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

To: Lane3 who wrote (7310)	1/21/2017 12:22:25 PM
From: neolib	1 Recommendation Recommended By Ron Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 364831

Context counts, you might read up on the WPA and CCC during the Great Depression. They did exactly what you below think is stupid. There is in fact some very positive aspects to the Gov being the employer of last resort under certain circumstances. Just like back in the depths of the Great Recession, after Obama took office, it was appropriate that the Gov be the spender of last resort (something the Reps in Congress howled about), while at the current stage of the business cycle, the Gov is unwise to be engaged in excess spending (something the Reps in Congress now embrace). As you can see, political ideology makes fools out of some people. They stop paying attention to the essential details... I'd be interested in hearing why you would think taxing working people to create a bunch of make-work jobs and workplaces for a bunch of unemployable people would be a good idea.

To: Lane3 who wrote (7310)	1/21/2017 1:43:21 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 364831

I see two issues, one, why isn't the onus on the individual to pull themselves up, and two, why should we tax the worker to provide jobs for people that don't want to work. Taking the second question first, I never said you should tax the worker to support peoples that won't work. The context I was referring to is jobs being replaced by robots. What so many people do, especially on the right, is never think of these issues in the context of our being a society. It helps me to think of our society as a village. And the first order of business of a society always has to be what's in the best interest of the village so that it can protect the individual. I believe in a progressive income tax, so most of the taxes would be to the higher income folks. And those taxes would be used to support things like education, universal health care and subsidizing the lack of jobs. It would not be a simple matter of some people working and some people not working. It would be more along the lines, that those that worked, would make say three or four times as much as those that didn't work. But still, the ones that didn't work would be provided with health and welfare. The advanced countries in the world are already working with this concept. With regard to a person pulling themselves up by the bootstrap, that is the old Horatio Alger idea and to be honest I thought we had done away with that myth 50 years ago. The very poor are not that way because they are lazy. They are that way because they don't know what to do generally speaking. As a person becomes educated they become more self-reliant and they become better able to figure out solutions to their problems. I came out of a town that is pretty much all workers. But we had a couple of community colleges in the area that didn't require grades or entrance exams and were very inexpensive. I saw those community colleges save a large percentage of the kids in my town by giving them a second chance at a good education. Most of us had terrible grades in high school because we had to work for a car and clothes and had no study habits because we were young and without guidance. I don't know of any of my friends that went through college that have spent any substantial amount of time on welfare. It was the people that didn't go for one reason or another, early marriage, or just not able to understand the importance or just didn't want to do it that had a much harder time. As a person becomes educated they change as a human being. Ask anyone what type of person they were before they started college and what type of person they were after they finished college. Most of them will tell you they completely changed. In my case, I went from being so ignorant when I entered college that I thought society meant high society, and had no idea what rhetoric meant, to embracing French existentialism four years later. That is a long intellectual trek and certainly changed me. I also learned the skills in college that allowed me to run large state agencies. There is no way I could've done that before I started college. Zero.