believer258 said:
People who assume.
You should know one thing: I have been poor for most of my life. Only in the past few months has any real luck come up, like my father finally landing a job after a few years of unemployment, and me landing my first 40-hr/wk job at my colleges' IT Help Desk.
You should have also read the rest of my post a little more closely. I support the idea of welfare and helping the poor get on their feet as best they can. What I don't support is when perfectly decent people don't even try to go out and get a decent job. They expect every damn thing to be handed to them hand and foot by the government and taxpayers...
Speaking of
people who assume, who decides who is
perfectly decent people who should be cut off from benefits and told to just get a job[footnote]Wow, that phrase looks like such a dichotomy.[/footnote] in contrast to those
suffering from genuine hardship that is properly worthy of welfare assistance? Do we hire jurists to make this distinction in every case? Do we create a magic worthiness detector?[footnote]What is with me and magic detectors, recently. I guess it's an easy assumption for folks to make that such things as guilt, worth and malintent are obvious to the naked human eye, or can be detected and gauged by some clever metric.[/footnote]
For now, we rely on
the applicants themselves to be smart and persistent enough to wind their way through a complex maze of processes,[footnote]I suspect it is intentionally left complex to govern the rate of applicants. This part of the process certainly leaves plenty of confused, frustrated folks out in the cold.[/footnote] and the
judgement of an untrained bureaucrat,[footnote]By
untrained, I mean, not a social worker, nor someone who is necessarily chosen for the task thanks to a recognized talent for assessing people.[/footnote] who often determines by first impression whether an applicant gets stamped through, or requires more auditing. So where, I ask, is the point in which a great wisdom accurately assesses whether or not a given someone needs another month's survival pay (here in California, benefits are really pathetic, and will still leave one homeless), or a boot to the pants?
I find it simultaneously fascinating and grotesque that people can even question this sort of thing in our current economy, in which we still have a
measured 10% unemployment rate[footnote]That is to say, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits (as opposed to welfare benefits) in comparison to our total national workforce in the US. This figure does not include those who can work, who want to work but are
not collecting benefits, including those whose benefits ran out, those who got fired, those who don't apply out of principle (or because they simply don't know to do so), those whose self-employment enterprises have failed (and are not eligible) and those who fell through the cracks thanks to the system's poor ability to process intermittant contract work.[/footnote] Economist estimations put the actual national unemployment up there around 20%-25% of the workforce. So do you
really want those in our welfare system, many of whom are on psych leave, back in the already-impacted workforce?
Incidentally, I hear the military is hiring. Rough entry program, and they don't pay well.
You know who else is hiring,
does pay well, and is, by far, safer than participation in our War on Terror [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror]?[footnote]Seriously. While I cannot speak for American deaths in the campaign, the wounded are grossly underreported. Most casualties removed from action suffer from
Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI for which treatments remain scant and ineffective. These guys are a special kind of retarded, which is to say, as smart as they were, but with conspicuous holes, like suddenly not being able to understand heard words (though they can still read) or not being able to recognize faces, or not remembering how to operate anything more complicated than a can-opener. Almost
completely unreported are the countless suicides, which are not counted as KIAs or even deaths, since they usually happen after discharge, or during an extended leave back in the states. Those who are particularly unlucky will wax their family and friends first.[/footnote] Organized crime.
238U.
EDIT: Posted prematurely without proofing. Sorry, all.
PS: Regarding magical detectors, in one case, I stand corrected. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malintent]
/rage
