patrick.net

futuresmc says

Globalization is a race to the bottom by its very nature. Near slave labor, prison labor, and sweatshops are global reality. If America sunk to global standards in terms of defining poverty, that would require casting millions of Americans into direct competition with these abominations.

This look slave labor to you? You should understand they are willfully competing against us, while you pathetically thinking its slave labor. Your being naive...

thomaswong.1986 says

futuresmc says

Globalization is a race to the bottom by its very nature. Near slave labor, prison labor, and sweatshops are global reality. If America sunk to global standards in terms of defining poverty, that would require casting millions of Americans into direct competition with these abominations.

This look slave labor to you? You should understand they are willfully competing against us, while you pathetically thinking its slave labor. Your being naive...

The workers in these photos are engaged in work that requires a higher skill set than what we've been discussing. This is not the garment worker or fast food server. An intelligent, well educated, very lucky few do the jobs you have pictured here and are paid a living wage or more for it. My quoted comment was geared towards the workers at the lower-skilled end of the spectrum and whether or not their labor can pay enough to feed, clothe, house, and keep them in the kind of health they need to continue working. In America, the answer would be no, despite full time, physically demanding employment.

curious2 says

People who travel to Mexico are amazed to find that the total retail price for whatever they need is less than their insurance co-payment. You blame the people who complain about having to pay the overinflated price, but you should be blaming the lobbyists who use our government as their tool to maximize revenues. The purported beneficiaries are not the real beneficiaries, they are props to jerk your sympathy, in fact they are hostages whose desperation ensures they continue to vote for their captors. The real beneficiaries are lobbyists and politicians and their patronage networks, including the political nepotism that uses your money to buy your votes and robs you blind and gets you blaming the wrong villain.

Oh, I agree that rent seeking is a MAJOR problem, but when people like you argue for America to adopt a global standard to our funding of anti-poverty programs, it never works out well. All starve the beast ever accomplishes is a lower standard of living for the people who use those programs, even when they work long hours and do the right thing. We can agree on fighting rent seeking towards the goal of bringing down prices for the working poor so that their labor alone can sustain them and their kids, but if you also vote to cut government spending on the poor, you won't be chastening the rent seekers as you hoped. Look at food stamp cuts and the reduction in section 8 vouchers. All those things did was leave workers working at multiple low wage jobs and living in cars, unable to feed their kids 3 squares. Big agra lost nothing and rents continued to climb undisturbed. Attacking rent seeking requires politically bloody, direct confrontation. Anything else and the rentiers game the system. So join with me to fight big pharma and big agra and oversubsidized real estate developers, but leave the poor out of it.

futuresmc says

America to adopt a global standard to our funding of anti-poverty programs, it never works out well.

It should get lazy people off of "disability" and doing jobs that Mexicans currently do, and that should be very good for the US. Why do you hate American workers?

This is why the USA is so great! Pay folks who do nothing with money we do not have. Winning!

Who do you vote for, if you agree the goal should be to fight back against rent seeking??

Surely not democrats who confuse monopolistic rent seeking, with capitalism

Lolololololol

Blurtman says

This is why the USA is so great! Pay folks who do nothing with money we do not have. Winning!

In 2015, we'll spend $20 BILLION dollars to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

That's about 2 million a head.

My niece was on disability for 2 months recently due to a VERY SEROUS health condition that could have ended her life. The meager disability payments she got helped out but were in no way a replacement for her salary. She is back at work now.

Frankly I'm glad my niece had a little bit of help and she wasn't sitting around for fun.

I have NO idea what those soldiers do in Afghanistan right now except hunker down in compounds and race down the road in convoys hoping they don't hit an IED. If you can point to some lists of important military objectives achieved recently by our troops over there that would be great.

I know several people on disability. They're not really disabled.

One came to Santa Cruz as a young rebel and got involved with the Mexican drug gangs while she became an addict. She is now "bipolar" and gets disability. However, she never had the manic episode and detatchment from reality that bipolar people have that actually need meds to control episodes.

Another I know graduated UCSC late, she did the normal fun things and bullshit jobs in town then decided to get a degree. She worked for a while but would fight with her boss, etc. She also flipped out briefly when her boyfriend dumped her. She's a pain in the butt sometimes but she gets total disability. She lives in a great building in Capitola, has free fast wifi, owns iPhone, a car, a roku, two flat screen TVs.

Another one I know claimed to have "lyme disease" although it's almost impossible to prove by tests. He just happened to be selling mortgages around 2007 and by odd coincidence when his work situation went to hell he said he was incredibly tired. Now that he's got disability he goes to the gym and posts on facebook pics of him flexing. Of course he's not gonna give up his disability lifetime annuity payments.

To receive disability payments you should be 1. blind 2. crippled 3. have IQ under 90

zzyzzx says

It should get lazy people off of "disability" and doing jobs that Mexicans currently do, and that should be very good for the US. Why do you hate American workers?

Americans would be happy to do those jobs for a living wage and adequate worker safety laws. Unfortunately, American employers don't want to be forced by a limited labor market to offer either, so they hire illegal foreign workers and lobby for visas to bring in guest workers legally. If our government would adopt an American worker friendly attitude, we could significantly cut our anti-poverty programs by strictly limiting the foreign competition within our own borders and giving our workers bargaining power to attain the wages that would feed their families without government assistance. Unfortunately, all you want to do is cut spending on anti-poverty programs while at the same time allow totally unfettered labor arbitrage. That is a recipe for destitution of the majority of Americans, no matter how hard they work, and that is morally indefensible.

"My niece was on disability for 2 months recently due to a VERY SEROUS health condition that could have ended her life. The meager disability payments she got helped out but were in no way a replacement for her salary. She is back at work now."

That's great that she received some help, but it is unlikely that the record number of Americans on disability is due to a sudden increase in illness and injury.

Blurtman says

"My niece was on disability for 2 months recently due to a VERY SEROUS health condition that could have ended her life. The meager disability payments she got helped out but were in no way a replacement for her salary. She is back at work now."

That's great that she received some help, but it is unlikely that the record number of Americans on disability is due to a sudden increase in illness and injury.

Exactly, that is the scenario for which welfare programs exist-not have people using it for generations.

lostand confused says

Exactly, that is the scenario for which welfare programs exist-not have people using it for generations.

If you know of some trick to pass down disability status have at it.

Frankly nobody in this thread has proved that disablity is some epidemic of Welfare Queendom.

Maybe more people are on disability now because more people are sick and need it. How do we separate "real" illness from fakers?

I see all the time not-poor fliers trying to take what seems a 3 year old onto the plane as a "lap child". Because they can get away with it? And yet I don't assume every child I see being carried onto a plane has lying thieving parents. Maybe they are big for their age.

Cerebral palsy, is that a character flaw? Perhaps we should kick some crutches out and see. Sometimes people over-magnify the abuse cases they do see, because you don't really see the many people who are severely disabled and need it.

Vicente says

Maybe more people are on disability now because more people are sick and need
it. How do we separate "real" illness from fakers?

If we used stalinist era enhanced interrogation investigative technique, I am sure that we could "sift" the real from the fake....

futuresmc says

people like you argue for America to adopt a global standard to our funding of anti-poverty programs....

Ugh - if you actually paid attention to HeritageFoundationCare (which includes everyone) and how many of those poor kids you pretend to feel sorry for are hooked on toxic pills that cause lifetime side effects by the teenage years, you might reconsider whom you think you're arguing for and against. In Mexico for example, healthcare for poor children is often better than here; Mexican kids get more vaccines and fewer pills, and at lower cost. And here's a hint: instead of re-framing other people's arguments in a false frame of your own invention, you might consider limiting your presentation of their views to what they actually said. It might lack the creativity of your false framing approach, and of course strawmen of your own fabrication are usually easier to argue against, but integrity does come at a price.