that was a long thread I didn’t read it all.
But here every little town or rathole has the same supermarkets with the same quality of food and almost the same amount of different makes.
Denmark is a very little country, we believe in equal rights for everybody and ONLY if you choose to be poor you’ll have no money, otherwise the state will provide you with a roof and money you can live for. The state pays for you education as well.
Most people receiving public assistance have all sorts of wealthy family they could get help from, but alas the government swoops in and they can’t even ask them for help! If it wasn’t for food subsidies they would be living like kings!
This is probably the reason why you’ve had success when you’ve been doing it on your own. It seems like you’ve had a good educational background. Going to guess your parents read to you when you were young, made sure you were well fed, helped with schoolwork, involved you in activities, showed you what personal hygiene and hard work looked like, etc.
That’s just not the case for a lot of people in poverty. They were born behind the 8 ball and while some of them can figure out a way to shoot around it, many can’t. It’s cyclical for a reason. Most people who demean poor people haven’t been around them or attempted to learn from them at any point in their life. And that’s pretty sad. Would go a long ways towards getting rid of a lot of the myths of poverty and of well off people looking down on them.
And I say that as someone whose perspectives completely changed based on the career path I took. I was certainly more along the lines of “why can’t they just figure this shit out” when I was younger.
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Giving poor people money doesn’t change any of the above. It actually perpetuates and institutionalizes it.
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How do you know that? I have seen some research that is contrary to your claim.
I guess that’s why we didn’t have poverty before welfare. No one had trouble eating or having basic necessities until big bad government came along and people asked it to help.
Ben Carson got that assistance and became a doctor who credited that assistance with him making it. Of course he would later go on to say other people shouldn’t get that assistance but that’s another story.
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Me too. Some life experience with some really poor people has changed my opinion on it. I used to be against “enabling” poor people with government programs. Experience, and reading some research on the topic has changed my opinion on it.
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What does corporate welfare do? Make CEOs quit their jobs to live in the ghettos?
The problem is that giving someone money with no strings doesn’t change their behavior. That goes for corporate welfare, too. Give the impoverished money and they don’t learn skills to take care of themselves. Bail out CEOs and they continue to take risks, privatizing profits while sharing the losses with taxpayers. It’s actually an appropriate connection.
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It’s hard to learn skills when you’re dead of starvation.
Most of the welfare recipients I know are more likely to die of complications from obesity, or drug overdose.
You just described Alabama.
How many Americans die of hunger each year? I did a little googling and the answer I got was that it doesn’t seem to happen at all. Perhaps you have other sources.
Thanks to welfare.
Well we have government programs designed to keep that from happening.
- On average, 40.4 million Americans rely on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) each month to meet their food needs. An additional 6.9 million women and children are assisted by the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program.9
Well, I live in NY. Cant really speak for Bama.
How many do you know? Research would show in multiple states that drug testing of these people costs far more than it catches and that the rates among recipients are significant lower than the average person. Studies don’t back up your anecdote in the least bit.
Depends on the level of government assistance. I know a lot (20+) people that get snap(food stamps). Most are overweight and none of them get drug tested to receive it.
Funny, the people I’d meet at my church’s food pantry/soup kitchen don’t usually fall into those same categories. Seemed to be more people that genuinely needed help for a list of reasons. Think less obesity/drug use, more crazy.
How many have kids?
The whole drug testing SNAP / WIC recipients does not make much sense to me. Why punish children, because the mom smokes pot? It is also a bit arbitrary. We could refuse benefits to people who have been caught speeding, or any other thing that is illegal. Why choose drugs?
Maybe it makes more sense to have the SNAP / WIC dependent on need, and then just punish illegal things as you normally would. I don’t see a reason to double punish someone. Plus it costs more to enforce drug testing requirements than it saves in reduced benefits.
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