>The findings contradict a common argument in the U.S. that poor parents cannot be trusted to receive cash to use however they want, said Amorim.
How utterly depressing if this truly is a common belief.
How utterly depressing if this truly is a common belief.
For example, i am a conservative Catholic. You can tax me sure, and spend it on welfare for atheists who love abortion (or whatever other group... just making up a culture I have little in common with), but then I, and others like myself, will want to have opinions on how my money is spent. If you didn't take my money, I wouldn't care.
A lot of strife over welfare in this country is due to the fact that we hold several cultures that are at odds with each other. For example, the amish don't like war, yet they pay taxes. If you asked the amish, they'd vote against war, but conveniently, they are outnumbered, so their money is co-opted. If the amish believed in protesting, and making a big fuss, this would be a major issue. Luckily for the powers that be, they don't. Ultimately, the more government programs / spending one has in a pluralistic society, the more civic strife there will be. This is unavoidable
I'm just curious and I don't know any conservative catholics in real life.
However, welfare and taxation is not charity and you do not grow in virtue through taxation. Welfare is meant to keep a good society. As catholics we have responsibility to vote (if we live in a democracy) for policies that form a just society (this is the original meaning of social justice before it was co-oped by the woke). There is no fundamental conflict between providing for non-christians here, as they too may fall on hard times.
Sorry... were you trying to get at something here?
And I am now curious about your beliefs that conservative politics will lead to a just society.
Of course not. Politics will never lead to a just society. There is no such thing as 'conservative' politics; or at least, such a thing is not advocated for in the United States. This is because most 'conservatives' are united not in any particular vision of the country but rather by what the country should not be. This isn't to say that individual factions don't have clear ideas of how society should be; just that no faction predominates. With that aside, by most meanings of 'conservative', it is used to mean limited government, little welfare, lower government spending, and policies encouraging social conservatism. Yes, I am broadly in support of these things.
On its own however, these things will not lead to a just society.
You need both conservative politics and a moral society to achieve a just society.
Unfortunately, the government cannot create a moral society. That is up to individuals to accomplish. We cannot vote on society being good. Many individuals in the united states view their only obligation to politics and the community is via voting and government. This is the worst take ever imaginable. After one votes, after one protests, after one calls their senator/representative, there is yet more to be done for community. Most people do not ever get to this level. It's not just volunteering to help those who are of a different class than you. No no no... that's the uninteresting part of civic duty. The interesting part is what you do for people like you. Do you spend time making your friends worlds a better place? What about your family? Do you make sure your friends and family aren't falling into destitution? Those things are the intangibles that no amount of voting or politics will ever fix, when a culture is broken.
For example, many liberals want universal child care paid for via public money. I don't think this is a good thing because I don't think children should be raised by businesses. They should be raised by their parents (they should be educated by them as well, in the early years at least) and their families.
In order to achieve this goal of having more parents stay home with their children, we both need to not have universal child care (should probably severely rethink public schooling too), as well as create a society that understands that parents staying home is the right thing to do, and thus does not do it. The first part is easily governmentally achievable; the second part is not. Although it's true that our current society incentivizes both parents working, there is no fundamental reason they have to (other than most people's desires for more material goods). Many subcultures in America achieve a one-income family (Amish, many evangelicals, many conservative Catholics, etc).
As another aside, I give thousands of dollars to direct action charities. I have no problem with this and would like to give more. Yet, I would resent if government took this money and instead used it, preventing me from giving it to those in need. In a lot of countries with more welfare, the people themselves become less charitable, because any social problem they expect someone else to fix. Those who fall behind anyway are looked at as failures. Far from forming community, welfare atomizes society. Thus, I am very suspicious of government welfare. Better for it to come from individuals. Tax breaks to encourage charity are fine, and better, indeed.
So no, I don't think conservative politics will achieve anything other than not directly incentivizing people to do bad. Fundamentally, I'm conservative because I want the freedom to do good.
Catholics are encouraged to donate to them and volunteer their time, and there's usually a once-a-month supplemental collection for them at Mass.
One is that we're engaged in our own internal culture-war around liturgy, the dwindling priesthood, and what to do about social issues that pit Western society's priorities against long-standing Church doctrine. When the most prominent Catholics in the news aren't acting Catholic, that drives us crazy.
But I don't think pluralism is really the problem; Catholics, at least in America in my lifetime, never had any kind of puritanical control. The problem is that there's a new amorphous religion of the state that insists it doesn't exist.
> It's America--everybody thinks everybody else is living their lives the wrong way.
I'm explaining why it is that others think they are living the wrong way.
> One is that we're engaged in our own internal culture-war around liturgy, the dwindling priesthood, and what to do about social issues that pit Western society's priorities against long-standing Church doctrine. When the most prominent Catholics in the news aren't acting Catholic, that drives us crazy.
Absolutely, and it's because the church in America is splitting into two cultures. On one hand, there are catholics who want to be American, and fit in with secular society. On the other hand, there are those who don't see it as that important. These two groups have different cultures.
I've always wondered if this belief about poor people is traced back to puritanical Calvinism.
I've been homeless and hung out with (separate occasions) homeless folks while occasionally interacting with passerbys.
There was always a curtness and subtle discomfort in others' speech and body language.
I can't imagine the social/mental effects of their presumption over time.
Of course when people find out you have financial security, you are either pandered to or treated as a "normal" person, depending on relative strata.
Has it occurred to you that this is because low wage employees might actually commit more thefts and such?
I mean... I've been on a grand jury, and i've seen the lengths some companies go to prevent theft from what I presume are low wage employees. These systems costs lots of money. If low wage employees were actually not stealing, then why would they expend all this money on these systems? It would seem any actuary would be able to tell you you're throwing money away. And yet, they continue to have the systems.
I don't think low wage employees are 'bad'. I'm just pointing out that if the employer behavior is so irrational, then certainly some company would start that wouldn't do that. That every single one does I think indicates that this is a common enough problem.
Surely the your team would be more productive if the LOCs were tracked per day and they had to get permission to use the restroom, or better yet use a piss jug. Did Jim really go to the doctor, or pick up his kids from school, or did he just go to the bar and get drunk? Better demand that note, and GPS track him.
I think it’s a combination of class (ie white collar workers are more similar to the management and owners), and low wage workers being considered more replaceable, thus managers feel freer to engage their baser impulses. Throw in a bit personal bias and stereotypes and voilà! You have a horrible situation.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...
I think it depends largely on how much you're exposed to it.
The root of the problem is with the judger, for thinking that money from the government is somehow less worthy than money from other sources (wages, inheritance, government-subsidized business wages, etc).
Freedom means freedom to make poor decisions, but when that money was given to you by taxpayers and is specifically earmarked to feed your kids, not spending it on your kids makes you a bad person.
In short, it talks about how in US poor people are being judged as moral failures. Buying "display items" like expensive handbags makes them look less poor. So it is an investment because when they look less poor, others treat them better. Others being predominantly people with power over them - bureaucrats, managers and so on.
(the article also discusses racism)
EDIT: and you see this at all levels of wealth too - there's certain expectation of a lawyer arriving in Mercedes or BMW, otherwise some people will think them incompetent, for example.
If the system is effective for the vast majority and the cost of those abusing the system is less than the cost to prevent the abuse then that's generally a win. (Of course you have to be careful of second order effects and unintended consequences. If people can easily get away with abuse will abuse of the system grow?)
In other words, you don't need to convince people that abuse of the system isn't wrong or that it is impossible, i.e. the "don't judge" comments, you need to convince them that the system is effective in both costs and outcomes.
It's pretty easy to understand why someone who perceives themselves as working hard and paying taxes would be upset when someone else seems to be using their government benefits to buy more than the "bare necessities" without the hard work.
Whether that perspective is helpful, good, or correct is a different matter but it's certainly not an affront to "freedom" as you mentioned. Money from the government might not be less worthy but it does come at the cost of someone else.
This is partially true at best. Spending does not equal revenue, and it doesn't need to. The best way to think about government taxation is that is money that is collected and destroyed. Then new money is printed to pay for government services.
In other words, the government spending money did not take any additional money out of your pocket...in fact, for the past 40 years, for the most part, the government has been trying to put money back in your pocket through tax cuts. Of course, we are now at the point where another tax cut doesn't effect 70% of tax payers because their tax burden is so low or non-existent.
For what it's worth though I agree with you. Government programs should be funded and planned based on net-benefit to society not strictly on an individual idea of fairness.
An example would be homelessness or drug rehab programs where it ends up being cheaper and better for society to help people than to continuously ignore and/or punish them.
Did it though? Government spending != spending your wallet money. Because money is fungible, I can easily make the case that all of your tax dollars went to whatever you value in government, and that we borrowed the rest of the dollars to pay for these beneifts.
And yes, because it's money from my pocket (as I explained), if someone asked me directly, I would have opinions on how it ought to be spent.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not your attitude is actually constructive. You seem to be stuck in the 80s era of Reaganomics/welfare queens thinking, which has since proven to be incredibly ineffectual, destructive, and misery-causing.
Generally it's the billionaires making 3% or whatever of every dollar that's getting run through those benefit cards.
But that doesn't mean that tax incentives or contracts already agreed upon shouldn't be honored.
Be upset at your government for bribing a business if you think it's a bad political decision, but it's just as rational for the business to accept it as it is for anyone to accept Snap or any other benefit.
When you start justifying $ redistribution for everything under the sun, don't be surprised if some of it gets redistributed in ways you disagree with.
Further, if other people presumed to stick their nose in your business in the same way to judge you, I'm fairly sure you'd be very offended. And rightly so, because it would be very rude.