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Yes, but it is the perversion of the wording that gets us into trouble. Certainly you cannot be dense enough to believe the founders meant "welfare" as it is being used today?!?
"Welfare" is a very general term, so I can't imagine the founding fathers had a very specific form of welfare in mind when they wrote that. That said, I'll leave it at that if you concede that "arms" didn't mean the same thing back in Colonial times as it does today --- they had muskets, we have AR-15s and Bushmasters.
Will you concede that point?
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and SS would have been around since the beginning.
What about the 13th Amendment? It wasn't around from the beginning. It banned slavery. It seems that the founding fathers didn't intend to illegalize slavery, so I guess we should scrap that one as well.
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We need to honor the debt, but STOP the insanity of SS
I agree; we should stop the insanity caused by unnecessary borrowing from the otherwise perfectly-stable SS trust fund.
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Thank you Mr Keynes, but if the "government spending cures economic hardship" policies worked, then we should be in a roaring economy right now!
It doesn't "cure" economic hardship. It has been shown through history and scientific examination to have a beneficial impact on the economy in times of economic hardship; no one policy can cure economic hardship. It's much more nuanced than that.
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What?
Libertarians want to give money to rich businessmen? wow!
Yes. They call it "tax cuts," and we just got a ton of them made permanent in this latest budget deal. Unless you want to argue that profitable motor speedway owners, for example, are not generally "rich businessmen." Anyway, the philosophy is that they shouldn't pay taxes because "the guvmint dun took mah munneh," but those same people who claim to hate taxation so much are more than happy to use the public services that are paid for by our taxes; they want to have their cake and eat it, too, so to speak --- hence, they want us to "hand them money" (by cutting their taxes but keeping the services which they find to be benificial to them personally [while expecting everyone else to help pay for said services], while cutting the services that benefit everyone else, like SS and Medicare).
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Umm, thats not exactly true either, while there are more middle class families, the middle class ISN'T where the bulk of the money comes from.
True. In a strict numbers game, the top income earners pay more. This is because the top income earners technically pay more money, but they pay a significantly lower percentage of their income overall into taxes (i.e. their tax rate is lower); poorer people make less money, but through the payroll tax and sales tax, they pay a larger percentage of their income into the system (which, numerically, isn't much); 50% of $500 a month is much less than 9% of $500 billion, after all. That is true. And capital gains are taxed very weakly, with many loopholes available to abuse, should the payer wish to avoid paying a percentage of those already-meager rates.
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And the basic problem with you leftie-type's economic policies is that the wages people earn are subject to government seizure, at the whim of the politicians (if it is popular with the voters(half of which don't pay federal taxes)) if they thinkit is a good idea (or it can buy them votes with whatever demographic their after this week). Aren't you doing the same thing "trusting them (politicians in your case) to do the right thing"? Even though historically you've been let down
(1) Yes, the Constitution guarantees that the government has the right to collect taxes, i.e. seize a portion of your wages (Article I, Section II -- "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by..."). We've discussed this already. Whether or not you or I like it makes no difference; it's legal, and there is no Constitutional grounds on which to oppose it.
(2) I can vote for which politicians I like. Unfortunately, I have no such vote in the private policies of a corporation (some might say I do through my purchasing power, but that power is very limited and it only affects those decisions in a very distant and indirect manner); if a company is not being run well, and my tax dollars are being invested into that company through unbalanced tax breaks, there is nothing I can say or do to change the management policies of that company. So I'd say there is a fundamental difference between a government and a corporation; those tax breaks just put one more link in the chain leading from my influence to the final result.
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Yes, at the state level.
Based on what?
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I have never argued that they CAN'T tax, just that they can only tax for what is within their purview, which takes us back to your distorted view on what was meant by "general welfare", and also by interstate commerce.
What, exactly, do you think the authors of the Constitution *specifically* meant by "general welfare?" You seem to be able to somehow divine exactly what was on their minds at the time of its writing; perhaps you can enlighten me?
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I wouldn't vote for it at the state level, but at least it IS in the purview of state government. See? We are a republic.
Yes; a Constitutional Republic, overseen by a central federal government (which is established in the Constitution).
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With what I said there is a back up, the state.
So, your reasoning is basically:
(1) We shouldn't have SS, because it is a ponzi scheme and is terrible (even though it provides a safety net to impoverished seniors and the disabled);
(2) The federal government shouldn't provide this safety net to the citizens because it doesn't have the right (and it's a ponzi scheme);
(3) But we don't need to worry about the safety net at the federal level because SS can be enacted at the state level as a safety net.
I just don't understand that. If you think SS should be disposed of and that it's a "ponzi scheme," why do you say "the state is the safety net," if from within that same view you say that SS should not be enacted at the state level? If that's the case, then no, the government at the state level is not a "backup."
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It is the fraud that is the problem, and it is rampant.
So you admit, then, that it's not a problem with the core program of SS?
As for this fraud, who do you think is committing SS fraud? Could you provide some hard evidence that fraud is occurring in large numbers, backed by something other than your own prejudiced, generalized assessment of people who are subsisting on SS income?
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I am jaded. I personally volunteer my services a lot, the company I work for does as well, and unfortunately, more often then not (read8-9 out of 10), I am going into the homes of those, who are receiving the full spectrum of benefits, and am tripping over the boxes to their new 50'+ LCD TV's, fighting through the piles of stuff that would make Hoarder's proud, while they lie on their ass, texting on their smartphone. Is it all of them, no, but far more than not.
I could provide just as many anecdotes to the contrary. Do you have any scientific evidence?
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but not one they are SUPPOSED to
Based on what?
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Again, I am talking about transfer payments there, Nice job reading "bruh"!
What do you mean by "transfer payments," exactly?
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No, my view is predicated on the fact that I don't believe that it is in the job description of the FEDERAL government to do.
Then, unfortunately, you are incorrect.
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But is also more than a "public option" to save for retirement, it is a personal responsibility.
The other edge of that sword is that, whenever the government provides a service to you, they invasively micromanage the details of your life in order to ascertain that you're cooperating with invasively strict guidelines. If we're going to start micromanaging who can get SS because they've made poor financial decisions in the past, then that opens up a whole new government purview of invasive micromanaging procedures --- if you decide not to pay the mortgage this month, so you have a little extra money for other necessities, maybe the government says, "you have a little extra money this year, so you don't need a tax cut, in fact, let's raise your taxes, since you have more money than we expected you to." I could just as easily argue that it's not the government's job to tell you how to spend your own disposable income.
What people do with their disposable income is not the government's business; these types of programs are not based on such fickle and flippant statistics, but rather on mathematical ratios --- how much you make, versus how much it costs to live and fulfill requirements x and y and z, were you to spend your money on reasonable necessities. I don't think you should have to allow your entire financial existence to be controlled by the government, just because you collect money for a government program that you qualified for based on an established, proven mathematical standard; you can only micromanage so much of a person's life before you start to control them. The purpose of government programs like SNAP and SS are not to control people's finances individually, but to give them help in an area where they need it; whether they put that help to good use or squander it is not up to me or you or the government, and it's unfair (and unrealistic, and unscientific) to judge people who do make use of that help based on the actions of people whom you perceive to be squandering it.
