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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

Poverty in America is a moral failure and why would you give money to people who are immoral?

This is the center of every issue in America that people need to understand. Poverty is seen as personal failure. You were lazy or a bad person thus you are poor. By that token, the rich are moral, just, and what we should aspire to be. But the biggest Trump supporters are the biggest consumers of welfare and social services, how can that be? It's not their fault! It's the blacks,immigrants,gays,trans,dems and whatever boogeyman we need that are causing their suffering. Vote for us and we'll solve that and you too can be rich and powerful.

I have some extended family members who have never worked a day in their lives by exploiting social services. Not surprisingly, their (now grown) children are doing the same thing. I don't judge people using it, nor do I consider it a purely moral issue, but I'm also not going to adopt a black-and-white view and just pretend this sort of stuff doesn't happen.

No one is saying it doesn't happen so I don't see what the point in your statement is.

I was picking up on the context of poverty, social services, and morality. In some cases, people end up in poverty due to laziness and an unwillingness to work. They then choose to (in my mind) misappropriate social service funds to maintain that lifestyle.

While I generally agree we shouldn't look at all poverty from this lens, I'm simply pointing out that in some cases it's warranted.

I agree but in your attempts to find nuance, you are missing the forest for the trees. Poverty doesn't mean you are lazy and unwilling to work and rich doesn't mean you are a genius leader who everyone should look to emulate but it is those two beliefs that underpin most of the political problems in America.

> I agree but in your attempts to find nuance, you are missing the forest for the trees.

No, because I agree with:

> Poverty doesn't mean you are lazy and unwilling to work and rich doesn't mean you are a genius

I think we are just talking past each other. You didn't think my nuance was necessary, and that's OK.

That's fair.

How would this work in practice? Indifferent case worker?

IDK about never in their life, but I have in-laws who got a sympathetic doctor to declare them permanently disabled around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, at which point their lack of education and skills had rendered them unemployable.

I've been disconnected from them for a long time (necessary as they routinely tried to grift me). However, from my recollection, there was a whole scheme they used that started with getting "hurt" in a commercial space. They would then sue the business while simultaneously getting a crooked doctor to sign off on some new disability they "got" from the incident.

They could have actually sustained a decent lifestyle had they not routinely decided to drop large chunks of the settlement money at Vegas.

This is largely a legacy of reconstruction as well. To prevent the lower class uniting based upon their shared class the upper classes pushed division based upon their differences.

Whose money would you give, mine or yours?

Well, I don't see your name on it.

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