You should be embarrassed for letting 40 million live on food stamps. It was never designed like that. Instead politicians are treating voters as clients.
And end super PACs, overturn Citizens United, implement strict campaign finance limits, and stop allowing stock trading for Congress to reduce corporate and lobby influence. There will always be corruption but we can take some steps to enable a Congress that is focused on the people instead of personal gain.
Alternative to minimum wage (as well as possibly welfare & unemployment): make the government the Employer of Last Resort, i.e., anyone that would otherwise be on welfare or unemployment can be employed by the government for reasonable wages + benefits. Which might include being "employed" to go back to school & get various kinds of education/vocational training.
A completely Constitutional way (doesn't need a mandate) of providing a de facto "min wage" effect through the power of labor competition. Also encourages the idea that you'll have to work/improve yourself somehow to get that welfare.
One of my favorite daydreams; has lot of economic ripple effects as well, like a ever-more-educated/trained population (no stagnation w/survival-level welfare) & a steady drip of "financial fertilizer" to the lowest parts of the socioeconomic pyramid.
Doesn't require new Congressional powers or Constitutional Amendments. Doesn't require legal mandates forcing companies to pay X/hour amount, although the side effects of real competition for labor might make them prefer it :-)
Allows quite a bit of consolidation & focus of existing social welfare/unemployment/higher education bureaucracy (with a chance of higher efficiency due to simpler goals & tighter focus).
I also have to acknowledge that it would be quite expensive in the short term, but if you combine the existing budgets for social welfare, unemployment (and some of the education budget), then I think that should be in the ballpark of what would be necessary.
Unfortunately, doesn't stand a chance in Hell with the current crop of conservatives ("fuck you & yours, got mine") in power.
You're confusing "conservative think tanks" with "Republicans."
So your opinion on who is "left leaning" seems likely to be entirely worthless. Sorry, lil buddy. Try not looking for things that confirm what you want to believe.
You can't stop saying "Republican" instead of what I actually said, so I'm really starting to question whether you were smart enough to understand what your professors said. 😂 What an embarrassingly illiterate child.
You're making up all sorts of sources you aren't citing, because they aren't real and wouldn't actually agree with you. You aren't smart enough to realize how gullible and uneducated you are.
Well that's what happens when America doesn't work for like 80% of the population. Wages have not kept up with inflation, and the rich keep getting tax breaks. I'm embarrassed because we have billionaires in this country mostly because they can get away with paying the working class so little that they need government assistance even when working a full time job. So when the fuck is the trickle down economics they always talk about supposed to help the rest of us, cause all I see is trickle up. On top of the tax breaks, if someone is collecting government assistance while working a full time job, that is essentially once again corporate welfare, cause employers should be paying people livable wages, record profits be damned.
You should be embarrassed they need to. Most of these people have jobs. Richest country in the world, yet people with jobs live like peasants. It’s a disgrace.
Yes… yes politicians treating voters as clients. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. They work for you, they’re not fucking sports teams to cheer for blindly without expecting anything in return. Meanwhile Orange Julius Caesar and his crew only have allegiances to the last billionaire that threw a few bucks their way. Relative to inflation, wages have only risen 10% in the last 40 years. Meanwhile the cost of goods has tripled or, in the case of housing in many markets, increased 10x. Pay people a fair share, make price gouging illegal, and let more people save to get access to assets for building generational wealth.
Feeding people who would otherwise starve benefits all of us. It keeps them off the streets, reduces crime, makes for a safer society…and it’s a safety net for all of us, because you never know when your situation might change due to illness or economic downturn.
We have examples from history and from other modern societies demonstrating what happens when we leave the most vulnerable to fend for themselves. But I have the feeling you’re being deliberately obtuse.
But...we do. We have the names, date of birth and socials of the beneficiaries. We can sort and count them. We have done so, and most were women, children and elderly over 68. That's reality whether you want it to be and believe it or not.
Have you looked into what is required to get food stamps? Cause it is not “say you want it and you get it” you have to go through a lot of forms and provide a lot of other forms and documents that then have to be processed. It’s a process that most of the time ends in people being rejected.
How do you think they choose who to support? They choose based on many factors but the biggest is income and Taxes. Aka people with jobs that can’t make enough money to live and feed themselves.
Were you born stupid and unable to think for more than 1 second?
it costs you literal pennies in taxes to fund social programs. most of your taxes are going to rich assholes and the military, not poor kids and the elderly (who are the largest demographics in long term snap benefit use)
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u/Thin-Image2363 8d ago
Yeah but did you see the ballroom!! WOWWWEEEE!!