taxation and social benefits (or the lack thereof)

I am troubled to learn that apparently those without children, regardless of why they do not have children, do not qualify for certain social benefits (welfare in particular was mentioned), despite being tax payers.

I had always assumed everyone could get it, and those with children got more because kids are expensive yo.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples for discussion as well, feel free to bring them up.

The biggest question is what do you mean by 'welfare' or 'social benefit'?

'Welfare' is actually a collection of federal and state programs, some of which require children and others that do not.

When most people think about 'welfare,' they're typically thinking about Temporary Aid to Dependent Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). What these programs have in common is that they are means tested, meaning the person or household has to make less than the poverty threshold (about $11,500 for a person or $20,000 for a family of three). These means tested program phase out very quickly once you approach or exceed the poverty threshold.

TANF is only available for families. It provides a monthly cash payment that varies considerably by state. Mississippi provides about $170 a month for a parent and two children while Alaska provides over $900 for the same. The average monthly benefit is about $450. About $31 billion of our tax dollars pays for TANF every year.

SNAP, aka food stamps, is available for families and individuals (families get additional benefits based on the number of children in the household). It provides funds that can only be used to purchase food. Again, the actual value of the benefit varies considerably by state, but the average for the nation is about $275 per month. About $80 billion of our tax dollars pays for SNAP every year.

But then there's a whole host of 'welfare' programs that most people--especially those in the middle class--never even think about because they're called tax credits. That $1,000 Uncle Sam shaves off your taxes every year simply because you had a kid? About a $60 billion welfare benefit. The mortgage interest tax deduction? $70+ billion welfare benefit.

And then there's 'welfare' benefits folks--again, mostly the middle and upper class--get but likely have no idea about. Things like tax credits for employer sponsored health insurance, pension contributions and earnings, and capital gains. Those are worth about $450 billion a year.

You completely missed the point. You should read this.

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/119281

DSGamer wrote:

You completely missed the point. You should read this.

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/119281

Not really, man. TANF is about the only welfare benefit that is restricted to children. Everything else people means tested and available to individuals: food, housing, healthcare, job training, etc. The only other social benefit the childless miss out on is the child tax credit.

But there are a whole host of social benefits that some people get, but others do not. Homeowners get the mortgage interest tax credit and renters get nothing. I mean why is the government rewarding people for taking on massive loads of debt? And people with jobs with benefits get massively subsidized healthcare (and likely don't even know it).

You're still missing the point. Krev was clearly talking about a specific type of welfare available to someone without a job or unemployed / underemployed.

No, he said certain social benefits and gave the example of welfare (which, like I pointed out, actually consists of a veritable sh*tload of different benefits). Social benefits means a lot more than "welfare."

I think OG's made a pretty reasoned argument here. Maybe the OP can clarify by being more specific?

IMAGE(http://m.quickmeme.com/img/fd/fd228807246f8d3ea29e0a3cdf92876dfccb22a778eada2c0f69582438f80027.jpg)

Shoal07 wrote:

I think OG's made a pretty reasoned argument here. Maybe the OP can clarify by being more specific?

Krev could be more clear. I agree. But I understood what he meant and it had context from a previous thread. FWIW.

Jayhawker wrote:

It's called living in a society. Single men have health insurance that covers pregnancy. Women have health insurance that covers prostate cancer.

Single or not, we all benefit from a society of educated and healthy adults. I found it interesting in the newest child-free thread that someone mentioned the world prefer to be part of the village than have their own kids. But then it was followed by how unfair it is that parents get more time off for their sick kids.

Basically, people often love the benefits of living in a society, but often resent that anyone gets a benefit that they can't use themselves.

Parents get extra time off for sick kids? I didn't know that, someone better tell my employer, they owe me sick leave!

DSGamer wrote:
Shoal07 wrote:

I think OG's made a pretty reasoned argument here. Maybe the OP can clarify by being more specific?

Krev could be more clear. I agree. But I understood what he meant and it had context from a previous thread. FWIW.

Ah, see, we don't.

Jayhawker wrote:

Basically, people often love the benefits of living in a society, but often resent that anyone gets a benefit that they can't use themselves.

It would be one thing if those benefits were being distributed in a somewhat equal fashion, but they're not. Uncle Sam spends *a lot* more on the middle class and the wealthy and those folks don't even acknowledge they're getting a benefit. But god forbid if the person ahead of them at the grocery store buys a steak with an EBT card.

I mean seriously. What's the actual reason people can write off their mortgage interest? What possible social benefit does that provide?

So I went to read the last few pages of the child-free thread and I think OG does answer the question posed here. Children do not bring massive benefits from the government, and if you're not super poor they're not going to write you any checks. If you're super poor w/kids, you'll get more, but if you're over that poverty line, kids or no, you're still SOL.

Also, there's a reason the parents avoid that thread, we get attacked if we say anything or try to dispel any of the crazy talk that goes on in there (like parents get more time off for sick kids). They chased us out a long time ago and instead want to sit around self-basting in their collective decision. They don't want our opinions, they want to justify each others. Some companies give parents extra benefits, but federally there's not much outside of the child tax credit or increased TANF or SNAP, and all of those are only available to certain incomes.

OG_slinger wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Basically, people often love the benefits of living in a society, but often resent that anyone gets a benefit that they can't use themselves.

It would be one thing if those benefits were being distributed in a somewhat equal fashion, but they're not. Uncle Sam spends *a lot* more on the middle class and the wealthy and those folks don't even acknowledge they're getting a benefit. But god forbid if the person ahead of them at the grocery store buys a steak with an EBT card.

I mean seriously. What's the actual reason people can write off their mortgage interest? What possible social benefit does that provide?

It makes home buying more affordable for the middle class so they can own homes. It came about in the mid-20th to get people into homes after WW2. You can argue whether we should have it or not (as you can with any welfare benefit) but it's there to get people to buy homes.

It's called living in a society. Single men have health insurance that covers pregnancy. Women have health insurance that covers prostate cancer.

Single or not, we all benefit from a society of educated and healthy adults. I found it interesting in the newest child-free thread that someone mentioned they would prefer to be part of the village than have their own kids. But then it was followed by how unfair it is that parents get more time off for their sick kids.

Basically, people often love the benefits of living in a society, but then resent that anyone gets a benefit that they can't use themselves.

Shoal07 wrote:

So I went to read the last few pages of the child-free thread and I think OG does answer the question posed here. Children do not bring massive benefits from the government, and if you're not super poor they're not going to write you any checks. If you're super poor w/kids, you'll get more, but if you're over that poverty line, kids or no, you're still SOL.

I guess people think "what if I fall through all the gaps in the saftey net?" and see that parents always have TANF to fall back on and feel that's unfair. Of course, actually looking at how threadbare the benefits TANF really are, it doesn't seem like a Parents Only saftey net of last resort as much as something that barely offsets the financial (and other) responsibilites of those kids in the first place.

edit: I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is also heavily weighted towards people with kids, but then again, you have to have a job in the first place to get that.

Really, I think focusing on the whole "parents get free stuff" is such a minor point in a much bigger, much more important discussion about what the social welfare system should look like, it feels a lot more like an emotional issue than a rational one.

The problem is, it's not "parents getting free stuff." It's kids getting benefits despite their parents not being able to provide for them. And sure, some truly awful parents take advantage the system and screw over their children. But some people, abuse disability and unemployment, but I would rather prosecute them than eliminate the benefits for those that need them.

We got the child income credit once. Let's just say life pretty much sucked at that point. I would not want to live at that economic level again, and I'm not going to complain about parents that do getting that credit.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I guess people think "what if I fall through all the gaps in the saftey net?" and see that parents always have TANF to fall back on and feel that's unfair.

That's because of how our social safety net is designed. All the benefits go bye-bye as soon as you make more than the poverty threshold. There's no gradual decrease until you reach, say, 200% of the poverty threshold. You're either practically destitute and you get benefits or you're making some money--but still struggling--and you get absolutely nothing.

My apologies, I invite others to clarify what they were referring to, I imagine the rules here differ from the US so I don't really have a horse in this race beyond trying to protect an everything else thread from spiraling into p&c.

Jayhawker wrote:

The problem is, it's not "parents getting free stuff." It's kids getting benefits despite their parents not being able to provide for them. And sure, some truly awful parents take advantage the system and screw over their children. But some people, abuse disability and unemployment, but I would rather prosecute them than eliminate the benefits for those that need them.

We got the child income credit once. Let's just say life pretty much sucked at that point. I would not want to live at that economic level again, and I'm not going to complain about parents that do getting that credit.

And to clarify, personally I'm totally okay with that. My (perhaps erroneous) understanding was that people were saying non-parents get nothing and having offspring was a requirement to get aid. If everyone gets basic needs and parents get more because they're responsible for the basic needs of more lives then I'm okay with that.

krev82 wrote:

My apologies, I invite others to clarify what they were referring to, I imagine the rules here differ from the US so I don't really have a horse in this race beyond trying to protect an everything else thread from spiraling into p&c.

Jayhawker wrote:

The problem is, it's not "parents getting free stuff." It's kids getting benefits despite their parents not being able to provide for them. And sure, some truly awful parents take advantage the system and screw over their children. But some people, abuse disability and unemployment, but I would rather prosecute them than eliminate the benefits for those that need them.

We got the child income credit once. Let's just say life pretty much sucked at that point. I would not want to live at that economic level again, and I'm not going to complain about parents that do getting that credit.

And to clarify, personally I'm totally okay with that. My (perhaps erroneous) understanding was that people were saying non-parents get nothing and having offspring was a requirement to get aid. If everyone gets basic needs and parents get more because they're responsible for the basic needs of more lives then I'm okay with that.

The article you linked falls into the same trap of ignoring all the welfare benefits given to the middle class in the form of tax breaks. I have no idea how Canada's system works but I would assume they have some of these too. Many of these programs have no children requirements or benefits - except for the child tax credit. But housing, education, capital gains, dividends, 401ks, other tax deductions (like state, property, local), and many of the other breaks have nothing to do with children and can be much, much larger than all the others combined. Capital gains & dividends is probably the largest break for the rich, but the rest target the middle class almost exclusively.

These benefits, as pointed out with the poverty targeted welfare, have ceilings that almost seem designed to keep the classes separate. There's a point where you no longer qualify for the poverty level benefits, but are still extremely poor - just not poor enough. The same goes for the middle class benefits. At a certain point you begin to lose them all, until you do. Both these lines make it financially difficult if not impossible to leave one class for another unless you somehow have a large influx of capital that boosts you into a sustainable level. Someone making 11500 a year isn't going to buy a house to deduct the tax, just a a middle class person with no more tax breaks probably doesn't have the disposable income to invest and grow a large asset subject to capital gains (they're busy paying all those taxes on their salary style income, which tends not to rise faster than inflation). Capital gains is taxed at half the rate that wage income is, which is why I'm using it as an example of a rich tax break. If all your income comes from capital gains then you pay a far smaller ratio of tax to income. Of course, the middle class benefit from this as well in any investments they do have, and if they ever sell their house, but we're talking chump change compared to the benefit Warren Buffet gets from the break.

Jayhawker wrote:

The problem is, it's not "parents getting free stuff." It's kids getting benefits despite their parents not being able to provide for them. And sure, some truly awful parents take advantage the system and screw over their children. But some people, abuse disability and unemployment, but I would rather prosecute them than eliminate the benefits for those that need them.

Oh yeah, I pointed that out in the other thread, that it's the Catch-22 of the entire situation where you can't really take care of the kids without taking care of the whole family, no matter what we're talking about. So to do right by the kids, you have to 'subsidize the lifestyle choices' (not a big fan of phrasing it that way, either) of the parents. There's really no way around it.

We got the child income credit once. Let's just say life pretty much sucked at that point. I would not want to live at that economic level again, and I'm not going to complain about parents that do getting that credit.

That's why called it an emotional reaction, not a rational one. I mean, I've never been in that situation, but I can't help but feel like it must really, really suck to have that additional responsiblity of a kid when you're that broke, to the point where any extra benefits you get for having kids would feel outweighed by how much tougher having kids must make that situation.

I'll note here a specific assistance program:

Medicaid, prior to the PPACA's Medicaid expansion (and still, in states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion) did not cover childless adults without disabilities.

In general, I think a lot of the "we provide support to adults with children" stuff comes down to the fact that "we are willing to just let people die if they can't support themselves" is more obviously despicable when there are children involved. In many people's minds it is apparently one thing to suggest that adults who have no means of support must have f*cked up and deserve what they get, and quite another to suggest that their children deserve to pay for the mistakes of those who care for them.

My own position is that the whole line of reasoning is horrible: People don't become destitute by choice. Being poor doesn't imply some sort of moral failing. (Some people *do* remain in these situations by choice--but often because of systemic problems that make any of the "solutions" to escaping destitution far less palatable to them than being destitute.)

That holds across the board, IMO, for any social welfare program.

I think there are good arguments for focusing first on the welfare of children if you have a morally bankrupt system like ours: they have *no* chance of escaping the system while they are young children, no matter how hard they struggle. But the overall problem is the entire system that refuses (by the will of the people) to support those who need it most.

I think Hypatian perfectly expressed my feelings on this issue. Children probably are the ones who need the most help under the circumstances, and I don't begrudge my tax money going to help them, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of other people that also need help. I just want everyone to have a home, food to eat, clothes, and health care, and it just baffles me that after all this time and technology that it doesn't happen. *Why* do we still have these problems? Why are we as a society so willing to let people die? It just upsets me so much. How can we fix this system?

Oh, I think the majority opinon among posters--myself included--on the forum when it comes to social welfare is pretty much "Sweden NOW!" : D

It's more about a feeling that parents have it better because they've got this extra level of the social saftey net, and how that not being available to the child-free (of course, it's also not available to parents with adult children, either) feels 'unfair'. And I don't know if it is. When you really look at how small the TANF benefit is and how many conditions are placed on it, even with some of the other family-friendly parts of the rest of the welfare programs like extra EITC benefits and such, I don't know--I feel like I'd rather take my chances without those benefits but also without the responsibility of a kid considering how little the government really provides from what I know of these programs. The 'parent only' programs really don't seem generous enough to offset how much harder that situation must be with a kid involved.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Oh, I think the majority opinon among posters--myself included--on the forum when it comes to social welfare is pretty much "Sweden NOW!" : D

It's more about a feeling that parents have it better because they've got this extra level of the social saftey net, and how that not being available to the child-free (of course, it's also not available to parents with adult children, either) feels 'unfair'. And I don't know if it is. When you really look at how small the TANF benefit is and how many conditions are placed on it, even with some of the other family-friendly parts of the rest of the welfare programs like extra EITC benefits and such, I don't know--I feel like I'd rather take my chances without those benefits but also without the responsibility of a kid considering how little the government really provides from what I know of these programs. The 'parent only' programs really don't seem generous enough to offset how much harder that situation must be with a kid involved.

Sweden has about 3% of the population of the US (it's only slightly more populous than NY city). I doubt we could afford it.

Between 1995 and 2003, the US spent more per capita on social services than all the Nordic countries *except* Sweden, and we were close to them. Looks like we probably *could* afford it. (In 2003, the US and the Nordic countries spent more on social services per capita than the 2009 per capita median income world-wide.)

We just need to change our focus from a safety net to a uniform set of services available to all. Especially since our safety net is more of a voracious hungry safety python with added spikes.

Yeah I've really grown to hate the "but we're so big!" argument against changing anything - whether it be infrastructure improvements or public transit or social welfare. It just doesn't make sense beyond a knee jerk reaction.

OG_slinger wrote:

It would be one thing if those benefits were being distributed in a somewhat equal fashion, but they're not. Uncle Sam spends *a lot* more on the middle class and the wealthy and those folks don't even acknowledge they're getting a benefit.

Tax breaks are not spending. If the government, for whatever reason, chooses to take less from a certain group of people, that just means there's less revenue - the remaining portion is not "spent", it was never collected. If your logic was applied to an individual, someone could "spend" thousands of dollars they never took from someone else, and vice versa, claiming it as business expenses on their taxes or something.

I mean seriously. What's the actual reason people can write off their mortgage interest? What possible social benefit does that provide?

The reason people can write off their mortgage interest is simple: people, convinced that they knew best, decided that home ownership was a social benefit and implemented government policy to further that goal. The same process is at work in a thousand other areas, like student loans. The fact that this is unfair is built into the policy; the policy must be unfair in order to favor one group (homeowners and prospective homeowners) over others.

Jayhawker wrote:

It's called living in a society. Single men have health insurance that covers pregnancy. Women have health insurance that covers prostate cancer.

Which didn't used to be true, and is plainly in defiance of common sense and basic biological science. The only reason this is true today is because it's been forced into place by the government, and as a side-effect it forced the small percentage of people who couldn't afford the increased cost to lose their insurance.

Single or not, we all benefit from a society of educated and healthy adults.

This is likely true, but how you get to that point is still a very open question. Normally, this reasoning is followed by the assumption that we must have public schooling, despite the many and obvious failures of public schooling to produce this very effect.

Basically, people often love the benefits of living in a society, but then resent that anyone gets a benefit that they can't use themselves.

Haha, no. People could care less what benefits others get, as long as they aren't paying for it. What they resent is being made to pay for it. As Plavonica mentioned above, most people are pretty unhappy with how their tax dollars get spent - not because they resent taxes, but because they think the taxes are being mis-spent on military adventurism, illegal immigrant welfare, foreign aid, welfare queens, or corporate cronyism, depending on the political leanings of the taxpayer.

Shoal07 wrote:

Sweden has about 3% of the population of the US (it's only slightly more populous than NY city). I doubt we could afford it.

Sweden couldn't afford it either, and is now in the middle of a second decade of movement away from a strongly socialist model and towards a more free market model.

bekkilyn wrote:

I just want everyone to have a home, food to eat, clothes, and health care, and it just baffles me that after all this time and technology that it doesn't happen.

Because these things take resources - and someone has to produce those resources. Let's say you have a person A who works and provides for their family. Then there is person B who doesn't (or can't - reason doesn't matter, for this argument). Is it acceptable to take resources produced by the first person and give them to the second person? Even if person A is unwilling and those resources will make the difference for person A's child surviving an illness?

This is the fundamental problem of all socialist systems. Once someone has a way to get what they need, there are large numbers of people who are perfectly fine with that - and not producing to provide for themselves. The greater the benefits, the worse the problem gets, the higher the burden is on the people who actually produce, and the stronger the incentive to avoid working for other people. It's a basic fact of nature that humans are largely self-centered; it's just how we are. And people get tired of other people living off of their labor and not taking care of themselves.

*Why* do we still have these problems? Why are we as a society so willing to let people die? It just upsets me so much. How can we fix this system?

You should consider this: you are entrusting your charity to, and trying to fix, a system that is completely okay with actively killing people, especially brown people in other countries. What could possibly make you think that such a system and the people running it would care about people dying at home?

And second, you're asking the wrong question. Why are YOU willing to let someone die? There's undoubtedly someone dying in, say, India right now of starvation. Why aren't YOU devoting all of your resources to providing for that person? Why aren't YOU stretching your income as far as it will go to provide for as many people as possible, even if it means you go without? What in your life is a luxury, rather than a need - TV, phone, internet, video games, food that's not the minimum you need to survive, social outings, clothing? What are you willing to give up - permanently - so that you can support someone you don't even know, halfway across the country or the world, for the rest of your life so that they don't have to work and provide for themselves?

Once you answer that question, you then know why our society is so willing to let people die, and you won't be so quick to say that others should have resources forcibly taken from them to be given to others. People have a responsibility to support themselves. That doesn't mean there isn't a large place for charity in our society - things happen, and people make mistakes. But there are some things you can't change, and some people you can't help - and a lot more people who are perfectly willing to take advantage of generosity if it means an easier life for them. And there are always, always limited resources. Making those decisions is difficult, and when you leave them to government apparatchiks with their own self-centered agendas, you shouldn't be surprised when the money gets spent on wars in the Middle East or subsidies for oil companies.

I NEVER said anything about forcibly taking ANYTHING from people. I never even brought up "socialism," whatever *that* really is other than a loaded term people typically bring up to promote fear-mongering among certain populations. All I am suggesting is that EVERYONE should have their basic needs met somehow and there is no excuse that we AS A SOCIETY have not managed this. Your "solutions" seem to be akin that an *individual* should make sure to eat every crumb from his/her plates during dinner because otherwise those poor children in a third-world country are starving, and that individual (usually a child) should be grateful he/she is not starving right along with them.

It's funny that for all the "limited resources" arguments that get thrown about all over the place, we certainly manage to scrounge up all the resources we need and then some whenever it just happens to mostly benefit those who already have most of the resources.

I'm not asking the wrong questions at all and I'm tired of the excuses of "we can't become a healthy society because of....reasons."

Instead of offering all the "can'ts" that I've heard over and over and over (and often peppered by a whole lot of political claptrap from all sides), why not offer suggestions of real *solutions* instead? It's always the "we can't, because..." though isn't it?

We really need to change our mentalities from the idea of scarceness over to abundance, and move away from the concepts of "I have mine, so screw the rest of you" that is currently so pervasive.

Aetius wrote:

Jayhawker wrote:

It's called living in a society. Single men have health insurance that covers pregnancy. Women have health insurance that covers prostate cancer.

Which didn't used to be true, and is plainly in defiance of common sense and basic biological science. The only reason this is true today is because it's been forced into place by the government, and as a side-effect it forced the small percentage of people who couldn't afford the increased cost to lose their insurance.

It's called "standardization" and "healthcare savings".

First off, you claim that people have "lost their insurance" due to the "increased cost" of adding coverage for maternity coverage to all policies. Prove it. And note that if your assertion *is* true, it's not only a "small percentage of people", but they also have several new mechanisms for getting *better* insurance, usually at equal or less cost, in the new marketplaces.

So I have to discount that as a real problem. It's at best an outlier.

Before the ACA, only 12% of policies in the individual market offered maternity coverage, and women paid a billion dollars more than men for the exact same coverage in their health insurance. This even had a name in the industry - it was called "gender rating" and was a way for insurance companies to take extra profits from women's policies.

At the same time, over half of the women in the US reported having delayed treatment for issues related to women's health due to the cost of their insurance (or lack of it). So Aetius, you're pitting a huge benefit for over a quarter of the US population against a *possible* downside for "a small percentage", combined with a standardization of costs which not only benefits women but spreads the cost of their health care out over the whole population, making it less expensive for all of us.

That's not just a practical advantage, but a socio-economic one, and even a moral one. Your "common sense" deliberately ignores the mechanism by which insurance becomes affordable (spreading costs among all members), and in that regard it's quite uncommon indeed. You're literally coming down on the side of more expensive exclusionary policies that hurt us economically and deny women health care.

I'm *proud* to contribute to a system that helps others without breaking my back or anyone else's. I'm not going to put ideological purity ahead of practical benefits. You might want to reconsider your position on this.

And with the fear of Ssssssocialism! running through your piece, the claim that libertarianism is not far-right is harder and harder to sustain...

Let's say you have a person A who works and provides for their family. Then there is person B who doesn't (or can't - reason doesn't matter, for this argument). Is it acceptable to take resources produced by the first person and give them to the second person?

Absolutely.

I mean we can pour plenty of anecdotes and hypotheticals to make either answer look evil, but put simply: yes. It's acceptable for a productive member of society to keep an unproductive member from dying.

I think i crystallized the fundamental disagreement I have with Aetius.

Seth wrote:
Let's say you have a person A who works and provides for their family. Then there is person B who doesn't (or can't - reason doesn't matter, for this argument). Is it acceptable to take resources produced by the first person and give them to the second person?

Absolutely.

I mean we can pour plenty of anecdotes and hypotheticals to make either answer look evil, but put simply: yes. It's acceptable for a productive member of society to keep an unproductive member from dying.

I think i crystallized the fundamental disagreement I have with Aetius.

There's also the matter of how little control some people have over their circumstances. I benefited from welfare, government cheese, free lunches and college aid growing up. Now I support all of those things ten-fold in my career as I pay a high tax rate. So I feel like the system worked in that case, even if I would generally quibble with the distribution of my tax dollars normally (defense, etc.). I recognize that I didn't ask to be born into poverty and given assistance I was able to work my way out of poverty.

As an adult there is nothing for me, though, if unemployment runs out. At least as far as I know. Disability insurance, which I was this close to needing to use with my recent health scare.

I'm pretty sure you can recieve disability payments as an adult if your injury qualifies. I have a brother-in-law with a back injury that prevents him from working, and he was eligible for payments.

Interestingly, he now spends most of his time listening to Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh when he isn't railing against the welfare state in online forums.

The other thing to understand, is that ins case, and any other I am aware of, the amount of assistance is only enough to live a meager existence, and it sure isn't what a normal person would aspire to. No one is living it up on welfare. Life isn't easier if you just quit your job and take handouts, yet folks make these kinds of statements all the time.

Aetius wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Single or not, we all benefit from a society of educated and healthy adults.

This is likely true, but how you get to that point is still a very open question. Normally, this reasoning is followed by the assumption that we must have public schooling, despite the many and obvious failures of public schooling to produce this very effect.

Of course, public schooling came about due to the absolute failure of the middle and lower classes being able to educate their children enough to thrive in this world. I don't mind finding fixes to help schools perform better. And even if the status quo is as good as we can do (which is bullsh*t, since all of those countries that kick our ass are using the concept of public schooling to do so) it is still better than not having it at all.