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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (187575)	5/1/2004 1:53:41 PM
From: steve harris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571145

Well John, I guess we disagree on the social security abuses. Go to your local social security office and see how many people under 60 are there not to get their children's social security cards. For those that can't make it, the government will buy you a house, send you a check for beer and give you free medical care. Why work? Steve

To: Road Walker who wrote (187575)	5/5/2004 6:00:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571145

Are there abuses in the welfare system? You bet. Is it a big problem? Not really. Its not just about abuses. Its more about perverse incentives. Fortunately the Welfare Reform Act reduced the perverse incentives as well but they haven't been removed completely and perhaps can't be. If your a borderline worker. If you have no experience, poor education, and little in the way of marketable skills or abilities you could make a strong effort to find a job and then work hard to move up, or you could make a normal effort to find a job but give up if the normal effort isn't enough, or you could just not make the effort at all. In a very permissive welfare scheme a lot of people will take option number 3 and even more will settle for 2. As the welfare regime has become less permissive/easy you give people more incentive to find work, but still the fact that welfare combined with other benefits can pay more then some entry level jobs does provide a perverse incentive. Sometimes people are less well off when they take a job. The bottom line is that in a very rich society, it would be criminal not to have a safety net for those that can't make it, for whatever reason. I see your perspective but on the other hand it is in another way criminal to take from some by force, to help out others. A compromise between those two ideas would be to have a temporary net set at a rather low level for most people, and a similarly low but longer term net for people who a seriously disabled. There are plenty of other folks getting fat on the dole, however. You ought to be at least equally incensed by the corporate farmers being paid millions not to grow crops, or many of the other "discretionary spending" programs that Bush has embraced. How about a multi-$million grant to St. Augustine, Florida to promote golf? I agree. I am even more against "corporate welfare" then plain old regular welfare. At least regular welfare is doing something that I see as wrong, in an effort to help people in desperate circumstances. With corporate welfare the actions taken are just as bad and the justification is far weaker. Tim