[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]malonetd wrote:
[quote]roguevampire wrote:
Things can happen. what happens if you lose your job and you have kids. what, you have to live in the streets with your kids? your country should provide for you. [/quote]
Of course things can happen. That’s why people should put a little money aside and prepare for emergencies. That way a simple job loss doesn’t force you on the streets. It’s called personal responsibility.[/quote]
I will agree with you mostly in principle; however, bad things happen to good people who don’t deserve it. What about a low income man boen into poverty trying to claw his way out as he grows up, or after he grows up? He has no safety net because all his assets are going to try and keep him fed and housed. There’s no way he can save up enough to last more than a small bit of job loss. So what happens when his job gets cut because of a falling economy?
Look, I am as pissed as anybody at these wackos who think that they should be able to live on welfare for the rest of their life. But as much as I am solidly conservative on this issue, I really think most people with that cut-and-dried attitude you displayed in this post have lived a far too sheltered life. I have friends in sorry ass situations that they tried to avoid every way possible. They never partied, they never spent money they didn’t have, but they still got fucked.[/quote]
My mother lost both parents in the war, got raised by her evil, evil relatives, was used to getting up at 4 and cleaning the pig sty before she milked the cows before she was 7 years old, could not get a decent education because nobody would pay for it, cleaned the toilets and bathrooms in a nunnery in order to get the little education she had, then she married and was left by her husband, my father, with two little kids, no formal education and an employer that chose this very unwelcome time to go bancrupt.
And yet, 5 years later she ran the office of a tax consulting firm and made about twice the average Austrian salary.
Right now, she is studying history after having finished her high school diploma.
So
a) please spare me the “you dont know true hardship” shtick
b) dont tell me that you cant make it, you can if you work your ass off
c) yeah well, who do you think will get fired first in your hypothetical example, if taxes rise because people need to support this poor bastard?
Thats right, people that are in a similar position he was in before he lost his job.
and finally
d) life sucks, it fucks everyone, get a fucking helmet. [/quote]
Hahaha. I musta touched a nerve!
A) it’s not a schtick. It’s my observation after being around people that got their shit kicked in, like your mother. I had a pretty decent family life growing up, I don’t pretend to have firsthand knowledge from personal experience. But I do have friends who are in tight places, theough no fault of their own, and it made me think a lot. God forbid something else goes down and they lose the ability to pay their bills and then lose their homes and apartments. And before you go shoutimg about using tax money, YES I would give them a place to stay and eat. I have already done that before and I would do it again. But hey, I can’t be around all the time to help. Maybe they’re out of state and I don’t even know about it.
B) I never, in any way at all, stated that people couldn’t still make it through hard work. I believe they can. However, I also know everybody fucks up, because it is human nature, and I don’t think that an honest hardworking person should have to go through an entire life clawing like your mother had to if they can be thrown a break. Industrious people turn a break to their advantage and use it to get ahead. Deadbeats live off the charity.
C) How do you expect someone to get their education if they can’t pay bills first? Of course they’re going to get laid off first. That doesn’t mean they’re not trying to claw their way up like youe mother succeeded in doing.
D) Of course life hits everybody hard, captain obvious. Thanks for the fucking news bullitin.
E) I explicitly stated that I despised people that live off of welfare for long peripds of time, or the majority of their lives, and you obviously do as well. How much money do you think could be saved by dumping the deadbeats off after a certain amount of time on welfare? Billions. if the welfare system were to be there for hardworking people like your mother for emergency use on a set period of time, we’d still save billions over the current deadbeat laden system. The tax burden isn’t so linear, and you know damned well that the economic crisis wasn’t precipitated by welfare load affecting tax burden.
So you can take your strawman and shove it up that extraordinarily uptight ass of yours.
[/quote]
Great post. No one likes the idea of public money chronically feeding personal laziness. And that kind of thing should be–must be–uprooted and destroyed as best as possible (something that isn’t at present happening). But this world isn’t some Randian wet dream where only the deserving Nietzschean Ubermensch prospers and only the lowlife scumbag fails. An anecdote about a hard-working mother does nothing to change that.