Category: the Rant Board
I’d like to say this, because I think someone needs to defend and support these that receive government benefits and rely on them for their living.
First, it is not shameful, nor always laziness why people are on benefits. It is not only the blind or lazy blind person that received them either.
I don’t know how many of you understand that people that have worked all their lives, and are not disabled, nor have been lazy depend on Social Security, Welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and other assistant programs.
Even the wealthy person that become of age can and does claim their Social Security benefits, and that money become part of their income.
You are one of the few blind persons that has a job, and doesn’t receive benefits. You work for ABC Corporation, and smile when you receive your pay each pay period. How long do you think ABC will continue to be in business if people that work for the Government, and the Government stops spending money?
How many of you understand how many businesses count on Government contracts, loans, regulations, grants, and other things to be in business?
If you’ve been a smart person, have invested your money well, and you own property, most likely you are renting some of your property section 8, or your investments are tied up in companies that are Government supported, like the Auto industry was.
How many of you working blind have investments that are safe from financial meltdown, or have investments at all?
Do you know how many dollars come in to your company due to people spending Government money on your company’s goods and services?
How much food, liquor, clothing, phone services, you name it are purchased on the 1st and 3RD of the month from these paychecks?
SSDI and SSI are actually good for the economy, because these lazy ass checks support many businesses, and if that money dried up so would many other paychecks.
I am glad my tax dollars can support my American people. I am glad we can feed our poor, house them, clothe them, and give them a comfortable life.
Think about it. If one person can own billions of dollars, and we’ve got several billionaires in America alone, there is enough money to make everyone rich and no one has to be with out anything. Doesn’t that make you proud, not angry, that your country can boast this type of life?
Sweden it is said has no poor. Why? They take care of their own, and well.
How many of you understand how many goods get thrown away, like food and such things so that the market price can stay at a serene level? How many remember that free cheese program and understand why not only was it free, but the best damn cheese you didn’t have to buy, and couldn’t buy in a store, because the store cheese wasn’t as good?
I could go on, but I’ll rest.
I urged you working, and hopefuls to work, to think about what you say about the lazy blind. You have no idea how difficult it is to work, and how lucky the few that can and have are.
Welcome that SSI and SSDI check, because you know what? That check is what is supporting you many times without you realizing it.
Have you thought about how it was the Government regulations that make is possible for you to even hold the job you hold? How much of the technology was purchased for you with Government funding?
Let us all support America, it is the reason we are strong.
Wayne, thank you for this fantastic post. I couldnt' agree with you more. Maybe your angle will get through to some of these people. But I won't hold my breath though. A plus for a job well executed.
Very well said, Wayne. Most people have no idea of this, and I really didn't until I needed to collect SSDI for a year.
Very rationally put.
They are certainly something to be greatful for. SSI isn't momething I want to rely on for life per say, but it does help me right now. Laundry change and my phone are what I need it most for. Haha.
I'll give you laundry change and I'll cover your phone bill. Let me have your SSI. Smile.
Really well said!
Well said.
I agree with everything except the part about billionaires. Yes, we probably have enough money in the economy to make everyone rich, but I don't want to become rich by someone else having their money taken away. SSI and SSDI should be fallbacks and supplements, not a way to get rich. A billionaire worked for his/her money, and its his/hers to do with as she pleases. I don't begrudge them anything, nor do I want to take more than the tax code allows from their paychecks.
That's bullshit. Most of those assholes inherited their money. And, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I get social security today because I worked a bunch of years and the government took part of my paycheck. However, that's not the reason I'm glad I get social security, I'm glad because I need it. I wish all of society was structured such that if I have something, and you need something, you could get it.
As long as there is one person going hungry in the United States, then the billionair asshole should hang his head in shame.
Bob
But you have more than a lot of people, how much do you give to starving people? Even if a billionaire did inherit their billions, A they pay more in taxes then you've probably ever seen in your entire life before taxes, B its there's. You should not be willing to take if you are not willing to be taken from. Are you willing to have your paycheck, as it stands now, taken from? If so, how much are you willing to give? Do you give that much? If not, why not? Why should others who have more than you have to give if you won't give what's yours? In short, what skin are you putting in the game?
I kinda agree with cody here. While I know many of the rich are Evil, corrupt, despotic Thieves, that lobby to create laws that give them unfair or unreasonable advantages in their industry, or in the way their taxes work, I wouldn't want to take there cash, considering their are a few good rich people out their, and I don't really feel i'd have the moral authority to do such.
I do think we should crack down on tax haven laws, and tighten the tax code to avoid loopholes. But I know were I to inherit a huge chunk of money, i'd feel differently. Considering how badly our government has fucked itself over the past 10ish years, I wouldn't want to give any more money than I had to, because I know the majority of it is going to be wasted.
I don't hate Rich people so much as I hate the way the majority of them have exploited a system to steal finances they couldn't have obtained with out exploitation.
though, to the rich.... what they're doing is just how the world works, and is no more immoral than J walking. So, maybe its just a gap in values.
thank you, Wayne. what a beautiful, and oh so true post.
Absolutely I think that illegal acts should be cracked down upon, but the middle class do illegal things to keep money too. I always love watching people debate this subject, because they foam at the mouth about all these things rich people are supposedly doing, and ignore two major things. First they ignore the fact that middle class and lower class people cheat on taxes too; in different ways, but they still cheat. Second, they ignore the fact that without the rich, this country's economy would shut down. Along with its cherities and other foundations. Imagine what the library system would look like without the proceeds from the steel industry, or the hundreds of organizations funded and/or started by the gates foundation.
Blaming the rich for being rich is just childish and short sighted. Blame criminals for being criminals, and let the rich live the life they've earned.
I heard a while back on the news that there is a group of rich people who actually approached the government to close the tax loopholes and equalize the tax burden on the grounds that they should pay their fair share. And actually,that’s the sum and substance of it all, it seems to me,and I think this group of rich people should be commended for that. If I had millions or billions, I would expect to pay my fair share, but no more. I should not like to be soaked just because I had great wealth; that’s confiscation, not equalization, so I won’t advocate a policy of soaking the rich just for the sake of soaking them. If you bought a lottery ticket with a big fat jackpot as the goal, you might suddenly be lucky (or unlucky enough, depending on how you look at it) to win, and you wouldn’t want the majority of it confiscated. Yes, I paid into the social security system for years and yes, I got a pretty substantial monthly check which I still get as a disabled worker, but I have some making of amends to do and I could not really do that if I didn’t get that check. When that money is finally my own again, and when I’ve paid down the worst of the debts I ran up, maybe I’ll think about taking myself off the roles, or maybe I’ll actually try to create a savings account, but either way, I consider myself fortunate right now to have those options. Sometimes I do wonder if it’s entirely ethical that I as a blind person have those options that maybe other people don’t quite get to have, but that’s a struggle I’m a little less willing to lose sleep over right now thanks to being just plain tired of the bullshit.
I agree at all levels people cheat on taxes.
I don’t think the rich are any worse at it however, and most are better at not cheating.
The reason why this is, they simply don’t have to cheat.
When you are in a specific financial category, you’ve got more money than you’ll ever need. Your family after you will be wealthy, and the family after them if the money is not mis managed.
Many as pointed out pay their fair share of taxes, then donate on top of that, because you see money makes money.
The taxes you pay you don’t miss really.
The rich that cheat, I believe are the wasteful, or people that mis manage, so they’ve got to cheat to keep from going broke.
The reason why, is if you, had 20 million dollars in the fiscal year, and you wasted 17 million, you are still taxed as if you have 20 million.
You can’t actually afford to pay, because you don’t have it.
That is a simplified example, but it happens.
Some people have stock options that on paper are worth lots until the stock goes down.
The Government doesn’t tax because of your bad luck, they tax according to what you are worth on paper.
The foundations menschen will forever have money, because they have products, services that people purchase daily.
If they pay a billion in taxes, that billion will return tomorrow.
It is a whole different world.
The poor and the rich will waste money, but with as much money and stuff in the world, no one should ever need anything basic, and some comforts.
It is said you can’t make a waster rich even if you gave him or her a billion dollars.
I agree, people should be able to afford food and clothes and shelter and clean water. People should have access to a quality education. People should have loving families who care for them and tend to their needs. However, I live in the real world, and I realize that even if you did confiscate all the wealth from the wealthy to feed the poor, you'd still have starving people.
The rich would stop working, because any money they were going to make would just be taken away, so why try. The companies they used to run now go out of business because they're not running them, so they slowly wind down over time. Then the people who worked at those companies have no jobs. Now everyone is starving, and there's no one to make the food.
We tried confiscation economics around 1917 in this little place called Russia. You may have heard of it by another name, communism. You may also remember it failing miserably.
Trust me, I've been to a communist country and seen the people there and talked to them, its not pretty.
Yup, it's easy to look at people richer than yourself and condemn them, but let's all be honest with ourselves here: if we're not willing to give our little bit of extra away, how can we, in good conscience, judge someone else for not wanting to do it either? I mean, if you won the lottery, would you give it all away to complete strangers because you don't need it for survival?
It's also easy to let the rich slide by saying that they own us. Let's keep our eyes open. Many of them go unpunished while the lower classes are squatted upon.
I completely agree with you Cody. Let me say this from another standpoint. How many times have we said it is unfair to punish an entire group just because of a few rotten apples? We have come so far from the past when it comes to equality, which enabled people the fair opportunity to be successful. Does it sound right to you to punish the rich for being successful? I really like what Cody said before, that we need to punish the criminals instead of condemning the rich. They are not all bad people.
i personaley do not know a rich person. so , i cannot declare them to be good nor bad. i can say this. since the 1970's middle class in america has shrunk. while the top one percent have gotten richer, the poorer have, yes u guessed it. gotten poorer. who is to blame? me, you, the rich,or the poor,middle class? i do know vodo economics does not work. if it did middle calss would inflate with new members of its class. the reality which no one here has mentioned is this. pretty soon, there will be two classes in this country. the have's and the have not's. which one wyill you be?
the lipnots test. does a law, policy, or rule elevate its citiziens? or does it supress them?
good men and women followed hitlers orders and put to death millions, if not thousands of folks.
""but i was d oing my job..." some of you sound like it. lets be fair. the rich dont pay their fare share. some of you who think they should not be soaked best look around you. fone day you might bump into another blind person begiging on the street.
I love when people say that the rich don't pay their fair share. It really is one of my favorite lines in this subject. Have you ever looked at how many zeroes are on the wealthy's tax invoices? Even with the breaks they get, its probably more than your yearly salary.
We have an interesting plarity in America that I've long wondered the source of. We condemn the successful for being successful, and we condemn the poor for being poor. Or else we condemn the successful for being successful, and then leave the poor absolutely blameless and expect them not to have to do something to get unpoor. I have yet to meet anyone who says that both the rich and the poor have people who suck, and people who are good. Some rich people inherit their wealth and spend it on diamonds, and some work for it and spend it on libraries and museums. Some poor people spend money on cable TV and platinum rims for their cars, and some spend it on food for their children.
I also love when middle class people complain that others aren't giving enough, when most of them give very little or nothing at all. Until you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, you don't really have a right to tell other people they aren't doing enough of what you're not doing at all.
For example GB up there hit that nice little hot button that one day we'll have a have and have not society. Setting aside all the factual fallaciousness of that statement for a moment, lets examine the fact that we can assume that the person behind the screen name is not either giving everything they have to cherity, or investing it all in the stockmarket. In essence, GB is probably not doing all that GB could to either be a have or a have not.
We can assume with some safety that GB is doing exactly what GB thinks GB should be doing. We can also assume with some safety that GB would not like if I or anyone else came to GB's house and took GB's computer because computers aren't necessary. GB would probably also not be a happy bear if we took GB's house and gave them a smaller one to live in that matches our standards of what size house GB needs.
No one ever seems willing to pony up when it comes to this subject. They want to slice their cake and eat it too, so that they can pick what size piece they get. I encourage you all to cut the cake as if you didn't get to pick your piece. You'd want to make all those slices equal so that you don't get the smallest piece.
Have you personally seen how much the rich pay in taxes cody? I doubt it.
Ah yes, Cody, I've actually done that as a parent and an uncle:
Make one of them divide it up, and all the rest pick their piece. It's a fair analogy, but it does actually work in reality, with the kids anyway, after the first time or 2 when the divider-up learns. Lol.
I'm going to throw another curve ball here:
Let us say, for sake of argument, that the country agreed to give one lucrative industry to the blind, in exchange for no blindness-related benefits ever. No blind exempsions, no automatic blind recipients of SSDI, etc.
Now we're not talking about an industry for the blind, we're talking about an industry run by the blind, for the population at large, something like how First Nations peoples run casinos.
This also doesn't mean you would *have* to work for that industry, only that that industry would have a job for you if you needed it.
When I visited Spain, the blind owned the lottery industry. That means you had lawyers representing them at the corporate level, public relations people, manufacturing for toys and game machines, sales and service personnel, and the list goes on.
Now, with that in place, and no blindness-specific benefits, my opinion is, nobody would ever again have a generic claim against all of us like everyone does now.
Now, I travel on business to anotheh state and have to convince a cab driver (who's not at the airport) that I am from out of state, and not a half-rate government subsidy, or be late for an appointment.
With such an industry belonging to us, and zero subsidies, none of us would have the generic claims laid against us that we've all faced since childhood. The only reasen those claims are there now is a perceived sizable amount goes to a perceived small number of people. Never mind that no one person ever really claims all that much. It's the priniple of the thing, and the fact everyone constantly feels like they're paying out.
This solution is not perfect, and I imagine one of its biggest detractors would be those who make their living doling out blind-specific services and benefits.
But, if you could pick whatwe have now, or the solution I proposed, would you take my option?
I know I would: what a difference that would have made when I was between jobs. And what a difference our whole lives would have been without the constant image people have that no matter who we are, we're taking their resources somehow.
We're all animals, every one, and we fight for what little we do have in the grand scheme of things. So while it sucks we all get this from people, I fully understand as a grown man the mechanics of why they do this. I'd rather have a generalized solution than endlessly work to quiet the restless beast, which gets wakeful at inopportune times like when you are getting school supplies for your kid, or headed to a contract site. I usually feel like "Dammit, I've got a job to do: I don't have time for this shit!"
Food for thought, for sure.
I'd take your option, but I want to choose the industry. Also, we would need as many industries as we needed to support all of us.
Dupont, or GM I say.
I'd love an industry so long as it had enough variety of jobs for people with different tallents, interests, and abilities. Also, I wouldn't want to be disqualified for another industry because of the existence of the industry for the blind.
Ugh, I can see it already: "Well, you have a guaranteed job stuffing envilopes for (insert industry), why do you need to look elsewhere? What would you need diversity laws for? Just go get a job where you've got reserved work, don't start competing with other people when you already have a job. Just like people do with immigrants. "The blind people are taking our jobs!" etc.
I need to make a very small correction here.
I live in Sweden, and while Sweden's poor do have a much easier existance when put against the American poor, they still do not have it easy, nor do they have access to all the things they should. Australians have an easier time accessing non-essential medical services than the Swedes do, because Sweden opts for a high cost protection rather than a medications scheme that gives people instant access to the drugs they might need. here you pay full price until you reach a certain amount, which is set quite high for people who might live on benefits or work a very low paying job.
there are various other things that could be pointed out. Swedes don't have a milk and honey existance though, and it needed to be pointed out.
Something else to add here:
First off, I'll preface this by saying that no, I don't actually think we should rob the rich. There are a lot of good rich people, and a lot of really grabby poor and middle-class people who'd fuck the system if they got half a chance. No, that won't do.
However, all of you who are talking about how much the rich have to pay...ask yourself how much it truly hurts most of them.
Let's say, for the sake of an argument, that I'm poor, and I'm a single person who earns twenty thousand dollars a year. My expenses are, say, three thousand dollars a year, and never mind the tax I pay on everything. My expenses are about fifteen percent of my yearly income.
Now, let's take a middle-class person. He makes fifty thousand dollars in a year, and his expenses are, let's say, five thousand dollars. Now he has only ten percent going to necessaries, and a bit more to play with.
Nw, I don't know how rich you're talking about here, but consider this. Let's say I was a rich person and I made three million dollars in a given year. Sure, the government might honestly bite fifteen percent out of that, and there goes almost five hundred thousand...but two and a half million dollars buys an awful lot of cable TV, bread, child care, car repairs and house maintenance, never mind the rest of it. Even if the tax return is far more than most of us see, what he's left with is far far more than he needs.
Does this mean he should lose it? No. But it does mean that those arguing for how much the governments eat the money of the rich might be missing the point a bit.
From experience, I can tell you that people with less money, people used to not having a lot of resources, are much tighter about spending what they have. There is smaller room for error; they still pay the same for food as the rich, they still pay the same taxi fare and the same if they have to get the cat fixed or the transmission in their car rebuilt. When you have less to play with, you are understandably less free with what you have. To a point, at least, this cannot be demonized or painted black.
I'll clarify one last thing before I go. I condemn the behaviour of those who have little and squander it on things they don't need. If a poor single mother spends half her cheque at the bar every Friday, or if a lower-middle-class couple gets a small winfall and blows the whole damn thing at the casino...well, that's just silly, and I don't have tons of sympathy for it.
The tax rate is about 33%. It is just as you pointed out, if a person that earns 3 million pays 33% they have way more money left over than a person earning 20 thousand after taxes.
We have plenty tax dollars, we need to cut waste. Doiing this will stop the arguments.
Not only do we generate tax dollars from incomes, we generate them from goods and services sold. In the states there is a drive to tax items purchased online, because before we had such a wide purchasing power, if you purchased a product in California, and had it shipped to Colorado, you didn't have to pay sales tax.
This is just a few keystrokes possible now, so states are tasing if they can figure out how to colect on you.
When I lived in California, I took advantage of this rule. When I came home, I'd buy stereo, furniture, and other products and send them to myself in California. Smile.
In some cases it save hundreds of dollars.