Universal Basic Income

[ya-ta-hey]

I thought your intention was clear, too. Your list was not built around generic stereotypes of the buying habits of poor people, but rather built around the stereotypes of the buying habits of black people. As you no doubt know, methol cigarettes, malt liquor, and rap CDs are all disproportionately purchased by African Americans. And "bling," although not associated with poor people, is definitely associated with African Americans (it's often used to describe the showy jewelry of super-rich hip-hop stars). You weren't painting a target of the poor underclass. You were painting a target of African Americans. You were going for a focus on a particular black, urban culture, even though much of the poverty in this country is white and rural. If you'd talked about beer, junk food, and drugs, only, I wouldn't have called you out for the dog whistle. But you knew what you were doing.

Mr. Arkady,

Oooh, you a racists for sterotyping black folk like that. I was just throwing out a laundry list of things that po' folk is likely to be having.

 

[Sunset Rose]

Mr. Arkady,

Oooh, you a racists for sterotyping black folk like that. I was just throwing out a laundry list of things that po' folk is likely to be having.

Arkady has you pinned right. The racist is YOU!

 

[ya-ta-hey]

Arkady has you pinned right. The racist is YOU!

Ms. Rose,

Except he were the one who sterotyped black folk, not me.

Sorry to ruin your premise, but even you should have known that whenever a liberal don't have no argument, they immediately cry "Racisms"

 

[Sunset Rose]

Ms. Rose,

Except he were the one who sterotyped black folk, not me.

Sorry to ruin your premise, but even you should have known that whenever a liberal don't have no argument, they immediately cry "Racisms"

And whenever a bigot is caught being a bigot he tries to hide his true intentions.

 

[ya-ta-hey]

And whenever a bigot is caught being a bigot he tries to hide his true intentions.

Ms. Rose,

Exactly, our Arkady sure comes off the bigot.

See , we can agree on something,.

 

[Boca]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing....

How come progressives can never come up with a GOYA plan to push?

A Get Off Your Ass plan that is

Could it be because work would be somehow demeaning and unnatural to this the third or fourth generation of government dependents sired by Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this month.

20 friggin' TRILLION DOLLARS after his armada of check writers set sail for the War on Poverty, poverty still runs at about 14% of the population!

Seriously....anybody got any fresh ideas? Lyndon's ain't working...and being that he's dead, he can't hold a press conference to lie about it!

 

[Arkady]

How come progressives can never come up with a GOYA plan to push?

A Get Off Your Ass plan that is

Could it be because work would be somehow demeaning and unnatural to this the third or fourth generation of government dependents sired by Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this month.

20 friggin' TRILLION DOLLARS after his armada of check writers set sail for the War on Poverty, poverty still runs at about 14% of the population!

Seriously....anybody got any fresh ideas? Lyndon's ain't working...and being that he's dead, he can't hold a press conference to lie about it!

Do you know what the poverty rate was before the War on Poverty? The poverty rate was cut almost in half in the first decade after that War started. Then, inexplicably, the Republicans decided we should surrender and allow poverty to win. If not for Johnson and the Clinton years, when things again improved, we'd be back to the bad old days of the 1950s, when a quarter of all Americans and half of all blacks lived in poverty.

 

[Arkady]

Here's one for the ages:

When we were POOR, there WAS no "extra money" to spend on ANYTHING. What you're saying is ridiculous. If people have enough money to buy designer sneakers, concert tickets etc, they are not "POOR".

It's all relative. Even the American poor in the depths of the Great Depression were wealthy by the standards of Stone Age people. Bread and cotton clothes, for example, were unimaginable luxuries by the standards of other eras, and the occasional trip to a Nickelodeon would be wealth beyond conception. In the same sense, the poor of the modern era have things those in the time of the Great Depression couldn't imagine. But it doesn't change the fact they're poor.

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkady,

Oooh, you a racists for sterotyping black folk like that. I was just throwing out a laundry list of things that po' folk is likely to be having.

Everyone here knows what you intended. To pretend otherwise just marks you as a liar as well as a race baiter.

 

[Barbella]

It's all relative. Even the American poor in the depths of the Great Depression were wealthy by the standards of Stone Age people. Bread and cotton clothes, for example, were unimaginable luxuries by the standards of other eras, and the occasional trip to a Nickelodeon would be wealth beyond conception. In the same sense, the poor of the modern era have things those in the time of the Great Depression couldn't imagine. But it doesn't change the fact they're poor.

Anyone who buys designer sneakers and bling while being "too poor" to buy the basic necessities is an idiot, obviously.....and that's EXACTLY what I blame democrats for. People buy shit they can't afford and don't NEED, and then expect government (aka hard-working taxpayers) to give them what they need to survive.

 

[ya-ta-hey]

Everyone here knows what you intended. To pretend otherwise just marks you as a liar as well as a race baiter.

Mr. Arkaday,

I'm not a duplicitious liberal; I say what I mean, and I was talking bout them po folk.

You, racist that you are, automatically assumed that po' stereotypes be the same as black stereotype.

Dude, this is 2014. Please try to get past the racism and judge peoples by the contents of deys hearts, not the color of deys skin.

 

[Alinvegas]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing, lately, to try to meet conservatives half-way, is a universal basic income, in lieu of welfare. The idea is that rather than things like food stamps, with all the rules about what people can buy with it and what they can't, and other things like subsidized housing, etc., you just have a simple cash payment the government hands to everyone, with which people can do whatever they want. Traditionally, this has been seen as a conservative alternative to liberal jobs- and welfare programs. Some conservatives like it because there are very low costs: no auditing for eligibility, no overhead for jobs programs, no policing what the money gets spent on, almost no bureaucracy, etc. And the distortions to the market are minimal, since government isn't trying to dictate where the demand and investment will be.

Switzerland, which is an arch-conservative nation by Western European standards, is considering a monthly basic income of around $2800 for its citizens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501

For practical purposes, Alaska, one of our most conservative states, already has something like this (although it's quite low, relative to what Switzerland is considering). Fans of the minimum income concept include arch-conservative economic godfather Milton Friedman, and Austrian Economic god-to-the-libertarians Friedrich Hayek.

Of course, in the US, implementation of this conservative-friendly idea would be confounded by the nature of our partisan politics. The moment some major Democrat starts pushing it, it will be labeled "socialism" and the Tea Party crazies will all go around screeching like little girls who got their hair pulled. Before long the very conservatives who promoted the idea will be leading the charge to attack it, and every ninny dittohead on the Internet will memorize the new talking points so they can provide the obligatory denunciations in chat forums. We saw that happen already with Obamacare, which started life as a conservative pet project, designed by the right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and championed by Mitt Romney. We've seen how quickly support of something by leading Democrats can cause conservatives to turn 180-degrees on their prior convictions. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless.

Sanny Klause will have to hire help.

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkaday,

I'm not a duplicitious liberal; I say what I mean, and I was talking bout them po folk.

You, racist that you are, automatically assumed that po' stereotypes be the same as black stereotype.

Dude, this is 2014. Please try to get past the racism and judge peoples by the contents of deys hearts, not the color of deys skin.

You're fooling exactly nobody. You didn't talk about buying Marlboros, you talked about buying a type of cigarette that is disprportionately bought by African Americans. There's no reason at all to specify menthols other than to race-bait. Only 30% of cigarettes sold are menthols. But over 70% of African American smokers smoke them:

http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/press-releases/archives/2005-releases/press08182005.html

You were looking for a product with a broadly understood link to the African American community --a product blacks were more than twice as likely to buy than whites-- and you found it. Then, as if to remove all doubt about it being intentional, you went on to provide two other suspiciously specific items with African American associations. They weren't buying CDs, generally, they were buying rap CDs, specifically. They weren't buying jewelry, generally, they were buying "bling" -- a term associated strongly with urban blacks. And then you started writing in your race-baiting faux African American patois ("deys skin").

You're a race-baiter. That's not uncommon on the right, of course. You have plenty of company, there. But where you really distinguish yourself is in being incredibly cowardly about it. You simply lack the balls to stand up and honestly admit what you were doing. And thus the rest of us don't just dislike you for your bigotry, we despise you for your lack courage.

 

[ya-ta-hey]

You're fooling exactly nobody. You didn't talk about buying Marlboros, you talked about buying a type of cigarette that is disprportionately bought by African Americans. There's no reason at all to specify menthols other than to race-bait. Only 30% of cigarettes sold are menthols. But over 70% of African American smokers smoke them:

http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/press-releases/archives/2005-releases/press08182005.html

You were looking for a product with a broadly understood link to the African American community --a product blacks were more than twice as likely to buy than whites-- and you found it. Then, as if to remove all doubt about it being intentional, you went on to provide two other suspiciously specific items with African American associations. They weren't buying CDs, generally, they were buying rap CDs, specifically. They weren't buying jewelry, generally, they were buying "bling" -- a term associated strongly with urban blacks. And then you started writing in your race-baiting faux African American patois ("deys skin").

You're a race-baiter. That's not uncommon on the right, of course. You have plenty of company, there. But where you really distinguish yourself is in being incredibly cowardly about it. You simply lack the balls to stand up and honestly admit what you were doing. And thus the rest of us don't just dislike you for your bigotry, we despise you for your lack courage.

Mr. Arkady,

Repeating yourself doesn't make you any less racist. Again, I was mentioning things ascribed to po people, you be the one who said "Oh, that what dem black folk do."

My friend, if you step away from your pre-held views of groups of people and just view them a people, you can begin to heal and find peace in your life.

 

[fairsheet]

Connieb, I saw myself in that article you linked. #5 made me smile. Even though I'm no longer poor I still won't buy more than 4 rolls of bathroom tissue or 3 bars of bath soap at a time! And I use dishwashing liquid for hand soap in my bathrooms. My daughter razzes me about that all the time. Just like the article says, there are some things about poverty that stay with you.

Reminds me of those 20 years when I smoked. I NEVER bought more than one pack at a time..never. I can only imagine how much that cost me over the years, as compared with buying them in some sort of bulk.

But you see....I was always just a pack away from quitting. Every time I ran out of cigarettes was an opportunity to quit. I was always afraid that my quitting time might come and I'd still have half a dozen packs on hand!

 

[marvin martian]

You're a race-baiter. That's not uncommon on the right, of course.

It's not uncommon on the left either (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Melissa Harris-Perry, The New Black Panther Party, Jeremiah Wright, etc), but you knew that. Of course, I'm sure you have a dozen reasons why none of those people are race-baiters...

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkady,

Repeating yourself doesn't make you any less racist. Again, I was mentioning things ascribed to po people, you be the one who said "Oh, that what dem black folk do."

My friend, if you step away from your pre-held views of groups of people and just view them a people, you can begin to heal and find peace in your life.

We both know what you were up to. So does everyone else here. Revealing yourself to be a cowardly liar is just a side bonus of the whole sordid affair.

 

[Arkady]

It's not uncommon on the left either (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Melissa Harris-Perry, The New Black Panther Party, Jeremiah Wright, etc), but you knew that. Of course, I'm sure you have a dozen reasons why none of those people are race-baiters...

I've seen plenty of race baiting from blacks. If Jesse Jackson show up here and engages in some, I'll call him out on it. But, in the meantime, the race baiting here is coming from racist white people.

 

[Sunset Rose]

Mr. Arkady,

Repeating yourself doesn't make you any less racist. Again, I was mentioning things ascribed to po people, you be the one who said "Oh, that what dem black folk do."

My friend, if you step away from your pre-held views of groups of people and just view them a people, you can begin to heal and find peace in your life.

Arkady is right. You have no balls. Stop trying to run away from what you said.

 

[Sunset Rose]

Reminds me of those 20 years when I smoked. I NEVER bought more than one pack at a time..never. I can only imagine how much that cost me over the years, as compared with buying them in some sort of bulk.

But you see....I was always just a pack away from quitting. Every time I ran out of cigarettes was an opportunity to quit. I was always afraid that my quitting time might come and I'd still have half a dozen packs on hand!

Congratulations on your quit. How long have you been smoke free? It's been 5 years and 3 months and 26 days for me.