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Welfare should be elmiinated


Argus

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If they could work most of them would, being on welfare is one of the most humiliating things a person can do. It's a last resort option.

And this is exactly the reason I despise the contempt against them. I remember having had to look for work in the past, and I can say that, ironically enough, it was harder work looking for work than it is now working. Let's not forget too that a person looking for work is actually spending money on printing resumes, ad has to keep his phone line hooked up to get prospective calls, even though he'd be getting no money if welfare didn't exist.

This does not mean I support welfare. I think we could get rid of welfare only if we got rid of other things too. For example, we'd have to remove minimum wage, laws making employers legally responsible for any person who volunteer for the company to gain work experience or whatever other means or strategies they may wish to use to get a job. Clearly, if we should remove welfare but not all these other obstacles to work, then it's not exactly a level playing field anymore, is it?

Again, don't misunderstand me here. I do support the idea of eliminating welfare, but on condition that it is removed hand in hand with legal obstacles to employment, and that it be done in good faith and not out of contempt and spite for their very existence as the OP seems to suggest.

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Guest TrueMetis
Humility is a subjective concept, not an objective one.

For example, some people may believe that it'd be more humiliating to live on the streets vs. homeless shelter, while others may believe that being a dirty bum on the streets is more humiliating than staying in a homeless shelter.

And who exactly doesn't think it's humiliating to basically have to say they are completly unable to take care of themselves.

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Another way of looking at it is, the seating government taking us into high debt and it taking us 10-15 years to get out of it but those same politicans retire with their $167,000 pensions! What do they care, they have their pensions and life is good! Don't get on the people on welfare, most don't want to be there and they are there because of the polices the government makes like Free Trade. You'll see more people on welfare when their EI runs out and they can't find jobs, even though they have had training.

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Guest TrueMetis
Do you actual think those guys who look after the CPP really earn that money after losing money in CPP? IF they get their 2 million dollars bonuses, even if they lose money in the CPP, why should they care how much is lost??

I think all CEO's are horribly overpaid and that even the ones that actually work hard are overpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars and bonus's more than their yearly salary are ridiculus.

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Topaz,

about your comment on free trade. This is exactly the kind of thing we ought to encourage. Free trade allows us to exploit foreign markets. However, even more important than free trade would be free movement of labour. The government's role ought to be to remove a many obstacles to work as is reasonably possible. The benefits of this are mutual. If for example, I'm an unemployed auto mechanic in France and Canada has a shortage of auto mechanics, and you're an unemployed aircraft mechanic in Canada and there's a shortage of those in France, would it be better that we both remain unemployed, or that we be free to seek out work wherever we can find it? Your proposal of protectonism is about adding more obstacles to finding work.

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No, but they are much less expensive.

Much less expensive compared to which other opportunity costs?

A good example on the news recently was the F22 in the US. The company has branches in almost every state, giving a stake in this to many politicians for job creation even though the Pentagon itself wanted to scrap the project a long time ago saying that plane was designed for cold war era operations and not what they need today. In spite of many years of wastage, it's only recently that they've finally decided to scrap it.

Your characterization as "wastage" is unfounded, given the entire set of deliverables for the program, direct and indirect employment, engineering, battle space efficiencies compared to obsolete airframes and weapons systems, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, and eventual foreign military sales.

Now you tell me, which is cheaper between giving someone a few hundred dollars a month and giving someone a few thousand dollars a month, provide him with a work place, training, expensive high tech equipment, and security personnel to boot, etc etc etc to produce something the Pentagon itself didn't even want?

Can the welfare recipients complete CAP missions and ground attack roles for a few hundred dollars?

We find similar with the auto bail out. Had we planned ahead (we know recessions always come sooner or later), we would have asked the police, paramedics, military, etc. to hold onto their old cars for a little longer, so that when the recession hit, first off the industry would have been smaller owing to fewer government purchases, whether police, military, public service, ambulances, etc. so a smaller industry in need of help, and in addition to that, instead of expensive bailouts to subsidize car buyers, the government could then have made all its car purchases to replace the old police cars, military jeeps, etc. all in desperate need of replacement anyway. As a result, instead of spending all this money in good times, and then even more again to subsidize them, we'd have spent much less in good times, and then the spending in bad times would no longer have been make work schemes, but rather filling legitimate needs to replace old hardware.

You lost me here...government has "bailed out" industry many times in the past for exactly the same reasons.

I do disagree with welfare except for those who cannot work, as long as we remove barriers to their finding work too. Obviously it wouldn't be fair to cut welfare while still leaving the barriers up.

Life isn't fair.

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Even the Pentagon itself wanted to scrap it years ago, saying it no longer fit with post-Cold-War needs. In fact, not one of these aircraft has been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan yet!

As for jobs, while job creation is certainly an added bonus of government spending, it ought never, ever, ever be the primary objective, otherwise it's paramount to highly paid welfare, essentially a make work job in disguise.

Now as for your comment about life being unfair, are you proposing we maintain legal barriers to employment while scrapping welfare? That would be outright cruel in my opinion. It would be like tying one's hands behind his back and then leaving him to fend for himself. At the very least, we can untie the knots. I can agree with cutting welfare, but only once we've removed other obstacles to employment first, such as all kinds of bureaucracy and red tape, certain labour laws designed not to help the unemployed find work, but the employed to keep their jobs by keeping the unemployed out, etc.

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Even the Pentagon itself wanted to scrap it years ago, saying it no longer fit with post-Cold-War needs. In fact, not one of these aircraft has been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan yet!

So what? The Pentagon serves at the pleasure of the President and Congress. Canada's CF-18's have also not deployed to Afghanistan.

As for jobs, while job creation is certainly an added bonus of government spending, it ought never, ever, ever be the primary objective, otherwise it's paramount to highly paid welfare, essentially a make work job in disguise.

FDR would disagree with you, as would John Keynes.

Now as for your comment about life being unfair, are you proposing we maintain legal barriers to employment while scrapping welfare? That would be outright cruel in my opinion. It would be like tying one's hands behind his back and then leaving him to fend for himself. At the very least, we can untie the knots. I can agree with cutting welfare, but only once we've removed other obstacles to employment first, such as all kinds of bureaucracy and red tape, certain labour laws designed not to help the unemployed find work, but the employed to keep their jobs by keeping the unemployed out, etc.

Yes...I am. So called legal barriers to employment are just another set of excuses. Turns out that the biggest practical barrier to employment is reliable transportation.

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Yeah, agreed completely. If left alone, GM would have rebuilt itself from the inside out. The market would have forced it along with many companies from wall street to become more efficient and profitable.

Farmers though, have been getting the raw deal for over 30 years because raw food prices have not changed since the 1960s. Food prices have, but the money isn't going to the producers but to the food companies who control the retail prices. My grandparents were farmers and they struggled many years to make ends meet. I'm not saying that welfare is the solution but they are getting screwed by measures like the Canadian Wheat Board.

Tax breaks for the rich, some are necessary to spur investment and push our society along (it is a capitalist society but government handouts to the rich are wrong. I don't think anyone should be given a handout unless they are legitimately unable to work due to a severe disability. More people would work, our society would be more productive and the government would wind up with more tax dollars through more people paying taxes.

Welfare does nothing but create a sense of entitlement and allows certain people to be lazy and take advantage of other people's hard work. If it's that important, there are many places where these people could be put to work to earn their way and help out society.

If GM had of failed it would have put 60,000 people in Canada on the welfare roles......

Your justification for ~some~ welfare i.e. farmers and the rich is hypocritical. We cannot give government handouts to ~some~ while ignoring others. If the roloe of government is to redistribute the wealth, then it must be universal and not selective.

Farners, like the rich should be allowed to fail if they cannot make ends meet with what they make. Tax breaks to the rich push the tax burden onto the middle income earners, which is unfair. Subsidizing farmers means that the middle income earners means that not only do we have to pay inflated marketing board prices for our produce, but our tax burden pays the farmers subsidies. For market garden goods sold to supermarket chains, the subsidies in essence end up subsidizing the wholesalers and the retailers who should also be standing on their own two feet.

Kill all subsidies and corporate welfare, or distribute it evenly.

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I was just sitting here wondering to myself whether I had ever known anyone on welfare who I'd want to hire, at the time they were on it.

Can't think of even one. Pretty well every last one had mental, physical or social/personal issues that made them literally unemployable at any price. None of them were in a good place in their lives, and none of them were living high.

Dang, Yes, I have known one. She was working full-time, and doing odd jobs on the side. Welfare was topping up/ guaranteeing her income to what they'd pay to keep her and her family if she didnt have a job.

My thought on welfare are.

1. I don't want the people on it to get a job where I work. (reasons stated above)

2. I'd rather they get a little money than be so desperate to rob me. I think every dollar spent on welfare saves 2 in law enforcement/prisons.

3. I feel kids born in Canada to these situations do deserve a bare minimum standard. And I doubt our current system doesn't even allow that level of standard.

The woman who quit McDonald's is a different issue. We should do more for the working poor. At $900 a month, you shouldn't have a job but not be able to afford a place to live.

I've been to many countries without a welfare system, and they are so much more dangerous, you anti-welfare people should go for a walk in one of those countries and then rejoin this discussion.

I would like to see more effort to stop the needless abuse of the system. Though I don't know any stats...

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So if you were middle class you could hire yourself a housekeeper or two for peanuts, and they'd take care of all the chores and help raise the kids if necessary.

It would make life a lot easier on hard working, middle-class folks, and would increase productivity across the board. I could even hire one. Winter is coming up and I hate shovelling my lane. Well, not that I do. I hire some guy for that. But I wouldn't have to pay as much if I had my own servant guy. He could cut the lawn in the summer and do the weeding, too. The welfare types would get experience in working, and would gain more self respect. I think getting rid of welfare would be an all-around winner for everyone.

Sounds like your a little too spoiled with that government paycheck. To lazy to shovel your own driveway and sidewalk?

What I find interesting, is that I know a good number of people on OW, and during this recession, I have watched as people denied EI have had to use the Welfare system.

I still have more respect for these people then I do for you. Your a lazy government worker with too much time on your hands. That's why you can bitch and complain so much about the little things.

However, to be courteous. You can hire a servant to do all your chores and domestic hardships.

Just ask this person how to get em cheap. You both seem to have the same mindset.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Dhalla

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Well, I thought I was being fairly obviously facetious in my OP but apparently not obvious enough.

That's not to say there wasn't any seriousness in the post. The situation as described is real. And we do have a lot of wasted resources sitting around sucking up government money while doing nothing. Yes, I understand some people are not psychologically capable of doing very much, while others are either disabled or busy with their own kids.

But there's no question there are a multitude of quite healthy, energetic people on government assistance accomplishing absolutely nothing of substance for themselves or anyone else - essentially warehoused by a system which not only provides a disincentive to work - for them, but also drives up the cost of unskilled labour for anyone who might wish to hire (as do minimum wage rules).

So what to do about it? The law of the jungle is a harsh one, but things seem to work quite well there. We have tended to try and put a protective arm around all the weaker members of our "herd" in order to keep that kind of natural law from unduly harming them. This was done with good intentions, of course. But to what end? For every person we help by providing their children with food and shelter do we not hurt another by removing any real purpose to their lives?

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If they could work most of them would, being on welfare is one of the most humiliating things a person can do. It's a last resort option.

It used to be, and perhaps it might be initially, but people seem to get used to it, and lose that embarrassment.

We, as a society, have removed the humiliatioin aspect of a lot of things. Having a child out of wedlock used to be a shameful experience, but not any more. The results, of course, can be seen in all those single mothers on welfare.

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Guest American Woman
It used to be, and perhaps it might be initially, but people seem to get used to it, and lose that embarrassment.

We, as a society, have removed the humiliatioin aspect of a lot of things. Having a child out of wedlock used to be a shameful experience, but not any more. The results, of course, can be seen in all those single mothers on welfare.

So where are all the single fathers who made babies with all those single mothers?

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I have mixed feelings about the entire welfare system, but I believe it is a valuable and vital safety-net. I do NOT think it should be eliminated, for a few reasons....

I've been lucky enough never to have had to collect, but came damn close to it once.

That being said, there is an element of society that choose to abuse the system.

My take is this; if you are CAPABLE of working, but are not, and require welfare to get you through, there should be some wort of work-for-pay system. Whether it's cleaning sidewalks, shoveling driveways for elderly people who cannot do so for themselves, sweeping streets, whatever.

This would accomplish two things. It would get some menial chores done that otherwise may be left unaddressed, and it would lend some dignity to those who actually WANT to work for a living. The other thing it would address is the abusers of the system. If they're forced to do menial work at minimum-or-slightly-above-minimum wage, it would motivate them to get off the system and into a real job.

An aside to this is the day-care situation. A system could be set up whereby daycare is provided by people who are on welfare. Of course the caretakers would have to be screened and monitored, but again, it would lend them some dignity. If they have kids, they can bring them to work where they could be cared for along with whatever kids are being farmed out to them for the day. It would allow daycare which could potentially be far less expensive than many of the daycare facilities now in operation.

For those who are unable to work for medical/psychological reasons, give them what they need to survive and to live comfortably.

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Yes, it's such a shame that you can't hire people and pay them "peanuts" to make your life easier. :lol:

One of the most important things, I would think, would be raising the kids, yet you think it's worth "peanuts," and expect that someone who is qualified for such a position should be willing to do it for "peanuts." But evidently "helping raise the kids" is nothing compared to an "important" job.

Frankly, minding kids is not a job which requires a heavy skill-set. Just about any idiot can and does do it quite succesfully. Vacuuming rugs and washing floors are likewise not overly complex tasks. But let us look at what welfare combined with pogey (often abused as a second welfare) and minimum wage laws have wrought.

I have to pay my cleaning lady $20hr - just to clean floors, cupboards, toilets, etc. This is absurd, on the face of it.

The guy who cuts my grass (and does a lousy job of it) raised his rate to $400 for the season this year - after which I fired him. He thought he was being generous since some other guy charges $500. This is for pushing a gas-powered lawn mower around and doing nothing else. He doesn't even trim the edges.

In winter, kids sometimes stop by and offer to shovel my walk for $20. I decline since I pay another guy $350 to take care of that, though I expect him to try and raise his rate again this year.

This spring I started looking around for someone to build me a small pond in the back yard. This requires digging a hole, laying out a rubbery membrane, then laying rocks around. Essentially. I called a place that specializes in doing this. They charge $60hr per man, in labour

All of the above completely unskilled labour. The only reason people who do it can demand ludicrously high wages is because most of the completely unskilled people who would otherwise be willing to do it are being supported or subsidized by ME in the form of my taxes, and so aren't much inclined to get off their asses and do some physical labour.

And so, all across the country, busy people and seniors who should be able to have someone else take care of these little things in exchange for reasonable payments are doing it themselves because the payments are artificially raised beyond their means. Meanwhile all those unskilled people who ought to be earning their money with hard work are sitting around watching soap operas and reality tv shows, playing video games and getting drunk.

I know I'm not the only one who thinks there's something bizarre about that.

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So where are all the single fathers who made babies with all those single mothers?

Again, back when families existed. A young man who got a young woman pregnant faced overwhelming family and community pressure to marry her, and in almost every case did so.

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I have mixed feelings about the entire welfare system, but I believe it is a valuable and vital safety-net. I do NOT think it should be eliminated, for a few reasons....

I've been lucky enough never to have had to collect, but came damn close to it once.

That being said, there is an element of society that choose to abuse the system.

My take is this; if you are CAPABLE of working, but are not, and require welfare to get you through, there should be some wort of work-for-pay system. Whether it's cleaning sidewalks, shoveling driveways for elderly people who cannot do so for themselves, sweeping streets, whatever.

This would accomplish two things. It would get some menial chores done that otherwise may be left unaddressed, and it would lend some dignity to those who actually WANT to work for a living. The other thing it would address is the abusers of the system. If they're forced to do menial work at minimum-or-slightly-above-minimum wage, it would motivate them to get off the system and into a real job.

An aside to this is the day-care situation. A system could be set up whereby daycare is provided by people who are on welfare. Of course the caretakers would have to be screened and monitored, but again, it would lend them some dignity. If they have kids, they can bring them to work where they could be cared for along with whatever kids are being farmed out to them for the day. It would allow daycare which could potentially be far less expensive than many of the daycare facilities now in operation.

For those who are unable to work for medical/psychological reasons, give them what they need to survive and to live comfortably.

Should society provide the social safety net charitably or should government take the responsibility?

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This would accomplish two things. It would get some menial chores done that otherwise may be left unaddressed, and it would lend some dignity to those who actually WANT to work for a living.

Menial? Where the hell did this idea of "menial" labour come from? What is menial abour doing a hard day's work? What is menial about digging ditches or cutting weeds or fixing broken stone work on a patio?

You know what? I think it came about when men started doing "womens work", like cleaning floors and such. When women did them it was no big deal. They did that at home anyway. They washed clothes at home so what was the big deal about washing someone else's clothes? Cleaning things was what women DID (mostly because men are pigs and really don't care that much most of the time). So why not pick up some coin by doing it for someone else?

But a man with a mop? That's doing menial work!

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I think all CEO's are horribly overpaid and that even the ones that actually work hard are overpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars and bonus's more than their yearly salary are ridiculus.

It's not just CEO's who are well over-paid, you can toss in upper management as well. In my company, we have so-called "Directors" who are paid six figure salaries and have stock options. To be honest, we have no idea what these "Directors" actually do to earn their wages and bonus's, other then to arbitrarily cut the working rank and file wages by 10%, close down offices and write bizarre touchy feely memo's about how much they "value" our dedication and sacrifice during the current economic crisis. The company I work for is fairly large with offices all over North America, including Mexico. At the this point in time I am not at liberty to name it or what we do, but watching the actions of upper Management these past few years makes me wonder how in the hell these people ever got their positions and how the hell can they justify their wages to the shareholders.

As for the welfare issue, I once had the pleasure or should I say displeasure of actually having to swallow my pride and self-respect and accept welfare assistance. Believe me, what I received was not enough to cover my rent, basic utilities and food, let alone leave me enough to pay for gas or bus fare to go to job interviews. I would not wish being placed on welfare on my worse enemy.

Edited by Sabre Rider
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