Forbidden Donut

I think working 40 hours a week should also be a requirement.

"In 1996, Congress undertook a massive overhaul of the welfare system. Under the Welfare Reform Act (officially known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), people convicted of drug offenses are subject to a lifetime ban on receiving cash assistance and food stamps.[vii] The law also allows states to impose drug testing on welfare recipients."

Discussion over?

/ooga booga the porr peeple is takein yo' moneez!

A drug offense is MUCH different then being clean, and you know that. Many drug-users are never arrested, or have charges filed against them.

Truth be told, if we need to think of qualifications for something like welfare, the best thing for it is to be abolished. See the other thread, however, for more discussion on this topic.

"The law also allows states to impose drug testing on welfare recipients."
I'm just gonna try that again since you missed it the first time.

Sucks when you take power away from the federal government and allow states to make choices for themselves doesn't it?

/seriously the cognitive dissonance on these boards is driving me nuts.
//How the HELL would abolishing welfare help ANYBODY.

I don't think I'm wavering in my opinions at all /ohmy.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":o" border="0" alt="ohmy.gif" />

Welfare is a required institution that takes money from everyone to help a few. It is a fundamental infringement on the freedom and equality of those that do not wish to support it. That's why I oppose it.

but how do you treat everyone the same when their circumstances aren't even comparable. It's not even worth having the equality discussion because it's THAT foolish of a litmus test. The wealthy in this country get a butt load of help and breaks from the government. They have more opportunities presented to them. They have more ways of making money, and more ways of saving that money. They have more freedom to move around than the poor. How do you give THOSE freedoms to the poor in an effort to foster "equality", Court?

these are VERY complicated issues and applying one rubric to all problems is how we ended up with an overly de-regulated market and an enormous, growing and accelerating gap between rich and poor

The gap between rich and poor is a deregulated Federal Reserve system issue. When the Fed creates money, the money goes through the hands of the rich before it ever works its way down. By the time the money gets down to the middle/lower class, its value has dropped (this is also the main problem with trickle down economics).

And in Court's defense, he did say that welfare is a required institution.

how do you apply "equality" to the issue of deregulation?

ALL the discussion of fairness and equality is predicated on the idea that if everybody has the same opportunities then they all have equal ability to partake of those opportunities. If that were the case this would be a rational discussion to have. As it isn't this is simply a distraction from REAL solutions to these REAL problems.

And you're right, Court has said that, numerous times.

He's still arguing what I believe to be a completely untenable position. An idealistic approach that I certainly appreciate at face value, but if you admit the idealistic approach doesn't work all the time, then the ideal simply isn't correct. Or isn't an ideal. You can't concede one point with an ideal without suggesting that there are possibly other areas in which you might need to concede again. And that's how you end up with.. you know... real answers.

/Or we can bypass the whole ideal thing altogether and get straight to the meat.
//We should incentivise getting off welfare. True or False?

There's a difference between everyone being equal and everyone having equal opportunity. Everyone has the same opportunities to move up. Some people merely have an advantage to do so. You can't say that being rich is the greatest advantage over everyone else though. Arguably intelligence, ingenuity or just plain talent have much more to do with becoming successful in this country. I'll never understand the desire to close the gap between the rich and poor. Society wouldn't work if everyone was rich or equal in status. That takes away the fundamental reason why this country works; the desire to improve your station in life. You take away the desire to go the extra mile and you end up with communism. How'd that work out?

In the end, everyone always the chance to win the lottery.

I'll do agree with you Andrew. Idealism is idealism, because it differs from realism. Sometimes, idealistic approaches don't work, but that doesn't mean that people should stop trying to gain the ideal. For example, welfare is currently a necessity in the system today. It doesn't mean we should stop trying to change things so that welfare isn't needed anymore.

Getting off of welfare should be its own incentive.

When the federal government doesn't have their hands in everyone's business, then everyone does have equal opportunities. Yeah, money makes life better and really opens up a whole new world, but as has been demonstrated time and time again, when allowed, innovation flourishes, and no amount of "old money" is going to keep that from happening. And only when that happens do the average people thrive. Think of Google. The same players dominated the technological world for decades. They took advantage of their "friends in high places" and effectively made it impossible for the little guy to compete. Then the internet came along. It was a totally unregulated breeding ground for innovative products that make life better, and even though the old players released their internet products, a company like Google could make a better product, turn the entire industry on its head, and literally change the world. The technology Google offered the web is present or mimicked on pretty much every major website on the web. Google was successful because on the Internet, they were on equal footing even with the big guys. When they started out in the back of a garage, they didn't have the opportunity to live a lavish rich lifestyle, but they did have the opportunity to obtain it.

Real equal opportunity can exist. When it does, there are a lot of losers and a lot of winners, but ultimately, everyone's future is only what they make of it. That is when things are as fair as they can possibly be, and that is what I seek.

There are only three possibilities: You follow a logical ideal and succeed, you pursue an irrational ideal and fail, or you follow no ideal -- trying to make the best decisions you can when you can make them -- and you fail. I believe we have been pursuing the third option for most of our country's history, and I believe that is the option you're pursuing now. History tells us that it doesn't work. "Trying to do what is best for everyone" always leads to a society's downfall. Good intentions are often downright dangerous. I don't compromise in the pursuit of a logical ideal so people are happier and healthier today.

Trying to do what is best for everyone has nothing to do with my position because, as I've pointed out, there is no cookie cutter ideal to apply to everything, including that.

Nice avoidance of the 4th option, making the best decisions available to you and succeeding. And no metric for what makes a logical or irrational ideal logical or irrational.

Norway would like a word with you.

Also. Your example of hard work making for great success is a once in a lifetime thing. There will be one winner and a shit load of losers in ANY realm of our economy. Once you're winning, you have so many tools at your disposal to keep everyone else down and stay ahead. Some very talented ex-google employees made a search engine of their own this year. It failed miserably.

I said a couple weeks ago, "If somebody says it's not who you know, but what you know." they're lying to you. And you (missing the point) said that the opposite is true. Agreeing that it's who you know by a long shot.

But now you're all "woo american dream just work hard and wharrgarbl"
/changed your mind?

Sorry, I probably should have said that your philosophy is "make life better for as many people as possible."

The option you mention doesn't exist -- it's a simple math: if you're constantly sacrificing a little even with the best intentions in mind, you're going to end up with nothing left.

Stop citing the current state of this country as evidence to refute my ideal. The current state of this country is a result of the things YOU support and is the single greatest reason I've adopted the ideal I have. Just because I acknowledge a certain truth about the country today doesn't mean I support it.

What's being sacrificed? Money? or People? I think it's hard to come up with a third option, and one of the two are going to end up sacrificed to the god of the other.

You're totally within your rights to hold whatever ideals you like. I'm totally within my rights to say that applying those ideals to our country would lead to disaster. For what it's worth I hold similar (if not identical) feelings about the federal government and the american dream. Working towards it is one thing. Just saying it over and over isn't constructive.

w/e.

And offering concessions won't work either. I have no allusions about the infeasibility of an immediate application of my ideal given the current state of the country, but I also realize that concessions get you nowhere. Every concession this country has made in the last 200 years has been disastrous in terms of a free society.

I'd say you're exaggerating, though generally correct. Our very constitution was a result of some very smart people conceding points of view to one another to come up with a somewhat cohesive mission for our country. I see what you're getting at though, and particularly lately you're probably right.

What I'd like, though, is not necessarily concession of your ideals, but rather a concession that your ideals are unattainable at the moment, which you've just given. Moving forward, do you think it would be possible to shift all but the most fundamental of responsibilities away from the federal government in our lifetime? I really don't know. And I am not necessarily confident that even if it is an option that we wouldn't make things worse along the way, only to arrive at a state-by-state solution that was unable to tackle the host of new problems introduced by the transition. What you propose (most likely accurately) as the diagnosis has no cure. And in the absence of a cure I'd prefer to treat the symptoms, rather than letting the patient code. (not that we would fail as a nation... just a little analogy to spice up the point)