Liberals

[cashmoney]

I'm tired of hearing all this crap about how Kerry would be so much better as president than Bush. One thing that Kerry has promised to do, if elected, would be to roll back the tax cut that Bush gave us. I don't know about the rest of you, but I definitely don't want that to happen.

I'm reg'd as a Republican. Even though I don't make $200,000+ a year at the moment, I still don't think it is right for him to do that. If Kerry is elected that means he'll be in office for 4 years. Who knows, I might be making that amount of money a yr in the next 4 years. I was talking this over with my dad and found out that he got a tax break of $60,000 because of Bush. I admit, most Americans don't make $200,000+ a year. But let me ask some of you liberals out there, if you were making that much money and some politician wanted to tax you more because some lazy ass people wont get up and do something with their lives, why should we have to give more to the crackheads, prostitutes, welfare greedy people out there when bust our asses?

For all you liberals out there....think about this:

Since just about everyone on this site is/has been in college, lets say you are busting your ass making good grades....got a 3.0 GPA or better. Now lets say all your friends are out there partying their asses off, getting drunk all week long, dont show up to class half the time and never do their homework or study and they are just barely getting by with C and D grades. You, you're never going out...study every night, you even miss some football games inorder to stay ahead in the class and you basically give up any serious social life inorder to do good in college. Now, lets say some politician decides that they're going make sure all students have the same average GPA or better and for those of you who busted your ass, they're going going to take away points from your GPA and give them to those lazy students inorder for everyone to fair well. How would you feel? How would you like it if you were busting ass to get in med school but your GPA was knocked down because some football player had shitty grades or some frat boy got way too drunk his first semester and needed some of your grades so he could stay in school? Well, thats basically how John Kerry feels about the tax cut Bush gave. Seriously, think about it.

I don't know about some of you, but it is my view that the Government's purpose is to protect our people. They're supposed to make sure we have a good military, make sure we have roads, helps us when there are natural disasters, protect our rights and uphold the constitution.

Right now our country is serisously divided in half. John Kerry has made mention doing exactly the opposite of president Bush. He's the most liberal of all the Democrats. He's made mention of investing in science and making advances in technology. Well, do you really think we, as a world, need advances in technology? The last time a bunch of scientist got together and made a forever changing discovery was when we made the Atomic bomb. How many of you think the world is a safer place since nuclear weapons came in to play? There are limits as to how far things should be allowed to go. I'm not saying that we should not look in to finding cures for dieseases like Parkinsons's, Cancer, Alzheimers, etc etc etc. I'm all for it. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a limit set, a threshold that must not be crossed when it comes to science and technology.

Just my political 2 cents for the month.

[Lil' Hannah]

So what you're saying here is that low income families don't deserve to have a decent education, good healthcare, a chance to get ahead?

And while welfare abuse exists, please don't assume that everyone that needs government assistance is lazy, a crackhead, or a prostitute.

[RACooper]

Originally posted by cashmoney
Right now our country is serisously divided in half. John Kerry has made mention doing exactly the opposite of president Bush. He's the most liberal of all the Democrats. He's made mention of investing in science and making advances in technology. Well, do you really think we, as a world, need advances in technology? The last time a bunch of scientist got together and made a forever changing discovery was when we made the Atomic bomb. How many of you think the world is a safer place since nuclear weapons came in to play? There are limits as to how far things should be allowed to go. I'm not saying that we should not look in to finding cures for dieseases like Parkinsons's, Cancer, Alzheimers, etc etc etc. I'm all for it. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a limit set, a threshold that must not be crossed when it comes to science and technology.

Just my political 2 cents for the month.

Wow the first part of your post I thought you were decribing how bitter Bush's classmates must have felt to see him succeed after slacking-off while they busted their asses...

As for technology, I'm all for continued funding and advancement. While you decry the evil that the Atomic bomb brought, you leave out all of the positive spin-offs of the Atomic bomb... advances in power, medicine, computers, and telecommunitations. Take for example the method of commincation that you use daily... the internet decended from a military defense communication network designed to co-ordinate nuclear defense. I will never oppose the advance of science, because you can never predict the results of any advance, and the benifits it might bring.

[cashmoney]

Originally posted by Lil' Hannah
So what you're saying here is that low income families don't deserve to have a decent education, good healthcare, a chance to get ahead?

No one ever said getting ahead in life was easy nor does it happen over night. In most cases it takes generations. For example, my great grandfather was a farmer. This is my Dad's grandfather. He owned 400 acres in North Florida. Couldn't read very well, hadn't had more than a shitty highschool education and health care was almost non existant. He planted pine trees on 200 of the 400 acres...waited 15 years, sold the wood and the land as well as the remainder 200 acres. Sold everything. Everything he was/knew about was gone. He didnt have anything except a farm. They were poor in a sense. Then he sent my grandfather to college and then to law school. My grandfather got ahead by nothing but hard work. Didnt really have much growing up. One christmas, he told me, the family didnt have any money and when my grandfather told his dad he wanted something for christmas to play with...he cut a hole in the center of his pants and told him "there you go". My grandfather sent my father to college and then to law school and now my father had sent me to college. The thing is, it took my family generations to get where we are. People don't understand, getting ahead doesnt happen over night and you can't rely on the government to help you get there. In todays world everyone wants other people do more for them instead of helping theirselves. When you hear about working mothers or fathers who have to hold down 2 jobs just to survive and make ends meat.....I'm sorry, but thats just how it is. Hopefully their kids will grow up realizing how hard it was for their parents and hopefully make something of theirselves and then their children as well. My grandfather remembered when his dad had to go out and shoot a hog or deer for meat many times during the depression or else there would have been no meat to eat. This is why I look up to atheletes. Most atheletes are where they are because of hard work. Nothing but hard work. Most of them come from families that werent very well off. Do you realize how much discipline it takes to work out 5-7 days a week from the time you are 10 yrs old until the time your body gives out on you around 30+ years of age? Alot. Fact is....its not right to take away from families who work hard, put everything on the line and take huge risks to get ahead just so you can improve the lives of those who say they can't do it on their own.

[cashmoney]

Originally posted by RACooper
As for technology, I'm all for continued funding and advancement. While you decry the evil that the Atomic bomb brought, you leave out all of the positive spin-offs of the Atomic bomb... advances in power, medicine, computers, and telecommunitations. Take for example the method of commincation that you use daily... the internet decended from a military defense communication network designed to co-ordinate nuclear defense. I will never oppose the advance of science, because you can never predict the results of any advance, and the benifits it might bring.

Yea, but do you or do you not agree that a standard should be set or a threshold drawn that must not be crossed? I mean, with advancement also come destruction. Einstein as well as Oppenheimer both thought the same....who are we to play god?

[PhiPsiRuss]

Originally posted by Lil' Hannah
So what you're saying here is that low income families don't deserve to have a decent education

A decent education is the responsibility of local communities. The US spends more money on education in absolute terms, per person, as a percentage of GDP, per person as a percentage of GDP, etc. then we ever have in our history. There is nothing that the federal government can do to improve education except to get out of the way of state and local governments.

Supporting increased federal involvement in education is paramount to supporting ineffective education for "low income families" and all others.

[Shortfuse]

Tax cut that you got? Cashmoney, I hope you didn't spend it all in one place.

The kneejerk reaction to defend Bush is something to behold.

[hoosier]

Many of the poor and deprived are simply living with the results of their own choices.

If they choose to drop out of school, and choose to use drugs, and choose to become parents without marriage, they are likely to be poor and dependent on welfare - and many of the women have several children with assorted fathers, no marketable skills, and no prospects for imjprovement.

In spite of their situation, these people have a vote, and they have discovered that they can vote for a living.

They can vote for whomever promises the most welfare, the most weeks of unemployment funds, and the most benefits.

Most often, this vote goes for the democrats.

It's sickening.

[AlphaGamDiva]

i'm surprised this thread isn't already 200 pages

[AlphaSigOU]

Originally posted by AlphaGamDiva
i'm surprised this thread isn't already 200 pages

Give it time, Mon... give it time!

[swissmiss04]

Originally posted by hoosier
Many of the poor and deprived are simply living with the results of their own choices.

If they choose to drop out of school, and choose to use drugs, and choose to become parents without marriage, they are likely to be poor and dependent on welfare - and many of the women have several children with assorted fathers, no marketable skills, and no prospects for imjprovement.

In spite of their situation, these people have a vote, and they have discovered that they can vote for a living.

They can vote for whomever promises the most welfare, the most weeks of unemployment funds, and the most benefits.

Most often, this vote goes for the democrats.

It's sickening.

To a certain extent, I agree with you. Not all people receiving some form of government assistance (i.e. welfare, educational funding, farm subsidies) are receiving it because of their missteps in life. I am receiving federal money for college, and my only misstep was not being born to rich parents! In this day and age, there's no reason why a person can't finish high school (at the very least) and find some sort of job. It may not be fun, enlightening, or enriching, but bills don't pay themselves.
The culture of entitlement that has developed here over the past 30 or so years is pretty disgusting. If that mentality was present during the infancy of our nation, I shudder to think what we would be today.
I know a few people who are only voting for Bush because of his tax cut plan. They disagree w/ him on almost every other single point. That, IMO, is equally sickening.

[RACooper]

Originally posted by cashmoney
Yea, but do you or do you not agree that a standard should be set or a threshold drawn that must not be crossed? I mean, with advancement also come destruction. Einstein as well as Oppenheimer both thought the same....who are we to play god?

Alright... how do we determine what is the limits are? How do we limit what avenues of research we can explore? I will never advocate a scientific threshold barrier... it smacks to much of Ludites or other fanatical opposition to science. Every country or culture has ethical or moral limitations to how research is conducted, but I tremble at the thought of any fanatical (religious, political, economic) group dictating what is "okay" science or technology.

Now as for the statement "who are we to play God?"... taken from a humanist standpoint, there is no God per se, but the inherent divinty of man acting under the imperitive to improve or grow. As for a religious perspective, God gave humanity free choice, for better or worse, but if we limit knowledge or research on religious grounds we are then holding ourselves to the standards of the so called "Dark Ages".

[GRhinoUK]

I was going to spend a lot of time on this but I felt myself becoming more and more drained by the level of blind ignorance my post was going to draw from both sides. Instead I'll say this, when people can stop being so damned selfish and looking out only for themselves, things will get better. There is a delicate balance that has been lost in this country between social responsibility and private gain. Unfortunately bipartisanship has all but vanished in it's true form. Just get that in your heads. Until people stop electing hardliners from either end, no matter who wins, America at large will lose.

And hoosier, your post is the perfect example of someone who doesn't know a thing except the same old escuses that have been told over and over again. It's one thing to be out of work because you're a drug addict or lazy, in which case i have no pity at all. It is something else to be plunged into inescapable poverty due to circumstances you could neither foresee nor prevent. More often than not, the latter is the reason people are homeless. But then I guess it's easier to say "most of them deserved it" and not feel guilt than to hear soemone's story and struggles and continue to not care.

[Betarulz!]

Originally posted by cashmoney

For all you liberals out there....think about this:

Since just about everyone on this site is/has been in college, lets say you are busting your ass making good grades....got a 3.0 GPA or better. Now lets say all your friends are out there partying their asses off, getting drunk all week long, dont show up to class half the time and never do their homework or study and they are just barely getting by with C and D grades. You, you're never going out...study every night, you even miss some football games inorder to stay ahead in the class and you basically give up any serious social life inorder to do good in college. Now, lets say some politician decides that they're going make sure all students have the same average GPA or better and for those of you who busted your ass, they're going going to take away points from your GPA and give them to those lazy students inorder for everyone to fair well. How would you feel? How would you like it if you were busting ass to get in med school but your GPA was knocked down because some football player had shitty grades or some frat boy got way too drunk his first semester and needed some of your grades so he could stay in school? Well, thats basically how John Kerry feels about the tax cut Bush gave. Seriously, think about it.

The problem with this "logic" is that when comparing it to the real world and the point you are trying to make, you fail to take into account the difference in conditions that make poor areas poor and affluent areas rich.

I know of no liberals who are for the equality of success. There is a dire need however in terms of equality of opportunity. I know this because I can look at myself and realize that I've been given a lot of chances to succeed not because of the work I've done, but because I live in an upper middle class suburb. My HS friends parents are all lawyers, doctors, and engineers. I'd say probably a good 15% own their own successful small business, and I'm willing to bet that probably 75% of them have degrees beyond a Bachelors degree. I look at my HS and I realize that it's only been open for 10 years. I know that when I went there, each classroom had at least 1 computer and many had 3, 4, or 5. We had 3 very large computer labs. I had new textbooks in at least one class every year, and I got the chance to do all sorts of unique things. Compare this to an inner city school, or that of a small rural school district like so many of the people I've met in college and there is no comparison. They didn't have computers in every classroom, they had art and music programs cut, they had to learn using older textbooks that didn't have the most recent history or discoveries covered in them. And this is just in my experience. I look at my little brother, and he's going to a HS that opened just last August, and every student there got a free palm pilot, the 1/2 the classrooms have these white boards that are called "smart boards" that when you use special markers they will change and edit powerpoint presentations. When they read a novel in english, they don't receive the book in print, they get it beamed to their palms and they read it on that.

Knowing this, does it surprise me that I had no problem getting into college, and if I had wanted to go into debt that I could have gone practically anywhere? And all this is only a discussion of the physical, tangible assets my school had. Compare the fact that the average salary for a teacher in my former school district is in the top 5 in the state of Kansas, we also got the best teachers, the ones who had multiple job offers because of their skills.

All this adds up to show that I got opportunities that other kids didn't. I didn't have to work nearly as hard to get to college as many of the people I've met in college. Where the vast majority of the people I graduated with went to some sort of 4 year school, I talk to friends from rural nebraska where they were among only a handful of students that even left the town. They tell me stories about going home to find out that 4 more girls they graduated with are having their second kid.

I know for a fact that there many kids who worked 1000x harder than I did in HS to get good grades and do the right thing, but they didn't get the opportunity to go to college. They worked harder than I did, but simply because of where I grew up, I got the advantages, and people I grew up with who didn't work at all have gotten farther than some of those kids.

Everyone wants to think that the US is a meritocracy, where you are rewarded by the amount and quality of the work that you do, but until everyone can start out on a far more equal setting then that idealization will never, ever come true. It is that chance to become more equal, where the life that people live is truly determined by the choices they make, that Liberals are working for. Only then will youre little analogy be true to the real world in the United States.

[swissmiss04]

Originally posted by Betarulz!
[B]
I know of no liberals who are for the equality of success. There is a dire need however in terms of equality of opportunity.

That's a very astute observation. I think the misconception that many people have about liberalism is that they're all about free handouts and making everyone the same in pseudo-Communist fashion. This is not the case. It's stupid to think that everyone can be successful and influential. On the other hand, it's wrong that people are denied opportunities because of their race, religion, or SES. What people choose to do with the opportunities given determines their success. I am all for offering equal opportunities for everyone. I am not for bailing people out because they blew it and chose to do drugs or commit crimes.

Saying that all liberals are for free handouts is like saying that all conservatives are against helping poor people.