9 Reasons Why America Is a Terrible Place to Raise Kids

[volpunter]

you can't dismantle a whole social welfare system just because a few abuse it. Or you also want to get rid of tax collections because some cheat? Your line of reasoning does not make the slightest sense to begin with.

The whole US health care system as postulated by Republicans aims at "self-responsibility", meaning that employers at their own choosing provide the health care coverage for their employees the company desires. That often results in horribly bad heath care plans without dental, with low caps for surgical procedures, and the like, leaving difficult cases with tens if not hundreds of thousands in the red despite an insurance plan. Then the remaining of self-responsibility basically for Republicans reads as everyone else being able to choose for themselves whether they want to be covered or not. This is utterly hypocritical given the fact the federal government invades the private lives in hundreds of other issues. Why is gambling regulated, why you guys cannot even trade futures options (LOL), why you cannot invest in the same assets as other people in the world, why you can buy tobacco and alcohol (much worse health effects than marijuana) but the federal government (Republicans especially) are vehemently opposed to legalizing marijuana. It is disingenuous to leave the common man at his own peril, health insurance wise, while it dictates which substances an individual can consume or not. I can rent a car in the US, get hit by another idiot, and not see a penny because the government does not require insurance coverage for insured third-parties. When you look at state wide legislation you see that mostly Republicans oppose any sort of forced protection of their citizens while they happily collect alcohol and tobacco taxes. The difference in stance towards above topics between Republicans and Democrats is CRYSTAL CLEAR. You can moan and bitch as much as you want but even Republicans admit the same. Their stance is towards SELF-DETERMINATION while they at the same time INTERFERE with uncountably many other issues in private lives. How contradictory.

Dude, look at congress and senate and tell me which overwhelming majority postulates liberalized financial markets, liberalizations whenever it benefits its BIG CORP donors while they fight liberalization in areas that would not directly benefit them? The huge difference I see here is that Republicans mostly favor legislation that benefits the upper echelon while Democrats ON AVERAGE have the common man in mind. I am not sure this is even debatable.




Ah right, there is no fraud in food stamp usage. Everyone follows the laws and willingly forks over money for items they can get for free...yep, that's credible...

health care: Medicaid has been in place for the poor. Catastrophic plans for the lower middle class/self-employed, etc, etc...Collusion between the insurance industry and government is not exactly a "democratic" principle, so I fail to see your point here. Believe me, there are plenty of liberals who aren't enamored with ACA....

bursting of the bubble: as I mentioned in my last post, we can trace back the origins of the credit bubble at least to Nixon...it was going to blow up at some point, and yet now we have the roots of an even bigger catastrophe under Bernanke and Yellen...and yes Glass-Steagall was repealed under Clinton...so why continue down this road...

Like I've mentioned a half dozen times, my hatred for leftists is NOT an endorsement of the GOP...

That's the end of it...[/QUOTE]

 

[Tsing Tao]

* Lol, food stamps abused? By whom? I am sure everyone wants to be seen paying with food stamps. You gotta be joking with me.

There is a ton of fraud in the SNAP program (what foodstamps are now called). First, people aren't "seen" paying with foodstamps. It's a debit card, and the transaction looks the same as anyone else paying with a card (which is just about everyone nowadays). There is no stigma at all. Everywhere you see signs now saying "EBT ACCEPTED HERE". It can be used at fast food joints, local convenience stores, etc. There are documented cases where EBT cards have been used at strip joints! There's even a rap video about "It's free, swipe yo' EBT"...Watch the first two minutes of it (below) and tell me that's a program that works well.

Craigslist is notorious for running EBT scams where a person with an EBT card that has $600 on it will sell that $600 to someone who wants to give then cash for $300. 50% is the going rate right now. Then they take that cash and use it for something I'm sure the government didn't intend. If they can sell their EBT card, they obviously didn't need the food.

Lastly, and anecdotally, there is a director level woman in my company. Her parents live with her, and because they report no income, they get an EBT card. She uses it all the time to buy groceries, despite making over $200,000USD a year. When I confronted her at lunch over it, she said "it's their card, they are entitled to it". She didn't even consider it fraud. And she works in shopper insights, which is the department that partners with customers (our customers are grocery chains, walmart, etc) on SNAP!!

You are way off base if you think there is not extensive abuse of the SNAP system.

 

[TooOldForThis]

There is a ton of fraud in the SNAP program (what foodstamps are now called).

My problem with the extent of government support for "poor" people is not in the fraud, but instead in what it means for the inevitable movement of US society towards a nationalist socialist state. My lefty buddies are all in favor of socialism and against nationalism. What they don't realize is that nationalists can be in favor of socialism too. Republicans and Democrats both know that government programs never disappear and decrease only very rarely. The inevitable end point is European style socialism. And then, next time the economy goes into the tank, we get the nationalist socialism of the sort now beginning to bloom in Europe. Those modern European "right wing" parties are not against socialism. No, they want more socialism for themselves and less for outsiders. In a country that is largely homogeneous, the result is xenophobia and anti-minority laws. In a country with higher minority percentages, the political parties into ethnic voting blocks (something that is starting to happen in the US).