On 7/21/15 5:28 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 7/21/2015 12:59 PM, jps wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jul 2015 01:22:50 -0400, wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 18:13:59 -0700, jps wrote:
He'd rather blame a race and parenting than rampant poverty and
underfunded, failing schools.
Where people have little opportunity and little chance of escape, they
learn to survive in the few ways available.
Other countries don't let their populations fail like this, at least
most westernized countries. Murika is about servicing the rich at the
cost of everything and everyone else.
Other countries (northern Europe, Japan, Singapore etc) have don't
have the same kind of give away programs as the "great society".
People are steered to work. They have no problem telling people that
they are going to be trained for a blue collar job and not acting like
everyone is going to Harvard.
They also have an entirely different culture about work, family and
social responsibility.
The great society created an entire welfare culture that was very hard
to break out of. We packed the inner citoes with people who had no
skills, except crime and little opportunity to escape.
Add to that the fact that low skill jobs have fled the country and you
have middle class people competing for them because those white collar
management jobs went away too,
What would your plan be? Throw more money at them?
Hogwash. Northern European countries subsidize the poor so they don't
have to starve and go without health coverage. They have the happiest
societies in the world with a tiny homicide rate.
The problem with this argument is the USA has never been a socialist
democracy like those to which you refer and has never been viewed as
such. It has always been viewed as "the land of opportunity" ... not
welfare. This is further evidenced by the fact that the USA has the
highest number of legal, yearly immigration of all countries in the
world, many coming from the "happiest societies in the world".
With the near end of defined benefit pensions, company provided health
insurance, and flat paychecks, and most of the opportunity being
siphoned off by corporations and their execs, perhaps it is time to
restructure so that there are more than crumbs for the lower income groups.