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

To: combjelly who wrote (432083)	11/2/2008 3:45:39 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573341

By giving low income people a couple of hundred bucks a year isn't going to mean that they stop working. Or even slow down. Likewise, raising someone's taxes by a couple of percent isn't going to mean they quit working, either. So this is a totally bogus argument. It, taken alone, may not be an incentive for everyone to stop working. But it is an incentive to become more and more reliant on handouts, wherever they come from. When you consider the incentive provided, for example, by food stamp eligibility, medicaid eligibility, other handout eligibility, plus the EITC, it DOES total up to an incentive to either not work or to do illicit work such as prostitution and dope dealing. This is really not subject to interpretation. Ask any behavioral analyst. It is animal nature, that when you receive a handout by conducting yourself in a particular way that you will continue to do so. Secondly, the incentive is not necessarily to quit working but it is to be a less productive member of society versus a more productive one. And as to those making 10s of millions of dollars worth of bonuses, where a few percent does mean a lot of bucks, if a small increase in their tax rate discourages them, so much the better. They were the guys who structured our current economic mess. If they hadn't of tried to shake dollar bills out of places they shouldn't have, we'd all be in better shape. These aren't the people we're talking about. I have no problem with higher tax rates on these people. But if you're making $200K and you have the option to work 65 hrs/week versus 60, and you know you'll have to give up more than half those extra hours earnings to the government, you may well decide it isn't worth the effort. That is not a good incentive to provide the hard working people in the country. You're a bright guy and this isn't complicated. We're not talking about discrete outcomes; these are degrees of productivity. You should be able to see that when you tax the hard workers by a few percentage points and hand that money over to the less productive members of society, everyone loses. There is also the issue of self respect. I keep referring to New Orleans because it constitutes a tragic microcosm of this problem. When these people were left to fend for themselves they were paralyzed and unable to do so. For some, it was because they were disabled or elderly, and the local governments should have provided for them -- these, I exclude. But if one studies what occurred in NOLA, you see a few able-bodied standouts who took control of their circumstances and thanks to those few, the others were saved. Take, for example, the story of Charmaine Neville, viciously raped at knifepoint atop Drew Elementary where she had crawled off to get some sleep. A day later, she commandeered a bus and drove herself and a load of others out of the muck -- which included having to run a roadblock manned by local authorities insisting she couldn't leave the area. Meanwhile, able-bodied people congregated on Convention Center Blvd., waiting to be saved (there were also disabled and elderly, who instead of being helped by the able-bodied were being assaulted by them). If you have a group of people who have come to rely on public assistance, it is the only thing they know. It isn't their fault. It is the fault of the American Left, who doesn't understand that it has created a society of dependents. I would urge you to study the events of early September, 2005 in NOLA to develop an understanding of what is wrong with the welfare state.