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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (5209)	1/7/2017 6:44:32 PM
From: Lane3	2 Recommendations Recommended By one_less TimF Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 367482

In that sense alone we have a universal obligation to the well being of all. I am not disagreeing with that. I am disagreeing on how best to achieve it. We need a robust system to meet those needs long term, which means thinking ahead. Communal systems fail because not everyone pulls his weight. A system can handle a certain amount of dead weight but there is always a tipping point. I don't know where that tipping point is but it's surely well south of the top one percent or ten percent supporting everyone else. We can't honor that obligation to all unless we produce enough wealth to go around. Small groups with common values can make that work. This country is nowhere near close to sharing common values. Small groups can use first-hand knowledge of the parties and social means to differentiate what used to be called the "deserving poor." We can't do that now. Even worse, many see anyone not of their tribe as automatically a system abuser. We are too tribal and too culturally different to make work a welfare system for other than the legitimately disabled, perhaps the poor elderly. We don't have a consensus beyond that. It's always exceedingly difficult even when feasible to share the commons. One way to avoid the problem is to keep what we handle as commons to only what inherently common.