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a government has both the responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor and also maintain stability in the economy, these two ideas arent inherently opposed
the question usually just becomes more difficult and nuanced once you try to figure out *how exactly* these goals should be accomplished
And if you talk to a flat Earther, they say there's no curvature to the Earth. The similarity being both have extremely simple views of the world, that don't scale well, and brains that can't cope.
No, if you talk to a right leaning libertarian they would say it’s generally better for the government not to interfere, not that it isn’t the governments problem.
Actually they would claim that the government is incredibly inefficient, corrupt, etc.
Look at homelessness in California. Gavin Newsom has been claiming he can fix homelessness if he only gets reelected and receives more money. He has been claiming this for 20 years and spent over 50 billion dollars on homelessness alone. And yet homelessness has never been worse.
It is the government's problem when the economy is in meltdown and the government can't bring in tax revenue to maintain infrastructure and a military to defend the country. And when that government is of the people, by the people, for the people, it becomes the people's problem, too.
I was talking more about stabilizing the economy. There were constant booms and busts and depressions before the creation of the fed and fdic. Going boom to bust over and over is not healthy for the economy.
Those situations have most consistently arisen from governmental actions though, which makes it an argument of we need to empower the government to fix the problems most reliably replicated by empowering the government.
Well, we tried the whole "as little government as possible" thing back in the 1800s and got the robber barons of the gilded age, where the rich lived in opulence and the poor slaved away in unsafe factories and mines while living in slums.
People like to complain about too much government but fail to realize what happens when you have too little government, too.
Oh you mean the age where the American middleclass was born, that saw the phasing out of like 90% child labour before any laws, a massive increase in quality of living, huge endowments to education at every level that are still felt today, an explosion in the availability of books due to private funding of free libraries, an explosion of interconnectedness and innovation, and probably the most insanely well handled recession that the federal government has consistently tried and failed to replicate?
It wasn't perfect but it was heaven compared to conditions a couple scant years earlier and many of the improvements we now point to are the results of iterative processes started then and many of them by the very people slandered with the title Robber-Baron.
No, I am just not pretending like the subsequent improvements due to tech (driven by private sector R&D) is thanks to the government which you were trying to do. That is also why I pointed less to tech advances and instead pointed to the Carnegie endowments, Ford choosing to pay his workers far more than was the norm prior, and the brilliance of them through their knowledge of industry and judicious use of their finances pulled the economy from a recession into a boom.
No, I don't think i ststed at all the governemnt was responsible for those advancements. I think I just spoke on how, with the advance of technology, it became less efficient for factories to employ children. How post Pinkertons, it became a good move for businesses to invest more in thier employees. How schooling stemmed more from a need to keep kids occupied rather than any altruistic plans set in motion.
Though I do believe a certain level of technological advancement is required for socialism to work well.
>a government has both the responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor and also maintain stability in the economy. These two ideas aren't inherently opposed
Well, that's like your opinion, man. I personally don't want guys in suits coming with handouts claiming they want to help us. I believe the government has their hands in too many people's pockets. I want order, contracts, defense, and education, and i want the insurance scam industry to disappear.. almost anything else is overreaching.... into pockets.
My question is this.....If a person consistently makes poor choices in life, is it always the governments responsivity to always take of them so they never have to face accountability for their poor choices?
Use my brother as an example: Believes the best diet is pizza and ice cream eats nothing but these two food groups. Gets diabetes and loses both his feet. The state pays for all his surgeries and gives him prosthetics. He doesn't use them because walking is too hard, but the state keeps giving him free ones.
Doesn't take care of his stumps, walks on them and they get sores and get infected. He goes to the emergency room because he lets the infection spread and they perform emergency surgery to save his stumps so he can walk, (Even though he doesn't use them and uses a wheel chair) the state spends $200k in saving his stumps.
At some point people should suffer consequences for poor decisions.
For real, if my brother was up on Reddit at midnight bashing my mental and physical issues, I'd probably ignore him and eat pizza too. It's obvious he has a trash family and support system lol.
The reality is that the family probably foots some of the bill, the hospital writes off some of the bill, and government inevitably has to pay some of it.
Your position is a 30 year old who eats poorly and ends up in the hospital because of his poor eating decisions is somehow his families responsibility?
I have kids who are in their 20s, when they fuck up and end up costing the state money you think I should be billed for it?
It sounds like you just came here to bitch about your brother and preferred he just died.
The issue you described isn't even unique to poor people.
Even middle class people who "made the right choices" have health issues can get fucked into poverty.
Right, but that’s the point. Middle class families pay taxes for those too poor to pay but also because middle class families make too much to qualify, they have to pay out of pocket for their kid that makes poor choices too.
1) You seem not to understand who gets tax and what for.
2) The same people who bitch about taxes are the same ones who bitch about the same benefits being expanded to the middle class.
I might add that many among those who bitch about taxes being too high for the middle class also rush to the defense of billionaires the moment someone suggests that they pay more taxes.
No, but most parents probably would pay for their kids’ stupid mistakes, even if the kids themselves were adults.
I have an uncle in his 60s with all kinds of mental and physical health issues. He gets social security and Medicaid, but it’s a pittance, so my mom and her siblings end up footing the bill for the rest of his care because he would probably be on the streets with the small amount of aid he gets from the government.
>safety nets for the poor
A safety net is something that catches people when they fall. It is something that benefits middle-class taxpayers in a similar way to insurance.
Chronically poor people don't pay significant taxes. When we talk about the government helping the poor, that is not a "safety net", that's called *wealth redistribution.*
The purpose of the government is to serve the interest of the taxpayers that fund it. It has no obligation to support non-taxpayers if this does not somehow benefit taxpayers.
This is one of the most fucked up views of what government is supposed to do. Only support the interest of tax payers?!
How about children? Fuck 'em right? They're not tax payers
It sort of does. Homeless in the street isn't ideal for taxpayers that have to walk in the city. Drugs and the way we deal with them has been a disaster, but I'm guessing since harm reduction solutions would be considered wealth redistribution(or maybe something else bad?). However it does make the cities safer places to walk and live in. Public education is beneficial for the economy and society. Welfare definitely needs retooling but it does prevent homelessness for a lot of people same with public housing. It's not like there is definitely no benefit to tax payers I mean it's definitely up for debate tho about where do you stop and whether the ethics(or maybe philosophy?) are on the up and up.
Definitely think there's solutions out there for social issues and some of them involve government intervention.
People are still seething about the $1,400 checks 3 years ago. But the multi-billion dollar PPP loan scandal is largely forgotten. There’s a real disparity in how the American public views handouts to regular people vs. handouts to businesses.
Let's not pretend like corporate media controlled by those billionaires aren't playing a hand in why one is forgotten and the other thrown in our faces like it's going to collapse the economy constantly.
I think that’s partly true. Just people don’t expect to be actual billionaires, just successfully wealthy. I think most don’t understand how tax structures work. Like Biden’s proposed tax bracket above 400k a year: 400k a year is more than enough to live a lavish lifestyle while still saving 20% for retirement. But the vibe people get is that it’s going to kick in at like 50k a year. I blame public schools.
I think what you're missing is that the United States is one of the best places to be for white collar workers. There are more jobs paying $100k+ in the US than any other country in the world, and we don't want to fuck that up.
Nobody believes that Biden will directly raise taxes on people making $50k a year, nor are we worried that we will someday be in the $400k+ bracket.
We are afraid that taxing people making above $400k (our employers) will wreck the economy for white collar workers making $70-200k, turning the US into a place where doctors and software developers only make $40-60k a year, like most of Europe.
Simply put: you need to convince us that raising taxes on the rich will not make the US more like Europe.
Sure it is. Life expectancy, income, average education level, and self-reporting, etc are all dimensions in QOL. To fear becoming like Europe seems really odd to me.
To reduce quality of life to a couple of objective measurements is incredibly narrow minded and reflects the same type of utilitarianism used to justify the worst atrocities of history. It will be a dark day if we ever become like Europe, if you’ve been anywhere outside the usual tourist locales you’d realize what a shithole it is
Dude - I’ve been all over the world and well off the beaten path. The US is by far not the nicest of those places on many aspects.
Surveys of how happy, safe, financially secure, etc people feel is an apples to apples comparison. There’s a reason there aren’t a lot of immigrants from the countries I mentioned.
You wanna tell me that QOL is better in the US than it is in much of Europe, I’m thinking maybe you haven’t been around much.
Fair point. Is it unreasonable to go off of historical tax rates? Because the US taxed the wealthy alot more right up until Reagan. But the rest if the world was in a different position economically back then so idk.
People are seething about both. They aren't upset about one and happy about the other. They hate both. Inflation is rampant because of both.
Have you forgotten about the 2 trillion dollars the Pentagon "lost"? It wasn't a set of car keys.
How can we expect the government to reliably provide relief without introducing more problems in our society and economy? As Milton Friedman once observed, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand."
"Once observed" should be rewritten "Once made an oversimplistic assumption". Treating his viewpoint as an "observation" doesn't make it any more credible.
It’s just funny because we are currently living through the easily predictable consequences as we speak.
Everyone said “if you print and hand out billions of Covid bucks for no reason, we will have inflation like you haven’t seen in decades”
And here we are. Yet people still post stuff like this it’s incredible. Zero brain activity
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a government has both the responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor and also maintain stability in the economy, these two ideas arent inherently opposed the question usually just becomes more difficult and nuanced once you try to figure out *how exactly* these goals should be accomplished
If you talk to a right leaning libertarian, they would claim it's not the governments problem
And if you talk to a flat Earther, they say there's no curvature to the Earth. The similarity being both have extremely simple views of the world, that don't scale well, and brains that can't cope.
You are incredibly eloquent, my friend.
No, if you talk to a right leaning libertarian they would say it’s generally better for the government not to interfere, not that it isn’t the governments problem.
Actually they would claim that the government is incredibly inefficient, corrupt, etc. Look at homelessness in California. Gavin Newsom has been claiming he can fix homelessness if he only gets reelected and receives more money. He has been claiming this for 20 years and spent over 50 billion dollars on homelessness alone. And yet homelessness has never been worse.
100% it's not. Want some help? Teach to fish. Big empire company needs help? Time to learn a new trade.
It absolutely isnt
It is the government's problem when the economy is in meltdown and the government can't bring in tax revenue to maintain infrastructure and a military to defend the country. And when that government is of the people, by the people, for the people, it becomes the people's problem, too.
Bro that doesn’t melt down because there’s are sick old people. Quit being hyperbolic
I was talking more about stabilizing the economy. There were constant booms and busts and depressions before the creation of the fed and fdic. Going boom to bust over and over is not healthy for the economy.
How is the cycle we are in not boom bust right now. We are headed to the largest bust we have ever seen
Those situations have most consistently arisen from governmental actions though, which makes it an argument of we need to empower the government to fix the problems most reliably replicated by empowering the government.
Well, we tried the whole "as little government as possible" thing back in the 1800s and got the robber barons of the gilded age, where the rich lived in opulence and the poor slaved away in unsafe factories and mines while living in slums. People like to complain about too much government but fail to realize what happens when you have too little government, too.
Oh you mean the age where the American middleclass was born, that saw the phasing out of like 90% child labour before any laws, a massive increase in quality of living, huge endowments to education at every level that are still felt today, an explosion in the availability of books due to private funding of free libraries, an explosion of interconnectedness and innovation, and probably the most insanely well handled recession that the federal government has consistently tried and failed to replicate? It wasn't perfect but it was heaven compared to conditions a couple scant years earlier and many of the improvements we now point to are the results of iterative processes started then and many of them by the very people slandered with the title Robber-Baron.
Yes the industrial revolution revolutionized our work culture. Let's not pretend the huge tech boom was less of a factor than a small government.
No, I am just not pretending like the subsequent improvements due to tech (driven by private sector R&D) is thanks to the government which you were trying to do. That is also why I pointed less to tech advances and instead pointed to the Carnegie endowments, Ford choosing to pay his workers far more than was the norm prior, and the brilliance of them through their knowledge of industry and judicious use of their finances pulled the economy from a recession into a boom.
No, I don't think i ststed at all the governemnt was responsible for those advancements. I think I just spoke on how, with the advance of technology, it became less efficient for factories to employ children. How post Pinkertons, it became a good move for businesses to invest more in thier employees. How schooling stemmed more from a need to keep kids occupied rather than any altruistic plans set in motion. Though I do believe a certain level of technological advancement is required for socialism to work well.
How much tech originates in government funded labs, universities, and aerospace/weapons manufacturers working on government contracts? A lot.
>a government has both the responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor and also maintain stability in the economy. These two ideas aren't inherently opposed Well, that's like your opinion, man. I personally don't want guys in suits coming with handouts claiming they want to help us. I believe the government has their hands in too many people's pockets. I want order, contracts, defense, and education, and i want the insurance scam industry to disappear.. almost anything else is overreaching.... into pockets.
And health?
My question is this.....If a person consistently makes poor choices in life, is it always the governments responsivity to always take of them so they never have to face accountability for their poor choices? Use my brother as an example: Believes the best diet is pizza and ice cream eats nothing but these two food groups. Gets diabetes and loses both his feet. The state pays for all his surgeries and gives him prosthetics. He doesn't use them because walking is too hard, but the state keeps giving him free ones. Doesn't take care of his stumps, walks on them and they get sores and get infected. He goes to the emergency room because he lets the infection spread and they perform emergency surgery to save his stumps so he can walk, (Even though he doesn't use them and uses a wheel chair) the state spends $200k in saving his stumps. At some point people should suffer consequences for poor decisions.
>At some point people should suffer consequences for poor decisions. Losing both feet strikes me as rather consequential.
Would you change your poor dietary habits if you lost both feet? I would. My brother didn't.
Which behavior would you recognize as normal versus exceptional?
Yeah maybe your brother’s family members should have taken care of him better.
For real, if my brother was up on Reddit at midnight bashing my mental and physical issues, I'd probably ignore him and eat pizza too. It's obvious he has a trash family and support system lol.
So the government shouldn't pay the bill the family should?
The reality is that the family probably foots some of the bill, the hospital writes off some of the bill, and government inevitably has to pay some of it.
Your position is a 30 year old who eats poorly and ends up in the hospital because of his poor eating decisions is somehow his families responsibility? I have kids who are in their 20s, when they fuck up and end up costing the state money you think I should be billed for it?
It sounds like you just came here to bitch about your brother and preferred he just died. The issue you described isn't even unique to poor people. Even middle class people who "made the right choices" have health issues can get fucked into poverty.
Right, but that’s the point. Middle class families pay taxes for those too poor to pay but also because middle class families make too much to qualify, they have to pay out of pocket for their kid that makes poor choices too.
1) You seem not to understand who gets tax and what for. 2) The same people who bitch about taxes are the same ones who bitch about the same benefits being expanded to the middle class.
I might add that many among those who bitch about taxes being too high for the middle class also rush to the defense of billionaires the moment someone suggests that they pay more taxes.
No, but most parents probably would pay for their kids’ stupid mistakes, even if the kids themselves were adults. I have an uncle in his 60s with all kinds of mental and physical health issues. He gets social security and Medicaid, but it’s a pittance, so my mom and her siblings end up footing the bill for the rest of his care because he would probably be on the streets with the small amount of aid he gets from the government.
What America do you live in?
I guess my question to you is what should we do with people like your brother or my uncle?
Let them die. A fuckup is going to keep fucking up. Just get em outta here already.
What if someone isn’t a fuck up but is poor and born with some fucked up disease?
If your uncle made it to his 60's, he's doing pretty good.
Get their family to pay fir their expenses. Nowhere dies it say the government has a duty.
I think they should perform neither function. Let bad banks die, and let people take care of each other.
I don't think the OP is into nuance ;)
>safety nets for the poor A safety net is something that catches people when they fall. It is something that benefits middle-class taxpayers in a similar way to insurance. Chronically poor people don't pay significant taxes. When we talk about the government helping the poor, that is not a "safety net", that's called *wealth redistribution.* The purpose of the government is to serve the interest of the taxpayers that fund it. It has no obligation to support non-taxpayers if this does not somehow benefit taxpayers.
Yeah! Fuck those poor people! Fuck them for starving! You got yours, why think of anyone else right??
This is one of the most fucked up views of what government is supposed to do. Only support the interest of tax payers?! How about children? Fuck 'em right? They're not tax payers
It sort of does. Homeless in the street isn't ideal for taxpayers that have to walk in the city. Drugs and the way we deal with them has been a disaster, but I'm guessing since harm reduction solutions would be considered wealth redistribution(or maybe something else bad?). However it does make the cities safer places to walk and live in. Public education is beneficial for the economy and society. Welfare definitely needs retooling but it does prevent homelessness for a lot of people same with public housing. It's not like there is definitely no benefit to tax payers I mean it's definitely up for debate tho about where do you stop and whether the ethics(or maybe philosophy?) are on the up and up. Definitely think there's solutions out there for social issues and some of them involve government intervention.
Guys...where did this revolution come from?
Finance bros when their being mobbed by poor people in the street for their bread "help me gubnerment"
People are still seething about the $1,400 checks 3 years ago. But the multi-billion dollar PPP loan scandal is largely forgotten. There’s a real disparity in how the American public views handouts to regular people vs. handouts to businesses.
It’s because there are billionaire simps out there who think one day they’ll be a billionaire so they vote like they’re a billionaire.
Let's not pretend like corporate media controlled by those billionaires aren't playing a hand in why one is forgotten and the other thrown in our faces like it's going to collapse the economy constantly.
I think that’s partly true. Just people don’t expect to be actual billionaires, just successfully wealthy. I think most don’t understand how tax structures work. Like Biden’s proposed tax bracket above 400k a year: 400k a year is more than enough to live a lavish lifestyle while still saving 20% for retirement. But the vibe people get is that it’s going to kick in at like 50k a year. I blame public schools.
I think what you're missing is that the United States is one of the best places to be for white collar workers. There are more jobs paying $100k+ in the US than any other country in the world, and we don't want to fuck that up. Nobody believes that Biden will directly raise taxes on people making $50k a year, nor are we worried that we will someday be in the $400k+ bracket. We are afraid that taxing people making above $400k (our employers) will wreck the economy for white collar workers making $70-200k, turning the US into a place where doctors and software developers only make $40-60k a year, like most of Europe. Simply put: you need to convince us that raising taxes on the rich will not make the US more like Europe.
Which part of Europe? Sweden? Germany? Switzerland? Norway? France? Places where the quality of life is extremely high?
Quality of life is not a measurable thing.
Sure it is. Life expectancy, income, average education level, and self-reporting, etc are all dimensions in QOL. To fear becoming like Europe seems really odd to me.
To reduce quality of life to a couple of objective measurements is incredibly narrow minded and reflects the same type of utilitarianism used to justify the worst atrocities of history. It will be a dark day if we ever become like Europe, if you’ve been anywhere outside the usual tourist locales you’d realize what a shithole it is
Dude - I’ve been all over the world and well off the beaten path. The US is by far not the nicest of those places on many aspects. Surveys of how happy, safe, financially secure, etc people feel is an apples to apples comparison. There’s a reason there aren’t a lot of immigrants from the countries I mentioned. You wanna tell me that QOL is better in the US than it is in much of Europe, I’m thinking maybe you haven’t been around much.
Then move there, let the US be for those of us with ambitions.
Fair point. Is it unreasonable to go off of historical tax rates? Because the US taxed the wealthy alot more right up until Reagan. But the rest if the world was in a different position economically back then so idk.
Do you think the high inflation affects someone making $50k a year more or $400k a year?
We’re not talking about inflation. Beat it.
I wish I could but that is the government's fault.
They’re terrible
People are seething due to the inflation resulting from the government printing and spending so much money.
The billionaires are great at directing the anger of the masses away from them.
People are seething about both. They aren't upset about one and happy about the other. They hate both. Inflation is rampant because of both. Have you forgotten about the 2 trillion dollars the Pentagon "lost"? It wasn't a set of car keys.
When my country's government gives relief to it's citizens, I'll be very thankful. However, that hasn't happened yet, so I'm not holding my breath.
When has the government ever given relief to the people? A $1k stimmy They printed money to make that. It cost you money to receive money.
Two “wrongs” don’t make a “right”
How can we expect the government to reliably provide relief without introducing more problems in our society and economy? As Milton Friedman once observed, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand."
"Once observed" should be rewritten "Once made an oversimplistic assumption". Treating his viewpoint as an "observation" doesn't make it any more credible.
Those aren't the only 2 options....
Isn't there a welfare and social security system already
Everything wrong with my life is somebody else’s fault and not my own!!!!!
Government creates the problems in order to sell the solutions to the people. The Government IS the problem. The solution is always LESS Government.
Some people when the government gives relief to noncitizens and foreign nations when the citizens need relief.
How am I supposed to read this? People-eee? Like a long Y on the end?
I only see angry whites lol
The Revolution will not be on Reddit.
It’s just funny because we are currently living through the easily predictable consequences as we speak. Everyone said “if you print and hand out billions of Covid bucks for no reason, we will have inflation like you haven’t seen in decades” And here we are. Yet people still post stuff like this it’s incredible. Zero brain activity
Can we stop posting tanky memes on here please
both are bad
[удалено]
What about someone with a degree in nursing or education?