Posts
5138
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8/15/2006
Location
Big D, TX
US
Fantasy
4947th
Edited Date/Time
1/27/2012 5:22am
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~
You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~
so i go for cash ..fuck this government..there will be plenty of under the table deals
Your preposterous premise renders the rest of your point completely moot. (not to mention it has nothing to do with the thread's initial post.
Other than, you're right.
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spend by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.
The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.
Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.
This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
The wealthiest of this society was willfully given $2 trillion worh of wealth generated by all working Americans in the form of tax cuts via our government representatives. It was done in the hopes that they would invest it wisely and generate more weatlh...it was neither invested wisely and it did not generate more wealth. Seventy five percent of the wealth that was generated by all working Americans during the Bush recovery from 2003 to 2006, $800 billion, went to the top 1% wealthiest Americans. You may think that willfully giving wealth to the top in the hope that they will be wise enough to invest well and benevolent enough to trickle it down is a good strategy however I would rather have that wealth generated by all working Americans dispersed out more evenly so we all get the chips due to us so we can all play in the game.
You don't care if wealth is handed out you just don't like it going to the lower and middle income as you have this irrational fear that if it is given to the poor or middle class they will not work. Let's just keep giving it to Paris Hilton and her ilk because they are so hardworking...they never spend time wasting away the hours at the country club playing golf or cribbage on the wealth we hard working Americans generate...no never. There is a reason they are called "The Leisure Class."
The Shop
Two, even if I agreed with the 'facts' that your weak attempt at vilifying free markets with "Seventy five percent of the wealth that was generated by all working Americans during the Bush recovery from 2003 to 2006, $800 billion, went to the top 1% wealthiest Americans." completely ignores that that top 1% invested the money that generated the wealth you think was 'unfairly distributed' and, they, therefore, were entitled to a proportional share of the returns on that investment. Even if your pie chart was accurate, and I don't believe it is, I guess you'd rather the 99% to give back the 25% they received?
And a wiki is about the LEAST authoritative reference one can cite. After I go edit that article, feel free to post it again.
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php
Also, how am I villifying free markets based upon my thoughts about tax policy? Did I ever say anything about scraping free markets...I just have a different theory on where to distribute wealth once it is created. By the way, lowering the rate of taxation on the top is wealth restribution via tax policy...it is just using it to redistribute wealth to the top as opposed to the middle or the bottom.
As for my figures and quoting wicki, if they are wrong prove it. Besides the wicki paste was just an excerpt from the memoirs of Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948 and reflect what he believed caused the depression. If you know that the citing of Eccles memoirs is incorrect please correct me.
I had a short debate with Ger a while back about charitable giving, in which I said that giving money to your church generally isn't charity, because charity, as defined by Jesus, was feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and healing the sick - and most churches spend a pittance on those kinds of things compared to what they spend on their own church. If you give a dollar to your church and they spend 95 cents of it on their own operation, then that's not charitable giving. And when the church does not help the poor, the only other option is for the government to help the poor. If the government does it badly, well, that's the way it goes. Maybe the church could do it better, but they're out there building 200 foot high crosses so they can prove they love Jesus more than the other guys do.
My family went to a church last Sunday that has its operations funded by a coffee shop and lunch counter. It's in a ramshackle building on the edge of the poorest part of Houston, and when it takes up the collection at their church services, I think they spend a larger portion of that money on help for the poor than any other church in town (just a guess on my part). The pastor makes most of his income from books that he's written and the "staff" is largely volunteers. They have programs to mentor and tutor poor children, they make sandwiches and go downtown and hand them out to homeless people, they provide blankets and things like that when it gets cold. We were early to church on Sunday, and I just happened to read the Sermon on the Mount while we were waiting for church to start, and it was very moving to me. I said to myself, "This is the way it should be done."
The point of all this is, we're debating government taking from one person and giving to another person because the church spends their money - which is supposed to be charitable giving - wastefully. When the church abdicates its responsibility, the government inefficiently steps in its place, and then everyone gets angry about it.. And to have trash like Adrian Rogers rail against government assistance to the poor, when the lack of assistance to the poor is his own direct fault, is unconscionable. But that's OK, because trash like Adrian Rogers has no conscience in the first place.
I'm certainly not against giving to help the poor, but I do not enjoy paying for it to be wasted, either by my church or my government. You quoted 95% of a church's income going to support its operations and I would venture a guess that the amount is similar for taxes paid to the amount funding programs for the poor.
`oG
What unresolved pain makes you so vitriolic, PK?
Here’s the deal – unless churches put at least 50% of their income into charitable, secular causes, they shouldn’t have a tax exemption. Back in the early days, churches were given tax exempt status because they were charities – if they are no longer charities, they shouldn’t have tax exempt status. And when Adrian Rogers and others like him not only refuse to care for the poor themselves but have the audacity to speak out against efforts of the government to care for them, they are no longer churches in any meaningful sense of the term.
Just where did they invest that money & how has that benefited us? In a perfect world perhaps, but that has not proven to be the case. I continues to amaze that working people like yourself allow yourself to be brainwashed into voting against your own best interests & actually believe that giving to the rich will somehow "trickle down" to the rest of us. Recent history has completely discredited that notion. The only people who have benefited from this "windfall" is people like Bernie Madhoff & Wall Street insiders along with their friends in the oil & gas business & the defense contractors who have all gotten rich off of taxpayer dollars at the expense of the middle class. Through their unmitigated greed they have done exactly what ENRON did & killed the golden goose. In an economy based on consumer spending the people have got less & less. No money, no spending, obviously no trickle down.
"During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. Not only did the Bush administration favor the interests of the wealthiest few Americans over those of the middle class, it has consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.
Under Bush, the economy grew at a reasonable pace for three years. But most Americans failed to benefit from that growth. All indicators of the economic status of ordinary Americans — poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health insurance — show that most of us were worse off in 2008 than we were in 2000.
So where did all the economic growth go? It went to a relative handful of people at the top. The earnings of the typical full-time worker, adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared — from 185 times that of average workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005. And after-tax corporate profits have also skyrocketed, more than doubling since Bush took office. Those profits will eventually be reflected in dividends and capital gains, which accrue mainly to the very well-off: More than three-quarters of all stocks are owned by the richest ten percent of the population."
Back to the original quote... I don't think Adrian Rogers is saying we shouldn't help the poor but may be referring to some of the Biblical quotes on work such as 1 Tim 5:8 (But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever) and wanting everyone to provide for his own family at a minimum.
http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6
The government should not be in the welfare business. Neither should they be in the retirement business. And they'd better not get in the health care business.
Our Federal Government's job is to gaurantee our inalienable rights, uphold the constitution, protect our boarders and maintain a sound infrastructure.
As soon as they start doing anything more than that, they begin to take away our freedom (as said so plainly in the original post, and is so obviously evidenced by a clear look at our current society).
Eliminate all government funded welfare programs. Cut taxes accordingly. Americans will take care of each other, if that was to take place I gaurantee you that charitable donations would spike dramatically as a result.
Pit Row
Ok, but Jesus' idea was that the church would help the poor - and the church doesn't do it in any proportion that you could even consider a valid charity program. So in the absence of the church doing what it's supposed to do, the government becomes the last resort - and Adrian Rogers has the nerve to criticize how they do it. It'd be like if I didn't do my job and someone else came along and tried to do it, and I went around talking about how poorly they're doing the work I'm supposed to be doing.
But here's the deal, the government shouldn't be an option when it comes to welfare.
Food, housing, welfare checks, etc aren't inalienable rights gauranteed by the constitution. And therefore the government has no business trying to provide them for it's citizens.
If "the church" (whatever that means??? Christan, Jewish, Muslim, Buddist..what?) fails, that isn't justification for the federal government to step in.
The federal government needs to focus on the inalienable rights in the constitution...and leave the rest to whomever VOLUNTARILY steps up to help.
If we choose to elect a majority of representatives that believe this to be government's role then the programs will be developed and if the opposite belief is the majority you will not see these programs developed. It appears at this time via elections the people have spoken and they would like the government to increase their role in this effort. What you are experiencing from your perspective is something known in democratic societies as the "tyranny of the majority."
Also, in this current economic climate how many people will volutarily choose or have the means to voluntarily step-up. This may be an option when the economy is doing well however in times like these something has to fill the void.
And I"m fine with the majority getting their way...I just get really pissed off when the majority of the majority don't care to understand the consequenses of their voting candidates that promise them the most. That's what's sad. Americans just don't give a shit anymore. They are voting away their freedom without even knwoing it.
And to use our current rescession as a means of validating your point is short sighted. We aren't always in a rescession, in fact, we aren't in rescessions more than we're in them. So "mr. majority", the majority of the time Americans would have the means to volutarily step-up. And if the welfare program were done away with, the tax cuts that would be possible would make Americans in an even better position to step-up.
Oh, and that "something" that has to fill pick up the slack when Americans don't have the means, should NEVER be our federal government (state governments, maybe).
And further, you are correct Welfare etc are NOT inalienable rights, I'll agree with you there. And as a result the federal government has no business administering them.
Is taxing the middle class and wealthy such that the federal government can afford to give the poor food, money, and housing REALLY for the greater good of the country, even if it might be the right thing to do? Is it?
I don't think it is...because I value freedom and the ability to succeed. The burden of the poor, when carried by the federal government, limits the freedom of everyone else.
So our tax funded welfare programs are what makes the American people great, huh? Forcing people to contribute to the welfare programs makes the American people great, is that what you think? I think you're selling yourself, and America, short if that's what you believe.
Do you really think our welfare programs are the only thing that separate us from Somolia and Darfur? Really? is that all? Do you really think that if we dropped all welfare programs we'd become a third world country? Wow!
Face it BMSOB, you're stretching here...the parallels you're trying to draw aren't really parrallels (tithing to welfare, USA to Somalia).
I Know for a fact people wouldn't be dying in the streets, Americans are better than that. You cut my taxes because we don't have to fund welfare, and I'm gong to donate more the charity. And I KNOW FOR A FACT I'm not the only one.
I'm not opposed to welfare programs, I'm just opposed to welfare programs that are involuntarily funded by the tax payer and administered by the government.
Anyway, if you are going to bitch about corporate welfare, then you need to also bitch about welfare for the poor. If not you're no better than the righties that bitch about welfare for the poor and are okay with corporate welfare.
This country is trying to privatize gains (success) and socialize losses (failure). They are trying to do in on the corporate level and on the individual level. And right or wrong, it isn't helping this country, it's hurting it.
This country either needs to go "all in" for socialism (god forbid), or "all out" (hopefully), because trying to do both is killing us.
-I'm saying that just because the church isn't doing it, doesn't mean the government SHOULD do it. Welfare isn't an inalienable right.
So if the church doesn't do it, it doesn't get done...or another NON-GOVERNMENT organization should step up and do it. But the federal government should NEVER administer them.
If the church was responsible for providing one of the inalienable rights gauranteed by the constituion, and they didn't or weren't doing it good enough...THEN the government could step in and do it, and I'd have no problem with that at all.
But when the government is trying to provide certain LUXURIES as something EVERY American DESERVES (just because they are alive), that bugs the crap out of me.
there needs to be a balance
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