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

To: tejek who wrote (623513)	8/8/2011 5:52:40 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577883

>>> but most people want to earn their own way. What makes you think that people are different from other animals? If you pitch raw meat out on your back porch daily for a month, you see how many animals show up waiting for their daily feedings. It is animal nature. If you hand people, or any other animal, freebies, they will take them.

To: tejek who wrote (623513)	8/8/2011 5:54:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577883

I didn't say the poor are con-artists. Some of them are, but most are not. Dependency on government programs has very little to do with con-artists unless perhaps you count the politician con-artists who make promise after promise without caring about the long term results. The handouts are not only to the poor, the middle class and even some of the rich get subsidies, transfer payments, and/or targeted tax breaks. The collection of all of this is unaffordable, but one the spending starts you get a huge constituency for it. And the bigger and more expensive and thus less affordable the program is, the bigger the constituency. Some of the people receiving it become dependent on it. People arrange their lives around it, the poor can even get trapped by it since if they work hard and make progress and earn more they might loose all the benefits and be worse off in the short run. Some might fight through that because they want something better at the end and are willing to suffer to get it, but most people avoid short term suffering, and if your poor even being a little worse off can be very painful. If the spending issue was short term, if there was a world war going on and we hoped to win in a couple of years and then spend less, well you can go in to a lot of debt if your going to have more income and lower costs later on. But the spending isn't short term, its mostly entitlements which in the mid term will explode up because of the baby boomers retiring, and then after a dip in the long term will start climbing again as we have more and more retirees for each worker as people live longer and don't have large families anymore.