Me: I don't understand how, on the one hand, you can claim that if this were a democracy the poor would be receiving more benefits, when, in fact, the benefits the poor are receiving have done nothing but climb since the Welfare State began, and their immediate material needs are taken care of. How is having your immediate material needs (and wants) taken care of by the government a healthy situation for adults?
Why is a retirement plan not a personal responsibility rather than an entitlement from the government (i.e. everybody else's pockets)? At what point does your standard of living cease to be the government's responsibility and begin to be one's own? Is there anything that we ought to be responsible for ourselves, or should other taxpayers bear all the burdens for supporting us in the manner to which we like to be accustomed?
What is this standard of living? The poor today are living like the middle class of forty years ago- this doesn't prove that we need to make more money to increase our standard of living, it proves that the sort of poverty the welfare state was supposed to wipe out was, in fact, wiped out. The goal posts moved, and now there's a brand new standard of living that shifts every few years- it's not about not living in poverty, it's about maintaining an artificial standard of living that the middle class could only dream of 50 years ago.
We not only do not have to chase that artificial standard of living, we have no MORAL obligation to provide it to others (or grasp after it ourselves). If the Bible says that a man who won't provide for his own is worse than an infidel, that those who will not work should not be permitted to eat, to make it our ambition to lead a quiet lives and to work with our own hands, and to be content with food and clothing, why is it the government's (i.e. your neighbor's) responsibility to cushion people from the consequences of disregarding those instructions and not working, not being content, not providing for one's own, etc. etc?
Also- I suspect that the homeless who irritate you in your home-town are, in fact, pretty representative of the homeless anywhere else.* What they, and most of us in this country, need is not more government money (especially since we can agree that they do have their immediate material needs, and then some, taken care of), but the gospel.
Government does not make a very good Saviour.
*This is one of those things that just bemuses me. He actually has some kind of rude and mean things to say about the real homeless people he saw on a daily business and had an opportunity to touch, to help- his lofty goals for helping the homeless involved taking other people's money to help the more deserving homeless who, naturally, lived somewhere else, and he never had to see, smell, or touch them, nor walk past them to go to his favorite hang-outs.
My argument is less about the homeless being deserving or not, whatever that means, but about his imagining that the people he saw every day (and found smelly, dirty, annoying, and unworthy of his compassion) were somehow less deserving than the abstract homeless he imagined were somehow cleaner, tidier, quieter, and stayed out of sight in other places. Conveniently, this absolved him of actually helping the homeless he saw daily through any effort more strenuous or inconvenient than mouthing off about those selfish, greedy conservatives.
That's interesting. I don't know about the town you're talking about, but I've never lived anyplace where the truly homeless would even have been able to survive (and certainly not able to also pursue their substance abuse hobbies) without the "charity" given them by Christians.
ReplyDeleteIt occurs to me that this might be why I was rolling my eyes so hard in the restaurant food stamp discussion. I spent most of my life in a city where there are huge, enormous amounts of religious charity and it's just as bad if not worse in terms of the results it produces in the recipients and those who have to live around them. Now sure, those people are disobeying St. Paul's injunction to require work out of those that receive help, but who's going to make them stop? This is a general cultural problem. You and your commenters seem to be stuck on the unfairness of redistribution via taxation. I am just not as exercised by the idea that people are *taking my money at gunpoint* and this allows a bunch of poor people to be more slatternly and feckless than they otherwise would. I'm not arguing that this isn't true - it obviously is - it's just the epic butthurt about it that everyone needs to move beyond, because the idea that everyone deserves magical sparkly ponies just for existing is already so deeply entrenched, the best you can do is work on convincing people that everyone just gets a pony, and it's ok if some people have magic ones, and rioting because your ponies don't sparkle will lead to no ponies for anybody.
Right now, my family is poor. We make precisely enough money each month to make rent...that's it. Our rent is far from outrageous, we rented the cheapest place the four of us could legally live in on the outskirts of civilization. We're in this situation due to my husband being laid off three years ago, my being laid off from one of my jobs two years ago, and neither of us being able to find work since. Any work. At all.
ReplyDeleteLast year, we each had a couple online gigs, but the company my husband worked for tanked. The company I worked for updated their program such that it and my computer were no longer compatible. I had to quit.
We have, to our shame, been dependent on family to help us meet our bills and stay fed. We've sold a lot of our stuff, too, to try to make ends meet. My husband finally has a new job, but it's commission and residuals only, paid quarterly (starting in January). In the mean time, we now have the additional expenses of his being in business without the additional income of being in business. He also, last year, was able to start earning a little income by substitute teaching.
Some months ago, we were on WIC, but that put us on a diet primarily consisting of cold cereal and almost eradicated produce from our meals. That combined with all the extra money I had to spend on milk to use up the cereal (WIC provides low fat milk, which makes my son very sick and does a number on my blood sugar), and our government "aide" cost us more than paying for our own food did.
Around that time, our second son was born. Having no way of affording the medical expenses that my employer-provided healthcare left uncovered, I applied for state benefits. We provided all our financial documentation. The state responded two months later (after the bills involved had already gone to collections) with a rejection letter. The state did not believe we had provided them with complete financial information.
I have also looked at the SNAP program, but the minimum standards for help are standards we do not meet at this time. How don't we meet them? We're too poor.
We've come to realize in our little adventure that government programs are not intended for the poor: they're intended for people who are dependent. It's a cyclical program.
Please explain, Mercy, why faith-based charity produces worse results in people than government charity. I'm a bit confused here.
ReplyDeleteAnd I must have missed the magic pony giveaway entirely...
Frances, eek, yes, I meant homeless. I wish I'd saved t'other guys remarks- he really was quite harsh about the homeless in his own town because they annoyed him so much. He wanted them moved out of the downtown areas and jailed for panhandling. The homeless in other towns and states, well, they didn't bother him, so....
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks.