More Americans Die of Poverty than Terrorism

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

It is your assumption that it is an optimistic one. We have not seen it in practice, so we cannot say.

We have in fact seen it in practice. It was just long enough ago that the results are incomparable. Also when preface with "i think" a statement is naturally one's thought.

Well the government does a great deal to harm these things, so it would be partially their fault. This includes taxes on food, income, apartments, etc, etc. Food taxes especially are incredibly anti-poor. Obama broke his promises of not raising taxes on the middle class and the poor by raising the tobacco taxes, where cigarettes are overwhelmingly smoked by the poorer classes.

Poor people don't pay income tax *been there* there is not an apartment tax, but there are property taxes that the landlords have to pay. If we remove all food tax and tobacco taxes, now what? That's maybe 5-10% of food dollars returned, that's not making a huge difference in the long run unfortunately.

If we had more money to spend to create jobs, we would have more money to give to other people. I believe I am correct in saying that the United States is the most philanthropic nation in the world. Just imagine if we had more of that money in our pockets to spend correctly instead of massive waste by the government.

Hence the reason I made this post.

I absolutely hate Rush Limbaugh...hate hate hate. Ignorant and misguided. But he did say this. "If I knew that my taxes were going to the most needy and that it wasn't incredibly wasted by the government, I would ask for more taxes." That's sort of how I feel.

But we don't live in a perfect world run by a perfect government, so what do we do with the imperfect one we have?

Watched it awhile back. Did it really have any affect on you?

Brought home exactly how on the edge people live even when working full time jobs. Right before i ended up in a very similar place myself, despite the fact that I still had the computers, phone, etc. all the trappings of having more money. It illustrates the point that the working poor are not being lazy, there simply is no way for all of them to get ahead. A relatively few make it, but that income gap is widening, not closing.

Originally Posted by knight_shadow

I'm not sure if you've ever worked in a menial job, but being paid low wages does not increase employee morale and would not positively impact customer service. Employees would be more concerned with "Wow. How am I going to pay rent when I'm spending all of my time here at $3/hr" and not "How can I make the next customer's visit more tolerable."

So, in essence, you'd have more pissed off people running around pissing off customers.

"How am I going to pay for the bus pass at $3/hr" even.

I just don't see how paying so little is anything but exploitation and why we should allow it.