Of course it did. Social programs save people from various things on a constant basis. Does it help everyone? Nope. Does it end up being worth it? Depends on your views. Does it help zero people? Absolutely not.
People are undoubtedly helped by social programs. They’re nowhere near perfect, but to imagine that it doesn’t help ANYBODY is wildly wrong.
I guess my point is that it seems weird to call the left the party of emotions when you FEEL so strongly about things that you make mirrored decisions based on your emotions.
Edit: Mirrored as in the opposite decisions, but you feel just as strongly about your stance as they do about theirs.
Sorry, I was not more clear. Sure it helps temporarily. What it doesn’t do is encourage any of them to get off said program. We have generations of people who have been on welfare.
Psychology 101 a behavior rewarded is often repeated.
That says it all. We reward people to stay home …to not work. Does that encourage them to go to work for about the same money they would make by sitting on their butts? No. So, I am not blaming the people I am blaming the government.
If we want less poverty we have to be ready to give less away for free. Maybe a program where the person works at the local State or Country building sweep, shoveling etc. And then it only lasts perhaps one year or less.
You see what I mean?
Edit: A party based on emotions is not the same as a person acting on emotions.
Agreed. Try to keep in mind a large % of people on these social programs truly wish they weren’t on them, and actively work every day to get off.
Why wouldn’t you blame the people that created said govt? Are we not all collectively to blame for what the govt has become?
So the left is a party based on emotions, because their people make decisions based on emotions, but the right, whose people make decisions based on emotions, doesn’t fit the same criteria?
"WASHINGTON — Do government efforts to support low-income families work? Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, skeptics have argued that even if these programs provide temporary relief, the only long-term impact is increased dependency — witness, they say, the persistent lack of mobility in places like inner-city Baltimore.
But a growing body of research tells a very different story. Investments in education, income, housing, health care and nutrition for working families have substantial long-term benefits for children."
I don’t believe that. My life experience tells me otherwise. And I think if you look at the statistics many of these folks are either on drugs or their children are using. It is an entire sub-culture that the US govt. has encouraged by not doing the right thing. With that said, yes there are people who no doubt fight hard to get out of their situation. But I fear that is a minority of the people.
I was referring to the folks that are encouraged to stay home by getting free stuff from the government. They are only human after all. If someone offers you x number of dollars to stay home and you would only make that same x number of dollars by working…human nature dictates that staying home is what will happen.
I guess I am not at all clear today am I?
My original assertion is that the democrat party is the party of jumping to act using taxpayer money trying to fix a problem that MUST exist. Hence they only make it worse. The old adage give a man a fish and you feed him once, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. I feel that the republican party largely represents the party that wants to teach the person to fish. Again, they have been complicit in this give-a-way nonsense as well they are not totally blameless. But there is no republican President equal to say LBJ in how much money he threw at a problem that can only be fixed by encouraging people to “learn to fish”.
My comment was purely anecdotal. As someone who has personally been on govt assistance, with nearly all of my family having been on it at some point (most of them now), I can tell you the vast majority of people I’ve known on social programs wish they weren’t and are actively looking to change that.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is what stems nearly all of my fiscal conservatism. Dems are just horribly inefficient in regards to expense vs reward. Where we disagree is that this somehow makes the left the party of emotion. They just draw the line in a different spot.
Dems need something to be X cost effective to implement. Republicans need something to be 3X cost effective. Just an example.
I don’t doubt at all what you are telling me. But there are vast numbers of people that grew up collecting free things from the government and they don’t know any better. That is why it is difficult to blame them. I am not pointing a finger at them and calling them lazy, or stupid, not at all. They are only doing what they have been trained to do by our inept government. And like your family there are plenty of people who want better and try to improve themselves.
Exactly! And as you said several weeks ago (I do pay attention to your posts). If the republicans would get off this social interference then they would govern for many years as they are so much more superior to the democrats on fiscal issues…they were words to that effect correct me where I misquoted you.
It’s not difficult for me at all. If someone is on a social govt program (not including those such as disabled very elderly etc that have little/no way of getting off) and don’t actively TRY to make their situation better so they no longer need it, I blame them fully for their actions.
I still stand by this claim. If the GOP wasn’t so woefully behind the times on nearly all social issues, we’d probably end up with a 1 party system in this country. From my limited view, I see very very few republicans looking to change that however.
Unfortunately for Republicans, they have quite a few very loud constituents that give the Dems so much more voting power purely based on social aspects.
Oops sorry ED I just saw your post wasn’t ignoring you.
This is what I got from the article you posted:
"But a growing body of research tells a very different story. Investments in education, income, housing, health care and nutrition for working families have substantial long-term benefits for children."
And I do agree with the conclusion. But it doesn’t state that it encourages parents of these children to better themselves. Also, it encourages the poor to have more children since the government will subsidize them.
Catch 22, we don’t want children to not have the proper nutrition for example, yet we don’t want to encourage a woman to have yet another child that she cannot afford.
I totally agree. Let’s see what the future brings. Trump being elected opens up the gates for many unorthodox candidates to step forward in both parties. The next 10 years will be very interesting indeed.
“Moreover, safety-net programs do not discourage work in any big way. Instead, the E.I.T.C. rewards low-income parents for working. And child care and pre-K programs make it easier for parents to work in the first place, while also putting children in a better position to succeed.”
"Repeated studies show no correlation between benefit levels and women’s choice to have children. (See, for example, Urban Institute Policy and Research Report, Fall/93.) States providing relatively higher benefits do not show higher birth rates among recipients.
In any case, welfare allowances are far too low to serve as any kind of “incentive”: A mother on welfare can expect about $90 in additional AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) benefits if she has another child.
Furthermore, the real value of AFDC benefits, which do not rise with inflation, has fallen 37 percent during the last two decades (The Nation, 12/12/94). Birth rates among poor women have not dropped correspondingly.
The average family receiving AFDC has 1.9 children — about the same as the national average."
If that were the case we would have less people on public assistance programs (percentage wise) than we did 50 years ago and that is not the case. So, that is wrong on its face.
“There are two things to note here. First, there was a huge fall in the poverty rate throughout the 1960s, and in particular after LBJ announced the War on Poverty in 1964 and followed up with Medicaid, Medicare, greater federal housing spending, and other programs to fight that war. In 1964, the poverty rate was 19 percent. Ten years later, it was 11.2 percent, and it has not gone above 15.2 percent any year since then. Contrary to what you may have heard, the best evidence indicates that the War on Poverty made a real and lasting difference.”
The Heritage article is so full of problems, I don’t know where to begin.
Ha ha Russia today…LOL Well that does play in to the left’s narrative and I was just trying to help you out.
Seriously it doesn’t matter where I pull the source from the number is around 45 million. Here’s another one:
I have an idea. If we further subsidize the bottom 10% of the working poor there will be even more people out of poverty…right? That appears to be the democrat solution.
