This cold spell is really abhorrent weather and cannot continue much longer without representing some sort of record climate fluctuation. This is only November and we are down to the low fifties every day. I don’t much listen to the news or weather but would not be surprised if there have been casualties. Houses in Florida do not have heaters.The above does not apply to Pete and I. Said heaters would likely be electric and we are camping. Pete has already made compliments about self-reliance as we drank coffee and had mushroom soup with hotdogs and smoked ham chili. Pete has a long outstanding disability claim, so he is the second person (Dave-O) that I’ve met recently in that situation. And they report similar difficulties with the system.
Men have trouble getting any help and it becomes annoying to repeatedly hear the authorities claim the system is not biased toward women and children when it is, in fact strongly biased against single men. A woman can walk into a welfare office and get instant help. A man will have an uphill battle. I’m not against helping the children but am not so sure about the mothers, particularly the ones who get pregnant while already on welfare. But they should have to meet the same criteria and be subject to investigation just as often. And yes, folks, being taken out to night clubs and restaurant dinners on a regular basis is income per the tax law. And it would probably happen a lot more if most welfare mothers were not so damn ugly.
Most Americans remain ignorant of the sheer size of the welfare problem. It is nowhere near as bad as Canada, whose welfare giveaway is a tumor that is slowly killing them. Death means becoming a country like England, with limited financial mobility, long-term stagnation, and the “I’m all right, Jack” national attitude. My wakeup call came when reading about Patty Hearst, remember the rich bitch who was kidnapped back in the 1970s.
The ransom was for her father, a newspaper baron, to place $52 worth of groceries on the doorstep of every person on welfare in California. He agreed. Until he found out there were 8 million people on welfare in California alone. His net worth was nowhere near the total. The kidnappers say they won by making a rich person aware of their plight. They lost by not figuring out the rich don’t have near enough money to bail out the poor.
However, that does not mean the rich aren’t a bit to blame. They do create artificial barriers to protect their riches and those often become severe disincentives to the have-nots. The only options of the downtrodden are to invent something spectacular that takes the market by storm before the establishment can react (think Facebook) or win the lotto. As it is, the rich have better access to colleges than the smart, and better access to jobs than the talented. Alas, most of the poor are quite ordinary or deficient in those very areas. The system is geared toward having landed, inherited wealth and those in control have little reason to see that change.
[Author's note 2015-11-08: Poor people do not exactly help their cause by continually demanding a share of what the rich have. The rich do NOT have enough money to collectively help the poor. Put another way, if the rich divided their money amongst the poor, everybody who is poor before would still be poor after. Got that, you goddam Liberals? Do the friggen math.
It is the constant assailing by the poor that, by and large, causes the rich into protectionist activities. And in a sense, the problem isn't even the system, it is the inability of the "poor" to manage their resources. Poor people don't have iPads, Nikes, and cable TV. The "poor" in America are fantastically wealthy compared to the world at large. That's not the whole issue, just most of it.]
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