"gpsman" wrote in message
...
On Nov 1, 7:06 am, "HeyBub" wrote:
Pay someone's rent and you are flushing wealth down a hole.

I would prefer that to seeing them sleeping in the park/freezing to death.

So would I. It's also important to note that when the government pays
someone's rent, it doesn't go "poof" and vanish into thin air. It goes to a
landlord, most likely in the middle or upper middle class who makes a profit
and buys more rental property with it. It's a transfer of wealth from the
rich to the poor back to the rich again.

It's tough to find work when you have no address.

Once a person loses their job, lots of bad processes begin. Now companies
are refusing to hire anyone who's been out of work - they'll only hire
people currently employed. How is anyone expected to be upwardly mobile
with a fix like that working against them? Maybe they can just materialize
$4 or 8K out of HeyBub's magic corn to go to college during the down time of
being unemployed.

I further hold that, in the main, it is misguided government programs that
keep the poor in their condition or, in fact, enlarge their numbers.

By keeping them from starving?

HeyBub holds a lot of things that aren't true, can't be proved or otherwise
have fatal flaws in them large enough to sail the Queen Mary through. He's
remarkable in that he keeps coming up with more and more bizarro ideas, like
his concept of how wealth is created.

After decades of good times, people can't remember the Watts or DC riots and
the destruction they caused. When people have no stake in the society
around them and nothing left to lose, they behave that way and seek to bring
everyone down to their level. We're approaching that situation as another
wave of foreclosures and homelessness is predicted. We surely could have
used the trillions we spent destroying Iraqi wealth on retraining programs
for American workers but our priorities are very, very messed up, as you've
noted. We blame poor kids for being born to crackheads and idiot parents
without ever realizing that "There but for the grace of God go I."

I am amazed at the number of people who can imagine a hungry child and
say, "**** you" because it's parents are poor/shiftless/drug addled.

Me too. Study after study has shown that what people attribute to their
superior intelligence is more often just better than average luck. People
who've got it good here seem to forget that they got a big leg up over most
people in the world just by being born here. It's a lot easier to become a
self-made man in America than it would be if you were born into the
untouchable class in India where people born shoveling shi+ usually die
shoveling shi+. That's because a lot of Americans before us worked hard and
many of them died to protect this country from the likes of the Third Reich
and the Japanese in WWII.

What really riles me is when people say: "We are all born equal." If that's
true, why do the children of uber-wealthy parents attend Harvard, drive
Ferraris or jet-set on the Riviera? Because they had a tremendous leg up on
most other people through inherited wealth that they did nothing to deserve
except by being lucky enough to be born into it.

--
Bobby G.