Why conservatives attack the welfare of government but not the welfare of banks, credit cards and...

Why conservatives attack the welfare of government but not the welfare of banks, credit cards and insurance companies?

I just had a revelation that has magnified the hypocrisy of free market, anti-welfare advocates in my view.

If welfare is fundamentally the dependence of an individual on the resources of an outside institution, aren't the relationships we have with banks, lenders, credit card and insurance companies also a type of welfare?

If being dependent on the resources of others represents a failure and corruption of human relations, don't these institutions represent failures and corruption as well?

In a properly working free market, shouldn't citizens be able to afford basics such as housing, transportation, insurance and medical care by themselves without looking to others?

Why aren't these types of institutions regarded as just an unwanted violation of the system as government welfare?

Why aren't the GOP and Tea Party just as opposed to the dependence economy reinforced by these private institutions as they are to government provided welfare?

And aren't these private companies guiltier than the government because they are charging citizens while reinforcing the dependence economy?

 

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"I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative." -- John Stuart Mill

 

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Well there certainly is a lot of STUPID in the Republican Party. Democrats have their fair share of stupid too, but Stupid isn't ruling the Democratic roost as it is in the Republican Party, probably because Democrats don't have their own echo chamber and propaganda machines (e.g. talk radio and Fox News).

 

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Those services contribute to the economy. Welfare has the appearance of being a drain on the budget.

 

Republicans are pawns of some very wealthy men who use entertainers to control and manipulate them in order to do their bidding. They don't have to make sense, they usually don't. They don't need facts or evidence, nor do they want them. As for your free market beliefs, well, they are not well thought out. All developed and most developing economies have mixed economies, some free markets and some socialism. So it's not all free market or all socialism. The two systems are not incompatible.

There are good reasons to support corporations, banks and businesses and there are good economic reasons to support individuals. It's not an either or situation. But if you are looking for logic and reason in Republican policy you will not find it unless you understand who is running the party, and it is the Republican entertainers and the super rich folk (e.g. Koch brothers) who fund and run the Republican Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy

 

An interesting and not often dicussed fact about tax supported welfare:

* "lost" means that when it is less profitable to do X, less X is done, and the taxes collected on producers of X become less. This does not happen when the poor are taxed more - they tend to work more as need a certain amount of net income to live. In contrast the rich do less as they have more than what they need for the "good life" still, and want more time for what they enjoy, if more hours working give them no actual benefit to their life style.

 

One difference is if you pay taxes, when the government gives you something, like a subsidy, all that happens is you have paid less taxes. The government gave you nothing that was not already yours before it took it. This type of subsidy is the government taking less. If you don't pay taxes and the government gives you a subsidy then this is different, since you gain what you did not previously own.

If the government gives someone a $1000 tax cut or a $1000 subsidy, there is no difference if you are a tax payer. The difference is more connected to rhetoric and spin. If you pay no taxes and someone gives you a $100o tax cut or a $1000 subsidy there is a difference, since any tax cut from nothing gives you nothing, will the subsidy gives you something.

If a mafia thug took your wallet and the $129 that was in the wallet, you would be a victim of a crime. If the thug turns around and gives you $20 back; subsidy, he gave you back some of your own money. You are still a victim of a thief. If the thug takes your wallet and gives $20 to some stranger, whom he did not shake down, then this is gift. But that gift required that you be a victim.

The welfare state should be done via charity and choice to give. Then there are only winners. Business welfare would not be needed if the tax rate was reduced so the government can steal less money. This will force the government to become less incompetent and less wasteful, since the paying citizens will still expect then to provide serves or be terminated.

 

Well, as usual, you are operating under a number of fallacies. First, government isn't any less incompetent than private enterprise. Medicare delivers healthcare insurance much cheaper and more efficiently than private insurers. That's a fact. Two, the role of government is to effect the will of those it governs as expressed by those elected to express that will. Government isn't a business. Its profit is collective the welfare of its constituents. Taxes are how we fund our government. You seem not to understand what a country and what government is. You cannot have a country if everyone can do choose which laws they will to obey, and that is basically what you are advocating. That defeats the reason for having a government.

Taxes are not illegal and the government isn't a mafia thug. And that "welfare state" nonsense is just that nonsense. It makes for great Republican demagoguery, but that's about it. It stirs up the idiot faction, and that's what it was intended to do. It generates anger, the anger Republicans need. Because if people thought too much they might realize the stupidity involved. Taxes are how we pay for our collective expenses.

 

If the government is so honest why the huge national debt that Obama has doubled? This was not an investment loan with a rate of return, but rather this is based on incompetence. What happens when interest rates go up and the cost of serving the debt gets huge? For example, 5% annual interest on $20trillion debt is $1Trillion/year in interest. What does the honest and efficient government do, print more money, borrow from John to pay Joe, rip off the creditors, raises taxes or shrink government? I added shrink government as a joke.

Government is not about efficiency but rather government is about power which benefits by redundancy and inefficiency. There is more power in your job if you have 50 underlings and $100M to do the job, compare to 10 underlings and $50M, even if both can do the same job. There no incentive to reduce the size of government since that means a demotion of power. Power is why you have redundancy such as a four security agencies that don't share information. Redundancy means 4 big bosses instead of 1, 40 second level bosses instead of 10, etc. There is more power in separate agencies for the same thing.

Obviously you have never worked in government to see how it works. You can't fire anyone. Who in the IRS or the Veterans Admin got fired for the various corruptions and incompetencies. You are living in a propaganda world.


What I would do with government is make all government jobs temporary, say six years maximum. There will be no more permanent government jobs besides national defense. After a six year job, one is shown the front door, and that job is made available to another citizen. All citizens should the opportunity to hang around and get paid and not just some. Jobs for life is part of the inefficiency and the need for constant redundancy until there are more chiefs than there are braves.

The tax code needs to be simplified to 1-2 pages so there is level playing field for all. The 70,000 page tax code is a who's who of crony capitalism. The tax code is where politicians gets paid campaign donations to add a new page to the code that that give away freebies to special interests groups.

The Democrats always talk about rising the tax rate. This is a distraction for their uninformed base. Anyone with half a brain in finance knows deductions and exemptions is where the big tax savings will be. You can raise the rate to 90% and some will still not pay taxes; 70,000 pages of loopholes. The Democrats must benefits by this scam the most, since they will not point this out to their base but prefer this remain a benefit to them.

 

What does honesty have to do with spending and the national debt? Nothing, they are unrelated issues.

The reason the national debt doubled while Obama was POTUS is because he inherited two wars an unfunded Medicare Part D and a great recession. When Obama entered office he inherited a trillion dollar deficit from the Baby Bush administration. Recessions are expensive. But that has nothing to do with honesty. That has everything to do with facts and economics.

Hmm.....is there any gray matter between your ears? Yes, when interest rates go up, it will cost the US government more money to finance its debt. But it is hardly catastrophic as you seem to believe. If interest rates rise, it doesn't mean the government will have to pay higher interest on existing debt. Because that isn't what happens. The US government sell debt and the interest paid on that debt, with a few exceptions, doesn't change. So if interest rates double or triple, it doesn't cost the US one red cent more. Increased increased interest rates only affects new debt, not existing debt. So as usual your analogy is incorrect.

And again, honesty has nothing to do with efficiency. They are two different and unrelated concepts. Further, efficiency has nothing to do with debt. I realize words and word meanings have little relevance beyond the emotional impact they bear in your conservative circles. But in the real world, words do have real meaning. I suggest you learn them.

Well having worked in government and in private industry and worked with government, I can tell you the same motives you attribute only to government employees are found in the private workplace as well. A bureaucracy is a bureaucracy be it private or government. And the fact remains, government can be more efficient than private industry (e.g. Medicare). That isn't ideology. That is fact.

Actually, I have worked in the government. I served in the US Navy. My son is in the Coast Guard and he works with military and civilians. A guy I graduated college went to Washington as a presidential intern and has served in and out of government over the course of his career. And I have spent the vast bulk of my career in private industry, working for Fortune 500 companies and then starting companies.

People have been fired, but in government people are afforded due process in order to assure fairness. So contrary to your assertion, government workers can be and have been fired. And due process isn't a bad thing, it means you need to be able to make a rational case for the firing. Firing employees is an expensive process for government and for private enterprise. So it is something that should be done sparingly it. Firing people isn't a mark of efficiency. It's quite the opposite, it's a mark of inefficiency. I really don't think you know what the word efficiency means. It means doing more with less and firing employees is a waste of resources.

And finally, we get to the ad hominem...the argument of desperation and last resort. And frankly, that's funny coming from you. That's the old pot calling the kettle black routine. All you do is mindlessly repeat Republican dogma.

And frankly that is just stupid. As previously explained, hiring and firing people is a tremendous waste of people and money. Obviously you have never ran a business or managed people or been responsible for a budget or P&L. If we did as you propose you would make government extremely inefficient and unproductive. That's why no one with half a brain on the right or left would ever do it.

Tax code simplification is greatly needed, but it will not happen unless and until special interest money is taken out of our politics. Until then its just a fancy bauble used to distract people like you and get your vote. Then 4 or 8 years down the road, you will be once again pissed. But you won't blame the folks who are responsible for your distress, you will blame someone else. It's what has repeatedly happened and will continue to happen unless and until campaign finance and ethics laws are changed.

You should know that Republicans are responsible for the vast sums of special interest money drowning our government and have been and continue to be steadfastly opposed to removing special interest money from our polity.

Well obviously you don't have half a brain. You like your Republican comrades like to oversimplify and in the process distort and misrepresent. That isn't a distraction, that is a fact. It's a fact Democrats advocate lowering the tax burden on middle class Americans, that's far more than tax rates. It's a fact Republicans have been and continue to be opposed to lowering the middle class tax burden and lowering the tax burden of America's wealthiest citizens.

Further, it doesn't matter if you focus on deductions and exemptions or tax rates. What matters is the bottom line. You my friend are being distracted by the baubles you attribute to Democrats. And I have a degree in finance and 30 year career in business to boot. It's the bottom line that's important. It's not how you get there.

One of the problems with our tax system is not all income is treated as income and not all income is taxed equally. Investment income is taxed less than earned income and that process began with Ronald Reagan when he increased payroll taxes, increasing taxes by wage earners, and using those increased taxes to fund tax cuts for America's wealthiest families. Both parties are responsible. It's not just Democrats. And in recent years, it's more of a Republican problem than a Democrat problem.

 

I don't agree with your implicit premise.

Conservatives don't "attack the welfare of government". They distrust intrusions by government into the lives of the people. (That liberty thing that Western societies pay lip-service to but don't really believe in.)

Everyone requires the services of other people if their needs and desires are to be met. We don't manufacture every product that we use, we don't grow all of our own food.

So the question arises, why should other people labor to help us satisfy our needs and desires, when they have needs and desires of their own? That's where money and the market-system come in. Money is a token of value that people will help strangers in order to get so that they can get strangers to help them.

In other words, money and the invention of markets is what allowed societies to grow larger than family and clan based villages.

Sure, if we define 'welfare' in the way you want to (which isn't how conservatives define it). It isn't just financial institutions that provide services to others. It's what everyone does when they go to work each day. If you want to define that as 'welfare', I think that you are defining the word too broadly.

The problem with 'welfare' isn't dependency, it's the lack of reciprocity. The problems arise when welfare recipients demand goods and services from others, without contributing anything of value to those others in return.

No. The whole principle of a market is trade, exchange and reciprocity. If somebody wants something that's the product of another person's labor, he or she can't just take it (that's stealing), they need to exchange something of value for it, whether money or their own labor.

The idea that people should just be given housing, transportation, insurance and medical care is an implicit demand for the return of slavery, since somebody would have to provide those things in exchange for nothing.

 

Well, the devil is in the details. It's a little more complicated than that. Even though I am not homeless giving a home to homeless and have never been homeless and giving a homeless person housing and food doesn't put anything in my pocket and may cost me money, that doesn't mean I don't benefit when a homeless person is giving housing and food. It keeps the streets free of homeless people. It reduces crime and it gives people opportunity. I'm happy and proud that American streets are not littered with homeless people. I'm happy that America affords opportunity to people who are down on their luck. I was never laid off work, but I always had the assurance that if I was laid off, I would have some income. While it may be difficult to quantify the value of these indirect benefits, it doesn't negate their existence. Many now valuable and wealthy folks once were homeless and welfare recipients.

http://www.businessinsider.com/formerly-homeless-people-who-became-famous-2012-6?op=1

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2474863/JK-Rowling-I-poor-possible-be.html

So it's a little more complicated than your representation. While those who foot the bills for welfare assistance may not receive a direct benefit, they receive many indirect benefits. So there is reciprocity even in charity. When I give to charity, unlike some, I don't do it to get my name on a building or for any kind of recognition. But even then, I get something back. I am rewarded simply by knowing that I did the right thing and for the right reasons and that has great value.

 

We have no ethical problems with charity and philanthropy supporting people with free products and services. Disabled veterans, the mentally ill, victims of disasters, children with cancer, the homeless, the elderly, the underfed. Why is the government setting aside funds to do the same suddenly suspect and supportive of slavery? Do you view being able to help the unfortunate as getting "nothing" in return for your money? I don't.

 

The welfare state has less to do with Government, as it does the Democratic party being in charge of these programs. The Democratic party has been in charge of the war against poverty for over 50 years and has spent about $22 trillion, yet the rate of poverty has not decreased, but went up under Obama. The welfare state and its war appears to be undermined by ulterior motives and morons. This is the problem.

U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history since the American Revolution.

Say you had a military war, where we spend more each year, and after fifty years we have not gained any ground.Wouldn't that make you think that the beneficiaries of this war are different from the humanitarian sales pitch? The democratic party benefits by dependency. If people get out of poverty, then they won't need the government handout and become more independent. On the other hand, if they can't get out of poverty, like the blacks, the government is needed and the democrats get their vote, each cycle, pretending to have the solution. Or they can scare the dependents with the prospect of the evil Republicans wanting to cut.

Say we had a 50 year war against corporate poverty and after 50 years and $20 trillion, all the corporations were still poor and needing of assistance. This would be a program run but the democrats; crony capitalism. There is hidden skim by middlemen, who will money launder back to democratic political candidates. People would benefit by poor corporations since this scam of need keeps the stream flowing, forever.


Here is an interesting statistic; from Jan 2015.

Rhode Island's minimum wage just rose to $9 an hour. There's a push by Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.

That’s chump change if you believe a Jan. 10 tweet by the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It said you can earn the equivalent of $20.83 an hour by not working and being on welfare.

Instead of a large government program and war against poverty with all types of middlemen, skimmers and scammers, we totally dismantle the beaurocracy and just give each poor person $20/hour. This would create zero poverty; all become middle class, and cost the same as before. This would work because we don't have to feed the skimmings and scammers who result in maintaining poverty.

 

Here is your problem in a nutshell Wellwisher, at some point fact and reason must matter. With you ideology, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how deluded and fallacious, always trumps fact and reason.

 

"Bush is mostly right on the numbers, but he's also clearly implying that President Obama is responsible for the increased number of Americans in poverty.

That's a tough case to make. Poverty was already on the upswing when Obama took office as the economy hurtled toward recession. Before George W. Bush took office, the poverty rate was 11.3 percent. When he left, it was 14.3 percent. So it's not as if Obama interrupted a rapidly improving poverty rate. In fact, as stated above, the trajectory of poverty has turned around under Obama, and it now appears to be falling.

But still. Poverty did grow under Obama. So what did he do about it? He expanded a lot of programs that most directly affect the poorest Americans' lives, and, according to one expert, he did an admirable job.

"Obama did a good job in a really tough situation. Poverty would have increased a lot more without what he did," says Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and former director of that school's Institute for Research on Poverty. "The American Recovery and Relief Act [more commonly known as the 2009 stimulus] did a great job helping our bottom end [of earners]."

The recession caused the big upswing in poverty under Obama, and the $830 billion stimulus package was his biggest effort to stop the economy's freefall. That's maybe the best place to examine his anti-poverty efforts.

For one thing, the stimulus package created millions of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that the package created millions of jobs, saving people from unemployment — even today, there's still a small boost from the 2009 stimulus package. Not only that, but top economists agreed in a 2014 surveythat the benefits of the stimulus outweighed the costs.

That law didn't make up for all of the jobs lost in the recession, but it did soften the blow and kept people from going without work ... which would have easily put them into poverty.

Moreover, the stimulus package also expanded lots of programs that disproportionately help lower earners: the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, SNAP (also known as food stamps)."===http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallp...eck-is-it-obamas-fault-that-poverty-has-grown

 

Well, the numbers are from Heritage House, a right wing organization which is not known for its veracity. Without spending a great deal of time doing the analysis, it's difficult to determine their veracity. But they really aren't that relevant. The devil is in the details. Do they include unemployment insurance in their antipoverty numbers? In order for the numbers to be meaningful more detail is needed but it isn't given. Probably because the authors have no interest in veracity. It's mostly red meat for the Republican base who accept unquestioningly anything Republican entertainers, officials, and propaganda groups like Heritage House tell them.

This is what the real numbers from credible sources shows us:

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The poverty rate has decreased since the war on Poverty began. Notice poverty rates normally increase during and after a recession. The blue shading in the above chart shows a recession. The fact is poverty rates have gone down since the War on Poverty began. And the fact is the economy does better when Democrats hold office.

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The chart below is from The Economist.

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Democratic fiscal policies tend to be more consumer friendly whereas Republican fiscal policies tend to favor the richest citizens at the expense of the middle class and poor.

 

This reply kind of missed my point. My point is, more specifically, in a capitalistic system that is supposedly working, why do you or I or other individuals need to look to large institutions to funds our lives, even with reciprocity?

The fact is, a person working a menial job and doing everything "right' according to Capitalism, will never be able to fund their own car or house or insurance, etc. And yet, these jobs need to be done by some citizens in a capitalistic society but at the same time don't give them the power to purchase basic things all people need to function without the help of a larger institution.

And you can't refute it by saying "some people have to work their way up the ladder to be able to afford more stuff."

Capitalism, if it truly works, has to work at ALL levels of skill. It obviously doesn't at the lower level skill sets. Looking to a larger institution for help, even with reciprocity, is not an example of capitalism working. It's an undeniable example of it failing.

Straight, (work for everything you got), Capitalism cannot, literally, support the vast majority of the planet's population.

 

I don't think you understand what capitalism is Cosmic or what it's suppose to do. Capitalism is a means to efficiently allocate resources. Now I realize that's probably sounds strange to you. You are probably saying, well if that is so, then why to some have so many resources and others have so few? The more productive people are, the more resources they have, because they can more effectively use those resources to produce more goods and services. But that isn't always the case. And over time, unrestricted capitalism has some very significant drawbacks. Unrestricted capitalism has led to economic and physical abuse and war and civil war. So capitalism needs some degree of moderation.

So the solution is to blend capitalism with socialism. Most advanced and successful economies blend aspects of socialism and capitalism and it works. The role of government should be to balance out the excesses of capitalism and help ensure every individual has an opportunity to succeed (e.g. public education). That is a legitimate role for the state play.

 

I'm glad you go as far as blending capitalism with socialism. While, not my ideal economy, it's a somewhat livable compromise, at least for me. For someone at the bottom of the economic chain, it may not be. But it's a start.

I tend to go further and ask the question: Do we really require money to manage resources peacefully? And is voluntary trade, if some are struggling to gain resources, really the opposite of violence?

Money is just a symbol of resources and energy. And everybody needs resources. Do resources come with price tags on them? If violence is wrong to gain resources why shouldn't price tags be? I understand voluntary cooperation in exchange for values but people need resources whether you or I deem them worthy of them or not and who is anybody to make that decision?

It seems to me "free" trade is just being used to extend and justify the violence paradigm. It's just an evolution of violence.

In other words, instead of the silverback managing his territory by aggression and the literal extraction of blood and injury from those who would dare to gain a piece of that territory--- the silverback manages his territory by the extraction of work or the meeting of his demands. It seems to me that is only slightly removed from raw violence. Granted, it's a step up in that one doesn't have to risk death to gain access to resources, but it is still making something akin to an invented and artificial demand on those who wish to access a resource.

It doesn't recognize the possibility of a third way of managing resources without price tags and extra demands. And that is take only what you need and not try to gain a local monopoly over resources others require for their existence. Recognize that others have needs and don't try to deny them the fulfillment of those needs using violence or demands for payment. Certainly, recruit the energy of those who are able to help extract resources to meet demands and share them but to hoard them and demand a price seems an unnecessary barrier to put up between people and resources.

And notice how closely aligned violence and payment are to one another. When a demand is not met for a resource, violence is quick to be the fallback remedy, rather than an objective recognition of mutual needs. Money or free trade seems to be only a conditional distraction from violence. A band-aid, as it were. We don't have to look too deeply into what our basic needs really are with free trade. We just have to concentrate on the transaction. When in reality we should just be more conscious and aware of each others biological resource requirements. All humans, based on our biological natures, require, basically, the same amount of resources to survive comfortably. Money does the same thing as violence: It allows the monopolizer or salesman of resources to ignore the issue.

If I recognized your physical and intellectual survival requirements and you recognized mine and we all worked together to manage the distribution and production of Earth's resources, I don't think we would need either violence or free trade.

I'm not saying people can't have private property, but trade of raw resources before they are in your possession in the form of a product or useable resource, implies that because you found a wild banana grove, source of water or ore deposit first, you alone get to dictate its distribution and demands placed upon its access by others. Did you work for that banana grove, water source or ore deposit? Not really. So what are we actually doing when we put price tags and demands on our fellow species members for access to resources? If you ask me, we are just extending the violence paradigm. Instead of just saying "Okay, you need some of these bananas and I need some of these bananas. I'll take some and you take some" we say, "I'm going to claim this entire banana grove as mine and put a price or demand on access to these bananas and if that demand is not met, violence will ensue."

That's not as civilized a solution to violence as some would believe it to be. It's kind of still an ape-like solution, to me.