mrstickball said:
richardhutnik said:
mrstickball said:
It all depends on who you are and how you look at it.
I've been a landlord over tenants who were on welfare for considerable periods of time. They were always the worst to deal with. Rarely paid on time, but always had beer and cigarettes. Kids would be in tatters, but mom would have decent clothes most of the time.
Like others have said, welfare should begin and end inside the society itself - what it can contribute to help the needy. It sickens me how much money I have to pay out in taxes for Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare-type systems.... Arguably 60-70% of what I am taxed goes towards some sort of redistribution as opposed to services I get.
God knows that if I didn't have to pay out that 60-70% (which amounts to quite a bit of money), I could do a lot more for the needy in my area. |
I will go with the reasoning found in Mike Huckabee's book, "Do the Right Thing" which looks at two towns and asks which one would have lower taxes. One is a high crime inner city where people are hostile, there is drugs and the whole lot. The other is one with better values, and people doing the right thing, and being good neighbors. Mike asks which one would have lower taxes, and I believe lower costs, to live. It utterly sucks that you have that with kids, where the mother uses the kids, and barely takes care of them. All that ends up causing an even large nanny state to pop up, unless either people stop caring how children are treated, or starts to intervene as a community. When they don't, the government grows. What I find folly is that there are people who believe all these problems will just go away if you stop funding government. That is cart before the horse, in my opinion, although the cart can contribute.
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The problem with your analogy is that if the towns are in the same state the taxes are going to generally be similar, because welfare payments generally come from the state. The rich town with little crime, good neighbors, and so on will be paying their taxes to help out the other town with the higher rate of poverty, and more problems. That is what is generally happening with most welfare payments - You take from people and areas that are doing well, and give them to areas that aren't. More often than, not, the bad areas do not improve. You see this with the wealthier blue states and the poorer red states in the US - New Yorkers are paying federal taxes to pay for the poor person in Mississippi and so on.
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