GP

I agreee we should deal with the illegals but the Bush administration just wants to make them legal. Then they can continue to get help. His budget request to Congress contains the funding request for 200 of the 10,000 border guards he claims are needed. How does he expect to hire the other 9,800?

You're not going to get me to praise GWB. I can't stand the guy or his policies. He's got America involved in a war to bring democracy to a bunch of largely illiterate cousin-loving Mohammedan savages. They are a backward, despicable people, desireable as neither friends nor foes, and should be completely segregated from the rest of the world.

On illegals, the Democrats have somehow managed to do even worse than Dubya. They want eventual citizenship for all the illegals so they can crowd into American voting booths and welfare offices, even more so than they already are. The difference between the Dumb-o-rats and the Re-puke-licans is the speed at which they are selling out their country. The former wants it quickly while the latter prefers to draw it out. At least the Donkeys are open about their hatred for America. The Elephants try to mask it behind the flag.

Sorry. Your Marxist-Leninist-inspired Jew-liberal guilt.

f*ck you

f*ck you

How eloquent. How's this -- same to you, douche bag.

dabe

I grew up in a single parent family with four children, we lived from a mid three digit monthly income, lived in the back of a station wagon, or a house with milk crates and old sleeping bags for furniture most my childhood. All but one of the children have found ourselves within the middle class today. The last has chosen to remain there. I will respond to this one using my personal experiences:

Tell that to those who cannot afford health care for a sick child.

ANY child (legal or illegal) can simply go to a public hospital when sick and get free health care. They will not be turned away. This myth that there is no health care for the children or poor is just that, a myth that the political socialist tell their follower to drum up support. Have you ever wondered why people complain about illegals getting free health care? This is the same system how they get it.

Tell that to an elderly person who must decide whether to eat or take meds.

My mother gets her meds from the Salvation Army, and meals from the "Meals on Wheals" programs and the local food pantry. She was place on these programs and is constantly monitored by the neighborhood senior center. It is only when an elderly person has placed enough money into savings to afford living, food and meds that these programs are not available. Just go to the local senior center and ask (as I did with my mother) and you would be surprised at what programs that are available.

Tell that to a parent who has no money to buy a decent meal for his/her kids.

Now what is your idea of a decent meal? Growing up we ate noodles, canned meat, canned vegetables, canned fruit, milk, butter, and homemade bread. All of which we picked up at the local Government free issue center (one of the best programs ever). Now that old system has been replaced in most states with a credit card system that allows you to only buy specific commodities. These commodities are usually marked on the shelf at the local supermarket. Check it out some time. I also always received a free lunch at school, until I got so embarrass in high school that I got a part time job to buy my own lunches off campus. The meals I eat as a child was not McDonalds or Twinkies. A soda pop was most likely a Shasta once a week (unlike the Cokes that I see people buy with food stamps today). It all depend on what your idea of decent is. I ate a balance meal, almost completely for free. But because it was not a great meal, it gave me the will power not of continue my life living that way. If I wanted to have could living like that I know I could have. I know because my sister still does, by choice.

particularly given that the wealthy are also much more wealthy today than they were a century ago.

So? The wealthy are wealthy because they (or their parents like the Kennedy's, Kerry's, ect..) worked for it. I someday want to be wealthy too and don't want other people demanding that I fork over all my “surplus money” when I get there, just to put me back where I was in the first place. It is the wealthy that pays most of my salary, it is the wealthy that employs my wife and best friends. When I get old and wealthy after a life time of work I will employ hard working people too. I have said this many times, that a wealthy person stays wealthy because he invest the money in jobs and companies. Those who just place the money under a rock, will not be wealthy for long.

What has ticked my off is the people like Jesse Jackson who have pressured FEMA to keep the poorest evacuees bottled up in places like the Superdome in Texas and not sent to other communities through out the US. These are the evacuees most likely could not find a job in the New Orleans slums, even if they had the will to take one. Here in Reno we where scheduled to host 300 of them. Before FEMA was pressured to stop the move by Jackson and his like. The local community here had well over three hundred employers offering jobs, over one hundred vacant apartments offered for families (more was being arranged) that landlords was offering for no rent until a later date given by FEMA, and literally diesel truck loads of items (i.e. cloths, toys, furniture....) donated by the local people.

They say it was to keep a community together. I say it was to keep them in poverty and a place where they are dependent on the new "Man" (i.e. Social Racist). This was their chance to pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty that was built in New Orleans and keep them sitting in the Superdome wearing out their welcome in a concentrated area of Texas. Of the six hundred that was moved to Utah before the program of relocation was stopped, a poll showed that 80% was not going to return to New Orleans. IMO the city of New Orleans should be reduce into a tourist trap along Baurban Street and the rest should be returned to the Mississippi river. The Levees system has failed a second time and will fail again.

It is just a shame that when an oppertunity to move out of poverty into a new life is give, it is those who have cried about them being poor for so many years, that are the one now trying to keep them poor.

That's My Two Cents

The wealthy can also afford to pay higher taxes to help stop borrowing money that in the long run will add to the Federal spending due to higher intetest on the growing debt. We are borrowing money so we can cut taxes to people that have more then they need. We cut taxes because we were told there was a Surplus that proved we were overtaxing the public. When it became clear there was NO surplus, the tax cuts should have ended.

Col, there are plenty of jobs available for those who want to work. The problem is most do not want to work. I have been out there col, and seen the way most poor people live. Like I said before, they can afford cell phones, rap cds, etc., but when it comes to real things like food or clothing....."I got no money".

" The wealthy can also afford to pay higher taxes to help stop borrowing money that in the long run will add to the Federal spending due to higher intetest on the growing debt"

What's the difference between borrowing money and stealing it from the general population? Borrowing is honest. Taxation with no accountability is simply stealing.

When you spend more than you earn, you either cut back on waste or go get a second job. Demanding your neighbors supplement your income isn't an option for a sane person.

being poor is a choice.

Only for monks, nuns and others inspired by religious or bohemians ideas. Now, if you were to say that the poor were poor through making poor choices, that is a (subtly) different thing.

Yes, the Left is correct. Society is inherently unequal and unfair. But so is life. Every attempt to violently transform society into something more equal and fair has always brought misery almost beyond imagination.

Yes, the Right is correct. Even when dealt a bad hand it is your responsibility to try and do something about that if you really want to. Where the Right is wrong is when its compassion gets short-circuited by its self righteousness.

The fact of the matter is those of us who enjoy good living standards do so through a mixture of wise choices, hard work and more good luck than we can honestly claim credit for.

I consider myself a moderate on this issue. I do believe that taking personal responsibility rather than being dependent is correct not only politically, but spiritually and morally. That sounds conservative, but I also intensely dislike "the useless feckless poor deserve their fate" mentality of some conservatives - the ones that make 'compassionate conservative' seem an oxymoron. The words "I have no compassion for..." deny 2,000 years of Christian culture more surely than any Marxist-Leninist.

Island Dog

During the past 4 1/2 years 6 million NEW workers came into the work force and we created less then 4 million new jobs. Many of the jobs that are available pay less then a living wage. A good example is the WalMart ad that claims they pay an average of $9 per hour. That is less then $19,000 per year assuming the person works 40 hours a week. In addition, many jobs do not have health or retirement benefits. Try and live on $19,000 per year. If the job pays minimum wage, you make about $11,000 per year. Many of the jobs you talk about are jobs like this.

BakerStreet

Borrowing more and more money and being obligated to pay more interest EVERY year to give tax cuts to the wealthy is nuts. When you spend more then you earn and can not break even after cutting spending, you increase your income. For government that means higher taxes. For individuals it means a better paying job or a second job. The wrong thing for a person or a country to do is just go deeper and deeper into debt.

The dubya assholes give most of the technical clean-up and repair contracts to their friends, ie Halliburton and Bechtel, withot bid requirements, I might add.

Dabe, you really can't avoid the colorful language, can you?

Meanwhile, you may or may not be surprised to know that one of the families that my own family grew to most care about along our various ways was one of a construction worker that came from Mississippi and put in several years in our area. He rented the trailer home that my family lived in during the first few years of my own life, when my parents were fairly poor newly weds, my father was a lowly paid law enforcement officer working for the state, and my mother was a waitress when not laid off because of pregnancy.

That worker and his wife were some of the most down-to-earth people you'd ever know. He took great pride, as did his wife, in keeping a very nice and tidy home. They paid their rent on time every time. They kept their home neat, the grass cut and neatly trimmed, and were the kind of neighbors that every family should want.

The thing is that they rented the space back in a time when whites and blacks didn't get along very well in our country. Around the times of the riots in D.C. and other areas following the assination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

They were from a poor southern family that happened to be black. For a border state that had seen it's share of racial issues, my parents renting to them at all caused a bit of a stir in our small town area. But everyone that came to know this family quickly grew to love them, respect them, and believe that they were the best kind of people.

That worker worked for Bechtel.

Many others like him worked for them as well, and helped to build several landmark structures in the Chesapeake bay area.

My own grandfather worked for them several times. He, like the other worker before him, made good money for doing a honest day's work. Some times it was union labor, sometimes not. The jobs included good benefits that helped pay for the medical needs of my grandmother, our friends family and the other workers families like them.

You can trash Bechtel if you wish, and trash Haliburton if you wish, but in many (and I mean many) cases what and who you are trashing is honest, hard-working employees that are quite literally building "America" (the good old U.S.A.) These are people that are paid honest wages for honest work. Not menial wages, and not menial or trivial work. Skilled construction workers earn quite well in this country. Even non-skilled ones can and do when they work on sites in "connected" areas ala the Sopranos.

For as fat and rich as you (Dabe) and the C.O.L. may want to paint the guys at the top of Haliburton, Bechtel and others, you blindly ignore the subs and others that work on the contracts that are being given out to those companies to build, or rebuild places like New Orleans, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Brownsville, and other cities that have been hard-hit by these recent Hurricanes, or in far more dangerous areas, places like Iraq where anyone that is helping to rebuild is most likely wearing a big fat target on their front/back/side and any other facing direction, which in turn leads to these companies having to make fantastic offers to prospective employees that will laugh in the face of danger and go for a chance at making a lot of money as quickly as possible.

So, again, go ahead and paint with the broad brush. While you are at it, take the brush and put it where you foot is most likely at, or use it to brush your teeth at least.


On to the real issue, how do you help the poor is a great question that we'll likely never get a real answer to. As soon as there are no poor to take advantage of, many liberals are out of a job, and many people who take advantage of those poor are also no longer able to find cheap labor. Neither side really has an incentive to fix the problem, and because of that, the only real way to help the poor is for the poor to help themselves. They can help themselves by doing as our family friend and his wife did - take advantage of the free education that is offered to everyone in this country. And then further take advantage of the system by excelling in school. Earn high marks, and if possible get an academic scholarship, or almost as good, get a grant of some sort. If necessary, get a student loan. If need be, work for McDonalds, or Chick-fil-a or a host of other companies that offer educational assistance to their employees (by what I know, even good old 'evil' Wal*Mart does that for some employees). Work your way up and out. And then once out, lend a hand to the ones left behind. Be a mentor, be an example, be someone that others can look up to and follow, and remind them that drugs aren't the answer. Alcohol isn't the answer. AFDC or other forms of welfare are not the answer. No one can be responsible for you but you.

Once that lesson is learned, and once someone learns that there are no easy ways out, then they can break the cycle of poverty without resorting to violence, or illegal activities like selling drugs, stealing cars, or other things that land much higher percentages of minorities in the legal system than other races do.

Or they continue to have children when they can't afford them.

... and there simply is no excuse for that to be happening either.

Thanks to very liberalized sex education teaching in school systems, and places like Planned Parenthood clinics (some of which also include abortion clinics or services/referrals) that pass out birth control materials for free(including Condoms, and other materials to help stop un-wanted pregnancies before they happen), no one really needs to be bringing children into the world that can't be cared for.

That some people still do is a testament to the idea that paying AFDC to unwed mothers is not fixing the system. Though we have reformed welfare somewhat, there are still places it can and should be reformed, including perhaps more funding for employment education and more requirements for those that get government money to work for it. Though, of course, we'll hear complaints about the jobs that are found through that training are low paying, don't pay living wages, don't provide benefits, and don't let people break free of poverty, which is not necessarily true. If someone wants to break free, they can.

What happened to the un-wed mother's family? To the dead-beat dad's family? Where are the relatives of that individual when it is time to provide day care for the child so the parent can get training? Even if we have to provide day-care for the child, we still should see the parent making more than just a token effort to get a job that will support her family.

And dead-beat dads are being dealt with. Many states and localities will suspend dead-beat dad's drivers license, business license, and other such measures in efforts to make sure that those individuals live up to their obligations. We waste (and I mean waste) tons of money paying for social services workers that help track such things and help fix such problems. I say waste because the human waste that try to cheat system are making us waste everyone's money because of their own failings. Those individuals should be forced to pay even *more* to cover the costs of making them pay their fair share. Perhaps then they'd make sure to spread the word that spreading legs isn't the answer.

...... I consider myself a moderate on this issue. I do believe that taking personal responsibility rather than being dependent is correct not only politically, but spiritually and morally. That sounds conservative, but I also intensely dislike "the useless feckless poor deserve their fate" mentality of some conservatives - the ones that make 'compassionate conservative' seem an oxymoron. The words "I have no compassion for..." deny 2,000 years of Christian culture more surely than any Marxist-Leninist.

Chak, this is one of the most insightful responses I've read on the subject so far. You sum up the issues between right and left so succinctly. Well done.

Dabe, you really can't avoid the colorful language, can you?

Nope. You really can't avoid being patronizing, can you?

We all have personal anectodotes about our experiences with being poor, or knowing poor people, or parents who were poor, etc. So, thanks Terp, for the anecdote that really doesn't address the issue I raised. My point has nothing to do with the workers who may work for Bechtel or Halliburton, and/or any of their subcontractors. My point is that by getting the no-bid contracts, then having the glorious presidential directive whereby they do not have to pay prevailing wages, they can now get away with paying employees less to clean and repair and whatever the mess in the gulf states. The result is they get to pocket the difference, because we all know (unless some of us are particularly naive) that they will get paid the same amount of mega money to implement the contracts, regardless that they are required to pay out less to their employees. Get it, terp? Understand now? So, your family, their workers, whomever are now going to get SCREWED by dubya. Get it?

The three step plan to avoid being poor.

1) Don't have children until you are financially able, even if it means waiting until you are older. If you never get financially able, don't have children; you can't afford them. Note, there is only one way to get pregnant. Ask your parents or a responsible adult if you're not sure how it works. Note #2, financially able means having a steady job, being responsible with money, and living within your means. See a financial advisor if you're unsure what this means.
2) Don't have children until you are in a committed relationship. With two people, it is not only easier to be financially able to afford to have children, it sets a good example for them and gives them much needed role models. This is necessary to break the cycle of poverty.
3) Read #1 and #2

Although this method is not guaranteed to work for 100% of the population due to severe mental or other health problems, it works very well for the huge majority of those who follow the plan rigorously.

they can now get away with paying employees less to clean and repair and whatever the mess in the gulf states.

and you are so damned cocksure that they are going to get away with paying less right?

Speak of patronizing, you take the cake.

How much do you think a worker that has to wade into the cesspool that is New Orleans to rebuild it is going to take for their wage?

Workers aren't that damned stupid (though liberals seem to think they are) and generally are not taken advantage of unless they let themselves be.

Understand that, because the people that are going to get the money, low bid, no bid, high bid, or whatever you want to do to protect their butts are going to get the same wages no matter how the money is handed out.

We have the same idiotic thinking trying to torpedo the building of the replacement of the Woodrow Wilson bridge in the D.C. area, and the soon to be new stadium for the Washington Nationals. Though shown multiple times that in trying to build in minority set-asides, local preferences, and other protections for workers (thanks to liberal governments that preceeded the current Republican Governor in Maryland) would result in higher prices for the projects and no higher wages for the workers, the local politicians bent over backward to try to win the governor's job for the liberal side. It didn't work, and thankfully the new governor in Maryland has tried to correct the contract situation.

In D.C. the liberal mayor, actually probably more moderate than liberal, has been chastised because he hasn't provided enough safeguards for some, too many for others, and no matter what, no one is happy that the contracts aren't just plain handing out money to local workers. In the end that is just what will happen though, because some one will sub out jobs just to meet quotas and then those "tokens" will sit on their butts and "earn" $$$ without lifting a finger.

And again, all of the employees for these groups will make whatever they can, because even as you and the C.O.L. insist that low wages are the prevailing thing, you miss the fact that the housing market is still pretty damned warm, paying people good wages to be electricians, carpenters, steel workers, and other "skilled labor" positions, which means unless your job is strictly to haul bricks, and even if it is, you are gonna make damned sight more than $10 an hour, or even $20 an hour.

If you'd prefer to be unskilled in any craft or trade, then hey, more power to you. The jobs at McDonalds do tend to pay only $6 - $9 an hour. The ones at Wal*Mart stocking shelves (heavy labor that requires, and lots of thinking too I'm sure) pay on the low end too. Perhaps we can put a few more liberals (you know, the folks that tend to be mentally deficient) to work in those jobs too so they don't strain their brains, and merely need to be able to move boxes around and put stock on shelves.

Even the cashiers tend to earn reasonable wages at many of those places because management has found that not paying cashiers enough tends to encourage the cashiers to find ways to pay themselves or their own friends.

Oh, I forget, you want health benefits for all of these folks, right? Except again, many of them never need the benefits anyway, or if they do need benefits, it's because of an injury on the job which is covered by Worksmen comp. If they need insurance for their families, then duh! again, perhaps they should be considering NOT HAVING FAMILIES until they can really afford to pay for the priviledge.