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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (97930)	3/13/2005 12:23:18 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

This whole debate circles around one point: How much of MY resources will I personally allow SOMEBODY ELSE to get? The fact is we have a government to provide for the needs of the secular good but its only partially funded by taxes. We also have the ability to make certain ventures tax-exempt. If we want to look like India, then we could just let the beggars and untouchables breed and let market forces control their destiny. That is not my vision of the future. My socialist leanings were largely disappointed by my experience in the Navy, however. I saw first hand how the inefficiency of a bureaucracy works. I've done some deep thinking about this, and have concluded if you want to feed kids then you create an economic incentive to do so: tax free status and government subsidy, with performance bonuses for efficiency. If they get x% qualified kids to nominal muscle mass and the blood tests show no malnutrition or obesity, then there's a bonus for the executives. That's how to do it. Same with teen pregnancy. Pay teens who don't get pregnant. Pay teens who don't impregnate. Provide a system of governmental service in return for skills development. It all costs money, but in the end, provides a benefit of a well-trained society in which everyone prospers. Yes, there would be fraud.

To: epicure who wrote (97930)	3/13/2005 1:20:38 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Is wanting the government to be involved whining? I'm not sure I understand where the whining begins. IMO, whining begins when you stop looking to those who are affected to act responsibly. Whining is at full bore when your only response to the problem is to complain about inadequate federal spending. And how many beggars are you personally willing to subsidize for breakfast? For the record, I wasn't proposing begging as the long term solution to the problem of childhood hunger. I was addressing the two key first steps in solving any systemic problem. If the pipe has burst and your home is flooding, you close off the pipe to keep more water from coming in (problem prevention) and you open the doors and sweep so you're not wading in water (band-aid). Then you can catch your breath and deal with the rest of the issues. I addressed both of prevention and band-aid--cutting down the production of new, hungry kids and feeding the kids you already have more cheaply. You can buy a pound of beans for about seventy five cents. A pound of beans will provide breakfast for a kid for about two weeks, enough so he can pay attention in school. I'm not suggesting that that's an optimal diet, only trying to point out that virtually anyone can easily come up with enough money to feed his kid breakfast. It doesn't take Washington to deal with that. As for how to teach that to parents, there are many venues for public service announcements. Maybe a bean company could be persuaded to produce bags of beans with the necessary information printed on them and we could hand out one to each school kid in at-risk neighborhoods. As for disabusing people from having kids they cannot afford, there is so much in our culture that does the opposite. "Oh, you're expecting. How lovely." It's pretty obvious to me that if you're using a free clinic for your medical care, you can't afford a baby. How about a sign in the window to that effect? How about a section in school health classes on the difficulty of providing for children? How about more characters on TV sending the message? Maybe once in a while when a woman claims to love a baby she has brought into dire conditions we have another character retort "you call that love?" If it were up to me, I'd have a Planned Parenthood outpost in every shopping center. We can change our message if we choose to. Seems to me that those two first steps could reduce the problem enough to be manageable, enough to get ahead of the curve while we look at other opportunities.