Posted on 11/21/2010 10:44:59 PM PST by TeachableMoment
~ Emmerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that "a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year." And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks.
America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system. Not surprisingly, it is not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper - it is also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world's most generous entitlement system.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
If I was a Mexican peasant, I’d be hotfooting it north as fast as I could.
Don’t worry. There’s plenty of middle class and corporate welfare too.
Didn’t Van Jones mention something about destroying America from top-down, bottom-up and inside out. Or some rot like that?
If the family provider works only one week a month at minimum wage, he or she makes 92 percent as much as a provider grossing $60,000 a year.
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Fixed it a little.
My parents decided they needed a bigger house, so they got with a realtor and we began to look at houses with more than five bedrooms. We found this three story house that had something like seven bedrooms. A single mom with two kids were renting it and the realtor told us that she was on welfare. Well, we walked through the kitchen and we opened the cabinets. She was well-stocked in Pepperidge Farm everything, bread, raisin bread and all those delicious cookies, with the money that my parents gave her through their taxes. I was only twelve at the time, but I got really angry. Not at my parents, but the fact that she was living high on the hog at my parents expense.
When the union at GM went on strike and we had no money for food my parents had to borrow ten bucks from my uncle. They went to the store to buy, not Pepperidge Farm cookies, but white bread, peanut butter and milk. To this day I relish eating fresh white bread. My parents paid my uncle back as soon as the union got its act together.
Yeah, and I remember surplus foods. I stood in line with my mom to get the butter, oatmeal and the powdered milk that my mom had to beat with a mixer and the milk STILL had lumps in it. There is nothing worse than drinking lumpy milk.
Today, America has the richest poor people in the world.
He might have, but I don’t recall exactly.
I doubt he meant it in the way I did, that the poor will be used as a permanent stimulus package for an economy that is increasingly dominated by a fewer and fewer number of uber-elite players, themselves protected by regulations and bailouts.
And the only people who have anything, and can’t protect it, are the middle class.
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My sons girlfriend was talking about how she doesn’t pay taxes because she is a single mom and gets the EIC- scores about $5k every year from Uncle Sam... Unbelievable.
She is a nice girl and hard worker and a good mom to her son.
But giving people a tax RETURN of money they never paid in the first place makes me so angry.
I hope you don't think that is a clever or original insight. Their job is to get in here and our job is to keep them out. And our traitorous Federal government in DC has not seen fit (for decades) to do its job. Which is layed out in the Constitution which is to defend America. Which in this case is to build proper fences and militarize the border to keep them out. This also would have kept out 50-60-70% of the drugs too. Meaning the Mexican drug traffickers would never have gotten so rich to where today they control many parts of Mexico and there is a shooting war in parts of Mexico close to our border
Certainly gives me a warm feeling
There is a case to be made for a negative income tax to keep people from starving in the gutters. Milton Friedman used to support it, as I recall. It cuts out the need for armies of social workers and bureaucrats.
But to work, it must not be accompanied by all the welfare and subsidies that are unavailable to workers higher up the income ladder. I could perhaps be open to abolishing all forms of welfare and guaranteeing a minimum income of say $10,000 per year per person (indexed for inflation), with inflation/deflation adjustments as necessary. It would have to be designed so there was NEVER a disincentive to work harder.
And another thing, government employees are parasites on the backs of the productive private sector. THEY DO NOT PAY TAXES.
Their income is paid with tax dollars. Sure, they have ‘deductions’ on their pay stubs, that is simply tax dollars taken back by the taxing government.
When you patiently (I’m working on the patient part) explain that to some of these knuckleheads the 4 of 6 who get it stare in wild-eyed shock. They are such dunderheads.
Note that the taxes on $60,000 is more than 3 times the taxes on $30,000.
FLAT TAX! We need a flat tax. If is is good enough of Russia, it is good enough for the USA.
Total transfer EITC payments are only a few billion a year - nothing that will seriously hurt the economy according to experts here on FR.
That chart is very telling, and needs to be made more public. These leeches, these freeloaders have been stealing from the taxpayer for long enough. The “earned Income Tax Credit” is particularly offensive, since there is no earned credit that goes with it.
I see room for a lot of government cuts - there’s no way that a deadbeat earning $14,500 a year should have anywhere close to the benefit of someone making 30,000 a year, let alone 60,000. No flippin’ way.
Single mom two kids (maybe a coupla baby daddies floatin around), job making minimum wage - maybe not.....
AFDC, EITC, Advanced EITC payments, Section 8 housing, EBT, WICS, Medicaid, SSI payments if she or baby daddy had an SSA qualifying job once - hell, probably gets it even if they didn’t-who knows?, School breakfast/lunch programs, etc. And I’m not even sure that I’ve gotten all of them.....
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