Study: More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Spent on Welfare But Poverty Levels Unaffect

Poor people get hit out of proportion to thier income by tobacco taxes and the lottery.

Every time that I go to purchase a revolting Murdoch tabloid, there is some poor schmuck ahead of me in line peeling off dollars to buy a scratch off card or some lottery ticket.

Yet, the MSNBC crowd has no critique of this because the monies paid help fund the Goverment.

If private industry was doing this there would be howls of outrage.

Poor schmucks are paying bout $8.00 for a pac-a-smokes in NY/NJ. most of it Gov. taxes. I hear its around $4 in Virginia.

 

Indie

Hell man, some things I’ve repeated a hundred maybe even a thousand times over the last two years are you going to use the goldfish approach and claim you can’t remember what they are?

No this is just more evasion, you know perfectly well what criticisms are outstanding you are just once again trying to weddle your way out of actually addressing them.

 

Thank you sir! Quite right.

 

Had to take a moment to stop laughing so I could type, but it is hilarious coming from the master of evasion. It would be pointless to try and guess what it is you feel that I have not answered to your satisfaction only to have you return your standard response that I am evading answering.

Either state what it is you refer to clearly in a single concisely written civil post or go back and re-read my past posts as you are accomplishing nothing at all by simply posting about 'some things' which could be, and probably would be, anything other than what I might conclude it to be.

 

PlacidDingo,

You can download PLAW-104publ193.pdf (H.R. 3734) ‘‘Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996’’ aka The 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, which not only details much of what necessitated it, but the actions a more or less bipartisan House and Senate were able to agree on, and then the results produced in later studies might be more understandable in relation to how people can be successfully motivated to become more self sufficient if not totally so.

Prior to the 251 page bills passage you might note some facts on page 6 that the average monthly number of children receiving AFDC benefits was:
3,300,000 in 1965
6,200,000 in 1970
7,400,000 in 1980
9,300,000 in 1990
and predicted to rise to 12,000,000 within 10 years.

This seems to validate the thread title "Study: More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Spent on Welfare But Poverty Levels Unaffected", and even though this program had a profound positive effect, it alone is inadequate.

The latest news is that $1,030,000,000,000 was spent on 83 or so welfare programs in 2011, not counting Social Security, Medicare, Veteran benefits, and State Welfare funding.That's the equivalent of paying 20,600,000 persons a $50,000 annual wage to produce nothing at all.

To use a zombiewolf dysphemism...fucking brilliant Yo'.

 

I've observed what you're talking about and I'm thinking he's a propagandist. He's not really interested in substance, he's just interested in repeating the same drivel over and over again.

 

Dude, I'm moving through your other links. Give me time.

Also, interesting to see that your focus has shifted. Even if all your points about the bill and OP were accurate, the point I'm arguing (THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT ELIMINATING GOVERNMENT WELFARE IS A GOOD IDEA) is still UN adressed.

I'll reply once I've gone though all those links.

 

Take your time, in fact I'm still reading the bill as I had never read it in its entirety, and also had never read any of the follow ups relating to successes or failures until now.

I'm uncertain what you are meaning by my focus has shifted.

More precisely, and I thought I had stated it previously, eventually eliminating FEDERAL government welfare. The State and local governments are another matter entirely.

 

I laughed out loud while reading this

 

Three things:

1. Welfare doesn't make a dent in your tax dollars. We spent multiple times the figure listed on TARP alone. If you want to see where your tax money went, go look at Goldman Sachs.

2. It comes down to this: Either you think poor people should be allowed to starve, or you don't.

3. Colollary: Either you believe poor people should be punished for being poor, or you don't (example: One poster here saying welfare recipients should be sterilized).

 

TARP is welfare, welfare for multimillionaires.

 

1. Medicaid is 7%, other safety net programs are 13%, so not even counting social security, or medicare, that's at least 1/5th of the federal budget. I think that'd classify as more than a "dent" by anyone's measure. Even if it was .1% of the budget, it'd still be an ineffective, immoral program, that encourages poverty rather than help remove it... so I really don't know what your point is.

2. Yes, I think people should be "allowed" to starve. People should be allowed to do anything they want, as long as they don't infringe on others rights or property.

3. No one has argued (seriously at least), that poor people should be "punished", just that all people (poor included), be treated equally. If anyone is arguing for a group of people to be "punished", it's you. You're basically advocating that people who produce more should be punished, and those who produce little or nothing be rewarded. Backwards by anyone's standards, and it doesn't take an economist to see that such incentives will yield you less people producing, and more subsisting off the produce of others.

 

Hey, you may be a filthy pig, but you're an alright filthy pig :love:

You laid it out.

Yet again.

But indie won't listen, he'll say that they should just stop being poor and get a real job or five and just take the bus out of the ghetto and live with the rich people. And if they don't do these things, it's because they're destined to be poor and that it's not government's place to keep them from starving to death, and life's just not fair, so suck it up and bring on the starving.

 

1: The amount that it costs should not even be on the table. The point is not ending the poverty, it's keeping people from dieing. Ending poverty should obviously be a different goal, but welfare is just to keep people from falling off the edge.

2: Nobody is forcing welfare down anyone's throat. Are you, perhaps, talking about the "right to starve"? Sort of like the "right to work"?

3: Taxing rich people will not cause anybody to want to NOT make money. It will not make rich people decide to give billions of dollars away and apply for foodstamps. It will not make people decide to not want to be rich anymore. Further, there is no reward associated with welfare, it is simply to insure that the human right to life is afforded to all. Also, you imply that rich people are producing something -- and WHAT, pray tell, might that be? There is no way that there are people who are thousands of times more productive than actual laborors, just about all of whom are poor, or close to poor. But there are plenty of people who are, on paper, worth thousands of times as much, who don't produce a fuckin' thing. This is a game of smoke and mirrors, illusory productivity and imaginary money.

But the bottom line is that I value the life of those without enough more than I value the forbes rank of those with too much.

 

I agree.

1. It was recently reported, as I had posted earlier, that the 83 or so welfare programs in 2011, not including Social Security, Medicare, Veteran benefits, and State Welfare funding, cost a total of $1,030,000,000,000 and if the Wiki is reliable as a source of information the 2011 budget was $3,630,000,000,000 making the 83 programs 28.37% of the budget, or if looked at as a percentage of revenue collected which the Wiki shows to be $2,314,000,000,000 those programs consumed 44.5% of all the tax revenue collected.

2. People should be free to do as they wish as long as they do not infringe upon the freedoms of others.

3. I believe that item was meant to be presented as 'corollary' based upon a Left winged redefinition, which eliminates the necessity of providing any truth for its basis of acceptance.
And you are correct, there are no laws I can find which apply any form of punishment at all due to being poor.

In this day and age of government required warning labels there should be one made visible constantly for everyone to view.

Warning: Not taking an interest or showing some responsibility for your own life can be hazardous to your health and life span.

 

To a degree you are correct, get a job? absolutely.
No jobs in the ghetto? Then get out a find where there are some jobs.
Destined to be poor? Has welfare made anyone rich?
And you are correct, it's not government's place to keep them from starving to death, which I doubt any really would before looking to earn an income.

 

As to your statement that there is no law punishing poor people:

Look up vagrency laws and their application. Look up the treatment of modern-day hoovervilles, where people are literally in tents because they have no house, and police slash them down because they said so, when the people have nowhere to go and no way to get there....

All that good stuff. If you think that poor people are treated equally or have the legal ability to stand up for themselves, well.... start actually thinking.

Now just consider those who actually DO choose to be homeless, and how they're treated.

 

Are there still some States or municipalities who maintain and enforce what you would call vagrancy laws applied simply because one is poor and nothing else?

I wouldn't complain about living in a tent, I've had to live in much worse conditions, although not in the U.S.
Police slash them down because 'who' said so? Likely they were trespassing if that actually happened.

I posted some time ago about a friend who worked for NASA in Florida and after being downsized and out of work he returned to Idaho and lived alone in a forest both happily and comfortably by his own choosing for a few years before returning to society and finding a new job in forestry.

If someone is being mistreated because of choosing to live homeless, the most likely cause of any mistreatment would be their choice of WHERE they chose to live or HOW they are attending to their needs and wants.

 

Those on the right do get upset about the poor mooching off the government tit but they have nothing to say about corporate welfare:

 

Let me ask all who are defending welfare this:

if you were on welfare and were taken off do you think you would just lay down and die or might you try to pick yourself up?