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Topic: Earning it
Workin4it's photo
Mon 01/08/18 05:55 PM

noway nothing simple going on here. Like to weigh in on this, but I can't even comprehend what's going on.
It's just another way for democrats to buy votes. They think if they can control the way we spend our money and distribute the wealth of ones Capitol to people they think should have it instead.thus the person on the receiving end will vote to keep that practice going. That's why they are in favor of open borders and sanctuary cities.

no photo
Mon 01/08/18 06:19 PM


noway nothing simple going on here. Like to weigh in on this, but I can't even comprehend what's going on.
It's just another way for democrats to buy votes. They think if they can control the way we spend our money and distribute the wealth of ones Capitol to people they think should have it instead.thus the person on the receiving end will vote to keep that practice going. That's why they are in favor of open borders and sanctuary cities.

noway to bad some can't wrap their head around the fact that the dems own the world. Keep on keeping on with the sickness.

msharmony's photo
Tue 01/09/18 04:25 AM
smh ... it was simply an editorial, lets calm down.

Senate currently has 51 republicans and and 47 democrats
House currently has 239 republicans and 193 democrats

this has alternated through the years, no one party dominates consistently in the US, though certain financial brackets tend to benefit consistently regardless of the political dynamic

Dodo_David's photo
Tue 01/09/18 04:51 AM

For conservatives and thus-inclined Democrats, work requirements are about making sure that people who receive federal aid aren't lazy loafers living off the dole — "welfare queens" in Reaganite parlance.

Built into the claim that it's only fair that poor people should be made to work for welfare are a few troubling assumptions: that poor people don't or won't work; that only compensated, market labor is real work; that society (and the state) always require work to precede income; and that each person is due to receive simply what they earn. Each of those is false.

87 percent of able-bodied adults covered by the Medicaid expansion are already working, in school or seeking work, and that about 75 percent of those not working are full-time caregivers.

before deciding whether it's morally right for them to receive income without working, consider a far larger group that takes in far more money without toil: the idle rich. They soak up plenty of unearned money from the economy, in the form of rent, dividends and capital income. Salaries and wages — that is, money paid for work — only make up about 15 percent of the income of Americans making $10 million per year or more; the rest is capital income from simply owning assets.


In other words, the well-to-do already do what workfare advocates seem so nervous about: rake in money they haven't earned through market labor and thrive off the government's largesse. Perhaps that itself is unfair — so why duplicate it on the other end of the economy? Put simply, it seems ludicrous at best and sadistic at most to start one's fairness policing from the bottom up.

In fact, none of us live entirely on what we earn. We rely on the infrastructure, knowledge and technology developed by those who have come before us, and those contemporaneous with us. Instead of trying to mince each person's life's work into careful calculations of contribution and merit, it seems more sensible to pursue a fairer economy overall: one that directs its excesses not to the already rich, but to those who have the greatest need; one that recognizes in its distributive structure that every person is immeasurably valuable, deserving of life and dignity.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/if-the-poor-must-work-to-earn-every-dollar-shouldnt-the-rich/2018/01/05/c36d9a10-f243-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html



Edited because the piece was far too lengthy in original form.


The author of the above-quoted opinion piece has erred.

According to her logic, every person with a 401 (k) doesn't deserve the earnings from it.

msharmony's photo
Tue 01/09/18 05:00 AM


For conservatives and thus-inclined Democrats, work requirements are about making sure that people who receive federal aid aren't lazy loafers living off the dole — "welfare queens" in Reaganite parlance.

Built into the claim that it's only fair that poor people should be made to work for welfare are a few troubling assumptions: that poor people don't or won't work; that only compensated, market labor is real work; that society (and the state) always require work to precede income; and that each person is due to receive simply what they earn. Each of those is false.

87 percent of able-bodied adults covered by the Medicaid expansion are already working, in school or seeking work, and that about 75 percent of those not working are full-time caregivers.

before deciding whether it's morally right for them to receive income without working, consider a far larger group that takes in far more money without toil: the idle rich. They soak up plenty of unearned money from the economy, in the form of rent, dividends and capital income. Salaries and wages — that is, money paid for work — only make up about 15 percent of the income of Americans making $10 million per year or more; the rest is capital income from simply owning assets.


In other words, the well-to-do already do what workfare advocates seem so nervous about: rake in money they haven't earned through market labor and thrive off the government's largesse. Perhaps that itself is unfair — so why duplicate it on the other end of the economy? Put simply, it seems ludicrous at best and sadistic at most to start one's fairness policing from the bottom up.

In fact, none of us live entirely on what we earn. We rely on the infrastructure, knowledge and technology developed by those who have come before us, and those contemporaneous with us. Instead of trying to mince each person's life's work into careful calculations of contribution and merit, it seems more sensible to pursue a fairer economy overall: one that directs its excesses not to the already rich, but to those who have the greatest need; one that recognizes in its distributive structure that every person is immeasurably valuable, deserving of life and dignity.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/if-the-poor-must-work-to-earn-every-dollar-shouldnt-the-rich/2018/01/05/c36d9a10-f243-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html



Edited because the piece was far too lengthy in original form.


The author of the above-quoted opinion piece has erred.

According to her logic, every person with a 401 (k) doesn't deserve the earnings from it.


in my control F search, I found no mention of the number 401 in the piece

but the author is making a point about whether EVERY dollar must be EARNED, with emphasis on EVERY and EARN

if you think about it a 401k is a savings from what the employee earned, and set aside, but then INVESTED, so what is earned on top of what they actually earned is not earned but gained through the luck of the economy.

no photo
Tue 01/09/18 10:15 PM
the issue is defining the requirements to have the dollars, if it is a requirement that EVERY dollar be earned through some type of 'work'(salary or wage), than why is it not the same for wealthy who have plenty of money that is non salary or wage

The author of the opinion piece is using that as a kind of diversion.
To justify a comparison of apples and oranges.

The government has an IRS. With police powers. You don't pay your taxes, they can SWAT team you and imprison you against your will.
They take that tax money (ultimately gained by force or the threat of force) and give it to poor people (although they don't really give it to poor people. First they funnel it through their administrative system, taking a cut, then they create a system that offers benefits, taking more of a cut of the stolen money by hiring people to run that system, to pay favored businesses a cut like those that process food stamps, or make the EBT cards, or print the food stamps).
They define who is "poor." They define what those "poor" people can do with that "money."

"Rich" people don't have an IRS. They don't kick down the doors of some random home owner and say "Okay, this house is ours now, we want 1/3 of your monthly income in rent, time to pay your fair share!"
People willingly enter into rental agreements, and pay rent for use of a property they want.

Capital gains are only realized by selling a stock to someone who is willing to pay for that stock.
You can have a billion shares of apple and be worth billions and billions of dollars, but still dead broke, unless you can find someone that will freely buy those shares for what you ask for them.
Dividends are only achieved by a company willingly and freely choosing to pay a dividend, and they have the freedom to stop paying it at any time.

Bonds/savings account interest is paid by people freely entering into that relationship in order to use that money somewhere else.

Tax "breaks" (or what the author calls "subsidies") are not "we the government are going to give you money," so much as "under these conditions we don't have the legal authority to IRS SWAT team down your doors and take it from you for not giving us the money we say you owe."


Implied in "the issue is defining the requirements to have the dollars, if it is a requirement that EVERY dollar be earned through some type of 'work'" is the idea that government owns the dollar as well as the value or meaning it is perceived to represent.
It does not.
Dollars don't define anything. They are a convenient means to exchange value and effort as defined by the people freely exchanging them.

The government can only force another person to accept the definition, meaning, or value of the dollar if they are dependent upon the dollar and the government defining the dollar for them in terms of enforcing what the people are able to do with it, either within markets it has absolute control over, or by piggybacking onto others that are freely accepted.

People using dollars as a convenient exchange for freely entered transactions of goods and services (stocks and rent) can find some other means of exchange.
Chickens, gold, cryptocurrencies, barrels of oil, handjobs, big macs, art, room & board, maintenance, farts in a bag, whatever.
They (those in freely chosen exchange) will never be slavishly dependent on the government to define what their goods and services are worth and what can be done with them ("poor" people do this too for certain things. Read about Tide laundry detergent becoming drug currency).

So this:
the issue is defining the requirements to have the dollars, if it is a requirement that EVERY dollar be earned through some type of 'work'(salary or wage), than why is it not the same for wealthy who have plenty of money that is non salary or wage

isn't really an issue at all. It's equating things which aren't, in a facile argument.
It's dealing with completely separate issues, beliefs, systems, perceptions, and in no way realistically possible.


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