Humble, you make your case like every other misinformed liberal: Rather than discussing the virtue or lack thereof of a point made in a discussion, you attack the person. Typical of liberals who then scratch their empty heads and wonder why our nation is so gridlocked.
Oh, I’ve had help from family to be sure. It wasn’t forced under threat of punishment; it was freely given and the related benefactor had the liberty of choosing not only to give, but also how much.
I’ve had a job since my first paper route when I was a third grader. I am not wealthy, but I do respect basic common sense concepts of individual liberty and ownership; private property. I am not envious of the wealthy, but have great respect for the work ethic that brought them success.
I have never received welfare and am determined to never do so. I have been officially unemployed, but performed contract work until something else became available. In other words, I never drew unemployment. I found work, even though it wasn’t the kind of work I would have preferred. I had to take what I could to put food on the table.
You want to know the secret? Have principles. Live every day according to those principles and to the Moral Law which is their foundation. Treat your neighbor as you would be treated. Stop focussing on what you can ‘t do and start accomplishing what you can. Learn from your mistakes and thank God for the priceless lessons gleaned from failure. The only real failure is the failure to try.
Am I a “self-made man?” To a degree, but again, I am not wealthy. Just happy. Am I the only self-made man? Hardly. Most of the wealthy are self-made. And you could learn a thing or two from them if you could just stop thinking that someone, or everyone for that matter, owes you something. Pay yourself first, Humble, and let others do the same.

White, yes. Over 50? No. Based upon your question I can only assume you’re a racist, being as that you want to inject race into a monetary discussion. And whose money would you be wagering; money you received from TANF or some other welfare program?

That’s because the notion that corporate subsidies are double what are given to welfare recipients is completely and utterly false. The writer of the article is either lying or misinformed. If he told you that wolverines make good house pets, would you believe him?

Here is a link to a report given by the Congressional Research Service detailing means-tested welfare spending between 2008 and 2011. These aren’t predictive numbers – they illustrate what was actually spent.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/110413572/CRS-Report-on-Welfare-Spending

The National Center for Policy Analysis confirms the numbers:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=21968

Of course, the progressives want to poo-poo the numbers by claiming that “welfare” should be defined only by dollars spent on the TANF program, which in reality, is ONE program from among roughly 80 welfare programs. IMO progressives avoid clarity and preciseness, and they do so purposefully. What’s the definition of welfare? “Statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.”

In other words, the “statutory effort” is “law” and the “promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need” means wealth redistribution. Can we at least agree on that?

So, by definition, any and all money confiscated from earners and re-distributed to the “poor and needy” is, by definition, WELFARE. To say that the paltry-by-comparison billions provided solely by TANF is the sum of our yearly welfare spending is so egregiously false one must question the motives, if not the sanity, of anyone regurgitating this lie. Time for an analogy. Suppose that person A stole from a baker, and that the baker caught him in the act. The police arrive and say, “yup, he stole from the baker and we’re going to put him in jail.” Person B on the other hand steals from the butcher, but wasn’t caught in the act. Well, to anyone with even half a brain, both person A and person B engaged in acts of theft. The progressive “Salon” mentality stating “TANF alone is welfare” is tantamount to someone declaring that only person A was stealing because he’s the only one who got caught.

I did address it. I stated that subsidies granted to businesses that don’t exceed their tax are simply a means of allowing businesses to keep their own money. If the government has money to give to businesses, then the government is taxing too much. Money given to businesses that would exceed their tax burden should rightly be called corporate welfare, and programs such as this should be terminated. Again, the guiding principle is that we are each entitled to what we earn.
Some facts about taxes and spending: on average, for every dollar collected by the government via tax and ear marked for welfare spending, only 15% gets to a welfare recipient. 85% of the money is exhausted as it traverses all of the bureaucratic layers of government. This is one reason government is the last institution we should consider getting involved. The extraordinary inefficiencies of government bureaucracy increase cost and allow far greater avenues for fraud. Consider private charities which demonstrate an efficiency of 85% or better; not only are the poor and needy in communities better served, but the financial burden placed on earners isn’t stifling.
Hoodieduck, you, like your liberal friends, are simply misinformed by your class warfare-obsessed elitist leaders; conservatives want to help the poor and the needy. We simply want the means to be fair and just. Charity should not line the pockets of bureaucrats before the needy receive the leftover pittance, nor should it be used by politicians to gain and retain power via populist, class-warfare rhetoric. The majority of people on various welfare programs are not the destitute and elderly you think. Most, today, are able-bodied. We can certainly get rid of Obama phones, can’t we? Of the 83 means-tested welfare programs out there, do you think all are necessary?

I can’t spell out a comprehensive solution here. I can give few and
broad ideas. In short, what’s wrong with our economy is everything that Keynesian Democrats and Republicans have created. The welfare state, a cultural collapse on an enormous scale. While the solution may be mufti-faceted and take years to make happen, it isn’t as complex as you might think. If they have a D by their names on election day, stop voting for them. If they are RINOs, don’t vote for them. Take everything the liberals have done over the last 50 years and get rid of it. (BTW, Civil Rights Legislation was a Republican cause – the Senate Democrats voted it down FIVE times before it was finally passed. I mention it now because the first thing that’s going to pop into some lunk-head’s mind when he reads “Take everything the liberals have done over the last 50 years and get rid of it” is going to be Civil Rights legislation – which we obviously need to keep.)

It took decades to create the mess we’re in today – logically it will take decades to fix. Our attention span seems to be fixed in 4 year cycles. We have to stop that and think in terms of long term solutions. Can we shut down all welfare programs tomorrow and expect to succeed? No – we need something – or rather, a lot of things – to replace them, and cultural solutions will be key. Our culture devolved from emphasizing hard work and success into one that romanticizes sloth, envy and entitlement-thinking. Let’s come up with an 80 year plan to end welfare and entitlement programs whereby cuts to these programs will be phased in gently and private counter parts can be created.

Education reform – we need high-schoolers to learn about personal finance, investment strategies etc., so that they start planning and working toward their own retirements, home-ownership etc. For example, if a person invests $100.00 per month for 6 years and that investment averages a 10% rate of return every year for 35 years, the investor will be a millionaire. Take that same person who began investing at age 18, but increased the amount invested every month as circumstances allowed, and kept investing until age 65. He or she would be a multi-millionaire and wouldn’t need government handouts to survive.

Leftists fear the market. They fear investment strategies, despite those strategies that use diversification to protect investments – something uncommon prior to the crash of ’29 and the Great Depression. Privatizing Social Security is actually a very smart thing to do, yet the leftists abhor the idea citing risk. Technically, there is more risk leaving it in government hands!

Lower taxes, allow people to keep and invest their own money. Stop rewarding non-earners. The deeper problem is not THAT they are on welfare, it’s WHY they are on welfare. If we want to fix the problem we have to eliminate the WHY. You know the old saying: People don’t plan to fail…they fail to plan. Engaging high-school aged kids to prepare them for financial success will help eliminate the WHY. Part of the reason people aren’t trying hard enough is that they can always fall back on the largesse of the federal government. There is no incentive to get off of welfare once you’re on it. We didn’t have a welfare system of any kind prior to FDR – gee, how did people get by?

You ask about people who don’t believe in God. Well, there is a common moral order among people whether or not they believe in God. We know, innately, that it’s wrong to steal, murder, rape etc., whether we believe in God or not. In other words, murder isn’t wrong because God said so; God, whether you believe in Him or not, was merely stating the obvious. I can’t think of a single atheist who doesn’t believe in a moral code of conduct. There may be differences of opinion regarding aspects of morality, but those same differences exist between people of differing religions too.

The ends do not justify the means. If we want to help the needy, that end is a good thing. But are we able to help the needy by stealing from others? Theft is wrong – using ill gotten goods and/or money to help the needy is a violation of any moral code.

You said: ” The problem is the cost of living has risen exponentially and the price we pay people has faltered.”

Inflation has not been as much of a problem as it was in the 70′s (although it will likely be soon). So the cost of living can’t be blamed on inflation today. Yet the cost of living has sky-rocketed in recent years. Why? Because of government mandates, generally higher taxes on businesses, increased minimum wage standards and gross government spending. New taxes will always cause businesses to raise prices to cover those costs. You want businesses to pay more of their “fair share?” Fine, but understand that you, the consumer – the poor – are actually going to be the one paying for those higher taxes. When fuel prices go up (most especially due to our ridiculous energy policy) you, the poor consumer, are the one paying for it. Higher fuel prices equal higher prices for everything – food, clothing, paper, pencils, entertainment, cable/dsl – everything! And those higher prices are always passed on to the consumer. Is that because businesses are greedy? NO! It’s because businesses need to survive too! It’s because a business man or woman gives all of his/her time, for years, to build a business, often barely squeaking by, in hopes that one day he or she can reap the rewards of his/her hard work. If they can’t maintain a profit margin they deem “worth the effort” they will simply close down, forcing all of their employees onto the unemployment line. If you want the cost of living to go down so that you can afford the things you need, then we need to CUT taxes for EVERYONE and figure out a way to end government welfare programs over time. We need a common sense energy policy not driven by environmentalist Chicken Littles.

What are all the welfare recipients going to do when all the money is gone? Take all those “1 percenters”. If they decide that they’ve had enough of the slander and verbal abuse and stop working and earning incomes for which they pay taxes – if they close down their businesses, empty their investment portfolios and keep all the income they’ve already paid taxes on – what are the welfare recipients to do then? Is our government going to decide that it needs to confiscate the remaining money too?
I wish I had the influence necessary to solve the problem; I do vote, and express my opinion, but as the saying goes, you can’t make the horse drink the water.
BTW – I appreciate your dialogue, and I am sympathetic to your situation. I would like to keep more of my own money to help with my children, especially my special-needs child. You may continue to receive food-stamps, but maybe you should consider that those of us paying taxes (and I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) that fund your food stamps need to keep more of what we earn for very good reasons too. I don’t want to be equal if by “equal” it means equally poor. I would hope we could all be equally successful, but the current tax code is making the first option the more likely.

First let me thank you for a well spoken reply. Problem 1 answer: There is no way to give everyone a completely equal shot, is there? We are all equal in the sense that each human life is of equal value in a moral sense. One is not better than another because he is wealthier – one is not entitled to better treatment by virtue of his wealth. However, we are not equal in terms of capability. Some are stronger, some are smarter, some have a better work ethic, some are better looking, some are kinder, some are more charismatic; each of us is endowed with abilities in greater measure than others. I hope that doesn’t sound elitist – it’s just a fact of life. Otherwise we’d all be models-Olympians-medical doctors- physicists-etc. we can all agree that certain forms of discrimination are morally wrong, but nonetheless we all discriminate. For example, you aren’t likely to hire a known sex offender to work in your daycare, are you? If you own a business you want to hire the best candidate for the job that you can, regardless of race, religion (excepting militant jihadists), gender etc, right? Did the sex offender not place himself on unequal grounds when he made the choice to commit a sex offense? Likewise, aren’t all children in this country given an opportunity to learn and excel? If students and their parents don’t make the most of those opportunities, is the tax payer to blame? So why do we punish the tax payer by raising his taxes to ostensibly give assistance to the high school dropout/ sexually promiscuous teen mother or father/ drug addict/ criminal – all of whom squandered their opportunities? Even then these people have second and third chances, but each requires effort and self discipline on the part of the individual, do they not?
Most of the wealthy in this country earned their wealth. There are few families by comparison who maintain wealth after two or more generations. You may know of the phenomenon particular to lottery winners, whereby most of them are broke within 5 years of a windfall lottery win. The same sort of phenomenon exists among the wealthy. Kids who inherit wealth are more likely, statistically speaking, to blow it all, because the value of that wealth and the hard work it took to acquire it are lost on them. Most of the currently wealthy in this country have earned, honestly, their wealth within the last 20 years, and the cycle will continue. Being as that such is the case, those born in poverty have every means available to them to earn and accumulate wealth. Most are unaware of the opportunities, which is why teaching kids about these opportunities is far more important than teaching them wood shop, metal shop, or that “Heather Has Two Mommies.” So I must counter that people born to lower economic families have every opportunity to move out of that bracket. Don’t take my word for it; talk to the Vietnamese kids whose families immigrated here not knowing a word of English, worked 2 and three menial labor type jobs, yet instilled such a work ethic into their children that they, the children, have PHD’s and very high incomes today.
I won’t argue that some schools are poor, both financially and at teaching. Are they so bad that kids remain hopeless? Or is that really, as I would argue, an outcome of the entitlement / welfare state mentality? Abe Lincoln’s formal education ended in the eighth grade. His family was, by any measure, poor. Yet he was one of the most else eloquent speakers/writers in our nation’s history – oh yeah, he was the best President too. Beethoven was abused as a child. History is replete with examples of people who overcame severe disability and hardship to achieve success. I would argue that the vast majority of the wealthy in this country faced the same challenges to various degrees as the poor. If we were all truly equal we would possess the same drive too. Government can’t give that to people no matter how much we spend. Note, I am not demonizing the poor. I am demonizing a system that has undermined the drive and work ethic of society and has therefore made poverty worse. Most liberals would argue that we should end the war on drugs. We’ve spent a lot of money on that program and have very little to show for it. Why can they not apply the same logic to the war on poverty? Not only does spending on that program (or programs) dwarf that of the war on drugs, there are more poor today than in 1960 – and I insist that it is all those programs (war on poverty) that have made it so. Liberal/progressive plans may be laid with the best of intentions, but over time they have proven that as far as equality goes, they will only make us all equally poor and equally dependent on government; enslaved if you will.

Problem 2 answer:
In general, yes, everyone should keep what he earns. I am not advocating for a tax less country: we need to maintain services and institutions that exist for the common welfare, such as judiciaries, police, fire and emergency and defense. I’m flabbergasted that the concept is strange to some. Private ownership is an inherent, innate sort of thing. The rich parents, by virtue of their ownership are fully within their rights to give their children their money, just as they are entitled to give it to anyone else. There are different ways to earn. First is by means of contract wage. Second is by barter or exchange. This would include investing, winning a lottery or gambling. (Risk was bartered for potential reward). Third is by way of gift. Someone else may have earned money by wage or investment, and then given it to someone else. The receiver is entitled to the gift – he or she becomes the new owner. You don’t actually disagree with that principle and here’s why I know that: Let’s suppose the wealthy parents gave their money to an impoverished widow who finds herself raising 2 great-grandchildren. Now she doesn’t have to work another day in her life. Should she be allowed to keep all that money? I would argue that she does. She earned it by way of gift. Now, I would argue that a parent’s first responsibility is to his/her children and family, but sometimes a lesson is a better gift than money. The principle is private ownership. The earner has every right to give to whom he/she pleases. We all do have a responsibility to help the poor BTW. I am saying that government welfare is the wrong way to go about that task.

Problem 3 answer:
I say that people, all people, should get to keep their money because it belongs to them. It is their money to do with what they please. It may surprise you that most people would give more to charity if they had the money to do so. Unfortunately, punitive taxation prevents this. I say businesses reinvest, which creates jobs. Simply injecting money into the economy isn’t the solution. There is no more money injected into the economy via welfare to the poor then there is if the wealthy spend it, is there? Our welfare system keeps poor people poor. There is no incentive for them to work if an unskilled job wage pays, for 40 hours of work, barely more than a weekly welfare check. As we’ve extended unemployment from six months to 99 weeks, more people remain jobless longer because they can. One might think that increasing the minimum wage would offer a solution, but it wouldn’t. Businesses would hirer fewer people and prices would go up, thus neutralizing any benefit to an increased minimum wage. The only substantive, long term fix is to lower unemployment checks and/or decrease the number of weeks of eligibility.

Problem 4 answer: what do you think of the fact that the wealthiest 25% pay 86% of income taxes? It’s a two way street. But, understand that you are falling into a trap here. The trap is the erroneous notion that there is only x amount of wealth to go around. Let’s say that x is an apple pie. If you divide it between 2 people they each get half a pie… No problem there. If you have three people they each get a third. Eventually, if you have a million people, the each receive (if equality matters) one one- millionth of the pie. No one is going to be satisfied with that, right? Of course, that isn’t the trap yet. What if two people get half of the pie (one quarter each) and the other million receive one millionth of the remaining half? That’s where your sense of injustice kicks in. So let me ask you, what if one of the quarter pie owners supplied the dough and baked the pie, and the other quarter-pie owner supplied the sugar and apples? Is it still as unjust as you originally thought? Ah, but we’re still operating in the trapped logic of the progressives. Why is there only one pie? Can’t we make enough pie for everyone? If everyone participates, why not? Why can’t we give one quarter to everyone, especially those who provide more apples, cinnamon, sugar, flour, etc? And aren’t those who contribute actually entitled to bigger pieces? My friend, wealth works exactly the same.

Problem 5 answer: that middle class citizen benefits from the goods and services delivered via that state highway, just as does the upper-class citizen. They should pay an equal tax. The upper-class’s fetish for driving BMW’s? To me, that sounds like class envy. How many years did that upper-class citizen work to climb out of lower-class/middle-class income brackets to be able to afford the BMW? I don’t think all the poor are lazy. I do think that circumstances beyond their control can contribute to their economic status. But that’s not the issue. The issue is government involvement and the adverse effects it causes. When we begin to eliminate government involvement we may see real solutions.

Thanks Lynn! You are more than welcome to participate, if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts.