lowing wrote:
Skorpy-chan wrote:
I disagree with that. I know someone who ended up working as a sign-holder, and he would have been perfectly willing to clear your garden up, as long as the offered money was fair.
Try stating your arguments in an unemployment office. The medical bills from the subsequent beating should serve as a stupid tax.
If that were the case, then he would have stood on the corner where day labor workers are offered work, instead of alone holding a sign.
Unemployment is different. It is money you pay as insurance in case you are laid off. You have every right to that money. That is not welfare.
Do you know how the day labourers are hired? They work for a gang-boss, who makes sure only his workers get picked up. Americans cannot get those jobs, they will be left standing on the corner and later beaten in an alleyway.
Do you have ANY idea how the damn world works?
-CARNIFEX-[LOC] wrote:
Macbeth wrote:
Can anyone think of any solutions to this or will things just work themselves out? Should Gov intervene or let the free market solve things on it's own?
The U.S. has a
proposed defense budget of $663.8 billion for fiscal 2010...
Although I agree that a lot of people in need are there due to their own ineptitude, there are certainly people who had a run of shitty luck and deserve whatever help they can get.
You could cut our "defense" (defensive as in, "Sometimes the best defense is a good offense...." kind of way) budget by literally $300 billion and it would still dwarf the next top 5 countries budgets, combined.
I'm all for a strong military, but you could fix a lot of fucking problems, in theory, with all of that cash.
Too bad it would probably just go to needless pork in some other guise if it wasn't spent for the military.
But then what would you do about the people rendered unemployed and possibly homeless by the defense spending cuts? It's not an automated fucking factory.
Hell, the BRITISH government's first response was to slash defense spending. By cancelling orders for armoured vehicles, that the troops needed.
I was working in the defense industry at the time, making parts for those vehicles. What happened? I was laid off. Then the company went bust. I had to apply to the liquidation agency to get the money for the holiday time I'd been saving up. That was over a year ago, and I've been unemployed since, costing the government more in benefits and civil servants' time than the nearly £3000 I'd paid in income tax tax, national insurance, VAT on luxuries, and so forth. The company employed 30 or so people, and it was only a subcontractor for larger firms.
On top of that, troops have DIED out there, and could have been saved by the stuff I was making parts FOR.
You can't just go slashing budgets. People's jobs rely on them. You cut healthcare, you fire doctors. Cut education, fire teachers. Cut defense, and you fire skilled labourers and machine operators, and risk killing the people out there fighting.
It seems to me that the american system needs a few changes, not uprooting and changing entirely.