College Hoops, Disrespection, and More
https://goatpen.net/forums/
That's not what he said. Details, details, details.So basically nobdy blieves that Hack, who shops at a bargan grocery store, sees people using food stamps every time he goes to the grocery store.
Big Orange Junky wrote:So basically nobdy blieves that Hack, who shops at a bargan grocery store, sees people using food stamps every time he goes to the grocery store.
Why is that hard to believe?
It's not hard to believe. It may be hard to swallow, but it's not hard to believe.
Show me a traditional blue blood country club Republican Party (not Tea Party) rally and I'll show you a group with <1% poor people. And any working class people there are probably chauffers.puterbac wrote:That is bullllshitProfessor Tiger wrote:If you were really poor or working class you'd be a democrat.
bluetick wrote:Big Orange Junky wrote:So basically nobdy blieves that Hack, who shops at a bargan grocery store, sees people using food stamps every time he goes to the grocery store.
Why is that hard to believe?
It's not hard to believe. It may be hard to swallow, but it's not hard to believe.
Heh. Wrong diagnosis, BOJ.
Hack made the announcement that nearly everybody at his grocery store was using food stamps..and unlike himself, buying top brands. On it's face it seemed like sort of a callous assessment of the people he lived among and shopped with.
It took AA to flush out the tidy detail that Hack was intentionally by-passing the stores catering to his neighbors.. in favor of the store that caters to people in serious need of thrift. That bit of context would have been useful in the beginning. "I went to the thrift store and it seemed like nearly everybody was using a food stamp card." My own reaction to that would have been "No shit, Clouseau."
Any-aways. We're all on the same page now.
On the other hand, Hack not clarifying or saying someone to the effect of, "It was a bit of hyperbole, Neidermyer" was poor form too.
AlabamAlum wrote:bluetick wrote:Big Orange Junky wrote:So basically nobdy blieves that Hack, who shops at a bargan grocery store, sees people using food stamps every time he goes to the grocery store.
Why is that hard to believe?
It's not hard to believe. It may be hard to swallow, but it's not hard to believe.
Heh. Wrong diagnosis, BOJ.
Hack made the announcement that nearly everybody at his grocery store was using food stamps..and unlike himself, buying top brands. On it's face it seemed like sort of a callous assessment of the people he lived among and shopped with.
It took AA to flush out the tidy detail that Hack was intentionally by-passing the stores catering to his neighbors.. in favor of the store that caters to people in serious need of thrift. That bit of context would have been useful in the beginning. "I went to the thrift store and it seemed like nearly everybody was using a food stamp card." My own reaction to that would have been "No shit, Clouseau."
Any-aways. We're all on the same page now.
I do not want to defend Hack. And he probably asked for some of it being stubborn and protesting everyone's correction, but I would have never called him on his welfare claim. It read like straight hyperbole, like when someone says, "every girl under 30 has a belly-button ring and a tramp stamp" or "All politicians are felons and liars" (well, that last one may be a bad example).
To call him on that bit of hyperbolic rhetoric was poor form. It teetered too close to pedantry, IMO.
On the other hand, Hack not clarifying or saying someone to the effect of, "It was a bit of hyperbole, Neidermyer" was poor form too.
In the end, two poor forms make the endless bludgeoning of a dead equine okay, I suppose.
I've been to one political rally in my life and that was an NRA rally in knoxville with lapierre and Heston talking in 2000Professor Tiger wrote:Show me a traditional blue blood country club Republican Party (not Tea Party) rally and I'll show you a group with <1% poor people. And any working class people there are probably chauffers.puterbac wrote:That is bullllshitProfessor Tiger wrote:If you were really poor or working class you'd be a democrat.
I really wish our children spent some real time being taught basic Civics because they might understand these things. We forget the mistakes we have made in our past and it is no surprise we are in the fiscal nightmare we now find ourselves.Megan wrote:To sketch a brief history of welfare, it emerged in the nineteenth century as "Widows and orphans pensions", which were paid by the state to destitute families whose breadwinner had passed away. They were often not available to blacks; they were never available to unwed mothers. Though public services expanded in the first half of the twentieth century, that mentality was very much the same: public services were about supporting unfortunate families, not unwed mothers. Unwed mothers could not, in most cases, obtain welfare; they were not allowed in public housing (which was supposed to be--and was--a way station for young, struggling families on the way to home ownership, not a permanent abode); they were otherwise discriminated against by social services. The help you could expect from society was a home for wayward girls, in which you would give birth and then put the baby up for adoption.
The description of public housing in the fifties is shocking to anyone who's spent any time in modern public housing. Big item on the agenda at the tenant's meeting: housewives, don't shake your dust cloths out of the windows--other wives don't want your dirt in their apartment! Men, if you wear heavy work boots, please don't walk on the lawns until you can change into lighter shoes, as it damages the grass! (Descriptions taken from the invaluable book, The Inheritance, about the transition of the white working class from Democrat to Republican.) Needless to say, if those same housing projects could today find a majority of tenants who reliably dusted, or worked, they would be thrilled.
Public housing was, in short, a place full of functioning families.
Now, in the late fifties, a debate began over whether to extend benefits to the unmarried. It was unfair to stigmatize unwed mothers. Why shouldn't they be able to avail themselves of the benefits available to other citizens? The brutal societal prejudice against illegitimacy was old fashioned, bigoted, irrational.
But if you give unmarried mothers money, said the critics, you will get more unmarried mothers.
Ridiculous, said the proponents of the change. Being an unmarried mother is a brutal, thankless task. What kind of idiot would have a baby out of wedlock just because the state was willing to give her paltry welfare benefits?
People do all sorts of idiotic things, said the critics. If you pay for something, you usually get more of it.
C'mon said the activists. That's just silly. I just can't imagine anyone deciding to get pregnant out of wedlock simply because there are welfare benefits available.
Oooops.
Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so. Meanwhile, women who wanted to get married essentially found themselves in competition for young men with women who were willing to have sex, and bear children, without forcing the men to take any responsibility. This is a pretty attractive proposition for most young men. So despite the fact that the sixties brought us the biggest advance in birth control ever, illegitimacy exploded. In the early 1960s, a black illegitimacy rate of roughly 25 percent caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a tract warning of a crisis in "the negro family" (a tract for which he was eviscerated by many of those selfsame activists.)
By 1990, that rate was over 70 percent. This, despite the fact that the inner city, where the illegitimacy problem was biggest, only accounts for a fraction of the black population.
But in that inner city, marriage had been destroyed. It had literally ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Possibly one of the most moving moments in Jason de Parle's absolutely wonderful book, American Dream, which follows three welfare mothers through welfare reform, is when he reveals that none of these three women, all in their late thirties, had ever been to a wedding.
I'll bet almost ALL of that 78% of those in poverty with air-conditioning have central air-conditioning in their unit, and not the box window units (owned by the tenant and not the landlord.) Air conditioning is pretty much as standard with new apartments as indoor plumbing. Its cheaper nowadays.puterbac wrote:Shocker...
Modern Poverty Includes A.C. and an Xbox
July 18, 2011 10:39 A.M.
By Ken McIntyre
When Americans think of poverty, we tend to picture people who can’t adequately shelter, clothe, and feed themselves or their families.
When the Census Bureau defines “poverty,” though, it winds up painting more than 40 million Americans — one in seven — as “poor.”
Census officials continue to grossly exaggerate the numbers of the poor, creating a false picture in the public mind of widespread material deprivation, writes Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Robert Rector in a new paper.
“Most news stories on poverty feature homeless families, people living in crumbling shacks, or lines of the downtrodden eating in soup kitchens,” Rector says. “The actual living conditions of America’s poor are far different from these images.”
Congress is tying itself in knots figuring out how to cut spending and bring down a $14 trillion national debt. Lawmakers might well take a much closer look at the nearly a trillion dollars spent each year on welfare even though many recipients aren’t what the typical American would recognize as poor and in need of government assistance.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/27 ... n-mcintyre