jusplay4fun wrote:riskllama wrote:if it costs $4 billion, it's not exactly free now, is it?
You MISSED the point. $4 billion dollars taken from someone or somewhere to provide FREE stuff for those who do NOTHING to earn it. $4 billion coming from taxes (supposedly, only on the RICH, supposedly) to give to the poor, That is called the Robin Hood effect.
That means, for example, Llama, that you are taxed so that a poor person can get FREE stuff. I assume that Canada has similar things going on in there social and socialist programs.
So many things wrong with that statement I hardly know where to begin.
First of all, only a small part of the $4 billion is targetted at the poor. Large parts are for such things as overdue improvements to highways, drinking water, electric grids, the internet, public schools, etc., which are all things that are used by rich and poor alike. America's infrastructure has been shortchanged and largely ignored by every president since Eisenhower, so it's a long-overdue set of fixes to a totally bipartisan problem.
The single largest line item is the stimulus cheques, which are targeted at not only the poor but the middle class. The very rich are left out but the cutoff point is pretty high. Most people who would call themselves middle class qualify.
The portion of the spending that is specifically targeted to the poor -- things like daycare subsidies and stuff -- hardly deserve the pejorative "free stuff". When a single mother gets subsidized daycare, it's so that she can go to work and slave away for the system. It's hardly 'free stuff'. It's a targeted subsidy that in the long run is more a gift to her employer than to her. Whoopdie-doo! She gets to bust her ass for minimum wage while someone else raises her kids, and in the end she might have $50 a week more than if she had stayed home on welfare. It's more a gift to the billionaire owners of 7-11, who will find it easier to fill their employment vacancies.
In general I find the whole tenor of your post offensive. Especially the statement "those who do nothing to earn it" which tries to perpetuate the stereotype that poor people are mostly non-workers. In fact, the vast majority of the poor are working poor, people going to work every day, some of them juggling two or three jobs, but victims of a system where employers are concerned above all with keeping wages low and making sure the poor never accumulate enough wealth to break out of the poverty trap.
