blue13326 on January 16, 2013 at 11:36 PM

Agreed. He has a better point on SS disability. It is apparently easy to defraud that system.

However, shipping manufacturing jobs overseas is not that bad. It reduces costs for everyone, freeing up capital to be plowed into new companies and new industries. Electronic call switching threw most phone operators out of work but enabled the Internet and cell phones.

A standard Bible is about 1,000 pages long. The federal government by itself puts out 70,000 pages of new regulations every year. If you’re looking for reasons why we don’t have lots of people stepping up to start companies and employ people, perhaps that is a good place to start.

but what, you get maybe a hundred bucks or two a month to eat

Wrong. In VA, SNAP provides (as of 2009) $526 for a family of three, every month. That assumes $0 monthly “net income” – but there is a whole formula for figuring your net income ($0 doesn’t mean you have no other money flowing in). It also appears you lose about $1 in SNAP for every $3 in income in that column. In that column the money peters out around $1,700+/month – which is nothing to sneeze at for an income.

You can’t even eat off that.

blue13326 on January 16, 2013 at 11:36 PM

Bullhockey. If you don’t eat out, you can feed a family of three off a few hundred dollars a month. Now, that will be changing as the economy continues to stagnate, but it’s still true as of now.

You have to actually work at it, though – shop smartly, cook from scratch, and not drink sodas and such. If you spend all that money on cheese doodles and coke zero, it will disappear pretty fast. I could feed my family pretty decently on $526 a month. Heck, it cost me ~$140 for Christmas dinner (including premade desserts) and some extra potatoes and vegetables – which I used to make leftover soup – and it mostly fed my family for two weeks. The ham lasted another week as sandwich material for my kid. (And, if you do the math, $140 is a little more than 1/4 of $526, and it worked out to more than 1/4 of a month’s worth of eating.)

Or the huge increase in energy costs, which reduces ecnomic output.

blue13326 on January 16, 2013 at 11:36 PM

I’ll agree this has a huge impact… are you actually going to oppose green energy, fracking bans, drilling bans, and actually try to make this better?

You’d better get on the left’s butt about this STAT… they’re the ones making sure energy prices keep going up; we’ve got a Secretary of Energy who WANTED Europe priced gasoline after all.

And before you defend the welfare state; and claim it DOESN’T discourage work… try this.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-tragedy-americas-welfare-state

A single mom with one kid is BETTER OFF with MORE disposable income making $29,000 and getting government benefits than making $69,000.

As for a family?

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak

The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year

But no, there is no problem there… it’s all something else. You should encourage minimum wage workers to stay minimum wage; because making more will be worse for them. That can’t hurt anything.

How about the fact that we carved out our manufacturing base? Or maybe the people who warned us about the sucking sound from NAFTA were at least a little right? Maybe when we say free trade it’s a bit different that what others do?

You know what else happened over that time span? Jobs by the millions were shipped over to China. Or the huge increase in energy costs, which reduces ecnomic output.

No, it’s got to be crap like the government giving poor people a couple hundred bucks a month so they won’t starve…get real.