Combat Ranting (formerly known as Famicom Mini)

[Weltall]

It will be. There well might be more restrictions (especially on age), but it will be.

I have serious doubts about that. In any case, in fifty-odd years we'll see.

The Founding Fathers were suspicious of the people and did what they could to keep the general public from having too much power in our government... remember things like the Senate being elected by the House of Representatives, or the President being elected by the Electoral College?

As for self-sufficiency I don't know what they would think. Political realities have changed so dramatically... back then it was very liberal to want to just give everyone the right to vote... we have advanced from there so of course the target moves. We have voting, more services are the clear place to go from there...

I know what they would think. You might remember that not too long before the Constitutional Convention, there was a little matter of a war, one that we defeated Britain in. You might remember that some of the main reasons we fought this conflict were overtaxation and overburdening governmental control. They, perhaps reflexively, did everything they could to limit the power and scope of the government. I can't find it possible to believe that they would even consider the idea of making the federal government a perpetual wetnurse charity organization.

Yes, by making sure that no one ever has any kind of chance of getting out of poverty, thus preserving our system where the top 5% of the population have 47% of the wealth.

Tell me this. Your solution is to give these people a living. How does that help them not be poor?

You spew lies about conservatives' methods, so tell me how your idea of giving a free ride to anyone who wants it helps poor people (key phrase coming) not be poor. If conservatives are trying their hardest to keep people destitute, how are your methods any better? How has any federal welfare/medicare program EVER helped the poor become middle class?

And as for poverty... yes in other places poor people are more destitute than here. But it is a major mistake to say that because they can manage to put food on the table, usually, and pay the bills -- sometimes -- they aren't poor. They are. When you need two or three jobs just to barely keep your house, and need to choose between the power and having enough (barely) to eat... and have to go to work as soon as you can, no way could you ever go to college no matter how smart you are... that is a problem and something we should do more to help.

There are very few people today who are in the situation where they graduate or drop out of high school and need multiple jobs to survive... and those that are in that position a majority of the time did it to themselves by being indescreet sexually. And, uncompassionate I may be, but I don't feel sorry for stupid people. Don't make them if you can't raise them. Don't KEEP them if you can't raise them; there is never a shortage of people willing to adopt children in America.

Oh yeah, and you didn't factor in relative costs. It costs a LOT more to live in America than some extremely poor part of Africa! You need to make $28,000 to be above the poverty line here and that's not nearly enough to actually live. In some places $100 a month is more than enough to live by what in that nation are decent standards... we need to remember relativism here. For trade too -- saying that everyone needs to meet our minimum wage laws would be idiotic. We need to look at what is a reasonable minimum wage for that society and say that for that country we won't let them trade with us unless they meet it (and actually enforce it, which is the bigger challenge)...

A single person or a couple without children can live comfortably on $28,000 a year, and even with one child, by skimping on a few things, it is very possible to get by just fine. And it's quite unlikely that a couple together makes less than that much money, unless they're very young and have no job experience. That isn't the case with most people. You seem to have this strange idea that everyone who makes less than the poverty line is a single mother of four and has to juggle three jobs. It's not anywhere near true.

First, Bush is far more vulnerable than you say.

There is no one in this divided Democratic comedy of errors that has a legitimate shot at winning this election.

I would just love if the ticket split, and the conditions are certainly ripe for it, considering how close this large race for second place is. Bush vs. Dean and Clark or Gephardt? It'd be murder.

Second, you're right that Clark doesn't make a very convincing Democrat... he seems to be more liberal than most military types for sure (he voted for Clinton and Gore), but a true liberal, like he is saying in his speeches? I don't really believe it.

Still, he has a very good point that we should never have gone into Iraq while the major issue of Afghanistan should have been our focus.

And third, campaigns are often bloody but usually they make peace in the end... I'm sure they will, because beating Bush is the most important thing here.

1. Clark is no liberal.
2. He has no point on the war. Everyone knows that until recently he was a vocal supporter of the war and has gone on public record stating so numerous times.
3. Beating Bush is the most important thing for the Dems because they have no real agenda or platform to fight for.

Now, with that aside, I found a lovely little article by one of my favorite pundits, Walter Williams. It was published in my paper yesterday and it deals with the poor in America, and just how wrong and laughably uninformed you are about them being a doomed people. Read on:

How can it be?
Walter E. Williams (archive)


January 14, 2004 | Print | Send

It might have been Ross Perot who first used the expression that America is turning into a nation of "hamburger flippers," in reference to the decline in good paying manufacturing jobs replaced by low-pay service sector jobs.

Here's my question: If millions of high-paying jobs are leaving the country only to be replaced by millions of low-paying jobs, what prediction would you make about the trend in our standard of living? It would have to be in steep decline, but the facts don't square with that. Per capita GDP, the population divided into the value of goods and services produced, is one of the methods used to gauge the standard of living. The historical trend, including today, is a rising American standard of living. In fact, our per capita GDP in 1980 was $21,500 and, as of 2002, it was $36,000 -- a 59 percent increase. So how can it be that we're becoming a nation of low-pay hamburger flippers?

How about this pronouncement: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? The Census Bureau just came out with a report saying that 35 million Americans are living in poverty. Robert Rector and Kirk A. Johnson addressed this figure in their recent publication "Understanding Poverty in America," produced by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

From various government reports they find that: 46 percent of poor households actually own their homes; 76 percent have air conditioning; the typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities in Europe; nearly 75 percent of poor households own one car, and 30 percent own two or more cars; 97 percent have at least one color television; 62 percent have cable or satellite reception; and 25 percent have cell phones.

While "poor" Americans don't live in opulence, they are surely not poor either by international or historical standards in our own country. I'm betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he'd choose United States.

How many times have we heard that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? Contrary to that nonsense, the fact of the matter is that some of the rich are getting poorer, and many of the poorer are getting richer.

According to the 1995 Annual Report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, only 5 percent of those in the bottom 20 percent category of income earners in 1975 were still there in 1991. What happened to them? A majority made it to the top 60 percent of the income distribution -- middle class or better -- over that 16-year span. Almost 29 percent of them rose to the top 20 percent.

The evidence suggests that low income is largely a transitory experience for those willing to work. There's no mystery to it: As a function of age, people get wiser and gain more experience. That means it's not very intelligent to think one can make meaningful statements about poverty simply by measuring income at a particular point in time. By the way, people are also mobile downward, as suggested by the joke that the easiest way to become a Texas millionaire is to start out as a Texas billionaire.

Here's Williams' roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.

[size=2]Why... that kinda means that your lines are untrue and nothing more than the desperate liberal class-warfare scare tactics I knew they were.


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