Obama Bucks

[Melchiah]

If I gave a fraction of a shit of what you thought, I might have laughed.

You call a man out for copious amounts of bullshit, citing a directly proportionate amount of intelligence in his argument. So the amount of intelligence is equal to the amount of bullshit?

It's very funny when small minds try to use big words, and I did laugh.

[0ni0n]

I should have phrased it better, people dieing or looking like the children in the adopt a child pictures from Africa. I don't recall that ever happening here.

I think you're setting the bar unreasonably low.

[Charla]

There's more than one way to starve, and not all of them turn someone into a walking skeleton first. More importantly, malnutrition can have consequences other than starvation, although some of those are harder to prove and less psychologically powerful from the perspective of everyone else. In a way, it's part of the whole "life is the most important thing in the world, therefore death is the worst thing in the world" mentality, but that's really another issue.

[Kuya]

Why is the issue always whether poor people get help from the government or not? I believe i've said this before, but most government money is spent on defense and veteran care, and most of the rest goes to the elderly. The poor getting some welfare money is the least important factor in government spending yet it seems to form the main point of contention for Republicans (well, they say smaller government, HAHAHA), or the main point of defense for the Dems, even though they could always just mention how we spend triple digit billions on policing the world, that is, if the Dems aren't in on it too.

[Charla]

The category I always see called largest is "entitlement spending", which apparently includes social security thanks to a bookkeeping loophole. As for the actual question, I think the theory is something along the lines of "if we keep giving people handouts it enables their lazyness. The only lasting solution is to encourage job creation and economic growth, so that everyone in this country can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. After all, if my parents can make half a million dollars by working themselves half to death for 50 years straight, anyone can!" That last line applies both to my life and to the theoretical Conservative I imagine saying the rest of the line. We both inherited our place in the middle class, and society treats us as if we deserve it. As such, I do my best not to forget that my personality and talents probably wouldn't be suited to pulling my bootstraps anywhere.

Now, in a certain way, this line of reasoning is attractive because it presupposes that (to modify something famous) all people are created equal and inherently endowed with certain inalienable things, among which are presumably free will and the physical and mental capacities necessary to improve oneself and one's condition. Were either of these verifiably true, it would indeed be quite convenient.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

I think it just boils down to caring about equality of opportunity (Repubs) vs equality of outcome (Dems). And is it possible that someone can't afford health insurance but doesn't qualify for medicare?

[fantasticdan]

I think it just boils down to caring about equality of opportunity (Repubs) vs equality of outcome (Dems). And is it possible that someone can't afford health insurance but doesn't qualify for medicare?

I don't understand how people like you can be so into politics, yet be so fucking clueless on actual issues. First off, medicare is for seniors, you are thinking of medicaid. And yes, there are tons of people that don't qualify for medicaid, but cannot afford to pay for health insurance on their own, or get it through their job, a very good portion of the middle class. And even if you qualify, medicaid sucks. It does not cover everything, and does not pay the full bill for things it does cover.

[Kuya]

I think it just boils down to caring about equality of opportunity (Repubs) vs equality of outcome (Dems). And is it possible that someone can't afford health insurance but doesn't qualify for medicare?

Let's ignore the Republicans, because we know they say one thing and do another, and ignore the Dems because they are at best centrists. Liberals support equal opportunity, not equality of outcome; i don't even know where you pulled that out from.

[ZarakiKujata]

I think it just boils down to caring about equality of opportunity (Repubs) vs equality of outcome (Dems). And is it possible that someone can't afford health insurance but doesn't qualify for medicare?

I'd argue about the equality of opportunity being republican as the party that doesn't support affirmative action or equal pay for equal work hardly seems like it supports equal opportunity for poor people and women. I wouldn't say the Democrats are 100% equality of opportunity either but the republicans are categorically not caring about that. I think the Republicans are currently the equality of outcome atm, since due to their policies we are all about to be equally poor waiting in the soup lines.

And it's very possible that someone falls through the cracks healthcarewise, and watching my cousin and aunt and 2 of my grandparents on medicaid/medicare struggling to get approval for the drugs and procedures they need is fucking sad. They spend more time fucking haggling with the medicaid/medicare people then visiting the doctor, but I guess its better than what would happen if they had nothing like compassionate conservatives want.

[kuronosan]

You call a man out for copious amounts of bullshit, citing a directly proportionate amount of intelligence in his argument. So the amount of intelligence is equal to the amount of bullshit?

It's very funny when small minds try to use big words, and I did laugh.

I think it's even more funny when you assume that because a person has a larger vocabulary than most people do that they must have a small over-compensating mind.

To be intellectual is not to be pseudo-intellectual, you know. You may be versed in politics and economics but that doesn't make you smart. It just makes you educated.

Second of all, if you read correctly you would have seen that I compared the level of intelligence to his use of logic. I see nothing wrong with that statement. As a matter of fact, it makes perfect sense unless you're an elitist piece of shit asshole with a degree who thinks that people without one can't use big words they may have learned in grade school.

Go regurgitate your shit somewhere else. I don't need or care for your respect, and I'm sure Beckwin doesn't either.

It was a serious post, I totally agree. How you morons missed the sarcasm is beyond me. Go get a massage.

Oh ho... I see what you did there. The classic "I was just being sarcastic" retort. Yea, well so was I. Totally sarcastic. How you could have missed that I'll never know. You and Milkies over there. I have no idea how two simpletons such as yourselves missed it. Guess I should just stop trying to be so smarty-pants all the time... then I'd be better at it. Like you.

[Correction]

We need a word for when arguments fall into the Endless Pit of Shitty Semantic Arguments, kind of like the word we have for when someone mentions Hitler.

[Kuya]

To bring things further into perspective, and to perhaps silence that whole "I don't want to give my money to lazy people!":

BILL MOYERS: Included in the large Latino community we just talked about are millions of people who work very hard for a living at very low wages. And they, in turn, are part of an even larger population that economists call "economically distressed." Translation: barely making a living, barely able to pay for the basic necessities of life, housing, food, medical care, transportation. There are almost 23 million households like that in America, 60 million individuals including 18 million children. They've gone virtually unmentioned in this campaign. Obama and McCain both talk about the middle class. These people are the forgotten class. And my next guest says it's time to bring them into the national conversation.

MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, these are people we see every day, we rely on every day. They're cashiers and truck drivers and home healthcare workers. These are people who are janitors. They're just ordinary people who, maybe they're poor but they're not necessarily poor.

What we did is we said let's take a look at the lives of people who really need help and how can we define who they are? How can we understand who these people are? So we started with housing. And we said according to the U.S. government you're not supposed to spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing. Now, I know people said, "Well, that's just nuts. Who can do that?" But that is, in fact, the government standard.

So what we did is we said, we'll take that government standard, which has been around for years, and say let's look at people whose incomes do not allow them to get above the bottom of the housing market without spending more than 30 percent of their income. And that's the numbers that you were just talking about.

BILL MOYERS: Why aren't we hearing about these people in this campaign?

MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, you know, I think it's hard for the country to get past the language of the middle class. Every politician wants to talk about the middle class. But when you actually hear who they're talking about, they're talking about the bus driver. They're talking about the waitress in the cafeteria where they were eating. They're talking about people who are the janitors, who are picking up the trash out of the wastebaskets in the evening.

Those aren't middle-class people. That's the working class in this country. Most people in this country are working-class people. The work that I've done, it's about 62 percent of the labor force in the United States are just ordinary working people.

BILL MOYERS: But Obama and McCain keep talking about the middle class, the middle class. Are you saying that middle class is already disappearing?

MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, I'm saying that the middle class is there as professional people, as small business owners, as managers. When we talk often about the disappearing middle class, we're talking about good jobs that are disappearing. But those are working class jobs. It isn't that the working class people are disappearing. The conditions of life of working class people are being pushed down. And that's been going on for 35 years.

The other $110 billion of this stimulus package is checks. Another round of checks. But instead of just sending the checks that was done earlier this year to basically everybody in the country, why don't we just focus that money on the people who really need it? And let's send it to the bottom half of the income distribution. Fifty-five million families in the United States and households-

BILL MOYERS: How many?

MICHAEL ZWEIG: Fifty-five million households.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

MICHAEL ZWEIG: That's half. And they make $50,000 a year or less. That's who we're talking about. Send that money out. And we would stimulate the economy. You would have time to get infrastructure projects going, which take a year or two to get going. And when those infrastructure projects are in place, some of these other transfers can be backed off.

Almost all of these economically distressed workers actually do have jobs and they work full time all year round. And they just don't make enough money. And they don't have healthcare. And they don't have good enough education for their kids. One of the things that we found in these conversations that was so interesting and so moving was the hope for the future that these workers had for their children.

So what we talked about was the need to go beyond just the immediate fix, as difficult as that is, to look at some of the more structural issues like universal healthcare programs, like having workers be able to be in unions. So in the United States today polls show that something on the order of 55 or 60 percent of workers want to be in a union if you ask them, "Do you wanna be in a union?" But only 12 percent are, right? Well, that's management resistance. And that's why something like the Employee Free Choice Act, for example, which is there to help workers more easily organize unions in the face of management opposition and more easily get to an actual contract, that's a very important structural reform.

[fantasticdan]

Other than health insurance, I don't want to give my money to the "working class" either.

[Kuya]

It's a good thing that you choose where your money is going to be used in taxes.

[Dimmauk]

If we weren't always running around playing G.I. Joe, we would have free Health care and Free University already.

I heard someone say yesterday, "You know America is still #1, when our economy sunk, the rest of the world's economies followed"

[Kuya]

As for the claims that we need to cut different kinds of taxes for those of higher income to create more jobs:

We set out to design an economic stimulus package that would provide direct relief to distressed workers while bringing the economy towards full employment. But we found that, as important as job creation is, most distressed workers have jobs – just not good ones. So in addition to short-term stimulus we propose longer-term structural reforms that provide universal health care and make it much easier for workers to organize unions.

For the past 35 years we have lived through one of the greatest redistributions of wealth away from working people to the corporate elite that this country has ever seen. Worker productivity has gone up while wages adjusted for inflation have gone down. That’s what class warfare looks like, and the working class has been on the losing side for almost two generations.

When we criticize the increasing inequality around us and call for economic justice, others denounce such talk as “class warfare.” But the complaint is itself part of the war, designed to change the subject. A market economy can produce great wealth, but what’s the point if the working people who create it don’t live better for it?

Hence working class, which forms an estimated 61 percent of the population in the US in labour.

[hexagram23]

I should have phrased it better, people dieing or looking like the children in the adopt a child pictures from Africa. I don't recall that ever happening here.

I normally don't comment on these types of things, but you're a fucking idiot.

"Well, there isn't a hunger problem in the US, because I don't see people looking like Adopt-A-Child ads" is like saying "well, there isn't a problem with violence in America because the US doesn't look like Iraq". In other words you're saying "if things aren't the absolute worse they can possibly be, then it obviously isn't so bad".

Which is dumb as fuck.

[Dimmauk]

I should have phrased it better, people dieing or looking like the children in the adopt a child pictures from Africa. I don't recall that ever happening here.

You do know Native Americans were purposely starved to death? Remember how American Buffalo almost became extinct? Pox Blankets anyone?

[Charla]

I think it just boils down to caring about equality of opportunity (Repubs) vs equality of outcome (Dems). And is it possible that someone can't afford health insurance but doesn't qualify for medicare?

Equality of opportunity is all well and good, but I honestly believe it's impossible. Just look at my last post. I inherited the condition in which I lived for the first 20 years of my life (give or take). If I had inherited a better one I wouldn't have to work at all, and unless being born rich had given me a different personality (which is also quite possible) I know that I wouldn't want to. Even without bringing poverty into the argument at all, I believe that this demonstrates the inequality of opportunity inherent in a mammalian reproduction paradigm. Parents give their offspring things. Parents with better things give their offspring better things. The theoretical rich me would have a very different opportunity than the actual middle-class me, and that makes me a living violation of the "equality of opportunity" theory.

Now, there are some theoretical civilization paradigms that could actually lead to equality of opportunity. Using Ghost in the Shell rules or the Way rules, we could imagine a society that transcends physical bodies, in which individuals exist as disembodied electronic brains or energy-based beings with communal consciousness (it's been a while since I read Eternity, but I think I remember that much at least). And that might be worked into true equality of opportunity (although it might also eliminate the need for reproduction at the same time). On this side of a technological singularity, however, it would appear that we're stuck with systemic inequality, and our objective should be to reduce the incidence and severity of the sociological problems that tend to result from inequality. This of course brings us right back where we started, because techniques that equalize opportunity and techniques that equalize outcomes can both be used to this end, and neither is inherently better than the other, leaving aside theoretical ideas of overhauling the underlying tenets such as inheritance, physical bodies and individual consciousness.

[hexagram23]

As far as the Obama Bucks....that shit is ridiculous. Not because it's super offensive, just because somebody out there on the Republican side thought this would be a good idea. This is almost the equivalent of somebody who claims to support Obama making McCain Bucks depicting him getting tortured. How is this helping your cause?

Lastly, I dunno how anybody can think Obama Bucks are funny. Not because it's racist or offensive....there's just nothing clever about regurgitating stereotypes or jokes that were around before you were born.

We know the stereotypes....black people love chicken and watermelon. We've heard it a billion times, saying "omg Obama is black, I bet he totally likes chicken and watermelon!" isn't funny. It's too obvious....it's like telling a joke everyone knows the punchline to, and the joke is about 100 years old. Maybe people think it's funny because they don't like black people, I dunno. To me it's just really corny.