Sorry for the delay. I've been waiting to find time to respond, and honestly, sometimes these discussions are exhausting to think about. You're not changing my mind, I'm not changing yours, so it's a lot of chatter back and forth, and since I'm the chatty sort... exhausting. So it's not something I look forward to coming to address even though I enjoy the debate.
Really?
To be fair, that's different than taking money. If he ever takes money, his only redeeming value will be that he drives you nuts.
Those two things sort of run at cross purposes.
I get your point, but they really don't. There's a huge different between a cane and a Rascal.
You act like that's out of the goodness of their hearts 100%.
I'm glad you qualified that remark. For some it is. For some it isn't, and you're right, it's about tax deductions. Either way, the underprivileged and/or needy are getting money from sources other than Uncle Sam.
They have incentive to donate because this country is fucking stupid enough to put a tax on income. Why you would penalize someone for generating revenue is beyond me, unless they're just locking it all up in a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault, real or virtual.
Right!
Call me arbitrary as much as you like after stratifying income a better way than by percentage of national income.
It's not you I'm calling arbitrary. It's the numbers being used. Even going by a percentage of national income in association with whatever budget is determined, it's still arbitrary because that budget is arbitrary. Sure there are things that are "needs" like schools, roads, hospitals, etc. but there's a LOT that would fall under "wants". That's where things get hazy. (This is where things like entitlement programs and max budgets for the military fall.)
start with the trillion-dollar military boondoggles
As a veteran, I would immediately point out that you and I can have this conversation because of that military and its boondoggles. However, I also agree with you to a point. Things like the F22 are a waste of money, not just because the plane is a disaster, but also because it's not really needed in today's conflicts. I don't think Congress should be deciding what our troops need, but I also don't think the Pentagon should write blank checks either.
Plus, the military was only 16% of the federal budget last year. Entitlements were 60%. You're saying we should shrink the smaller number and increase the bigger one.
Evil, stupid self-interest exists among the poor, too.
Couldn't agree more. The size of your bank account has no bearing on who you are as a person.
If a government tit is what it takes to raise them from actively damaging the country to merely 'not contributing' while we skim off the ones who can be saved, I'm comparatively ok with that. I understand if you have an intellectual hurdle with rewarding someone for nothing... I do too, but I've made my peace because the alternative is ghastly.
Like I said, same goals, different methods.
I don't think the alternative is ghastly. I think it gets painted as ghastly so we're afraid to go there. It's propaganda. I don't know if we can point to a "cause" anymore without seeing people screaming about the sky falling.
The other folks around here (I don't want to put words in mouths) will tell you that we, as a society, could force people to donate without laws by simply not supporting their fortune/businesses. "That's how a capitalist system should work, and we're not currently living in one despite claims that we are, and yada yada yada."
Please understand, I'm not saying people shouldn't pay their fair share. I'm simply debating 1) What that fair share is, and 2) Does it make sense to simply continue to throw more and more money at a broken system instead of fixing the system?
Financial health for billionaires is a poor rallying cry. What's the practical difference between 400 million in yearly personal income versus 360 million, not just to you and me, but to the billionaire?
If you're talking about old money that's just sitting in a bank, you're right.
If you're talking about new money, you're wrong because a $40 million loss is bad. That's going to make rich people tighten their purses. They're going to cut costs.
My company is a good example of this in action. Our Q1 earnings were 50% of projected. I can't give you the exact numbers just in case someone is watching, but we're talking millions of dollars. We've hit a bad spell because the market completely dropped out on one of our products. On top of that, we just spent 10s of millions building a new plant. So our board is looking at cutting costs all over the place.
Crisis right?
Well, not really. Not only would this 50% downward swing have been a record year 10 years ago, but that 50% of projected budget is still earnings. We're making money and lots of it, but the drop from where we "should" be is causing belt tightening. We're not as anxious to spend money.
If you take money from someone, even a billionaire, they're going to shy away from giving or spending more. From us normal folks, that means national sales numbers drop. When it happens to billionaires or corporations, it means layoffs and opportunities that get ignored.
Rich people don't get and stay rich by pissing their money away.
And again, it's a really slippery slope. Because tax rates aren't decreasing. Today Sanders wants to increase the taxes on the rich, but we both know that won't be the end of it. And this is really my point, when is it time to stop taking and start looking at where we're putting this money?
I assume you have a personal budget? Do you just spend money whenever and whereever you want, even if there's no return and just continue to do so without worry about any consequences? The government does, and that is a insanely important distinction that people leave out when discussing spending other people's money.
There's our favorite word again. Yes, a stratified tax burden that considers how much each can comfortably bear is exceedingly arbitrary -- far moreso than the criteria the poorly-educated and hungry would use when deciding whom to rob because they think the system failed them.
You can try to mock the word, but my usage of it is no less legit than you deciding it's fair to take as much of someone else's money as you determine "fair" and giving it to someone else.
And please stop painting everyone as needy and poor due to no fault of their own. Are there people in that situation? OF COURSE! That's who we should be helping. But are we helping them by giving them blank free money with no conditions? Plus, you both know there's also a lot of people who aren't poor or needy just by circumstance and they continue to bleed the system. Is it really wrong for people to want something to be done about that? Really?
Is it really ok to continue to take more and more of other people's money and not worry about the system you're putting the money into? I guess it won't completely break down while we're alive, so fuck it! Not our problem!
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but do you have a citation for your assertion that he took this sort of money?
First link that came up when I googled:
Donor list for Sanders.
Since we don't want to be arbitrary, where are your cut-offs?
I'd say somewhere before your cutoff of when to stop taking their money, and I assume that's when it's all gone.
If children are born into hopelessness because their mothers fell and couldn't get up and passed that despair on, are they just shit out of luck because we can't condone being on the government tit for more than X number of years?
Yes.
Now notice your first instinct is to use "children" as your example? It's done that way to evoke an emotion. To make someone seem like a monster if they oppose you. It's the exact same reason why when Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown have their pictures in the paper, it's shots of them smiling and younger instead of recent pictures that more reflect who they actually are. Like the picture of Trayvon with the gun and drugs or the video of Mike Brown beating the shit out of the old man or strong arm robbing the convenience store. Why use the propaganda pictures? Because there's an agenda that's being pushed and it's harder to argue against kids that look innocent and sweet than violent criminals.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent there. Back to your point, you simply CANNOT save everyone. It can't be done. That's nature. Charles Darwin would say it's natural selection.
Now children, should absolutely have programs in place to help them when parents fail. So you can remove their little faces from your poster. 
However, we shouldn't be paying for adults to live on welfare their entire lives and we are. That's a fucking problem. There's no incentive for them to get jobs. To train. To give back to society. To be anything other than a drain on those people who actually work in and care about their community.
I knew a guy who used to apply for jobs at the beginning of every fall, work all winter, then get fired every time late spring rolled around. Why? So he could get unemployment and his summers off. Tax payer funded summer vacations every year! I know countless manual laborers who game the system so they receive federal funds while they're not working "officially". Ditto for union folks. Why do you think so many manual labor jobs can be found that pay under the table? Go in the want ads and hunt for contractors. You'll find a lot of folks working full time contracting, yet are considered "unemployed" so they get government checks.
You say you want to help those children and those folks who have fallen down, right? Imagine how much more money and focus we could focus on them if the system was working as intended. Instead of using buckshot to spray down everything in an area, we could use slugs and act problems surgically.
If it has to exist in its current form to exist at all, then I'll take it as-is -- and that's even precluding the possibility of improving it through better public education. 'A little good' isn't 'amazingly good', but it's better than bad.
Again, I have to point out that we're not opposed. We're debating back and forth, but at the end of the day our goals aren't really different. You want tax money to help folks in need so it does some good for them, and thus, our society. I agree, but I'm saying the system is so broken at this point that we need to stop asking for more money out of those who already pay the most and create all the jobs, and start examining those folks actually spending the money (politicians) and finding out why so much of it is being misspent.
What if you reworded your questions to be about number of people materially helped instead of dollar figures on a paper?
Yeah, the Red Cross does the same thing during the blood drive I organize here at work every year. "Every donation saves up to 3 lives."
Trying to make this is about lives versus dollar figures is a fine tactic. It attempts to put a face on what I'm opposing and makes me look like a materialistic, greedy monster. Fair enough.
However, it's a short term view of the issue. You've stopped the smoke pouring into the room, but you're still in a building that's on fire. Socialism doesn't exactly have a winning record around the globe.
You do understand that money is a finite resource, yes? So since welfare and entitlements have become a part of our country, the number of people depending on them has grown. It hasn't shrunk, the number has just grown. If we continue throwing money at the problem rather than fixing the system, do you really think that number is going to magically reverse course and start shrinking? Eventually, the money will run out. Then what? This year a hundred kids might starve to death in the U.S., and not because there aren't programs available, but because they're neglected. However, if we continue down this entitlement path and taxing the rich, we will eventually see a day when millions of children starve to death because there's nobody left to pay for entitlements.
Is that ok just because we might not live long enough to see it?
Democratic government is necessarily going to help as many as it can, and it's a far better apparatus for assessing utilitarian ends than the individual or the corporation even if the undeserving can vote themselves free beer and corn chips.
Our country has already danced with socialism, and it didn't work out very well.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Also, just FYI, we don't live in a democracy. The U.S. is a republic. It's also run by corrupt assholes who have turned everything they touched to shit. (Seriously, name a government run program that isn't bloated and broken.) You really think they'll do better with an even larger budget that hurts the very folks who create jobs?
Ask Venezuala how socialism is working for them. Hooray for mass starvation.
I seriously can't do small to the point posts. I apologize. I'm no TPR when it comes to that. When I rant, I tend to rant... This whole thing is why, like Catt, I hate Sanders more than Trump (not that I'm voting for either one or Clinton). I'd rather have the guy with no plan then the guy who's villainizing the job creators and whose plan has failed every where else it's been attempted.
Can I sum up and hopefully we can just focus on this and not continue to pass walls of text back and forth?
Can we agree?
-You want people to receive assistance and so do I.
-You want people to pay their fair share to keep the trains running and so do I.
-We both agree the current system isn't working as it should or could.
Where we disagree is in one point only (I think):
-You want the rich to pay even more right now.
-I want the system audited and corrected before we keep throwing money into a bottomless pit.
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” - Dr Thomas Sowell