My crazy art professor said we should "emancipate" rich people's wealth in honor of Black History Month.

Welfare and good stamp recipients are scum of the earth. They're lazy thugs who expect the government to pay for their laziness, drug and alcohol abuse. Not to mention babies when one those thugs knocks a thick girl.

Time to end these programs and make these losers work.

Never said it was impossible or that it didn't happen. All I said was that people don't get a "welfare check" and that you can't spend it on booze.

There are all sorts of ways to get money illegally, whether it's drugs, prostitution, or selling SNAP benefits. All of them require trading something for money, and all of them are illegal.

The post I initially responded to indicated that you could legally take free money from the government and spend it on alcohol and lotto tickets.

No Way wrote:

Never said it was impossible or that it didn't happen. All I said was that people don't get a "welfare check" and that you can't spend it on booze.

There are all sorts of ways to get money illegally, whether it's drugs, prostitution, or selling SNAP benefits. All of them require trading something for money, and all of them are illegal.

The post I initially responded to indicated that you could legally take free money from the government and spend it on alcohol and lotto tickets.

Your statement: "In other words, you really can't be a second generation welfare recipient spending your check on booze and lotto tickets."

Yet, you CAN be a second generation welfare recipient that gets cash for their check and spends that cash on booze and lotto tickets.

Thanks for missing the forest for the trees.

OK, you win. For a few years you probably could.

So "No Way" is your typical detached-from-reality liberal - "if that's what it says - that's how it happens".

Never will this kind of liberal think about the abuse that occurs in the system because he sees the world through naive rose-colored glasses while he crusades for causes that do more harm then good. His justification is that because the 'good' can be seen, it trumps the 'bad' that occur as an effect.

Section 8/public housing is 'good' because it provides housing to those less fortunate. What these people don't care about is the market-paying citizens that live around the public housing. Or that you are subsidizing employers of low-wage industries. Or that you are increasing the cost of market housing by removing housing units from the real market. Or that you're suppressing that wages of the working class by providing constant, desperate low-skill labor.

I support public assistance in many forms but not when it is administered in some of the most expensive cities/metros in the world and keeps out the truly deserving.

Exactly what I was going to point out. The grocery store I shop at has guys trying to pawn off their food stamps for 50% cash, in case they weren't bad enough at managing money already.

f-ck you wrote:

krispy kremlin wrote:

I support public assistance in many forms but ....

No you don't, you self-righteous piece of $hit.

And as far as poor down and out black people who abuse welfare.....

....

So yes, your poor toothless redneck, burning through his welfare card so he can buy more pseudo-ephedrine to cook up some meth, IS a large part of the republican base. Remember that, a$$hole (but let's not forget the gun-nuts, the truthers, the preppers, the hypocritical religious nuts, the hedge fund managers, and other assorted scum bags.......like you)

Wow. Such hostility...

Not krispy kremlin, but just for the record, the neighbors I referred to were all white. Males & female, most between the ages of 35 and 60. Southeast Michigan.

Not really a race thing in my mind. I'm sure there is abuse across races, & genders for that matter. Just a reality I witnessed. And a perfect example of people finding a way to get what they want, and a way around any system or rule that is attempting to keep them from what they want. Really an example of the power of markets.

exactly - so many shogun-liberals want to jump on to the 'race card'.

THIS ISN'T ABOUT RACE

I'll admit, i'm "discriminatory" on a social-economic basis - but sh&t - we all are. Tell those f&*king champagne socialist in Brookline MA that we're busing some "under privilege youths" from Roxbury into their school system and see how they like it...

Can some one explain how the projects end up in New Bedford and not Brookline? All Barney's District 4... Where are the projects in Brookline?

The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.”

In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern:

The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.

First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.

They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.

Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked.

Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.

Here is an excellent article on different races.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html

Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

The rest of the blacks have a cultural problem that limits their success as a group. They need to stop the blame game and own it.

Well this got a little out of hand with the name-calling...

All I was saying is that you can't spend your SNAP benefits on alcohol. In order to trade your benefits for cash you have to make the decision to do something illegal, similar to selling drugs or becoming a prostitute. If you're working under the assumption that all welfare recipients are criminals, then this makes sense.

Obviously welfare fraud is a big issue and happens all the time. No one in this thread has denied that.

Unfortunately, some people have this idea that you can just take your EBT card and spend your SNAP benefits on beer on cough syrup, when the reality is that you can't. What you can do is go into the store, buy $30 worth of cereal, sell that cereal to someone for $20 cash, then go back to the store and buy beer.

This course of action is a lot different than lining up at Walmart at midnight on the last day of the month to buy beer. People who commit fraud should be punished. People who are on welfare should not. The two groups are not the same.

Things like SNAP, EITCs, and CTCs are correlated with things like higher graduation rates and higher wages. (how is a parent going to work if they can't afford day care?) It is sad that some of you are so concerned with the mythical welfare queen that you're willing to slash benefits for people who really need them in order root out the few instances of fraud. The amount of money this country loses on things like tax incentives for large relocating corporations, or tax loopholes for higher earners is way more than the cost of bad eggs gaming the system at the bottom. Get mad about that.

Frühstuck wrote:

Bad math wrote:

his argument doesn't sound convincing...

“A lot of wealthy white and black people aren't bad but they control 1 percent of the economy and this cannot stand,”

1%? I think we can let them have 1%.

Yup, par for the course for Joe. He is a real life Michael Scott.

nah, Michael Scott would be such a better VP than joey mensa..

Giant Johnson wrote:

The amount of money this country loses on things like tax incentives for large relocating corporations, or tax loopholes for higher earners is way more than the cost of bad eggs gaming the system at the bottom. Get mad about that.

Since you seem to have thoughtfully determined that one is "way more" than another, can you provide some general overall numbers to support your claim?

Thanks.

is that so? wrote:

Giant Johnson wrote:

The amount of money this country loses on things like tax incentives for large relocating corporations, or tax loopholes for higher earners is way more than the cost of bad eggs gaming the system at the bottom. Get mad about that.

Since you seem to have thoughtfully determined that one is "way more" than another, can you provide some general overall numbers to support your claim?

Thanks.

Well it's not hard to figure out the cost of social welfare programs. SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers, EITC, SSI, and the Child Tax Credit add up to about $213B per year.

The money lost to tax loopholes is a little more complicated. The numbers I've found seem to hover round $180B for corporate tax breaks and money lost to tax havens and around $70B for wealthy individuals doing the same for a total of around $250B.

Way more? Not really, but definitely more.

This is one of the dumber threads I have seen. No Way shows that the programs are heavily limited, which has harmed millions in this economy, where jobs are scarce. The response is that some people can trade the cards for money. There is no evidence here that this is a general situation. If it were, I would have no problem with that. Larger cash transfers to the poor are entirely justified and have a stimulative effect on the economy of roughly $1.60 per dollar spent on the programs.

Hoser wrote:

Here is an excellent article on different races.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html

Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

The rest of the blacks have a cultural problem that limits their success as a group. They need to stop the blame game and own it.

The German American whites are the best whites - Tegenkamp, Ritzenhein, Prefontaine, Yeager, etc.. The other whites - the Italians, Irish, English, Polish, etc. have a cultural problem that limits their success as a group. They need to stop the lame game and own it.

jjjjjj wrote:

This is one of the dumber threads I have seen. No Way shows that the programs are heavily limited, which has harmed millions in this economy, where jobs are scarce. The response is that some people can trade the cards for money. There is no evidence here that this is a general situation. If it were, I would have no problem with that. Larger cash transfers to the poor are entirely justified and have a stimulative effect on the economy of roughly $1.60 per dollar spent on the programs.

I would trade for money too. You can't even buy toilet paper with SNAP.

Why did you leave out the other African and West Indian countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana and Haiti? BTW, Scottish-Americans Armenian-Americans are better than Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans.