Screw the poor, start a war.

Show more than anecdotes... We all have stories of people abusing welfare systems. But how many are they really?

You mentioned some worked illegally on the side. Now if that was work bringing in a lot of money on a regular basis, surely it would be picked up somewhere that someone on welfare owns way more than what is logically fine for someone in that situation?

I'm not sure where you got that I was assuming "the government" was transparent. I was referring to your statement about statistics generally, but I did take a look at one of the GAO links Aljosa provided and it does seem to be pretty well cited at first glance (and links to additional well-cited studies at that, so it seems to be pretty deep).

The employment statistics that you imply are fraudulent are a great example of statistics being thorough, transparent in methodology..... and completely misunderstood by the conspiracy theorists out there (and misrepresented by those who look to take advantage of them). The unemployment statistics are not a single number - they are a wide range of numbers whose methodologies of calculation are very transparent and well known.

How are you not banned yet?

For insulting republicans for their pro-war behavior which typically results in (non-white)casualties?

Maybe I shouldn't have put it in a form of a satirical rhetorical question, for all the PC clowns and SJWs.

Non-white casualities?? You know we lost people? including some of my friends? Instead of being a little kid who doesn't know shit about the real world, grow a pair and stop being a racist stereotyping asshole?

What the hell are you going on about?

Republicans love starting wars in the middle-east, that was my point. How is that racist?

Obviously some people abuse it.. But the fact of the matter is they are a drop in the bucket compared to the massive abuse by corporations within the United States.. Look at the fucking Haiti relief effort recently btw.. Just recently evidence surfaced in that hardly anything has been done to aid the people there, and much of the money was either pocketed by contractors, or were used to build vacation areas in the country..

Take a look at the abuse by contracting corporations like Haliburton in Iraq War basically ripping off the US government with outrageous costs with in return substandard services..

See here is the thing the poor are not some how getting more powerful in this country, they are not sucking the country dry, or condensing the wealth.. They do not have a immense hold on our political system.. Corporate America does.. Let me repost my quote by Jason Read.. "People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as "parasites" fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by the its host, one that can make its host work for it without appear as a burden. Such is the ruling class in capitalist society."..

Agreed, we are spending like its world war 3 and it's not. When defense spending gets to bloated it becomes a massive drain on the economy.

I was joking dude. That was a sarcastic jab at Republicans not you. And my father lived off disability for the final 11 years of his life, most of his money came from his former business.

And I hope you don't live in the USA, as this is NOT the most expensive country on the planet. Try going to Yemen if you want some real high food prices.

@Jankarcop: Better someone else's kids than ours.

Yeah cuase those kids with a bunch of rocks are surely going to topple Murica'

Remember when there was a middle class?

I'm sorry but if you were born into a nice upper class family with a box of fine silver tableware crammed up your ass, you shouldn't be speaking on social issues involving those with less. Not everyone on EBT is a lazy piece of shit, times have changed.

**** them.

Are you being serious with anything you say?

@TheWalkingGhost: This whole thread is stupid. The mind set of the individuals who start a thread like this and support have know idea what they are talking about or know history or current events. If they had the sense God gave a tumble bug they would know better.

@sSubZerOo: I'm not disagreeing with the things you said, but I don't get how its relevant to the topic. If you read my posts I have said that welfare programs are necessary but are being abused and are in need of reform. The problem with welfare as it stands now is it does not help people move on with their live, in fact being on welfare often keeps people down. People on welfare figiure out how to milk the system and because they can, they do. As a result we have a system that does not help people, a good system of welfare would force people to enter the workforce at some point, and assist them in doing so. What we have now is a joke, it is easy to milk for those who want to and does little to give real assistance to those who need it(whether they want it or not)

The rest of the stuff you said, while I mostly agree with, is not what is being discussed on this thread, do you agree with me that the welfare system is in need of reform?

The creator of this thread knows the difference between 'no' and 'know'.

... We have people who are in the work force on welfare.. In fact Walmart is infamous in keeping worker wages low and promote them to use government welfare.... My point is, the people who are gaming the system are minor compared to the far larger issues out there if you want to talk about parasites, those being corporations..

Republicans dont care about the poor and middle class

Clearly you've never worked in the military. As of right now, the military is severely underfunded and under manned, I've seen teams of 15 doing the work of 25 to 30 people, and that's not at all uncommon. On top of that, the military doesn't have enough money for it's efforts in the Pacific where there has been a big shift in activity in recent years.

How the flying hell is the military underfunded and under manned when we're pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into it? Oh, wait. Corruption. Duh.

Because weapons, bases and deployment are expensive? That much seems pretty obvious.

The military has very little corruption in it compared to other areas. Integrity and discipline are big areas of focus.

I'm know there are areas where there is a lot of waste, but it's more on the side of bad planning, not corruption.

I didn't know presenting facts constitutes as ideology. If you're just going to bring up conjecture and more anecdotes this conversation is pointless.

I don't know how you can generalize what one million individual want for themselves. And it's seen as a last resort by whom? For vast majority of impoverished inner cities population, federal subsidy is a fact of life. I would go as far to say that today's youth culture respect someone who work for living less than someone who game the system. As with most government programs, there are simply not a lot of scrutiny on qualification the individual recipients. I don't believe living on welfare is a myth; I think you underestimated how cheaply you can sustain yourself in some states. The point of contention has always been whether you can live comfortably or well on welfare compare to working not whether you can survive on welfare.

I'm not debating on whether budget spent on welfare is actually going to the individuals, so the graphs and statistics comparing various Federal subsidies are moot. I don't care that the help is getting to the individuals instead of corrupted officials/corporations. My point is none of that is actually doing anything to improve the situation. IMO education is most effective way to do that. I'm a big believer of teaching people to fish for themselves instead of give them fish. But that's something people don't want to discuss because that's an investment with long term return.

@Iszdope: @br0kenrabbit:There's a new Dr. Seuss book out?

Yeah. A 3% increase to the military seems reasonable at a time when ISIS and Iran are growing more powerful and Russia and China are pushing their weight around. I haven't looked into the the details about the cuts to judge if they're too severe or not. I guess the budget does have to be balanced eventually though, we can't keep racking up debt like we are.

Okay: actually it looks like the increase might be more than 3%, but it's still not that big of a deal.

Given the cuts and the provision on Obamacare, the White House will likely issue a veto threat and Senate Democrats will filibuster. I mean, Senate Democrats recently filibustered a bill designed to combat human trafficking and help the human trafficking victims because they didn't like that it included language that prohibited monies appropriated under the act (specifically money gotten by fining human traffickers) for paying for abortions except in the cases or rape, incest and life of the mother. The Democrat filibuster held the bill up for about a month before a compromise was reached - medical funds would come from funds already governed by the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits funding abortions except in the aforementioned cases) while funds from fining the traffickers would help law enforcement and social services to the victims, but would not cover any health-care at all. So if they are willing to filibuster a bill that most Americans would likely support - taking quite a political risk - then I imagine they'd filibuster on a this bill which it seems to be less popular.

Sure, about 0.1% of the war casualties have been white... Nothing racist about pointing out the facts.

they running, hidin', prayin' that the bomb ain't dirty

they hope the bomb ain't dirty

they hope the bomb ain't dirty

they hope the bomb ain't dirty

Frozen? If I could choke some cartoon characters... it'd be them.

I don't mean to interpose without knowledge of what's being discussed-and I'm certainly late to the party-but I've heard this cavil so many times that it made me cringe to see it surfacing again. Unless one can prove that a statistical research has been "rigged", I don't understand the point of conjuring this conjecture. We might as well abolish the discipline of statistics altogether since its not impossible to manipulate.

I would understand if someone who studied the research methodology or reviewed the statistical procedure made that point. But to make it right off the bat is just moronic. I'm not necessarily pointing fingers at you pook as this isn't the first time I've seen this point being made here in OT.

I don't think he's serious anyway. No one who is would toss out statistical studies out of hand while offering up personal anecdotes as alternative evidence.

My level of seriousness doesn't really matter, the whole conversation got sidetracked due to people throwing out random statistics that had nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

not all statistics are irrelevant, but in the issue of welfare fraud, the facts are extremely hard to find and often very fuzzy. I have read statistics that welfare fraud is as low as half a percent and others that say it is as high as 11.5 percent, thats a pretty big gap wouldnt't you agree? The poster on this discussion posted a rather low figure (1.9%) which backed up his point. A bit of searching can give you much higher numbers, if that is the point that you want to make.

So while not all statistics are irrelevant, an issue like this, that is as politically charged as it is, tends to have wildly varying numbers depending on who you ask. I am an advocate of welfare programs, but there needs to be reforms to protect those who really need it and deny those who are abusing it. In the future try and get the context of what is being discussed before just jumping in to a discussion. Part of the reason I was dismissing those statistics are outlined above, the othe reason is they were not relevant to the points being discussed.

You'd be surprised. I once heard an allegedly intelligent user discrediting statistics because "it uses samples".

Fun fact: America is 8% of the total population of earth yet they use 20% of it's resources, let that sink in for a moment!

Unless you objectively discredited the statistics he cited, my point stands and the context remains irrelevant as you'd still be discrediting research based on the visceral and the anecdotal instead of the objective and the critical. You can't contend the reliability of something based on its possibility of being wrong-until you prove otherwise, or at least intelligently argue against it, the point is moot.

But since you insist on viewing my post in light of the topic, let us analyze. In statistics it is generally accepted that the top and lower 25% of a [potentially] biased distribution are outliers when calculating an accurate range. Going by the range you provided, and assuming a 0.5% step, we can eliminate findings below and above the 3% and 9% respectively. For an issue that is as politically charged as this, this isn't a wide range or a fuzzy spectrum. Note that this is a worst-case scenario as a biased distribution can be biased only at either tails instead of both.

Your still missing the entire point of the discussion. Your focusing on the statistics which was not the point of the discussion in the first place. Having said that the idea that I would need to try and discredit a random statistic posted by a random person from a website is ludicrous. I can post random statistics as well that contradict what the prior poster but it is a waste of time because that is not what the point of the the original discussion was. Of course if you were following the discussion in the first place you may have realized that.

You know, obstinacy isn't a valid discussion strategy. It's true that I interposed, but what I touched on had nothing to do with the subject matter of the discussion. I clarified that from the start yet you chose to make it about the research literature of welfare fraud. Now that I played ball, you're moving away from the research literature. Not that any of this matters as I discussed both and you replied to neither.

and randonmnly changing topics is not a valid discussion strategy either, nor is completely ignoring what the other person is saying, nor is only looking at one set of data and ignoring the loads of contradictory data that exists because it is inconvenient.

Want to really have a discussion? Fine, my original statement that started this whole mess was that the welfare system is in serious need of reform for a number of reasons.

1) The main reason is that it does nothing to improve peoples situations, Often times people on welfare remain on welfare and never change their social status. That is not good, a good welfare system would help people who are struggling financially but also put systems in place to help those people improve their lot in life(ie: mandatory job training programs, job placement, education etc all of which are lacking in our current system)

2) there are many people who need welfare who don't get it, that is a problem and something that needs to be seriously looked at if anyone is serious about creating a welfare system that helps people who are really in need.

3) There is fraud, and people committing this fraud know how to milk the system, as a result needy people and taxpayers suffer. the funny thing about you is you are obsessing over the one statistic that someone posted. Why not do your own research and find some other statistics which completely contradict the one the original poster posted. The fact is there are no accurate statistics which show the amount of fraud that takes place, partly because many who post abut welfare are trying to prove a point(doing some more research I have found studies that say welfare fraud is as high as 25%, doesn't matter if its accurate point is the numbers vary wildly) and partly because there are people who are scamming the system that are not caught so they are not counted among the population of people committing fraud.

If you want to have a discussion about the topic why not answer the question: Do you think the welfare system is in need of reform? Why or why not? Of course you can choose to ignore this and focus on one random statistic, thus completely ignoring the hundreds of other contradictory statistics and the actual topic being discussed.