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Who isn�t on some form of Welfare?

1. Deficit spending to pay for �free� Public Education for children.
2. Deficit spending to furnish grants and low interest subsidized loans for college students.
3. Deficit spending for government subsidized rental housing and home loans.
4. Deficit spending for building and maintaining government subsidized infrastructure: airports, hospitals, roads, schools, etc.
5. Deficit spending for government sponsored: prisons, police, the largest and most expensive military on Earth, government officials and their enormous entourage.
6. Deficit spending to subsidize: NASA, medical research, timber industries, airline industries, oil industries, coal industries, and the list continues.
7. Deficit spending to subsidize farm prices and farmers, and creating a need to give Food Stamps to those folks who can�t afford to pay the high prices for food caused by government subsidies.
8. Way down this list is a few tax paying folks who have lost their jobs due imports, recession, inflation, Republicans, Democrats, and a host of other reasons, and we don�t want them to receive the Unemployment benefits that were taken from their wages in the form of Unemployment Insurance.
9. Farther down the list we find that 1 penny on the dollar of all tax money goes to Welfare recipients and the colossal bureaucracy that passes out enough money to pay rent on minimal housing and buy a few used clothes for their children.

Haggis...I'll try to address your points, though I don't believe you are looking for intelligent counterpoints.


Generally nothing wrong with that. I don't mind my tax dollar going there. However, I would like to have the option of getting to spend my tax dollar in a non-public school.


Nothing wrong with that.


Prisons and police could be scaled down if certain other conditions are met. That said, I don't mind my tax dollar being spent on some public safety.
The largest and most expensive military in the world? Just where do you get those numbers? In fact, what are the numbers?
Large as in number of people? I would like to think that the PRC has a much larger and much more expensive military, if for no other reason than population size and communism.
Don't confuse the issue with facts now.


I personally don't have a problem funding NASA, as they indirectly generate gov't revenue. Industries shouldn't be as heavily subsidized as they are, or not at all. It's supposed to be capitalism...In some cases, the subsidation makes sense.


So the farm subsidies are the one singular reason necessitating food stamps, eh?


I don't have a problem with some limited form of unemployment benefits. It should bridge any financial gap you might have. It should still give you plenty incentive to get off your behind and find work ASAP, even if it isn't your line of work or not according to your likings.
I do have a problem with financing people to sit at home and being largely uninterested in finding a job.
There is no benefit for me here, you see. All the other spendings that were farther up the list give me some sort of benefit.


Again, I don't have a problem with some limited amount of wellfare for the truly needy. Plus, this really shouldn't be so much a federal effort, but rather a very local one. And even then it should mostly originate from private donations, i.e. churches, family, etc.

We spend more on defense, then any other country, by far. China spends anywhere from 20 to 60 billion. Its hard to tell cause they dont advertise it, and they buy a lot of Russian systems. The US is going to spend aprroximately 466 Billion on defense this year. In fact the rest of the entire world only spends 500 billion on defense, so you see, we spend about the same as the rest of the world.

It costs money to be able to pack up conventional forces, go to the other side of the earth, and blow the snot out of a hostile country. We have a several generation edge over most of these countrys with our weapons systems, and that "prevents" war. Like with China, which wouldnt hesitate to take Taiwan by force if they could.

An American carrier battle group parked off each end o the straight can completely freeze any intention China had. The Chinese cant crack that nut, nothing lives within 600 miles of that carrier , from sea bottom to stratosphere, unless that commander allows it to.

But that capability costs money, a lot of it............10

Well worth the money then... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Thanks for clarifying the defense budget issue. Apparently it is I that was clueless.
I apologize. Haggis.

A better question: Which of the items that Haggis listed are actually authorized by the Constitution of the United States?

I don't see anything in the Constitution that authorizes the federal gov't to steal my money and transfer it to other individuals or corporations. We tend to get caught up in debates over the "fairness" of this or that policy. The question that should be asked when presented with the details af any new, or existing, federal transfer program is: "Which article of the Constitution says it's even legal?". Economic stability, fiscal responsibility, economic sustainability, social justice, and fairness are all red herrings. If a desired program is so important to the health of the nation, it should be important enough to pass the necessary powers through the amendment process.

It's interesting that the only federal expenditures that liberals object to are the very few things that are specifically enumerated in the US Constitution (like military defense and regulation of immigration). Isn't that curious?

Task Force Smith.

They wouldn't dare attack the US, we have "the bomb."

Seems our superiority didn't work out quite that way in Korea did it?

That was a failure of will, not of power.

Like Vietnam? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

Haggis, I don't understand where you were going with this. Are you upset by the deficit spending? or the amount of people who are actually getting some return for their tax dollars paid? or haveing the most powerful military in the world? Or that we actually have an infrastructure, unlike most countries of this world? Or are you not upset at all and you just want to show us and remind us of how beholding to this government we actually are? What was the purpose of this thread and do we pass or fail? Are we good little liberals or evil conservatives or the other way around? Tell us what is right so we can respond and what you were looking for.

Well, a careful observation of Haggis' past posts might lead one to the conclusion that he has a beef with the gubmint or any authority, for that matter.
But that's JustMe.... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Matthias I may be wrong and if I am I deeply apologize but I thought I read where Haggis said he was a teacher and if he was he's spent his share of time eating from the welfare troth.

I noticed on one of the other threads that folks were discussing Unemployment Benefits, and the Welfare system. I didn't really wish to hijack that thread so I made of partial list welfare programs that all of us, in one way or another, depend on.

It has always rubbed me raw to hear or read about folks bi*ching on Welfare and Unemployment to poor folks while they themselves were soaking up the freebies from the Government.

Oh yeah, I was/am a teacher and it is nothing more than a WPA for the teachers and welfare for the students, but then so are thousands of other jobs and institutions if people are honest about it.

Haggis...as I pointed out in my first response to this post of yours, I don't mind my tax dollar going to certain programs.
What I do mind is supporting folks unwilling to work.

Yeah Haggis I know what you are saying. I was in construction and about 50% of our work was for some form of government, either city state or federal so I guess I was living off of tax payer dollars and sweat. As repulsive as the system seems at times I can think of no other way to finance the needs of the country. We've grown out of the one room school house and the one local sheriff and a few dirt roads. And I also see Matthias' point of view how the system is so corrupt, There are just some problems on this earth that are unsolveable by mankind and we just plod along doing the best we can with what we've got and wait for the day when it ends.

The problem is your definition of welfare.



My definition of welfare is:



Payments given to people so that don't have to work even though they are able to work.



OR



Transfers of money from people who earn it to people who don't.

Conrad has struck on the key. We as a society need desparately to develop some definitions for:

Welfare
Work
Gift
Charity
Taxes
Extortion
Spending
Investment
Temporary
Rights
Privledges
Responcibilities

I do not think my definitions would be the same as Haggis', but this nation needs to come to some level of consensus on these terms.

Fireplug

The reason most people are against welfare is that they have to work hard and pay taxes so lazy bums can lay arround all day.

Conrad

When I was teaching, at a high school level, I had a student whose Father left him and his Mother with nothing. She went on Welfare and started back to school. By the time the boy had graduated high school, she had finished her undergraduate and graduate degrees and was teaching at a local college. She said that she hated drawing Welfare, but now she was paying more a year in taxes than she received in all of the years she was on Welfare; and she would be paying taxes for a long time into the future.

I've read that the average person on Welfare is a "single white women, between 20 and 25, with two children, and that they will be on Welfare less than two years," but then that's the average.

And I don't have a problem with folks who utlize wellfare as a tool to bridge a gap. Just don't treat it as a highway to carry you through life.
Looking around where I live, there's PLENTY of those folks.