What is my responsibility to the poor?

[Argus]

I used to be poor. I am not poor now. I am not poor because I have a certain measure of skill, intelligence and education, and because I kept poking away at things until I made it. When I was poor, I got little from the government. I have never recieved welfare or pogey. On the other hand, the government relieved me of the burden of paying for any of the services I might need, such as health care. I paid no income taxes, you see. I got GST rebates for my sales taxes.

Now I pay a LOT of taxes. And a lot of those taxes go to helping the poor, either by paying for the things they don't have to pay for (one third of adult Canadians pay no income taxes) or by paying for things like welfare, repeat pogey, and CPP.

But what really IS my responsibility to the poor, morally speaking, ignoring what the government forces me to pay? I don't see that I really have much of a responsibilty. As a member of the community, I do not want children to go uneducated. I do not want anyone dying or being in pain for lack of health care. I do not want anyone starving to death or freezing in the dark. I realize poor people do freeze, starve, and die for lack of services all over the world, but I don't see my responsibility as being as great there, possibly because I know we here in Canada can't really stop it, especially given the horribly bad government in most of these places.

But I do not see it as my responsility to ensure poor people here have a good life. I just don't. I don't think I should be buying them televisions, computers, gameboys, Ipods, stereos, cablevision, cigarettes, cell phones, booze, or hair dye. The difference between the 'poor' here and the poor elsewhere, is that here they tend to have all those things. I lived in a poorer neighborhood for years, two blocks from a public housing complex (which, btw, had a lot of cars parked there). I couldn't afford a car at the time and could never quite understand how people living in public housing could. They always seemed able to afford booze and drugs, too.

I also think that if you rely on the government for your food you ought to be availble to do whatever the government tells you to do. If that means raking leaves or clearing snow, or looking after the elderly, then so be it. Nobody talks about what the responsibilities are of the poor because nobody seems to feel they should have any. I think that's wrong. I think your primary responsiblity ought to be doing whatever you can to standon your own two legs and support yourself.

And btw, if you pay no taxes, you're not supporting yourself. I'm supporting you. I'm paying extra to make up for you paying nothing.

[-1=e^ipi]

I'm not sure that I like the wording of the question.

You use the word 'responsibility' to the poor, which implies there must be moral justification.

Would you prefer to use the question 'Why should society implement policies to help lower income peoples?" which is more objective and can avoid more morality issues?

[cybercoma]

When Mike Harris was the premier of Ontario the Conservatives there setup a hotline so people could report social assistance fraud. You know what they found? The people being reported weren't on social assistance. Frankly, I don't trust anecdotal opinions about what the poor have and don't have because people don't often know who truly is and is not on social assistance.

[Michael Hardner]

You can work on social assistance too, so can you begrudge someone who pays for booze with that ?

[cybercoma]

Also, we need to keep Social Assistance (welfare) and Employment Insurance distinct here too.

[TimG]

You can't legislate morality so if one agrees that a support system is required then abuses will occur. However, support systems need to be designed in a way that people that choose to work are always better off that if they just collected the benefits. This implies a graduated income tested system for non-monetary benefits and welfare benefits that cannot exceed the prevailing wage for low skilled labour.

Edited March 29, 2014 by TimG

[-1=e^ipi]

You can't legislate morality so if one agrees that a support system is required then abuses will occur. However, support systems need to be designed in a way that people that choose to work are always better off that if they just collected the benefits. This implies a graduated income tested system for non-monetary benefits and welfare benefits that cannot exceed the prevailing wage for low skilled labour.

I do not disagree with your first 2 sentences, but the 3rd sentence is not implied from your second. You can have welfare benefits that exceed the prevailing wage if you also income supplement people that have low income wages.

[Argus]

I'm not sure that I like the wording of the question.

You use the word 'responsibility' to the poor, which implies there must be moral justification.

Would you prefer to use the question 'Why should society implement policies to help lower income peoples?" which is more objective and can avoid more morality issues?

I'm interested in the morality issue. I know I have no control over how much of my money the government decides to take away and give to someone else. So there really isn't a lot of point in discussing that. But there appears to be a belief, in society, that if you're making a lot of money, then somehow or other you shouldn't begrudge giving some of it to poor people, that you owe them something for some reason. If you don't like your money being taken away to give to poor people then you're immoral.

[Argus]

When Mike Harris was the premier of Ontario the Conservatives there setup a hotline so people could report social assistance fraud. You know what they found? The people being reported weren't on social assistance. Frankly, I don't trust anecdotal opinions about what the poor have and don't have because people don't often know who truly is and is not on social assistance.

I know that if you're in public housing you're not paying income taxes, and are therefore being subsidized by me. Yet all the public housing complexes have lots of parking spaces. When I was poor, I took the bus everywhere I went. How is it you can be poor enough to be in public housing and still own a car?

I think if I had my way I'd provide rooms for people to live in similar to the long-term rooms at the YM/YWCA, which are fairly small and spartan. They could eat in the cafeteria, and get clothes from the goodwill. I would not provide anything else other than the opportunity to improve their education and job skills. If they wanted extras, like money for tv or beer, they'd have to work at something.

[Argus]

You can work on social assistance too, so can you begrudge someone who pays for booze with that ?

I begrudge anyone whose life is being subsidized by me and who wastes money on booze and cigarettes.

[Argus]

Also, we need to keep Social Assistance (welfare) and Employment Insurance distinct here too.

Why? Pogey is just an alternative welfare mechanism in much of the country. For fishermen, forestry workers and construction people, for example, it's a job subsidy. How many people in this country have collected employment insurance for ten or twenty years straight?

Edited March 29, 2014 by Argus

[cybercoma]

Why? Pogey is just an alternative welfare mechanism in much of the country. For fishermen, forestry workers and construction people, for example, it's a job subsidy. How many people in this country have collected employment insurance for ten or twenty years straight?

They need to be kept distinct because they're different programs with different qualifications and requirements. For the sake of making a clear argument here, it's best to distinguish between the two.

[dre]

You are trying to look at this in terms of a moral obligation but that completely missed the point. The real reason that we help the poor is to protect our own right to private property. If you allow a large and desperate underclass to emerge they would start to vote, and they would vote for people like Chavez.

Programs that prevent the poor from slipping into abject poverty and desperation are actually designed to serve the wealthy.

[-1=e^ipi]

I'm interested in the morality issue.

Personally, I am a nihilist so I do not believe that objective morality exists. Which is why I wanted you to rephrase the question.

I know I have no control over how much of my money the government decides to take away and give to someone else.

You have some control since you can vote and talk to others to change your opinions. Furthermore, the fact that your behaviour is affected by things such as level of taxation should always be of concern to policy makers. (I.e. your control is small but non-zero).

And regardless of if you have control or not should not demerit the question of asking if income redistributing policies are good for society.

But there appears to be a belief, in society, that if you're making a lot of money, then somehow or other you shouldn't begrudge giving some of it to poor people, that you owe them something for some reason. If you don't like your money being taken away to give to poor people then you're immoral.

I agree that this belief and similar beliefs are common in our society and I do not agree with these beliefs. However, that does not mean that some level of income redistribution isn't good. I'll give you 3 'strong' arguments that can be used to justify some income redistribution:

Crime Argument:

Poorer people tend to commit crimes at a greater rate. There are a number of reasons why this occurs but this is expected even for rational individuals. Poorer people have less to lose by committing crimes (and roughly the same amount to gain), so poor people have a lower expected cost to commit crimes. This means that there is a greater expected net benefit to commit a crime if you are poor. So the result is poorer people tend to commit crimes. If you income supplement poor people then this reduces the crime rate (of course this will make the richer people poorer, which will increase crime, but it will not be enough to offset the crime reduction due to diminishing marginal utility of income).

Human Capital Argument:

Individuals accumulate human capital throughout their lifetime. This means education, skills, etc. It takes a long time and many resources for individuals to acquire this human capital (they have to be raised from birth, go into the public school system, maybe do university, maybe take various training sessions,etc.). Note that most of the costs of giving someone human capital is not internalized and most of it is paid for by the government and/or parents. If people have extremely low income they are at a higher risk of dying, more susceptible to physical and metal illnesses, malnutrition, poor fitness, etc. The effect is that if a society has more people in low income situations, it will have a higher rate of human capital depreciation, which means a lower level of human capital (which is expensive to replace as now you have to have someone have a new child, have them be raised for 2 decades, etc.). The reduction in human capital per capita means a lower income / less production per capita, which means society is not better off. Now if you were to say 'well we could just have less people, so the effect on human capital per capita does not change if a poor person dies', you forget for a society like Canada, we have an extremely low population density and could benefit from economies of scale. So either way, society is worse off from the higher rate of human capital depreciation.

Utilitarian Argument:

If we were to make a claim that society should try to maximize the sum of the utilities of the individuals. And furthermore, assume that the utilities of individuals (as a function of income) are positive, have a positive first derivative, have a negative second derivative and are roughly the same for all individuals (these are fairly reasonable assumptions since it is just saying people prefer more income, they have diminishing returns to income and we value everyone as roughly equal). If these assumptions hold, then if we were to perform a very small amount of income redistribution from a rich person to a poor person (and we start from the walrasian/Market equilibrium), and we also assume that the implementation costs of implementing a redistribution program are relatively small, then as long as the loss of economic efficiency from that income transfer is less than 1, there will exist some level of income redistribution that increases societies overall utility. Note that large levels of income redistribution will decrease society's overall utility due to increasing effects of loss of economic efficiency.

[Michael Hardner]

I begrudge anyone whose life is being subsidized by me and who wastes money on booze and cigarettes.

I was going to withdraw the word 'begrudge' because it's rooted in emotion, but then I thought maybe that is a good way to think about it. Seeing people, and hearing of people who are largely on subsidy (I use 'largely' to distinguish between people who receive direct sustainability payments, versus those who work in subsidized, or government protected industries, or those who work directly for the government) seems to evoke reactions in a lot of people, with 'scorn' and 'pity' being at the top of the list.

What if we harnessed the energy of that emotional reaction and started a new program that worked directly on individuals to work out why they're unable to take care of themselves, and to try to find answers that are particular to them ? The program would recognize that those emotions are actually paired together, and provide a kind of framing context around problems that would speak (at least partly) to people who are interested in these cases.

[Argus]

You are trying to look at this in terms of a moral obligation but that completely missed the point. The real reason that we help the poor is to protect our own right to private property. If you allow a large and desperate underclass to emerge they would start to vote, and they would vote for people like Chavez.

Programs that prevent the poor from slipping into abject poverty and desperation are actually designed to serve the wealthy.

There is that theory, yes. And It's not a foolish one. After all, why would one third of Canadians pay no income taxes other than that the government is currying favour with those voters?

We tend to forget that there was a day, not all that far back in history, when most taxes were paid by corporations. The only individuals who paid income taxes were the rich and land owners (mostly also rich). On the other hand, all those ordinary people who paid no taxes got no vote either, nor health care, nor any other government services to speak of.

So in a sense, the poor have a pretty sweet deal today. They don't pay any taxes, and in return they get the same rights as everyone else, including the right to vote. They get lots of social benefits, including free health care. Some even get free housing and monthly allowances. This is called equality, and it's a nice thing, but there is no equality of responsility involved.

Back in the day, if you wanted to eat, you worked at something, worked hard. If that meant working in a coal mine all day, or a freezing sawmill, or being the maid for some better off woman in exchange for room and board and a pittance then that was what you did, and you considered yourself damned lucky to get it. A desperate underclass emerges when there are no jobs of any kind. That is, when no matter how eager for work they are and how hard they work, the people can't feed themselves, and watch their children starve. I don't see that happening in Canada. Was there a lot of desperate starvation before social welfare programs were introduced? I don't remember ever reading about it.

And in any event I'm not suggesting we let poor people starve or freeze to death in the dark. I consider there to be a moral obligation to help in that regard. I don't see my moral obligation to go any further, however.

[Argus]

Personally, I am a nihilist so I do not believe that objective morality exists. Which is why I wanted you to rephrase the question.

Why is a nihilist even bothering to read topics in the morals and ethics section?

Crime Argument:

The crime argument doesn't work given crime rose in tandem with the introduction and increase in social programs and social benefits.

Human Capital Argument:

This one seems to be suggesting we need to subsidize the poor so they don't die young, thus costing us a lot to replace them. But what if the poor are of no objective value to society's economic health? Certainly some of them are not, the ones who produce nothing whatever and only consume. Those who do actually work are at least producing something, though perhaps not enough to offset their cost to society in terms of social services given them. Still, they are doing work which needs doing.

I'm not convinced the poor in this country are destined to die younger than others. They have access to largely the same health services. Their earlier deaths tend to be due to ignorance (bad eating) a sedentary lifestyle (poor health), and the overconsumption of alcohol and drugs. These are educatonal issues. Or if we instead took control of the poor and made them live in dormitory style buildings, where they would be required to exercise before eating, and made them eat at the building cafeteria which had only healthy food their lives would be greatly extended.

Granted, there is a cost involved in that but I'm not begrudging the cost of provoding for the food, clothing, education and housing of the poor. I'm suggesting I am under no further oblitation than that bare minimum.

Utilitarian Argument:

You are making enormous assumptions here. You assume the income redistribution will be efficient and have a minimal cost, which we know is not correct. You assume all are equal, which we also know is not correct. And you use the term 'small" to describe the income redistribution without defining the term.

[Argus]

I was going to withdraw the word 'begrudge' because it's rooted in emotion, but then I thought maybe that is a good way to think about it. Seeing people, and hearing of people who are largely on subsidy (I use 'largely' to distinguish between people who receive direct sustainability payments, versus those who work in subsidized, or government protected industries, or those who work directly for the government) seems to evoke reactions in a lot of people, with 'scorn' and 'pity' being at the top of the list.

You are redefining things to suit your own biases here, including people you suggest are 'partly subsidized' if they work in 'government protected industries' or work directly for the government, and then completely excluding the one third of Canadians who pay no income taxes. Let me put things in a more realistic frame. If you pay no income taxes, then regardless of what you do for a living, those who do pay income taxes are subsidizing your life. As for those who work in 'government protected industries' or directly for the government, they don't really enter into the conversation provided their skills earn sufficient income to pay income taxes.

Even this is simplifying things given people might earn enough income to pay income taxes, but are still being subsidized by others through the wide variety of deductions. For example, even if you do earn a decent salary, but have three children and a wife who does not work, chances are I am still helping support your family's lifestyle.

What if we harnessed the energy of that emotional reaction and started a new program that worked directly on individuals to work out why they're unable to take care of themselves, and to try to find answers that are particular to them ? The program would recognize that those emotions are actually paired together, and provide a kind of framing context around problems that would speak (at least partly) to people who are interested in these cases.

The sixties were before my time, so I'm afraid this strange flashback you've typed doesn't really strike a chord with me.

Edited March 30, 2014 by Argus

[Michael Hardner]

We tend to forget that there was a day, not all that far back in history, when most taxes were paid by corporations. The only individuals who paid income taxes were the rich and land owners (mostly also rich). On the other hand, all those ordinary people who paid no taxes got no vote either, nor health care, nor any other government services to speak of.

What era is this ? Prior to universal suffrage and yet corporations paid most taxes ?

So in a sense, the poor have a pretty sweet deal today. They don't pay any taxes, and in return they get the same rights as everyone else, including the right to vote. They get lots of social benefits, including free health care. Some even get free housing and monthly allowances. This is called equality, and it's a nice thing, but there is no equality of responsility involved.

I think there's something to this but we need to agree, as a society, as to what this person's rights, privileges and responsibilities are.

[Michael Hardner]

You are redefining things to suit your own biases here, including people you suggest are 'partly subsidized' if they work in 'government protected industries' or work directly for the government, and then completely excluding the one third of Canadians who pay no income taxes.

You're misreading my post - I excluded partially subsidized people right off the top. For clarity, I'm talking about "people on welfare" as I am guessing you'd refer to them.

For example, even if you do earn a decent salary, but have three children and a wife who does not work, chances are I am still helping support your family's lifestyle.

Including such people is a much wider conversation. If you want to have that conversation we can, but it's a different question. The government 'subsidizes' a lot of things, by direct payments or by allowing monopolies.

The sixties were before my time, so I'm afraid this strange flashback you've typed doesn't really strike a chord with me.

I typed 'new', which refers to the future actually.

[kimmy]

I go through the same sort of thing each year, at roughly the time I am filling out my taxes. Seeing how much money the government takes from my salary all added up in one place kind of stirs up the emotions.

And in any event I'm not suggesting we let poor people starve or freeze to death in the dark. I consider there to be a moral obligation to help in that regard. I don't see my moral obligation to go any further, however.

I agree about this much, but would add a couple more things... the necessities of getting a job. We could provide a mailing address and telephone, for example. A transit pass, maybe. I don't actually know what we provide for people, but I think that if someone's problem is that they can't get work, having a phone and a mailing address and a way to get to work would be helpful a job.

I'm not sure who we're actually talking about. There are some people who would like to work but can't get jobs for some reason or another. There are other people who have no interest in working and have figured out how to get free money from the government some way or another... fake medical disability in one case I'm personally familiar with. There's still more who are at the fringes of society who I have no idea how they continue to survive. I don't know what proportion of people fall into which categories. I think there's different sets of problems in each case and there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

In the bigger picture, what's the actual breakdown of money spent assisting the poor in the overall budget? How does it stack up against subsidies to big businesses, for example? And how much overlap is there in services provided through different programs? For example in the case of aboriginal people, who constitute an overwhelming majority of street-people where I live... do we have Canada Human Resources and Indian Affairs throwing money at the same problems from different angles?

-k

[eyeball]

I get a hoot listening to back-in-the-day arguments that wax eloquently about the charming attitudes that existed at the dawn of the industrial age especially from people who disregard the 60's as ancient history.

In any case and looking forward, we've entered an era that contains almost 10 times as many human beings as the good ol days on a planet who's natural resources are being drawn down past the point of sustainability.

A return to the hard-assed moral imperatives of the 1900's and the sort of labour eliminating automation that is being projected makes the future something to really look forward to. I know it turns people's stomachs but I'm afraid holding hands and singing Kumbiya is the only way forward, otherwise expect violence, and a lot of it. Of course it'll take a hell of a lot more effort to accomplish the former now than it would have in the 60's, so you better roll up your sleeves.

[-1=e^ipi]

Why is a nihilist even bothering to read topics in the morals and ethics section?

Because subjective morals still exist even if objective morals do not. Furthermore, decision rules can still exist, and methodology for finding the best course of action in order to benefit society overall can exist.

The crime argument doesn't work given crime rose in tandem with the introduction and increase in social programs and social benefits.

Correlation does not imply causation and I would like to see the 'evidence' for your claim of a correlation. Also, the crime argument I gave is similar to what Dre argued in some of his/her posts (of course the wording used is very different). But it is well known that poor people commit more crime.

This one seems to be suggesting we need to subsidize the poor so they don't die young, thus costing us a lot to replace them.

Not quite. The depreciation can also include things like the deterioration of a person's physical or mental health due to being poorer (poor people are more at risk of physical and mental health issues).

But what if the poor are of no objective value to society's economic health? Certainly some of them are not, the ones who produce nothing whatever and only consume. Those who do actually work are at least producing something, though perhaps not enough to offset their cost to society in terms of social services given them. Still, they are doing work which needs doing.

Certainly, there are some people that might not want to contribute to society ever, but you only need a fraction of the poorer people to want to work and contribute to society to justify the existence of the human capital effect. Furthermore, even if an individual is taking more from 'the rest of society' than they produce, that does not mean that increasing their human capital won't be beneficial for society (since they become more productive). Also, you are mixing up 'cost to society' with 'cost to the rest of society' since you omit that the poor individual in question is part of society.

Another thing you need to remember is that people are not poor their entire lives. There is a large change in a person's income status as they age and income mobility in most developed countries is relatively high. If a person is poor and you reduce depreciation of their human capital due to income redistribution, later on they might be richer (and still have that undepreciated human capital) so they will be more productive than if no income redistribution took place.

Another important point on the human capital argument is that there are human capital & technological spillover effects. Not everything can be internalized in society (particularly people participating in the free market place of ideas), and just by being surrounded by others with a higher level of human capital, your level of human capital will be slightly higher via some sort of osmosis effect of human capital. Example: if you are surrounded by individuals that know a lot about neuroscience, then changes are over time you will learn a bit of neuroscience just by talking to them.

I'm not convinced the poor in this country are destined to die younger than others.

There is no 'destiny' required. You only need a correlation & causation from income level to physical/mental health.

Their earlier deaths tend to be due to ignorance (bad eating) a sedentary lifestyle (poor health), and the overconsumption of alcohol and drugs. These are educatonal issues.

Yeah.. that is sort of the point. Poorer people make worse decisions due to lower levels of human capital/income, which can cause greater human capital depreciation.

Or if we instead took control of the poor and made them live in dormitory style buildings, where they would be required to exercise before eating, and made them eat at the building cafeteria which had only healthy food their lives would be greatly extended.

That sounds unfeasible or expensive to implement.

Granted, there is a cost involved in that but I'm not begrudging the cost of provoding for the food, clothing, education and housing of the poor. I'm suggesting I am under no further oblitation than that bare minimum.

And society is more favourable to supporting food, clothing, education & housing because these things have a greater effect on human capital. So even if you do not explicitly say it, you implicitly realize the importance of human capital. The only problem is that you have this strange concept of a 'bare-minimum' cut off value where if you support someone after this value there is no change in the human capital. There will still be a change if you go beyond the 'bare-minimum' but it will just be much smaller.

You are making enormous assumptions here. You assume the income redistribution will be efficient and have a minimal cost, which we know is not correct. You assume all are equal, which we also know is not correct. And you use the term 'small" to describe the income redistribution without defining the term.

The assumptions I made are not unreasonable and the conclusion is true under more circumstances. U > 0 is somewhat unnecessary but people generally agree that you get positive utility by having stuff. U' > 0 just means that people prefer to be richer. U'' < 0 just means that people get diminishing marginal returns to utility (i.e. $1 to a poor person means more than $1 to a rich person). The idea of having 'roughly equal' utility functions for individuals is primarily to exclude extreme cases where you have rich people by much more than you value poor people (should society value a person who is twice as rich as a poor person as twice the value as the poor person? I think most people would not agree with this). Obviously, different individuals have different utility functions (some people prefer jam over peanut butter for example) but we are primarily concerned with their overall utility based on their income if they are free to do with their income whatever they want.

Your claim that I assumed income redistribution is efficient is completely false. I specifically said that inefficiency of redistribution can take place. I merely excluded the case of 100% inefficiency (i.e. if I try to take $1 from a rich person and give it to a poor person that that entire $1 will be lost due to loss of economic efficiency, bureaucrats, etc.).

The initial implementation costs of setting up a redistribution program (i.e. costs independent of the amount redistributed that are zero if you do zero redistribution and positive otherwise) just have to be sufficiency small compared to the change in society's net utility from the performing the redistribution (which based on empirical analysis that I will not get into is roughly correct).

But if you have these conditions (or similar conditions) then 'small' amounts of redistribution will increase society's net utility and 'large' amounts of redistribution will decrease society's net utility. It is a matter of choosing the correct value.

Your question on 'small' cannot be answered without information on the specific utility functions of individuals, the economic loss in efficiency of redistribution, etc. I can't just arbitrary say '$5 is small'. But if you want me to do the mathematical proof that a small income-inequality-reducing redistribution from the Walrasian equilibrium leads to an increase in the sum of the utilities of individuals in a society then I can provide it for you.

Edited March 30, 2014 by -1=e^ipi

[Argus]

You're misreading my post - I excluded partially subsidized people right off the top. For clarity, I'm talking about "people on welfare" as I am guessing you'd refer to them.

Including such people is a much wider conversation. If you want to have that conversation we can, but it's a different question. The government 'subsidizes' a lot of things, by direct payments or by allowing monopolies.

But I'm specifically not just talking about people on welfare. As I said, if you pay no income taxes and get your sales taxes reimbursed you are essentially getting a free ride, whether you work or not. That's 1/3rd the population. The reason I brought up the old days was that if you didn't pay tax in the old days you didn't get to vote. You were not considered to be an equal member of society. But there are no obligations today. You are a full and equal member of society with one equal vote whether you contribute tens of millions in taxes or contribute nothing at all.

Now if you' contribute tens of millions, let's not kid ourselves, you almost certainly have enormous influence, far more than most people. But what about the big majority of people in the middle who pay tens of thousands in taxes? What does that buy you as compared to the guy who contributes nothing? Nothing.

So the question is, should I feel fine with this, as a lot of people seem to think I should be, given I have a high income? Is it immoral to think ill of them and not want my money going to people who contribute nothing? More than half my money goes in taxes now. Heck, I'm in a 48% tax bracket just for income taxes. That doesn't count sales and service taxes, or municipal taxes. It doesn't seem to me unreasonable to look at these other people who pay nothing and wonder how it is that they're "poor" enough to not be contributing anything, and yet, not really all that poor.

[Michael Hardner]

So the question is, should I feel fine with this, as a lot of people seem to think I should be, given I have a high income? Is it immoral to think ill of them and not want my money going to people who contribute nothing? More than half my money goes in taxes now. Heck, I'm in a 48% tax bracket just for income taxes. That doesn't count sales and service taxes, or municipal taxes. It doesn't seem to me unreasonable to look at these other people who pay nothing and wonder how it is that they're "poor" enough to not be contributing anything, and yet, not really all that poor.

Ok, I think I understand now. It seems you think you're already doing enough for those sometimes called the working poor. They're not really "all that poor", as you point out, so you'd like them to be more poor. You have answered the question, it seems, by saying your responsibility is currently more than it should be.

If we're just going to answer the question individually on the thread, then that's fine. And I think that the answer to the question will be worked out through politics, as always.

Personally, I think that we should be doing more than pushing wages down and cutting a cheque for those who can't or won't work.