- Aug 3, 2012
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That's not an accurate assessment...
That's like disingenuously snarking "Hey this one house on the street had their basement flood...wait I thought we were in a drought??"
Two things can be true at the same time.
You can have some poor people who are obese because the only thing they can afford to buy (to feed 4 people) are cheap things like Tostino's pizza rolls and pop tarts 5 days a week, and then some people who are so poor they can't even afford the pizza rolls.
But even what you were saying was 100% true. Let's pretend that the entirety of the extremely poor community had kids that were going hungry because "mommy needs crack and lottery scratch offs", should the kid be punished for that?
This is one particular area where I think the pro-life community needs to figuratively and literally put their money where their mouth is.
They'll frame it in a way that attempts to talk a drug-addicted low-income woman that she shouldn't have an abortion and to put faith in private charity to help her, and then when she needs the help, tell her "no, because you're a drug addict who's spending what money you do have on something we don't approve of"
The pro-life community (largely, I realize that there are some who are quite charitable) needs to come up with an answer to this question if they wish to have their cause make it more than 10 years, because the list of red states voting pro-choice (when presented as an a la carte option) is growing.
The pro-lifers have no idea how anything works. Complaining that charity ought to cover it belies a gross ignorance of the magnitude of the problems.
At some point the question has to be asked, "Why isn't it enough?" We have charities galore, we have 75% of our budget going to welfare programs. We've been giving a lot of money for 50 years now, increasing it every cycle, "Why isn't it enough?"
What's the causes behind it and what do we need to do differently if what we are doing currently isn't working?
What we need to do differently is distribute wealth differently. I can't seem to find the paper at the moment, but a few years ago, I read about a simulation showing that, even in a perfectly fair system, imperfections in market pricing (i.e. people charging a little less than they could or paying a little more than they have to) will naturally lead to an oligopoly. It doesn't predict which few entities will wind up with most of the money, just that somebody eventually will. If you want to prevent that, you need to implement measures that actively counteract it.
Rocks did the biggest one. Another example I can think of off the top of my head is the Estate Tax which only effects about 2500 people a year but is treated as an existential threat to the American way of life, especially for farmers.
There are ways to restructure the estate tax so that it protects farms and other valuable-but-illiquid businesses from being shuttered while still also not giving away huge benefits to the already-wealthy. The fact that inheritance resets an investment's cost basis is wild.
I don't know what state you live in or how their structure their budget, but property taxes that low aren't enough to cover the services provided to your property. Congraulations, your mom may not have accepted a welfare check, but you're benefiting from a government subsidy somewhere, even if it's not obvious to you.I'm retired and living on SS plus a couple hundred a month from an old pension plan. Because my retirement plan was to have a low cost of living, rather than a lot of money saved up, I am living the most free life I've known since puberty.
We own our own home free and clear and have zero debt. We moved to a low tax (for retired people) state, and our monthly cost of living is roughly 1/3 our monthly SS checks. Our property taxes on 32 beautiful acres, a new shop building and a home are roughly the price of a large pizza every month. We pay zero income tax. That last sentence is huge. The freedom that brings is hard to describe, but it's almost tangible. We don't worry about food, but if we did, we'd just expand the garden and buy more chickens.![]()
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