Tag Archives: welfare

The 3 Commandments

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Forget the 10 Commandments — George Carlin has already downsized those to 2 anyway.  Here’s the 3 Commandments we Americans should adhere to — all Americans should have:

#1) Access to adequate & free medical care, regardless of income level.  Sure, those with money will have access to faster & better care, but that’s capitalism.

#2) Adequate & safe minimum free housing, if they can’t afford it.  Not slums, but decent accommodations.

#3) Free adequate & nutritious food, should they not be able to afford it.  Nobody in America should be starving or malnourished, but it’s happening.

I’m not saying they should live like kings, but they should have safe & adequate medical care, housing & food free of charge to some degree.

If they’re sheltered & working, whether in a rusty trailer, an old apartment, a suburban home or a mansion, they should have access to free basic medical care paid for by our government.  No, it might not performed by the greatest specialists in the world, but it’s adequate medical care & they should be able to get what they need, including any medicine or surgical procedure in a timely manner.

If they NEED shelter, whether working or not, they should have free (if unemployed) or low-cost access (if employed) to at least an apartment or trailer that provides the minimum adequate shelter for their family size, i.e., 2 people per bedroom & 3 people per bath.  I’m not talking about a high-rise condo or a home in your neighborhood (NIMBY, you know), but safe & adequate shelter somewhere, paid for by our government via our taxes, and also subsidized by deleting unnecessary government programs & other political “pork” projects that serve to help no one but the rich & privileged, who don’t need our help at all.  I’ve been a long-time advocate for a bipartisan government agency that is given a mandate to delete a certain portion of Federal spending each year.

If they don’t have food, they should have access to getting free meals when needed.  I’m not saying steak & or a premium vegan menu, just adequate nutritious hot meals 3 times a day.

Why?  Because we’re all in the same boat.  We’re all human, and we’re all Americans.  We all have compassion in our minds, but we seem to oppress it as much as possible.  “Hmmm”, as The Church Lady might have once said: What would Jesus do?

How do we pay for all this?  Simple — downsize the overblown military starting first with their ridiculous defense spending (we have more military spending than the next 10 kazillion countries combined) & their overblown worldwide presence (we don’t need air bases in many of these places we have them, including many in America); cut out all the “political pork” programs we subsidize annually (mostly hidden inside of bills that have nothing to do with them); heavily raise taxes on the wealthy & on corporations & remove their tax breaks that limit that tax; nail the large estates (I say that’s those over $2 million) with a hefty estate tax & disallow all the breaks they use to get out of it; levy a small flat minimum tax on all religions (I know — separation of church & state, but I can dream, can’t I?); eliminate the subsidies & expenditures we make for people & programs that obviously don’t need it (we have a National Helium Reserve that’s costed us billions that they’ve been trying to delete for appx 20 years now with no luck); and eliminate all those gov’t agencies that employ people with overblown salaries who do pretty much next to nothing but live off the gov’t teat, the same teat they don’t want the poor to partake upon.  And a final salvo the GOP-ers will like — pay the Earned Income Credit in 12 monthly checks instead of a big check they simply blow once a year — look at all the interest the gov’t will make floating it for a year.

After all, isn’t all of this what Jesus would do?  Funny how the right-wing chooses which of Jesus’ teachings to adhere to.  Of course, that assumes he really existed in the first place.  If he did, how come The Jerusalem Times (of that day) had all kinds of contemporary news reports & special editorials about all the other figures of history in that time, yet nothing about Jesus until 40 years after he allegedly died?  That’s a whole other blog entry.

The unemployable

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The unemployment rate should always be at appx 7.5%, not 5% or less.  In regards to the “ideal” 5% figure, I believe that 4% of the public is unemployable in any capacity and/or won’t work, and 1% is employable but simply in-between jobs at the moment, but there’s another segment being left out, and they make all the difference in the world . . .

The people who should be working ARE working at 7.5%, and those who are entirely too stupid, incompetent or unemployable to find or keep a job are able to not only find work, they can bounce from job to job during a “boom” when unemployment rates are between 5% & 7.5% & continue screwing up life for everyone they come in contact with.

These people are the chronically unemployable, which means that sometimes they’re good employees & sometimes they’re bad.  This happens due to a number of reasons, e.g., poor work habits, poor personal decisions, addiction, personality disorders, you name it.

But if they get fired in a boom period, they’ll simply get hired on elsewhere due to a lack of qualified employees.  So there’s actually a segment of the population that will work, but they don’t do good work & you can’t work with them for long, or they’re just too damn stupid or lazy or shiftless to toe the line, and that figure is about 2.5% of the population in my opinion.

We may have 7.5 million people out there that we can’t keep employed and who cause trouble everywhere they go.  No, they’re not ALL your relatives or co-workers, though it may seem like that at times.

A boom period also brings in these same idiots who now think they that since they constantly clash with their employers & can’t hold a job for whatever reasons, they were meant to run a business, and many of them do so simply because they have no option otherwise.  They then proceed to screw over their customers because they aren’t smart enough to be in business and/or they’re perpetually under-capitalized & not tending to their business, and now they have no one to whom they can pass the buck.

Everybody I know who has a good brain & is a good person/businessman is making money right now.  At the current national unemployment rate of 7.3% as of Oct 2013, we have the perfect balance to keep the idiots “out of the loop” who don’t deserve to prosper & screw up the natural market balance.  It keeps out “loser” employees who are only working to fund a drug habit or simply pay whatever current debt they have that they can’t cover through their own normal, unscrupulous means (drug sales or the opportunity to steal is not good at this moment), plus it omits wannabe entrepreneurs who have no business being in business, including unscrupulous, inexperienced & low-capitalized employers/contractors, protecting those who know how to deliver goods & services properly, which protects consumers from shoddy business practices & horrible employees.

Be happy we’re where we’re at, as a buyer’s market is what we need to ensure not only that the few thriving experienced businesses are paid a proper profit margin, but mainly to protect consumers from unsound businesses that are riding the prosperity wave and trying to cash in to collect a dollar for a dime’s worth of service, who employ people who should be sitting on the sidelines until they get their act together.

Politics preys on the weak

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Politics should not be about increasing the wealth & power of only certain individuals or segments of our population who clearly don’t need its help, including special-interest groups.  It should be about ideals that bring society together on a just & fair plane with a better societal direction & working to rectify problems, achieve goals & maintain a fair societal balance rather than separating us into unequal divisions fueled by hate, greed & egotistical values.

Our people should be taken care of in all their basic needs as needed, such as adequate safe housing that has access to proper infrastructure such as sanitary sewer/septic systems, public water & electricity, free & proper health care, treatment for mental issues & addictive disorders and given basic food if they cannot afford it. However, this help should be temporary and only as-needed, and those “in the system” need to be trained & educated to get out of it quickly, and failure to do so should land them in a minimum-security “educational prison” until they learn a trade they can use to earn a living. Many homeless are so simply of their own choosing/doing, and many people getting welfare refuse to improve themselves to try & get off it.

Unlike animals, our human minds are naturally geared toward compassion, reason & rationalization in a zero-sum game rather than being polar opposites fighting for survival — instead, we are taught to hate those who are different & see things differently & we despise the weak & less-fortunate in our society.

We do that because we’ve been taught to win at all costs & punish those who don’t make the grade for whatever reason, and that’s what will cost us as a society at some point — we’re paying for it now by worshiping people who have no business being idolized simply because our society looks upon them as strong, beautiful, or some other appealing yet superficial trait.

Until we can treat all of our citizens with respect, and until all our citizens work to earn that respect, we will be doomed to mediocrity.