| scat398 said: @richardhutnik. I understand your points, despite the uneeded exagerations and I am also familiar with the current public assistance system (not in New York mind you, but in California, although they are similar). Just to get this out of the way right now, if you think for one minute that the requirements by the state to receive benefits are anything but a bunch of rubberstamping and one big giant circle jerk we are not going to find common ground. Our current system is designed to have you jump through just the right number of hoops to keep uncle sam sending you a check and nothing more, it's a lesson in CYA to the ultimate extreme. But my point was that these individuals are not stupid, they know what they are doing and are making a concious choice to not work for minimum wage or slighlty better because they can and do receive more from the goverenment to stay home. We can talk all day long about the lady with five kids that can't work because she can't afford daycare but the truth is she shouldn't have five kids, she shouldn't have any kids, but you can't say that can you? The truth is people need to go back to work at reduced wages. These wages overtime will reduce prices and will lower the burden on the federal government. But you have to decide if that is what you really want. We both know the circe gets smaller as the number of unemployed increases. More people on federal assistance, less taxes come in, less demand for goods, more unemployed, more people on federal assistance...raise taxes...and so on, we both know it doesn't end well. |
And I am familiar first hand with the current welfare system and see that it is broken. It is a system designed to placate collective guilt and try to prevent mass riots from people doing without. The system will place demands on people, and unless you have kids or a disability, you get kicked off welfare after a few years. This is the current system that is in place. The system will then shuffle someone into any sort of work they remotely can do, and pay for the rest. There were reforms done during the Clinton administration that did things. Also, the public assistance in NY is only a few hundred dollars a month, excluding food stamps and medicaid. It isn't a lot. It is barely enough to survive at this point.
As far as "people need to get back to work", that is nice, so long as there are jobs. When, for example, McDonald's does National Hiring Day, and over 1 million apply and they only hire 60,000, the thing is broken. Out of this then is, as some have argued, if you just make things harsh enough, people will get motivated to go and find work. Just make it brutal enough. Is that the answer? I gave a very harsh way above, an extreme. Do you thing a situation like this will lead to zero percent unemployment? Death is a pretty harsh motivator.
