If You're Poor, You Didn't Get There On Your Own. Government Helped You Get There...

Recently I've been more or less forced to apply for welfare due to health problems. It makes me sick to be honest. The last thing I want to do is rely on someone else to survive. Unfortunately, In the current state of affairs, we are barely surviving, much less living, and I have to think about my family. You can be sure that when it goes through, I will be using that money to try and find my way out of welfare as soon as I am able.

My point is, that not everyone who is on welfare wants to be there. Sure, some people play the system, and some just continually make bad decisions that leave them there, but some of us have no choice.

And you know what? It's not the government's fault that I'm in this situation. They didn't make me sick, but they're going to make it possible for me to recover and pull myself out of this hole once I do. As much as I hate the idea of going on welfare, it will be a useful tool and I'll have to be grateful for it.



You know what. I'm tired of people blaming the government for the welfare state. They just offer the option and only give it out if people can prove they need it. It's not their fault people game the system. As much as the government may try, they can't control everyone's behavior.

Now, the question is, why do people game the system? The government doesn't control people's motives after all. The reason is because our culture has become largely based on addiction. Be it food, TV, video games, the internet, or whatever else, most people can't seem to sacrifice these habits in order to build themselves a more stable life. No one wants to sacrifice their precious luxuries in order to be more self sufficient, and sacrifice is usually necessary.

If you want to get healthy people off welfare and contributing, start a campaign for personal responsibility and breaking addiction. Forget about blame. Take responsibility for yourselves and your community and solve the problem instead of waiting for the government to do it for you.

idk what to say!

reply to post by glasshouse

Currently, 40 states have time limits that can result in the termination of families’ welfare benefits; 17 of those states have limits of fewer than 60 months.

www.mdrc.org...

So 17 states have a stricter welfare time limit than what the federal government code.

or a time limit that reduces or modifies benefits when the limit is reached (8 states and the District of Columbia).

www.mdrc.org...

She’s in the state, Connecticut, with the shortest time limit in the country. After welfare reform, states were given vast amount of power to determine how long people could stay on cash assistance, how generous the program would be. And the state set the shortest time limit of any state of the country.

www.democracynow.org...

Funny! I never really blamed it on anybody but myself! Poor is such a small word to use, I'm there of my own doings and luck, or maybe choice. Now if you want to go into the fact that poor is only based upon how many credit cards you have, house and car etc from the bank. I own everything I have and paid for it in cash! I owe some child support, that is a scam though for thr states to make money, look it up! Intrests on that is well over 300%, better to have gone to a loan shark paid it off and be done with it! USA is based on credit and interest only, Who who say were poor is because everything you have the banks own! Trick they use to keep you in their frame of mind. So my car is 28yrs old, tv is 20yrs and house is 90yrs, it was paid in cash and I own it. The crap they make today is useless last for 2-3yrs and you got to get another one, On Credit so you can call yourself Not Poor.

What annoys me is all these workshy welfare recipients driving round first thing in the morning then go home only to do it again later in the afternoon. Thus creating rush hour traffic. We all know that only 50% of the country is working because they are the only ones paying taxes.

It is no coincidence that the rise in welfare, the boom in credit card debt and the stagnation of wages all happened at the same time.

A fair days pay for a fair days work.

If you can not afford to pay your staff a living wage you do NOT have a viable business and we are all subsidizing you.

I know for a fact that once you start receiving any kind of assistance the government tries their darnedest to keep you dependent on it. Back in the mid 1980s I was recently divorced with two babies. Then I lost my job. I went to Human Services to apply for Medicaid for my children so that at least if THEY got sick I could get medical care for them. When I went for my interview before I knew it they had talked me into food stamps and financial assistance. When I got another job and told them I would like to keep the Medicaid for the kids if I still qualified but would like to discontinue all other benefits. They tried to convince me that I was crazy to do this and that it was bordering on neglecting my children by getting off those programs! When I remarried I asked for my children to be taken off Medicaid and the caseworker refused to do it. I had to cause a scene to have my kids removed from Medicaid (my husband had good insurance).

Fast forward to the present. My daughter applied for Medicaid for my grandbaby. The caseworker started trying to shove food stamps and financial assistance down her throat. When she refused the caseworker threatened to call CPS on her for child neglect. My daughter told the caseworker to bring it on but she didn't want anything more than what she needed, which was medical coverage for her child. Funny thing is the first time she had to re-apply for the Medicaid the caseworker claimed to have "lost" her paperwork and cut off the grandbaby's medical. She filled out duplicate paperwork which I took her to hand deliver personally. That was 4 months ago and she hasn't heard back from them since. I guess if you don't want to be completely dependent on the system they don't want to help you at all!

Originally posted by The Old American
What I believe Obama meant to say:

"There are a lot of poor, downtrodden Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been on welfare, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own.

/TOA

Right, of course. The role of the Government is to protect the rich. To police the population and prevent the masses of poor from walking on this or that piece of land, because it has readily been "allocated" to the rich. Government does that. The rich don't protect their own property. They get to "call it" their own property because of a deal struck with the Government, who write the laws to favor them. If you remove the Government, you'll eliminate poverty in an instant.

reply to post by RealSpoke


Thanks for doing the leg work. So, I guess we've got 33 states that could be directly effected by the work requirement waiver. I wonder if an unintended consequence will be that more states draft laws that go further than the federal requirements?

Originally posted by pisssss
reply to post by The Old American

 

If that is a silly and emotionally angry post I don't know what is...

In conservative America, feeding people makes them hungry, I have heard it all before,
you guys expect the worst from people.

Conservative Americans are the most giving and charitable in the country.

D/P

Originally posted by jude11
Didn't get there on their own and now they have to climb back...on their own.

Vicious cycle.

Peace

And it is going to get ugly, once the money train stops, and it will.

There are no jobs,

If every person on welfare had to get a job there would be mass starvation.

reply to post by BritofTexas

I think the percentage of people paying income tax is arrived at after Tax breaks and credits are included ie tax credits for dependents. So, I'm sure more than 50% are working, it's still not right, in my opinion, that at the end of the year you only have roughly 57% of adults paying an income tax

reply to post by glasshouse


Then minimum wage needs to be raised and enforced. If the workforce is payed a living wage then they can pay taxes.

It's businesses paying low, unlivable wages that force the country to step in with welfare.

The largest group taking advantage of the welfare system is business.

Originally posted by boot2theface
There is so much wrong with this post that it kind of makes me nauseated. Being a very poor person myself I must say that you sir have never seen our side of the fence. I can honestly say that the "big bad" government DOES NOT make it easy to receive welfare. The "red tape" in that department is more like a big red electrified 50 foot iron wall. I do receive food assistance that I am very grateful to the "big bad" government for. Without it me and my girlfriend would have already died of starvation long ago.

This post is what I believe to be the main problem with america today. No one wants to see someone else getting help. They believe since they did things themselves that others would be able to do the same. Not everyone has the capital to start a moneymaking venture so we just join the workforce in an entry level position and before you know it capitalism has you as a wage slave.

Got a computer? Got an internet connection?Got the ability to read? Obviously "yes" to all three:

There is a world of essentially "free" knowledge available at your fingertips. Do something with it. At no other time in history could an entrepreneur market to the entire globe as cheaply as today.
"poor" my fuzzy red baboon butt...
"poor" in ideas maybe:
Solve a problem.
Find a need
in your area and fill it..

This isn't really that accurate as it's a sweeping generalization clouded in bias politics.
Here is an example that in my assessment, reveals the true out of context nature of the debates on poor vs rich in this nation.

My grandmother (who raised me when I was a child) lived on a farm in Alabama during the Great Depression.
She was dirt poor. Didn't even know she was poor because she didn't know of anything better.

Her parents were farmers. She, a white person, picked cotton with her bare hands as a child for a large duration while growing up there. She said her hands would bleed from the pricks and hurt so bad.

No one enslaved them or forced them to be poor. There was no welfare program to save her family.
They just picked cotton and sold it, grew a garden, and traded goods with neighbors, like beans for okra or whatnot.

She knew what it was like to go hungry and without anything.
But yet it wasn't anyone's fault, it was "her lot in life". Her "fate". It cannot be reversed or changed or affected, it can only be learned from.

I admit this fine woman did spoil me growing up, she bought me things I didn't need that were too expensive that I didn't play with long enough to justify the expense. This in her view, was making up for everything she never had as a child. But it harmed me mentally by allowing an arrogant entitled attitude to coalesce and form within me.

It took me years to overcome this selfish attitude I was raised with. I still have to temper my expectations and fight against the arrogant notions I was mistakenly instilled with.

So this is why I am not giving my kids anything other than a few basics. I will not pamper them because that ruins a child apparently. My grandmother is a great and good person whom I respect and look up to, but she made a critical mistake by giving me what she never had.

So what is "Poor"? Are we even using this terminology accurately?
I have Zero Dollars $ right now, yet I feel wealthier than anyone I know. I have vast riches within, and that is what I will take with me to the afterlife if anything can be taken at all.

reply to post by BritofTexas


I think there's a direct correlation between raising minimum wage and the decline in employment opportunities for less educated, unskilled workers. It could probably play a role in artificially inflating the price of goods and services as well. I think this would apply to "living wage" also. If an employer is forced to pay a higher amount for labor, that employer would most likely prefer to hire someone with a higher amount of skills, experience and education in order to get more bang for their buck. Because of the increased overhead, most business owners would probably raise the cost of their products or services as well. Due to that raise in cost of goods and services, the "calculated living wage" would surely go up.
Rinse, repeat.

Also insinuating that everyone could be rich if they work hard is totally false.

There are some really hard workers out there who scrub toilets daily, and never make it anywhere beyond that in life. They get paid table scraps for one of the most disgusting jobs in existence.

Yet on the other hand, we have all these hot shots making big $ but yet they sit around and talk all day, and don't do any labor-intensive work at all.

The truth is that those who work the least, and convince everyone else to work for them, have the best odds to become wealthy. Those who work extremely hard to make someone else rich will not come out too well.

Merit has nothing to do with this system, it is not a meritocracy, that is a flat out lie and 100% false. In a meritocracy your efforts determine your rewards. This system is actually an aristocracy where those with all the guns/power/wealth have full control of the game and rigged it so they will never be displaced from the top.

How is everyone going to be rich at the same time anyway? Who will clean the rich guys' toilet? Another rich guy? Pretty doubtful.
You would need significant infrastructure and well developed robot technology in order to even get close to considering having a "system" like we do today in any shape or form, that is based on fairness and merit-generated wealth (and yet we all get to be rich at the same time).

So sad. I was very poor at one time. My mother and her four children was deserted by our father in the 60's. There was not much help for women at that time. We did get to live in housing projects. But food was a real problem to provide for five people, even back then. Mom worked any job she could and was gone from home a lot because of that. I was kind of a cute girl, so someone was always feeding me. But not my brothers. One day my 13yr brother came home from school looking for something to eat. He found some noodles and catsup and called it spaghetti. He took one bite, cussed, and walked out and joined a gang and spent the next 25 years in prison. I think the cruelest accusation I have heard is that people choose to be poor. If you only knew how painful poverty was, like a cancer.

reply to post by muzzleflash


Just because a certain job isn't labor intensive doesn't mean it's not hard. As far as "insinuating everyone can be rich", I guess it goes back to what you stated before. Wealth is relative from person to person. Maybe we can't all be rich but truly believe the vast majority are capable of doing better. I agree with several of your other points though.

Originally posted by glasshouse
reply to post by BritofTexas

 

I think there's a direct correlation between raising minimum wage and the decline in employment opportunities for less educated, unskilled workers. It could probably play a role in artificially inflating the price of goods and services as well. I think this would apply to "living wage" also. If an employer is forced to pay a higher amount for labor, that employer would most likely prefer to hire someone with a higher amount of skills, experience and education in order to get more bang for their buck. Because of the increased overhead, most business owners would probably raise the cost of their products or services as well. Due to that raise in cost of goods and services, the "calculated living wage" would surely go up.
Rinse, repeat.

edit on 07/27/12 by glasshouse because: (no reason given)

It doesn't even make that much sense.

The "established criteria" for considering someone "less educated" has no basis in reality of "how much information someone knows", instead it is based on how much they paid for a degree/certification document.

"Unskilled" doesn't actually have anything to do with skills, it has to do with how much money $ you paid for a certification document.

This system isn't even based on reality. It's based on fictions represented by pieces of paper.