Perhaps a bit late to the thread, but I spent the time typing, so I'm posting. Suck it.
DSMatticus wrote:PR thinks he shouldn't have to provide for other people's financial stability, but why can't I ask why I should have to pay for protecting PR's property? I don't care about his property. I have no interest in the matter. Yet my money goes to protecting it.
If you live in a society, you pay for society. It is a benefit for everyone to have welfare programs because they prevent the stinking sickly masses from clogging the streets and infecting others with various diseases and uncleanliness.
My aunt hasn't been taking advantage of the welfare programs available to her, and she
should be because she is certifiably nuts. She's destroyed every house or apartment she's lived in by clogging it with her filth. She has mental health problems and thus won't pay her own bills, won't follow the advice of her doctors, and thinks nothing of being on oxygen and lighting up a cigarette outside of someone else's home. And when she's evicted, she'll hide out in her neighbor's garage, rather than seeking assistance from someone who might "tell her what to do" and "take away her freedom."
She's infuriating. She's gross. She's sick. Truly and honest to God mentally ill, and a hazard who needs to be taken care of by
someone - no one in her family has been capable of doing it, though they've tried.
Paying my taxes is the easiest, cheapest way that I can support my aunt. I don't have to pull my hair out looking for a private hospital to attend to her. I don't have to get involved in her medical history. I don't have to clean her house out in a hazmat suit (ever seen
Hoarders?). I don't have to worry about her doing something to endanger the life of my son.
No, it doesn't make me happy. She has the money to pay her bills, but instead, she buys mountains of crap from mail order catalogues and piles it up all over her house. She could take a shower, but instead she fills it with towels and wears heavy perfume to mask how bad she smells. But she's mentally ill and without help, she's a frickin' Typhoid Mary who destroys just about everything she gets her hands on.
Despite the fact that she starts fires in the middle of someone else's living room and clogs the plumbing with her own excrement because she's inhabiting an empty house not her own where the water isn't turned on, it's taken more than half a century for someone to get her on the state's dime. The reigning theory has been to help her, get her on meds, and get her to take care of herself. But she can't. She's sick. Calling the police and the health department to come haul her out and clean things up won't prevent her from doing it again.
Does knowing someone who scammed a welfare program mean that the welfare program automatically should be done away with? Does one scam - or even thousands - out of millions mean that the program isn't useful and does no good whatsoever?
Every system has a loophole that some jerk-off will exploit. We should all know this because Denizens are largely considered by the gaming world to be the jerk-offs exploiting the loopholes. Is that a real justification for not playing - or even making - the game? Because a douchebag will exploit it?
For an interesting read on the problems of homelessness, I point you to
Million Dollar Murray {OK, Homeless, Just Pay For It and Solve the Damned Problem}.
DSMatticus wrote:The key here is to focus on increasing our economic strength. Not balancing our debt. Because if we increase our economic strength, managing the debt is not painful. If we balance our budget at the expense of destroying our economy further, tax revenue will decrease and it will be in fact harder to balance the debt every single year after next and we spiral straight to the bottom.
Yes. Or to put it another way, if we cut back without investing, we will reach a point where we can't cut back further. Investing requires that we use money that we need in the short term, but in the long term, it results in a bigger, smarter payoff.
It is in times of need when conservation kicks in and obfuscates the very thing that will save us.
' cover story?
