Should We Take Care of the Poor?

Do we have an ethical or moral obligation to take care of our people? Should that be left to the will of charity? To be specific, I am not talking about safety net programs like unemployment. I specifically mean money given to poor people for the express purpose of giving them a standard of living above extreme poverty. These are things like food stamps, school lunches, TANF, and stuff like that.

It seems to me that you could cure a lot of the "racial tension" if you simply cut off the money that went to them. It might not, but that's certainly the logic that is used to justify racism right now. If every American knew that their money was not being redistributed, then would we have racial conflicts?

Follow up question, if we removed social security and medicaid, two of the biggest wealth distribution vehicles in history, would we have problems with each other? Maybe we could annex places like the Philippians and Puerto Rico?

So should we actually take care of the poor? After all, if you take money from one group and don't produce a benefit for the people who you took money from, that's always going to cause strife, right? Then again, if history is any indicator, people were much more racist back before we had all of this wealth distribution.

 

You seem to be insinuating that all poor are black and because they are black people want to end government welfare.

Sorry I don't agree with the premise of your post.

 

OP, dunno. No law demanding it, it is up to the people.

I carry round some extra water bottles in my car to hand out. Cost about .09 per bottle. I also carry round some little crackers that cost .20 a pack and hand out a few when I visit NYC or Vegas. I don't have much to hand out, but try to give out a little something.

 

There were more welfare and food stamp recipients under Obama than ever before. Did these programs do any good? No, they just made more people more dependent. Every person needs to feel that they can take care of themselves. It instills a sense of pride and a feeling of success. Education is the key. Why don't Democrats want to improve education especially in poor neighborhoods?

“You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”

 

If you claim to be a Christian, you'd better! It's one of the more obvious statements in the Bible. (Not saying you are one, OP. Just stating a fact.)


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Keeping the poor in ghettos, providing them with token handouts, bleating about them non-stop during election campaigns, bussing them to polling stations, wahsing the hands, rinsing and repeating seems to be the lib/prog idea of taking care of the poor.

Lest we forget shipping the jobs the poor could do to China and letting millions of illegals in to take whatever jobs are left.

 

"The Poor" is a pretty big pool filled with a lot of different problems.

Are they poor because they're mentally ill, drug users, psychopaths, career criminals, low intelligence, lazy, destitute due to medical bills/emergencies/natural disasters, irresponsible/make bad choices....

Poverty doesn't have just one root cause, and is certainly not based on skin color as you seem to equate poverty to racial reasons.

 

Why not give them all good paying jobs instead, giving them a means to live with some kind of dignity?

 

lol such a cute and simple solution.

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Skin color presently affects average income.

 

How incredibly disheartening it is that this topic, even couched as it is, even has to be discussed.

We have plenty.

Why not allow everyone to have sufficient?

What do we get by denying some enough?

 

Guess who already thought of that, ran on it, and was elected for it?

 

We are the richest nation to ever exist on earth. We don't need to have any poor, we choose to.

 

No I'm sorry, when you have black mayors, judges, police chiefs and presidents then your skin color is not determining anything, your level of effort is.

 

Simple answer "YES"

Realistic answer "NO"

If feeding the countries poor is going to place my family in the same situation then count me out! I have never been big on working my way through life to provide a better life for my own to have a people that believe "We" a family should accept a lesser existence to provide for those with less. Bare in mind I'm am a huge fan of Margret Sanger and planned Parenthood!

[video=youtube;-wa4U6TQlNI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wa4U6TQlNI[/video]

 

Some are poor simply due to their violent nature, just like this guy.

http://heavy.com/news/2017/01/jason...antonio-suspect-shooter-gunman-photos-record/

Poverty cannot be resolved by throwing money at people like this.

 

No, but poverty can and will be solved by a universal basic income. It's coming in the wake of automation and the exportation of manufacturing.

 

Universal Basic Income, laughable! That's the stuff lemming are made of! Hordes of zombies with no chance of betterment, Agenda 21, read it

 

Yes we have the duty that no persons suffers for the lack of sustenance, housing, medical care.

But, do we have a duty to do so in a desired geographic area such as San Francisco. No!
Chronically homeless do not have the right to be housed in Beverly Hills either because they chose to be homeless there.


Moi


r > g

View attachment 47175
Great for homeless relocation, too.
Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.​

 

Do you know why people will have no jobs? Automation, outsourcing, corporate greed. Jobs aren't created out of thin air, someone has to pay a salary, enough to live off of. Private enterprise has failed in this regard, which is why we have low income populations rising, while the middle class has died.

 

I like how dopes tat their faces, implant a couple horns, nose rings, mutilate/stretch their ear lobes the size of an egg and then wonder why they are working at a record store or washing pots and pans at Denny's.

THINK before you INK!

 

Well if that's the case slick

then what's your beef? Universal "NO JOB" isn't going to generate jack s$%t now it is. Back to the drawing board for you I suppose

 

I saw a homeless guy behind the grocery store going through the dumpster so I went through the drive thru at Burger King and got him a couple burgers and a drink. When I took it to him he said "I don't want that, I want the adult beverages".

In my area the bums are on almost every corner with their hand out and the new thing of saying they ran out of gas and need a few bucks to get home, then hit you the next day too with the same BS. I call them bums because 99% have seemed to be able to work, wearing decent clothing, backpacks on, not dirty, don't show any signs of being unstable yet they can stand out there for years and beg. I don't give unless they really look mentally unhinged. Around Christmas I gave $20 to a homeless woman and she needed it, she may have spent it on booze but it as her money to do so with.

I see kids coming out of the HS and go to the medians and start begging for cash. It's become their job and I'm tired of seeing it. One guy I gave $5 to has been around here for 5 years, he looks like he's about 30 and I found one of the local bum ladies is his girlfriend and I saw them casually walking out of Walmart with bags of goodies and get in their car and drive off.

One guy came up to me with a gas can and asked for a gallon of gas. I asked what his story was and he told me he moved to the area for a job, he lost the job, his wife left him and he had a generator in the woods where he was staying. I believed him so I filled his gas can, 3 gallons. People give to the poor but it's these lazy SOBs that burn me up and get nothing from me. It is becoming a real problem around here in Northern VA. /End Rant

 

Yes it should be left to charity.

Charity works better and is superior.

With charity individuals can actually distinguish between who is simply a free loader and who legitimately needs help.

The government canot do this and only ends up creating massive dependency

 

You're jabbering nonsense, you fail to present a rebuttal to my argument.

http://basicincome.org/basic-income/

Enlighten yourself, and no, it doesn't discourage innovation. If people don't have to worry about surviving, they are free to follow their passions, dreams and life goals. Masses of people doing meaningless work to enrich major corporations doesn't spur innovation or growth, it stifles it.

 

Your question is of course one of huge conflict. When we “take care” of the poor by government edict, we are telling people that they must make charitable contributions against their will- taxing them for money that does not provide any service they participate in or benefit from directly, and distributing it to people and by means that they have no control over. Basically, this amounts to taking what does not belong to you and giving it to others- by force of law. By any other means this would be illegal, and called theft. Done by law- it is still theft by definition, but no longer illegal. I find that inappropriate for a government to do.

Charity existed and helped the poor long before the government took it over, and it was done by local and voluntary means. There is an advantage to that, because the ability to genuinely assess the needs and benefits are far better.

There is a truth regarding giving assistance to others, that most people can't bring themselves to respect. That is, that it can do harm- severe harm- as well as good. The greatest treasure any individual can have is self-esteem, the knowledge that they can stand alone, provide for themselves, be a burden to nobody. The key word is self; in means that this is your honest opinion of your own value. It must be earned, by you, from you. Nobody can give it to you. You simply must prove yourself to yourself. Such people are free- and control their own destiny, virtually without fear. Once you have that, you never want to surrender it.

We are all inclined to seek the easy way to do things, inclined to procrastinate, rationalize and evade blame and responsibility. All of those inclinations preclude developing self-respect. Yet self-respect is the source of power over your own life, of strength and confidence and success and inner peace- all the things we want for ourselves and our children. While the avoidance of being responsible is always attractive, the long-term cost of that is dependence- and a lack of self-respect. When we make or help people become dependent, we enable the mechanism that robs them of that most powerful asset of all.

Children that are brought up to have that asset find that on becoming of age, they don't need the support of their parents anymore- and will love them forever for making them strong. Children that are brought up where parents always cover for them and save them from the consequences of their own actions remain dependent- and they resent their parents forever for making them weak. They will resent those who are strong, and feel somehow cheated by them.

So when is it right to help? When it does good, rather than harm.

I define the difference here as the good form being a hand-up, where we help a person who is doing their best but struggling- and who will realize that they have been helped by their fellow man, do their best to get on their feet and later pay it forward. Years back, this was seen as “beholden”. Meaning they recognized a debt existed and would want it to be paid. One example is the practice of farmers gathering to rebuild a neighbors barn or bring in his crops if he was unable- knowing that if circumstance were different, he would do the same for them. The hand-up helps people believe in the human spirit, and both those who give and receive benefit from it.

The other form is the hand-out, which only helps the dependent person to further avoid doing for themselves. This is enablement, prolonging dependence. In recent times, we have done this to the point where it's seen by recipients as entitlement- something owed to them- a payment of a bill, not something they see as any obligation. More likely, they feel it's less than they should have... and they often do resent it. In truth, they resent the fact that they lack the power over their own lives- the power of self-respect hat is only absent because they refuse to earn it. Today- we have families living on generational welfare. That is not a good thing, for them or the rest of us.

There is a very important difference between those who could and won't, and those who truly can't. I think most of us would help the latter- but we resent being forced to support the former.

Government is perhaps the worst possible judge of the difference between the two. At a minimum, this should not be be a federal program, but a state or local or even private one.