It's over... The balance has tipped and the welfare state has won... For now...

I agree, what TPTB have always intended is exactly what happens every time there's a need.

Keep those you govern under as much controllable infighting as you can when they notice what you're doing and with technology as convenient as it is, it's very difficult to imagine statistics like these not being consumed and processed before the next thread or post or whatever it is that exposes them is even up for internet review.

Hell, all ya gotta do is hit send! and topics like this are sufficiently rendered harmless to those that fear them. Without them ever doing anything other than providing information. In not saying there isn't too much advantage being taken but...United there is nothing that could stop us IMHO.

a reply to: Mirthful Me

Growing up I thought it was socialism that was taking over. But other ATS users insist that there is capitalism everywhere... I apparently record government ownership of nearly everything, and most of the population being government leeches, is capitalism if they are right.

Government regulation of business serves only to crush small startups... nothing more. There was all the regulation needed available through the civil court system... if a business wrongs you, you right it in court. But that wasn't enough for the socialists who insist a million pages of government regulations constitutes capitalism being out of control.

But no, socialism is the problem. Socialism is destroying the middle class in America. Socialism makes the poor what, 1% or 2% less likely to starve, but then expands the number of poor by 2x or more. But oh there are no statistics on that lets just spent billions of dollars on a program and never find out the effects. Why not, its other peoples money.

And taking away other people's money without their permission isn't stealing because they invented a new word for it... taxes. Not cool... changing what word you use doesn't make it less morally wrong. So imagine that... rampant moral corruption throughout all of society is leading to a society in decay. So predictable. And yes I've been telling people there will be no economic recovery. Until people decide moral values are a good idea there can be no recovery of any sort.

I think people need to take a good hard look at what they consider "welfare" or the "dependent class." I mentioned this in detail on the last page, but maybe I need to state it a different way:

16.61% of the American population is on Social Security. Most of those are also on Medicare.
The combined outlays for 2012 from those two programs alone accounted for 71.9% of program outlays that I could find numbers for (couldn't find other cash assistance or workers' comp).

a reply to: Greven

What I consider welfare is whatever money is given to people capable of working for a living and, in choosing not to do so, collect their support from the govt with no other requirement made of them.

Mostly: The use of SSI as a welfare tool to support those in HUD communities, not to mention the actual HUD communities themselves which are a huge drain on govt resources. Add SNAP to that and you pretty much have the package.

a reply to: bbracken677

So corporate welfare is fine? I see, so you assume that everyone on HUD or food stamps aren't working and can work?

Haven't had a minimum wage job in a while have you?

Care to do the calculations how a single parent is expected to survive on minimum wage without any assistance?

a reply to: HauntWok

First, I did not mention "corporate welfare" so you are attempting to put words in my mouth in order to skew the meaning of what I posted. What do you call it when one does that?

Secondly, minimum wage jobs are not supposed to be one's career. If one is working a minimum wage job and you have kids, or you are working a minimum wage job and are past school by years then I would say that some really poor life choices have been made. Additionally, for people in those positions, there are numerous options available from the govt for job training and education.

originally posted by: InverseLookingGlass

Anybody buying this garbage? I'm not. 2-3 CEO bonuses could cover food stamps for the whole nation. 1 year of the Iraq war could cover welfare easily. Critical mass? A vast majority of these people are apolitical and don't even vote.

I agree with the Iraq war part, but I think people over estimate CEO/Leadership pay. A while back I posted that the CEO of Boeing made about 15 million in bonuses and if he gave it ALL to the employees they would get a 10 buck a month raise...

Now when you go down the path of something like a hedge fund manager or investment broker etc they can generate 100 of millions in personal profit...this maybe the area we need to look into, but the typically CEO would not equal a drop in the bucket of need.

originally posted by: bbracken677
Secondly, minimum wage jobs are not supposed to be one's career. If one is working a minimum wage job and you have kids, or you are working a minimum wage job and are past school by years then I would say that some really poor life choices have been made. Additionally, for people in those positions, there are numerous options available from the govt for job training and education.

Everywhere else in the world people operate in groups. Families stick together, other groups pool their resources, everywhere but America. For some reason we have this view that minimum wage should be enough to take care of a family, or even all the needs of one person.

That is total bull....

As bbracken677 said, minimum wage is a start for low skill/low educated work. If you find yourself years later with a family and at minimum wage you made some poor life choices.

Also, minimum wage should be enough to support two people working 40 hours per week and pooling their resources with no dependents. That would put a pooled resource of about 35k a year for them to live on.

If someone thinks otherwise then maybe they need to understand this in MINMUM, as in the lowest...

originally posted by: HauntWok
So corporate welfare is fine? I see, so you assume that everyone on HUD or food stamps aren't working and can work?

Haven't had a minimum wage job in a while have you?

So just what is corporate welfare? I work at Boeing and their new site in the very low income state of Alabama will have an average pay of 90k a year.

What corporation outside of foodservice, customer service etc pays even close to minimum wage. BTW all these service related jobs have always been the lowest paying jobs, so nothing new here.

a reply to: HauntWok

This deserves a 2nd reply:

No. I have not had a minimum wage job in a while. I am 60 years old. The 60 year old who is working minimum wage I would say has either had a tough spot in their life and have the guts to work it until they find something better, or they have made some screwed up choices in life. Period. One other option would be that they are semi-retired and just working to have something to do and generate some spending money.

No, not everyone in HUD or on SNAP is capable of working, but a very large portion of them are. A disappointingly large percentage of them are. This is from experience.

a reply to: bbracken677

"minimum wage jobs are not supposed to be one's career"

ive heard this tripe so many times im sick of it. its complete and total rubbish.

i dont care what your job is, you should make enough to live without gov assistance. if you get up in the morning and do nothing but pick up cig butts in the parking lot for 40 hrs a week, then you should make enough for an apartment, a used car (beater, nothing fancy), and food in the fridge.

you know why we have minimum wage? because the corp would gladly pay you less if they could. the corp would strip every right you think you have from you in a heart beat if they could. if you think they give you a 40 hr week out of the goodness of their heart, ask yourself this: why dont they do it in the sweat shops they run overseas? you want to see what a corp would do here if they werent regulated, just look there to find your answer.

another example of how the corp would rip you off if they could, just look at "tipped wages". you run the company, its your business to pay your employees. how did my tip become your money to pay your employees? what right do you have to my gift to the server? servers should be paid minimum wage regardless of whether they are tipped or not!

"Federal minimum wage law allows restaurant owners to pay their tipped employees just $2.13 an hour.

"This sub-minimum wage hasn’t increased for 22 years and amounts to less than a third of the federal minimum wage. It helps large restaurant corporations and their CEOs pad their bottom lines while trapping millions of American workers in economic insecurity.

"The average server earned $20,710...Darden Restaurants, the world’s largest full-service restaurant chain and the owner of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Longhorn Steakhouse, among others. In 1991, Darden reported $2.6 million in sales per restaurant. By 2013, sales per restaurant increased 52 percent to $4 million. During the same period, the hourly pay of much of Darden’s wait staff increased by, well, zero.

"A lot of Darden’s increase in revenue is finding its way into the wallet of CEO Clarence Otis, Jr., who took home $6.4 million last year. That’s nearly four times what his predecessor was paid in 1996, when the restaurant industry first blocked an increase in the tipped minimum wage. Otis’ take works out to $2,116 an hour (assuming he works 60 hours a week all year, with two weeks of vacation). Every two hours, Darden’s CEO makes more than his company pays its $2.13-an-hour wait staff for a full year’s work."

Read more here: www.miamiherald.com...=cpy

this is not a fluke, but the norm, and is the perfect example of what EVERY corporation would do if they could.

another great example of the "minimum wage" malarkey is lawn care. you would pay the neighbors kid $10 to mow your lawn, but joe of joes lawn care you pay $25 or more. since when is mowing a lawn a career choice? ive got 5 acres and mow my own lawn, but if the kid showed up at my door saying "im saving for a bike, can i mow your lawn?" you better believe im gonna give him a pretty penny cause its not easy! joe can pound sand.

while i may have ranted about the minimum wage, it fits into the op because it shows how corps continue to pay the top way too much and leave the bottom to scrounge. they support welfare, cause they know that if you took welfare away their employees would strike and they would have to pay more, just like what is happening at fast food joints across the country.

again, welfare is for the rich, not the poor.

lets look at corporate "welfare":

"The report looks at the profits and U.S. federal income taxes of the 288 Fortune 500 companies that have been consistently profitable in each of the five years between 2008 and 2012, excluding companies that experienced even one unprofitable year during this period."

"Some Key Findings:

• As a group, the 288 corporations examined paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 19.4 percent over the five-year period — far less than the statutory 35 percent tax rate.

• Twenty-six of the corporations, including Boeing, General Electric, Priceline.com and Verizon, paid no federal income tax at all over the five year period. A third of the corporations (93) paid an effective tax rate of less than ten percent over that period.

• Of those corporations in our sample with significant offshore profits, two thirds paid higher corporate tax rates to foreign governments where they operate than they paid in the U.S. on their U.S. profits.

These findings refute the prevailing view inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway that America’s corporate income tax is more burdensome than the corporate income taxes levied by other countries, and that this purported (but false) excess burden somehow makes the U.S. “uncompetitive.”

Other Findings:

• One hundred and eleven of the 288 companies (39 percent of them) paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2008 to 2012.

• The sectors with the lowest effective corporate tax rates over the five-year period were utilities (2.9 percent), industrial machinery (4.3 percent), telecommunications (9.8 percent), oil, gas and pipelines (14.4 percent), transportation (16.4 percent), aerospace and defense (16.7 percent) and financial (18.8 percent).

• The tax breaks claimed by these companies are highly concentrated in the hands of a few very large corporations. Just 25 companies claimed $174 billion in tax breaks over the five years between 2008 and 2012. That’s almost half the $364 billion in tax subsidies claimed by all of the 288 companies in our sample.

• Five companies — Wells Fargo, AT&T, IBM, General Electric, and Verizon — enjoyed over $77 billion in tax breaks during this five-year period."

www.ctj.org...

remember, this is during the "great recession". imagine how well they are doing now with a record stock market!

billion dollar corps, "they create jobs!" (tho they dont unless its minimum wage, and/or decreasing your pay since median wage is down 23%), lets give them the bank!

your starving neighbor? let him starve, the low-life! no welfare for you!

a reply to: stormson

Very deceptive statement:

billion dollar corps, "they create jobs!" (tho they dont unless its minimum wage, and/or decreasing your pay since median wage is down 23%), lets give them the bank!

That is only true with those companies in the food industry. Do you think, for one second, that GE entry level jobs are minimum wage? Banking industry? Paper industry? Utilities, industrial machinery and telecomm?

Most of the companies or industries you are bashing have very nice entry level pay.

Most of the minimum wage jobs are in retail, restaurant and fast food. In other words, non-skilled jobs.

Someone working at a fast food place, making minimum wage and content to remain there has made some screwed up life choices or are in the process of doing so. If you are making minimum wage, then you should have a path and a plan as to how you are going to move up from there. IF not, dayum!

a reply to: bbracken677

Very deceptive post.

Minimum wage has not kept with the cost of living. To say that someone who works a minimum wage is just an unskilled worker and needs to work their way for better pay is a straight up lie, there are many college graduates who are stuck working minimum wage jobs because it is the only work they can find. Instead of promoting most places that hire minimum wage workers will simply lay someone off before giving them a raise and replacing them with someone else willing to work for the minimum.

This is one of those lies being spewed to help fuel the class warfare that is going on in the US. I used to believe it, but I did enough of my own research to realize that the minimum wage in the US needs to be increased.

Since 2008 after the economy crash, about 95% of all the growth in the economy has been by those in the top 1% of income earners. To say that companies cannot afford to pay their workers a little more is complete BS!

a reply to: stormson

Another thing that should be noted about server's in the US is most are required by their company to give a portion of their tips in 'tip outs' and that money goes to the bussers. My SO just quit a franchise style restaurant where all servers were required to 'tip out' a portion of the total bill regardless if the table even left a tip. Occasionally servers get stiffed on a tip, when this happened they would actually end up owing the company(Chef's International) money for the table they served.

This is practiced in most franchise restaurants. I do not think practice is legal, however because most who work those kind of jobs have no options, speaking up against that practice will result in that server's termination.

It's a rigged system.

a reply to: jrod

First: I have not, in my posts here, mentioned whether the amount paid was fair or not. I have not discussed whether minimum wage has kept up with inflation or not.. So nice strawman job you have going there. Totally disingenuous however.

I spoke about the positions that pay minimum wage and the fact that they are entry level and non-skilled positions. Are you denying that? Seriously? Seriously? Show me entry level positions that pay minimum wage and are skilled positions? For that matter, anything requiring skills or knowledge (specialized) will not pay a minimum wage level at entry.

The "since 2008.." comment, last paragraph, have any data to support that? I am truly curious since 95% of facts and figures are randomly made up 60% of the time.

In fact, I would tend to say that most of your assertions are anecdotal at best.

You call my post deceptive, and then you do not address any of the assertions I made. Are you saying that the industries I listed hire on people at minimum wage? Are you saying that most of those industries do not, in fact, have rather nice entry level pay packages?

So exactly where was I deceptive? Where did I post non-truths?

a reply to: bbracken677

Again with the deception, no I have not created a strawman. I have made an argument that you can not counter so this is the best you can do is attempt to discredit me.

My source on that claim is Robert Reich. That is a very accurate figure. Since 2008 we have an economic recovery where 95% of the gains in the economy went to those in the top 1% of income earners.

That is a true statement, not some misleading statistic.

originally posted by: bbracken677

No, not everyone in HUD or on SNAP is capable of working, but a very large portion of them are. A disappointingly large percentage of them are. This is from experience.

Now this is something I can agree with you on. It is also the younger crowd too. Because of this, I do not think bringing back the draft is a bad idea, either go to school, find work or join the military.

I enlisted when I was 23 because of was over working for $10 hr while paying for college, rent(1/2share) and never having free time or extra money.

I'm 31 one now and can't find steady work. However the little work I have found usually pays me much better than the minimum hourly........


This was the deception I was talking about:

Most of the minimum wage jobs are in retail, restaurant and fast food. In other words, non-skilled jobs.

Someone working at a fast food place, making minimum wage and content to remain there has made some screwed up life choices or are in the process of doing so. If you are making minimum wage, then you should have a path and a plan as to how you are going to move up from there. IF not, dayum!

Many have no choice and are forced to work these kind of jobs because its the only work that is available....

a reply to: jrod

Exactly how is that deceptive?

Are you saying that people working a minimum wage should not have a plan to move up from there? I am a bit confused by the designation of deceptive.

While I have not addressed what it actually is, I will say that there should be yearly or at least every 5 years adjustments made for cost of living.

Back in the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up and entering the work force good jobs were a bit easier to find. It was a given back then that minimum wage was for strictly unskilled and entry level positions in food and retail. That last part has not changed.

You mentioned not being able to find steady work: I do not know what your skill set is, if you have one, so I cannot comment at all. I do not know where you live, but if you consider moving, I would suggest the Houston or Dallas, or San Antonio areas. There are good jobs here to be had. One's with futures... I would be happy to give you some advice re: job hunting if you wish to PM me. Right now I know zippo about you so cannot offer anything constructive. Not only have I recently had to find work, but I have also been on the other side of the desk doing the hiring.



BTW, thank you for your service. It is never said enough. My daughter also enlisted, back around 2000. She had the ROTC view of military life and would not believe any different....until she signed up for 6, and actually got to experience the reality. She had planned on making it a career, but changed her mind lol.

a reply to: bbracken677

I think if I had a different rate or in a different command with more like minded people I may still be in. I was an AT(aviation electronics tech) in the Navy.

Being enlisted can be really harsh. I was lucky enough to get the kind of job I got. While I like technology and a bit of a nerd, I am not a gamer. The vast majority of my fellow ATs were die-hard gamers, the kind who would use leave days when the new WoW came out.

Compared to most other enlisted rates in the Navy, I had it made and since I mostly worked on P-3 equipment I never even set foot on a boat.