Cut all the benefits/welfare, fix the economy

Post Reply New Topic

I think the important thing to remember here is that we're not dealing with a fully-grown adult here, but a naive 16 year old who still lives with his parents and has no experience of the real world. I had similar attitudes at his age and got a very rude awakening when I had to start fending for myself.

Asp-Z, wait until you have to keep a roof over your head before you start passing judgement on other people. In the meantime, lighten up and enjoy life; there are far more worthwhile things for a 16/17 year old to do than whinge about the government.

People on the Right have been very consistent in claiming Capitalism to be the state religion. Under Capitalism, they say, the economy is in the hands of corporations, governments must serve corporations. Corporations exist only for profit and have no social function. So by definition, governments must care only for profits of corporations. This, they claim, will cause a spinoff effect - that this will cause the "economy" to improve and this will trickle down benefits to the people who are obligated to figure out ways to be useful to business. It's fitting that the Catfood Commission proclaimed that in the bright future they hope to build, workers will be able to "compete for jobs"... Business have no obligations to anyone, however, a totally one-sided arrangement. Despite claiming that work is a virtue and people should improve themselves through work, they also insist that a huge percentage of the paid jobs be paid poverty wages, so they clearly insist that large numbers of working people be poor. Their principles also demand that the owners and controllers have the right to take as much money as they can, and with it, they build their power at the expense of the rest of society and build feudalism. Theirs is truly dystopia, and they justify it in the name of a deranged Social Darwinism.

Being 16 would of course explain the ignorance that leads him to ignore everything he is told. Asp-Z, come back in a few years when you've had a proper go at living in the grown up world.

Oh the ignorance of some ego-driven adults, eh?

This is a topical issue among many teenagers, too, I'll have you know. If you're in the UK, you'll surely have heard of EMA, which the Tories are cutting in a year or two. This is one of the reasons for the recent student protests, in fact, though the main cause of those is increasing tuition fees.

So, I ask you, Macbeth and EnglishInvader, how would you go about doing things? All I've done is put forward an idea, and while you can argue with it and even resort to personal attacks on me, you have yet to give me any better solution. Care to prove me with some of the all powerful wisdom you seem to believe you possess?

Maybe you will be the first person in history who will not realize later in life that they were very ignorant of what life is and how it works when they were sixteen compared to what they understood ten or twenty years later. Maybe. I personally don't know of any older person who would say they understood things better when they were sixteen than they do now, but maybe you will be the first?

Sometimes I wish I didn't know what I know now. It can be a good feeling to be as certain of what one believes as when one is a teenager. Everything is intense for that age group, even for neurotypicals. For those of us on the spectrum everything is more intense anyway, so you as a teenager on the spectrum have a double whammy going on right now.

Some of what you are so dogmatic about are shaky subjects with too many variables for anyone to claim certainty for their opinion. Don't worry. Stand up for what you believe in, but keep an open mind to other viewpoints and don't just dismiss them automatically because you don't agree with them. If they give sources, check the reliability of their sources compared to yours and be honest with yourself when you do it.

Good luck, and thanks for posting to the forums!

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 07 Dec 2010, 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know teenagers who are smarter than some adults...

I defended my original point because the whole point of this thread, and the whole PPR section, in fact, is to debate points. But I don't think the personal attacks against me were warranted at all. It just shows how weak Macbeth and EnglishInvader are if they have to resort to attacking someone instead of debating their view.

In some ways I was smarter than many adults before I was even ten years old. It's taken a lot longer than that though to learn some humility, and I'm damn proud of that! Oops...

I know some kids that are smarter than some adults too. The problem is the kids don't realize that adults may know more than them on certain issues.


Ordinarily, welfare and all that rot is just an incentive not to work (and in a sense it still is). That said, we are in a rather unusual situation in which the jobs just aren't there. Blaming businesses for laying people off (cause they can't afford to keep them employed without going broke) is quite frankly stupid. There are businesses out there with unethical people running them, but there are also businesses with ethical people running them. The ethical business owners can be either Liberal or Conservative (in my experience they tend to be Conservative but my experience is admittedly limited).

What people need to understand is that the rich are being used as a scapegoat, they are not the real culprits in this fiasco.

Government forced banks to make loans they didn't want to make, to people whom couldn't afford the loans.

The rich deliberately crashed the economy and are making out like bandits. They get free money from governments, they get redistribution in their favour by cancelling or cutting back pensions for workers, cancelling health insurance, cancelling or reducing social programmes in general. The Reserve Army of Labour is deliberately built up to force wages down. People are told There is No Alternative. The rich blackmailed the government in the USA by holding the unemployed hostage so that they get another freebie from the government in the form of a giant tax cut. This is a serious crime and they're in command so they are getting away with it. Expect them to do it again in the not too distant future. Then they'll fully implement feudalism.

There's this case in upstate New York where Dr Pepper-Snapple ordered the workers to swallow a large wage and pension and benefit cut despite massive profits. They argued that the new unemployment means that they are worth less and though they're making lots of profits they can make more by making them poorer. There was a long strike over that. This is an example of how the filth at the top are capitalising from the disaster that they themselves caused. Only through long prison terms for these people will progress ever be made.

That may have been the case for you, but...



...You can't generalise. Generalisations and stereotypes are rarely, if ever, accurate.

And besides, if there exist teenagers who are wiser than adults, then the whole "your opinion means nothing because of your age" thing is invalidated either way.

I'm not comparing you or any other teenager with adults. I am comparing any teenager with who they will be ten or twenty years down the line, and I'm telling you, it's almost certain you will realize then that you weren't nearly as smart as you thought you were when you were a teenager. I'm just offering a heads up from someone who's been down that road, to let you know what's ahead. You might become wiser sooner if you take your own cockiness with a grain of salt as you do everyone else's cockiness.

Unless you are referring to someone like George Soros, whom makes his money off of economic collapses, most rich people whom live in this country want this country to do well.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNERS ARE struggling to keep their companies afloat are doing anything they can to ride the recession, even taking on second jobs.

For Darren Hammond, co-owner of Chile Blossoms, a Concord, Calif., importer of peonies from Chile, the winter was particularly harsh as clients stopped paying or fell behind in payments. Sales are down 60% from last season, Mr. Hammond says.

Last year, he had to stop taking a salary so that he could continue paying business expenses.

To manage personal expenses, such as cellphone bills and car payments, Mr. Hammond found a part-time job working two to three days a week as a customer-service representative and weekend guide for All-Outdoors California Whitewater Rafting in Walnut Creek. "Everybody has bills to pay," he says. "It'd be nice if I could sit back and collect money from Chile Blossoms and live a very comfortable life. At this stage, that's not the case."

http://www.smsmallbiz.com/profiles/Taki ... float.html

Like he wanted the economy to tank...

Get real xenon13, many "rich" people are hurting too.

We also read an article about the White Castle chain of hamburger restaurants that’s going to be in deep trouble because of Obamacare. White Castle has offered employees health insurance since the 1920s. But, because of Obamacare, it’s going to have to get rid of the program it already has because it’s going to be billed thousands of dollars for each employee no matter what it does. Either it will pay a $2,000 fee per employee if it keeps its current healthcare offering, or it will pay a $3,000 fee if employees opt for the government program when Obamacare descends upon us. But, if employees do that, then the health program White Castle has now will collapse because not enough employees will be in the pool for the company to maintain its current premiums…so ultimately it will just have to pay that $3,000 fee per employee anyway.

http://hillbuzz.org/2010/07/09/research ... y-in-2011/

Seriously, business people are not the problem, Government has been causing the problem.

I'm not cocky at all, and I don't believe I'm particularly smart, though others I am I tell them they're wrong. I simply hate how arrogant adults often are with their swift dismissal of opinions that come from anyone younger than them, and I think if you have to resort to attacking someone because of their age (or anything personal for that matter) to make yourself feel better, you're doing nothing but weakening yourself.

I tend to agree a lot more with what xenon13 says than with what Inuyasha says.

While it's not fair for anyone to sponge off anyone else's labor, the gap between the super rich and the rest of society is greater by many orders of magnitude than at any other time in history, and it is getting bigger! That does not seem right or fair to me. Once they have wealth, they use it to protect their interests. It's a human thing, totally understandable, but not very fair to the other 99.9% of humanity. It especially bothers me that much of their wealth is not acquired ethically in my opinion if it involves exploiting the poor or the environment. I know some people think that anything goes as long as it is legal, but since the biggest crooks are the ones who write the laws that doesn't make it right in my opinion.

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 07 Dec 2010, 2:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Like your generalization that all people who can't find work are just lazy and deserve to be cut off from existence.


Well be happy that I'm not giving you a free pass for being a cruel bigot just because of your age. There are many adults here in the US who share your sentiment, some of them in congress.

I need to rephrase one sentence to clarify.
"it's almost certain you will realize then that you weren't nearly as smart as you thought you were when you were a teenager."

change to "it's almost certain you will realize you weren't as smart when you were a teenager as you thought you were then."

You will gain more data and perspective from life experience. Ten years from now you might look back at the statements you make today and kick yourself. I'm not saying your statements are wrong or that will happen. I just offer the possibility to you as something I and perhaps most others have experienced themselves.