right has lead to the ultimate demise of the American dream and made it easy for the oligarchs to seize control of absolutely everything! The controllers have made it so that families are cared for by those complicit in the destruction of freedom! Those that dissent are dealt with swiftly and efficiently so that others believe that they were wrong to have a different opinion of how things should be! Totalitarian regime anyone?!
Wake up and understand that this could happen anywhere anytime! You have drones watching you 24/7 by YOUR OWN MANDATE OF LAW! You put this in place! Is your front fucking lawn and your 2.000sq ft house enough payment for the demise of the security you enjoyed under the sacrifice of your WWII soldiers? Most of our pHD candidates are foreign born, is that O.K with you?? Wake up an return control of this country to those who actually respect freedom! Quit paying attention to these divisive peripheral issues and give your kids a free education! Learning equals freedom, period!

Immigration DID make this country strong and continues to do so, but accepting hordes of unskilled workers from all over the globe is overwhelming the country’s ability to absorb those without training. Regulation IS needed to keep a steady, controlled flow of entrants to this country so that it can both employ and assist immigrants in a smooth transition into American society. Intentionally overwhelming the financial ability of this nation to process entrants amounts to the most foolish of undertakings that will eventually bankrupt the resources that were designed to help these people. With no financial resources to ease the transition, the immigrant population is left to spread over a penniless economy that can no longer suffer the burden. What is the outcome? Possibly assimilating into a society as bankrupt as the one that was left behind, to a life of hard scrabble just as bleak as the previous one? Where is the economic logic in this? Why would the oligarchs pit the opposing political parties against one another so that hands are tied and problems grow unchecked? Maybe the answers lay in the fact that these rich assholes are international and have no loyalties to any country and just milk a system dry and move on to the next growing super power.

Common sense dictates that unstable circumstances be brought under control, this includes the problem of immigration, this includes controlling dispersal of firearms, population control, and societal contributions to the less fortunate without contract to educate or eventually separate them from Federal and state assistance. As long as we have walls between nations and unchecked greed, we, as common people, need to have sensible controls agreed upon by all citizens regarding social contract, fair treatment under the laws and control of the population as to regulate and share valuable resources.

Right now we have warring political factions carrying out the mandates of people who live above the law and who use the public as pawns to achieve their goals, whatever the fuck their goals are! I assume that it lies in the halls of power and resource, because money is just paper that is used by many to purchase goods. It is backed by neither gold or silver and is just fancy paper with expensive ink and pretty pictures. The true controlling factions do not waste their time accumulating worthless pieces of paper and believing that they are wealthy, they corner resources and transportation networks to deliver those resources so that they can exercise true control. The Gold Standard hasn’t existed on the dollar for years.

The following is an explanation of the suspension of the Gold Standard meant to enlighten you a bit as to the insignificance of common power based on the money that we earn.

The Fed was formed in 1913, the same year the income tax was first allowed. As most readers know when the Fed was formed the American money was “Redeemable” in Silver or Gold, mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

In about 1917-1918 WW I broke out in Europe.
The U.S. got involved and the Fed began to issue way more dollars than the Treasury had in Gold { @ $20 per ounce} to pay for the war expenses.

When WW I ended there were way too many unbacked American dollars in circulation which led to a period called the roaring 20’s because there was too much money in circulation which caused stock prices to climb way up, by investors spending their extra dollars by investing in stocks.

In 1929 investors suddenly realized all the dollars in circulation couldn’t possibly be backed by Gold, which caused a mass sell off of stocks called the “crash”.

By 1932-33 the Treasury department realized that so many Gold backed American dollars had gone overseas, if the overseas people decided to cash them in for Gold the Treasury couldn’t pay off,,,which led to Roosevelt signing an excutive order confiscating all Americans privately owned Gold, to cover the Treasury’s shortage.

Later he changed the official value of an ounce of Gold from $20 an ounce to $35 dollars an ounce, where it remained until 1971.

In 1971 the world’s Gold supply & demand factor kicked in sending the European price to over $38 dollars per ounce, which caused Europeans to cash in dollars for Gold until Nixon decreed that the U.S. dollar was no longer redeemable in Gold.

Mass inflation followed in the U.S.

Congressman Ron Paul {elected in 1976} & Senetor Jesse Helms of North Carolina tried to reinstate the Gold standard by forming a group called the U.S. Gold commission. From the beginning the commission worked against them since other members of the commission were bought off by the Fed to oppose a re-instatement of the Gold standard, (and while I am describing how worthless our currency has become, I am certainly not endorsing the political party of the creators of The Gold Commission).

Currently the world is flooded with unbacked American dollars, bringing the value down, as it now takes many more of them to buy an ounce of Gold that used to be worth $20.

Now I know that there was an extended focus on immigration at the beginning of the article, but this was used as an illustration of the current divide in American politics and an example of the foolish policies adhered to by both the left and the right. The fact that the public is not reading cost analysis for many of these problems attests to the educational problems in this country. Intelligent informed skeptical thinkers would insist upon justification for Govt. policy BEFORE it was enacted, but most Americans lack even the basic understanding of their own Govt/Financial system and choose to remain with heads planted firmly in the sand. Why, in the medical field most pamphlets given to the public have been printed at the 3rd and 4th grade level due to the complete and abhorrent lack of general education and basic literacy! Most people are too busy watching American Idol, or that cavalcade of fucking idiocy Duck Dynasty, to fight for the preservation of a once great public school system! Skepticism is born of education and continued study throughout one’s life, not by pablumizing one’s mind with insipid nonsense fed to the masses by mass media in attempt to distract them from real and present dangers.

I speak on these peripheral nonsense issues and their power over the public at every turn, and actively sign petitions, give money and exercise my voice in an effort to change public focus to the issues that actually carry weight. I frequently ask the intelligent people to recognize divisive tactics in politics and to ignore distractions meant to pit people against one another. The key lies in common sense, reason, logic and skeptical thought. While many chase the Supreme Court decision over the Hobby Lobby case, the power brokers broker ever larger contracts for greater influence literally ‘fiddling as Rome burns.’ They don’t have to worry, they can move on, we, the common people are left to pick up the remnants of a shattered economy.

The key is education, and a quality, well rounded education that teaches one to learn from their past mistakes. Rebuild the school system and most of these problems will all of a sudden be recognized by fresh intelligent people. Dummy our children down and we can look forward to desperate uneducated masses grateful for  jobs paying shit wages from cradle to grave. Our choice.