“Do you think that people who are 28-years-old, that can work, & refuse to work, should get free [fill in social service]?”
- Fire department services
- Police protection
- Military protection
- Public street access
- Public park access
- Library access
- …
If you dont give them healthcare then congrats you’ve just lost a 28 year old that could have been a productive member of the workforce. Reps are so short sighted it hurts.
Just flip the question around and think about it for a sec. Should people who can work but don’t and then get sick just die? Obviously fucking not, that’s insane.
“who refuse to work” - And how many people is that? Numbers please.
If someone refuses to work, that’s the problem you need to address. Not that dumb question.
who refuse to work
Minimum wage jobs that limit you to 20 hours a week.
So they legally dont have to supply you with healthcare, you know that thing you need to keep you from getting sick and help you when your sick that is for some reason tied to you being employed in the first place?
Conservative values is just a wrapper for control & fascism
Stop framing it as you might help others that take advantage of the system and frame it as helping yourself and those who might need it legitimately.
There will always be bad eggs in society. Including this representative that punishes the many for the failures of the few. You cannot have civilization without the outliers. But you can help the majority even if there are a few leeches. It says a lot about the right wing when their public face is hypocritical selfishness.
Stop framing it as you might help others that take advantage of the system and frame it as helping yourself and those who might need it legitimately.
Exactly. You know what I see when I see someone who “just doesn’t want to work?” I see someone likely struggling with depression or other mental health issues. And I’m not so prideful that I believe I’m immune to those mental health struggles. I’m certainly not immune from them. None of us are. And if I fall into such a dark place in the future, I don’t want to risk dying or bankruptcy just because I’m struggling with my mental health. If someone thinks they can’t fall into such a dark place, they’re a fool.
People need to frame it back on him. Should representatives get paid since some dont want to show up to work. Should representatives have all of their assets siezed when theyre elected because some of them are taking bribes and doing illegal trading. Shouldnt representatives have to wear ankle braclets since theyre living on the tax payer dime, we deserve to know where they arw at all times if theyre living off our money. Shouldnt they be subiect to weekly random drug tests since theyre all on welfare.
Awkwardly stated at the start there but you pulled it back at the end
“Advantage” can be interpreted differently - as in legitimate usage vs selfish gain.
Everyone else understood you, dude is just being pedantic.
It’s not free. We all work to lift up the most vulnerable people in our society. I am very thankful to be an able bodied person that pays taxes. I’ll never look down upon anyone that needs to use public assistance.
I’m sick and fucking tired of Republicans talking about welfare queens.
This. And when we lift people up, it generally helps get people out of poverty and become contributing members of society.
It’s not a hand out, it’s a hand up. And for those that dgaf about helping their neighbors, it also is generally cheaper to help people once and get them squared away, vs being screwed up for life, committing crimes and using up tax dollars on police/justice/jail/cleanup resources.
In short, literally everyone should be on the same page. It’s the moral and economically right thing to do, lol.
It’s “free at time of service” which is an important distinction. Everyone in a community contributes in some way to fire services. The fire brigade doesn’t ask for payment before they arrive at the scene.
Health should not be tied to employment. You shouldn’t be afraid to take care of your health because you’re between jobs. I imagine that people who do visit doctors regularly have better health and as a result lower healthcare costs. If you have to worry about how you’re going to pay for it you’re less likely to go.
I pay a fair amount to cover my family and pay a fair bit more in taxes if it meant that I didn’t have to worry about my employment to get coverage or knew that my child would be covered in the future.
Meanwhile these assholes suck off the public teat and do nothing to give back to anyone except the donor class.
I think you maybe didn’t understand my point. It seems like you drank from the right wing talking points fire hose.
I think you missed this person’s point- he is calling the politicians (aka this idiot) the useless ones. They help no one and only take away from the vulnerable and make things worse for those they are supposed to help. The comment agreed with you
You’re correct. I took the comment the other way. My apologies.
I think you misread
You missed my point. This guy (and plenty of other Republican assholes like him) is saying that only “productive” members of society deserve to live a healthy life while producing nothing but misery for most of the people they were elected to represent and are supposed to be helping. They are the true “welfare queens.” They live off of taxpayer money and contribute nothing to taxpayers.
I think you’re misunderstanding. He’s saying Republican states that hate welfare are usually the welfare states that need the most funding and then the only money they want to give back, it’s to ultra millionaire conservatives who parrot the welfare Queen rhetoric.
You definitely misread. Re-read their comment in context to yours.
Exactly. I tell people all the time I am happy to pay taxes and heck I’d even pay more in taxes, but what I want is for everybody to pay their fair share.
I don’t even know how it’s become so radical these days. We’ve got governments around the world being elected and saying governments can’t be trusted so let’s give it all to corporations.
Hell, even if I didn’t, the means testing and their errors wouldn’t be worth it.
Part of the problem with neoliberalism is that humans are somewhat wired to a gift economy. Part of the right to rule comes from the giving of services and benefits. A Friedman government leaves those less fortunate acutely aware that the government doesn’t benefit us at all.
The government’s right to enforce property laws in part stems from the fact that part of taxation is earmarked for redistribution. Even kings understood that a decent portion of their job was to attempt to balance the needs of the peasantry and the nobility, because either could cause serious problems when sufficiently pissed off.
Even if you if you agree with the premise, it still always costs us all more in the long run when people don’t get healthcare.
We need to provide healthcare early and often. Turns out there’s a high correlation between well-fed healthy people and people who learn effectively and have the energy and aptitude to be productive later in life!
Plus, the less often people are laid up, the more time they can spend on doing things: raising family, working, making society feel worth being part of.
The wealthy are corroding the foundation of society, and they will suffer when the building collapses upon them. People are the source of civilization.
Kinda depends on what kind of economy you want. If you need an educated population for advanced work, provide healthcare and welfare in general. If you just need some schmucks to work in the mines or sweatshops, it’s much less of a priority. You get what you pay for in the end.
I think the 1% are idiots. Culture comes from people, and the wealthy go out of their way to prevent the fostering of culture. New foods, new media, tourism, people to do things with, all vanishing because the people are too busy being run ragged for the sake of a line going up.
Money is inherently boring. Money is just a means of accessing cool stuff, but if neat things goes extinct, money becomes pointless. The elites are myopic as hell.
With every million people forced to be burger flippers, a George Lucas or Hideo Kojima won’t have a career. Our overlords are robbing themselves of a more interesting life.
Where we see the tragedy of the commons, the ly see first-mover advantage.
Our main issue is that the 1% get to say what kind of economy we want instead of the other 99%. We all know the 1% would love to replace all humans with AI.
This is an argument I’ve made a few times, well run public healthcare is the fiscally conservative position because it costs much less over time than what we have today.
people who learn effectively
There’s the sticking point; one side of the political spectrum opposes learning
Refuse to get work. *
* they’re unqualified for it, or just disabled enough to not be able to properly do it.
I’ll believe it when I actually see it.
I don’t know much / anything about the particular crowd being referenced in that meme.
What I do know is my conservative neighbors, conservative family, and so on. These people legitimately and without any shame or self reflection believe that because they did not get “free healthcare” nobody else deserves it. They are unwavering in the belief that they should not have to pay for other people’s medical bills. They truly think that anybody getting government healthcare (aside from retirees) is a leach on society and that they cannot afford to keep paying for those people.
I know this because I have conservative neighbors, conservative family members, and so on. And they aren’t the least bit afraid to air their opinion on this any chance they get. Now I don’t live in Nebraska USA, but I honestly have a hard time believing that conservatives in the midwest are all that different from conservatives on the east coast.
Please let them know that you can’t be refused emergency care in the US and the cost of those uncovered unreimbursed ER visits ultimately result in larger private insurance premiums when the hospitals use them to cover the losses. It’s cheaper for everybody when everybody is covered.
“Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.”
- Pearl Buck, The Good Earth
His last name is flood? Like the bad thing that happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? What kind of idiot would vote for that?
I don’t ‘refuse’ to work. Motherfuckers like him won’t even give me an interview.
And even if they do, they don’t offer enough pay to make working worthwhile. Especially if you have kids and shit to deal with on top of it.
Or the hours are incorrectly posted - “morning shift” that starts at 3AM - or the benefits are nonexistent, or the job posting is for a completely different position and they just posted the wrong one because “it draws us more applicants”. Literally had someone offer me a janitor position after applying for an IT position, because they thought they could dupe some new graduate into mopping floors for half the pay and no benefits.
Exactly.
That whole “nobody wants to work” narrative is such horseshit.
It’s not that nobody wants to work, it’s that nobody can afford to work for bottom-of-the-barrel wages. In a lot of places it’s simply not possible to survive on minimum wage, and having a shitty job take away from the time and energy you could be spending looking for a good job isn’t worth the money you save.
I’m a school bus driver and my boss (the district’s transportation director) loves to bitch about how “nobody wants to work” because we have so much trouble finding drivers. Our hourly pay is actually decent (over $30 an hour) and we get benefits including excellent health insurance (the entire reason I do this job) and a small pension down the road. However (and this is why we have so much trouble finding drivers) you usually get only about 4.5 hours a day, and when you start as a driver you’re only a substitute and you don’t get the benefits until you become a regular route driver - which takes some unknown length of time until somebody retires or dies or tests positive for drugs (which happens) or drives kids around drunk (which also happens). So very few people, even if qualified and experienced as bus drivers, can afford to live for a long time without benefits or an adequate total salary until they have enough seniority to exist reasonably well. I was lucky to become a regular route driver with benefits after only two months as a substitute, but some people wait years.
I’m totally pro-union, but seniority really makes for a strange mindset. I find myself looking at coworkers that I like and respect and pondering what their chances are of getting cancer and dying. Many of them are trumpers (and smokers) and I actively root for them to die.
Same here. I am lucky to have the job I have (no really).
“Refuse to get a job” lol. Listen, I’ve dealt with my state’s unemployment insurance claim website and it’s awful. Anyway they’re gonna implement people proving they’re “not refusing to get a job” is going to be poorly thought out and half baked which will inevitably lead to people not getting healthcare.
“Refusing to get a job” folks are the same ones who kick and scream when you whisper “affirmative action” or “job security” in their ears.
These guys aren’t happy unless they can buy and sell the working class at auction, then whip them into the ground to maximize ROI.
During 2020 I moved states after leaving a job. Then I was seasonally laid off in PA. I didn’t qualify for unemployment because I didn’t work enough in the look back period of PA, and didn’t qualify for NY because I willingly switched state residencies and I didn’t work there recently enough. Unemployment being left up to states is an extra layer of bull - especially for anyone considering un/employment numbers as some kind of valid metric.
a job
The people making the requires don’t care how good the job is or what it pays. In some places, there simply aren’t good jobs. I’d rather we as a society used our combined economic power (taxes) to take care of the basic needs of everyone, regardless of whether they have a job or not. Or if their job pays $7/hr or $500k a year.
In my state, in order to keep unemployment you have to prove that you made some sort of action towards getting a job on at least five separate days every week. Also, declining a job offer, no matter how bad it might be, ends the unemployment immediately.
Oh and also we have one of the lowest amounts of benefits and you can only be on for about 24 weeks before they cut you off entirely. Also, they don’t pay the first week after you’re approved.
I got laid off from my last job, and for the first time ever in my career I got paid a severance. As it turned out, however, the total amount of the severance was about $100 less than the total amount I could have gotten from unemployment. I say “could have” because any amount you get as a severance is deducted from the amount of unemployment you’re eligible for, so had I applied for unemployment I would have been eligible for the grand total of $100 - definitely not worth the hassle.
I can’t really complain, I guess. I got the whole amount up front instead of in dribs and drabs for six months, and I didn’t have to pretend to be looking for work at any point.
If it’s like my state it’s a part time job just keeping on unemployment because of the amount of paperwork and trips to random places to turn it in in person.
I got called in once for some sort of audit/training thing. I lucked out, I live extremely close to one of the offices. The site is so bad, someone picked one that was way further away and had to make over an hour drive to come here. (If the site wasn’t so shitty I’d blame user error, but it’s so so bad.)
Also, so many times I’d apply for companies only to realize they’re either a scam or don’t have a US address or any address listed. I never lied but I may have stretched the truth as much as I could on some of them.
A government official that will register a fake company, then refuse to police its conduct, has very little ground to complain when people interact with the company’s HR scheme sincerely.
