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this topic will get a lot of attention

cj1234

Posted 10:02 pm, 08/22/2015

Awesome comeback jack***

Basking

Posted 6:55 pm, 08/21/2015

Shut up Stupid

cj1234

Posted 6:41 pm, 08/21/2015

Average bear do you feel like a big man calling people you don't know stupid? That proves your intelligence and youre small penis compcomplex.weve been through this before. Please get that treated because you will be much happier. You Little piece of@$/#!.

Basking

Posted 3:16 pm, 08/21/2015

Actually, he has changed his opinions a lot to try to get conservative voters. Dig back further than 6 months. Hint: pro choice, pro gun control, pro gay marriage, pro socialized medicine.

averagebear

Posted 2:52 pm, 08/21/2015

He's sort of like you, CJ. He's stupid and comfortable being so!

cj1234

Posted 2:24 pm, 08/21/2015

I don't agree with everything he talks about but at least he has the balls to stick to it and not change just to be politically correct.

underdog2

Posted 7:25 pm, 08/11/2015

Toby what will your encore performance be?

Basking

Posted 7:03 pm, 08/11/2015

Thanks, you just won me $20. I've been waiting for the John Locke references

Todosrazon

Posted 11:17 pm, 08/10/2015

Basking - That is one of the absolute stupidest things I've ever heard - and I'm not exaggerating. You fundamentally don't understand the difference between right and wrong. For the more respected philosophers (coming from John Locke) the difference between something being good and bad is the application of force / coercion. Using force against another person to impose your will on them - thus removing their agency - is wrong, outside of self defense. This is called the non-aggression principle.

It's the difference between theft and charity
It's the difference between rape and good old fashioned consensual sex
It's the difference between physical assault and sport
etc...

Placing a gun to someone's head and pulling the trigger is certainly a violation of the non-aggression principle. Shooting someone in the head is murder lol.

But withdrawing government assistance from a person (especially if they are still getting some assistance) is not the same thing at all, not even close. Stealing someone's property is certainly wrong - but government assistance isn't the property of my cousin. In fact, it's the property of others that was forcibly removed from them through taxation.

Withdrawing assistance isn't the same as instantly killing someone, it's just setting things to neutral. And I would go as far as to say that people wouldn't die if all assistance, every bit, was withdrawn. People in poverty might have to rely on charity, or church, or family, they might have to work bad jobs, they might have to move, but they most definitely wouldn't die. My cousin would be just fine if she didn't draw as much from the government.

You can't compare the action of physical assault with the non-action of austerity.

Basking

Posted 10:24 pm, 08/10/2015

Toby, you have no idea what the norm is. You are only guessing what it is, and siding with the version that you want the norm to be. You haven't actually looked at the fact or numbers to see who is on assistance. Are you willing to take a gun and put it to your cousin's children and pull the trigger? Because truth is, that's what your idealist system is. A death warrant to the children in the system. I'm not saying I have a problem with that, as long as you are willing to pull the trigger.

Todosrazon

Posted 10:07 pm, 08/10/2015

Here's a video of what I'm talking about:

Todosrazon

Posted 10:04 pm, 08/10/2015

Well like I said earlier, i would be willing to push the minimum up to $9K upon further review of the math involved. My friend called me out on it and said that was probably too little. Also, I'm glad things worked out for you - your case went as well as it could have.

However, there is the other case as well, like the case with my cousin. She hasn't really worked a single day in her life, I mean real honest to God work. She sits at home and draws a welfare check which helps her pay for food, housing, etc... through SNAP. HUD, and disability for having mental health problems, even though she doesn't really have those problems. You could argue welfare isn't for her, but for her children. But her children are also a mess.

The real question is, between you and my cousin, which case do you think is more common? I'm afraid your case of being on assistance, getting educated and finding a good paying job in short order is the exception, not the norm. The reason I say that is because we have third and fourth generation recipients of welfare, and roughly a third of our nation is on some form of welfare.

You can say we should take it on a case by case basis, but how exactly do you plan to do that? and why does my cousin deserve so much money for not working? She actually draws more that my friend who works a 40 hour job making a low wage. And a portion of his money is taken away from him through taxes, which through a bureaucratic nightmare, gets transferred to my cousin. How exactly is that fair?

And every tax dollar that's being removed from a lower middle, middle, and upper class member of society shifts resources from someone who's being more productive in society to someone who's being less productive in society. That doesn't make them bad, but someone in the lower class probably won't be spending that money on something that will grow the economy.

Don't believe me? Well if welfare benefits actually do lift society out of poverty, then why do we still have so many people in poverty? We've been fighting a "War on Poverty" since 1965, and we haven't eve made a dent in it thus far. $680 billion was spent in 2013 at the federal level on poverty program - not unemployment, just poverty program - and when combined with state and local programs, this results in $1 trillion per year combating poverty.

Looking online, I found this video with a gentleman from CATO, explaining how being too generous actually creates a perverse incentive against working. That would explain why our 50 year, multi-trillion dollar campaign against poverty have failed.

averagebear

Posted 11:32 am, 08/10/2015

The part that we're missing here isn't so much that the system needs this much reform as does the availability of a living wage being offered, which is clearly in the hands of the private sector. Who created inflation to the point of wages not being up to what is required to live? If the private sector wants to fix this mess, they could.

Heels09

Posted 11:02 am, 08/10/2015

My point is it should be a case by case basis.


I can use myself as an example. I actually drew unemployment for close to 2 years and received TAA benefits. During that time after I lost my job I drew around 22k per year. I was able to keep paying my mortgage, Car Payments, and paid taxes. As a matter of fact, at the time I had no kids we were hit hard with income taxes. During this time I went to school and finished my BS degree and worked on my Masters. Even though my tuition and Books were paid for I still accumulated student loans for a 2 year period. My point is I was not working, and received a probably 30-35k in Benefits in a 2 year period. Every dime of that money was pumped back into the economy. I also was able to get a job within 2 weeks of graduating.


So, By using the 2 programs effectively, I was able to recover, keep my house, and get an education and a job, all while I was still contributing to the economy. That is a pretty successful program in my eyes. Hard to do that on 6K.

Todosrazon

Posted 10:19 am, 08/10/2015

Heels, good questions!

For this conversation, by unemployed, I simply mean that they are not working between a certain age, which I haven't determined yet - probably 21-67, but I'm just throwing those out there -

The subsidies would be added to a check in the same way that taxes are removed from a check. For most people drawing, the supplement would be added bi-weekly, directly to their paychecks. If they are unemployed, and are not reveiving a check from an employer, then they would file through a system like unemployment, which would send them checks bi-weekly.

I understand that there are multiple situations that would cause a person to be unemployed, but look at the current system.

According to a report from the CATO Institute, many welfare recipients receive more in handouts than people who are employed in the private sector. For instance, a mother with two children in New York is able to collect $38,004 per year in welfare. This is greater than the starting salary of a teacher in the state - that's insane.

In the most generous state, Hawaii, a mother of two is eligible to earn $60,590 per year. In the least generous state, Idaho, a mother of two is still eligible for $11,150 per year.

And here's the real problem, for that mother drawing $38K for not working, she CANNOT start working a decent paying starting job making $30K, because she'll loose $8,000 in benefits. She's not a bad person for not getting off welfare, she just doesn't want to loose $8K.

Guys, however one may feel about welfare, we can't have a system that rewards not working, and punishes working. We should encourage working, not punish it, even if it's just a par-time job.

That's the reason why the negative income people would draw is relatively low - because you don't want people being comfortable not working. Otherwise, there's no reason for them to ever get off welfare.

That being said, would you feel more comfortable if someone earning 0 income drew $9,000 rather than $6,000? Because me and a friend have batted that back and forth, moving the credit from $20,000 to $30,000.

Also, no this is not a matter of swapping out one bureaucracy for another, because my system would be far more simple to administer. I mean seriously, do you think the IRS uses as many resources than the entire DSS? In fact, the IRS may even shrink a little because of the lack of loopholes.

But seriously, before addressing anything else, tell me if you think the credit should be moved from $20,000 to $30,000. That would give a single person claiming $0 in income a minimum income of $9,000 annually.

Heels09

Posted 8:49 am, 08/10/2015

"How much assistance should a person draw from the government if they don't work?"


Describe what you mean by not working? I don't really know what the point is but there are many different situations. You can't just give 6K to everyone not working. It does not work that way. You have kids getting out of school, people being laid off, disability, seniors that can't work, those that can't find a living wage.

Right now if you draw NC unemployment for 13 weeks you can get up ****4550 or $350 per week before taxes. You are wanting to cut that by a third per week and have a open ended system.

Also, you have to administer the subsidy. Is it going to be weekly payments, Monthly, yearly? What happens is some one falls into or out of a level over the course of the year. Is it prorated? Where do they go for problems.? I assume this would be a function of the IRS, but it would have to be much larger than it is now because it would take place at a local level. You are swapping out one bureaucracy for another.

Todosrazon

Posted 10:38 pm, 08/09/2015

How much? and from who? Our budget deficit in 2014 was $483 billion, but really, in order to pay off our debt, we need even more. Our debt is $18.6 trillion. So even if we had a surplus of $500 billion (with the interest rate staying the same) it would still take us 37 years to pay off the debt - 37 years of higher taxes / lower benefits, with no extra spending for things like greater numbers of social security enrollees, natural disasters or wars -

So how do we increase our revenue by $1 trillion dollars. How much money in tax would that require?

Basking

Posted 10:23 pm, 08/09/2015

More money, Stupid

Todosrazon

Posted 10:17 pm, 08/09/2015

So how exactly do we fix our deficit? I'm just dying to know -

Basking

Posted 10:09 pm, 08/09/2015

Wow, you are a moron. I already explained, we can't reduce spending enough to still get to the point that we can pay the expenses that we are obligated to pay. But yet, you still bring up reducing spending. More proof to me that you don't understand the economy or the budget numbers.

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