I’m taking an exit requirement course with the general topic of equality in schools and the workplace. It’s my 3rd of its kind since meeting exit requirements for my A.A., so it’s getting pretty boring by this point. Anyway, I thought it might be some good conversation.
I think the first steps to reforming racism is to begin radical social reform in the form of slashing federal and state programs that encourage social delinquency. Here are three of the top social programs that are holding back the progress minorities are looking to achieve but are actually slaves to the system that created the programs. I say this as a former recipient of assistance for the extreme expenses associated with having cystic fibrosis. I’d never choose to limit myself to $1,000/mo income again just for that lousy assistance.
Welfare: gone – if you can’t work, then move in with family – if you had 4 kids with no mom or dad around to help, then you can’t afford to have had them in the first place. If you don’t pay for the car you bought or don’t pay for the insurance on the car you were given, they take it from you, and kids are more valuable than a car.
Social Security: completely broken. I’ve already paid more into it than I’ll ever get out and it sets people up with a false sense of security and entitlement that the gov’t will take care of them just because they worked or got injured. Retirement’s not a right and neither is gov’t spoon-feeding.
Bussing is racist in its purest form. Let me translate what the legislatures and school administrators are saying with a veil of compassion: “those kids are too poor, have too many issues at home, and are possibly too stupid to excel as a group, so if there are some shining stars, lets’ get them out of there to a ‘good school'” How about you hire the same caliber of teachers, pay them the same, fund them the same, and treat those kids like the other schools treat their kids? That’s the racism going on in school!
Jesse,
I agree on most points except one and a half. About welfare you said, “if you had 4 kids with no mom or dad around to help, then you can’t afford to have had them in the first place”
My parents had three kids and could afford us just fine – till the day my dad dropped dead of a heart attack when we were still little. One day we are affordable and the next we were not. No one in our family had the resources to take on four more people. The government kept us going till mom got married again. Very few women worked outside the home and, unlike most mothers today, mom believed we needed to have at least one parent. I suppose she could have gone out and found a menial job, but she never could have earned enough to support us in those days, so the government bailed us out big time. There are plenty more examples of way a family’s financial situation can change overnight.
The problem is when people abuse it by making a career out of mooching off others. Don’t dump a system because someone abuses it – fix it so they can’t abuse it. But the lawmakers will not fix it (or drop it) because it buys votes.
The half disagreement is Social security. It’s not a bad idea – it was just implemented wrong. As it is, it’s sort of a ponzi scheme. People paying in are funding those drawing out, so you need a constant increase of people contributing. The right way would be to hold the money in some sort of interest-bearing account that the contributor would get back at retirement.
#1 is referring to people with 1 to 5 baby daddies who chose to shack up and have that many kids on one income because they like sex and don’t want to be inconvenienced with condoms or self-control.
#2 – of course, but that’s what makes it “social” security rather than “personal” security. It’s socialist in its very essence, shrouded in some FDR/WWII/polio/liberal mystique of God save our second king mentality that nothing the man did could be wrong almost 70 years later. After all, the man was reported by Biden to have gotten on national TV after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Anyone who could do that before TV was a household technology must be amazing and never wrong with policy.
The problem is that they do all of this with a guise of “good intentions” while their true intention is te preservation and expansion of personal/party power. I have yet to see anything out of this administration that can realistically be considered to be for the long-term good of the country – only Congress and appeasing enough minority/needy groups with their cause to get votes. Political whores, that’s what they are.
Sounds like we pretty much agree. 😉
And the beautiful thing is we never got into this over dinner – separate paths, same ideas. Must be not-so-common common sense.