Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Of course I can. The problem is that you determine how concerned someone is about something based on how much that person is willing to fund government a government program related to that thing. It's completely circular.

Unless you show an ability to break out of the "more spending must be better" mindset, there's no way for you to comprehend the conservative argument I'm making. You've decided that the blue crayon is the best one, so anything drawn in any other color can't be as good. Period. I see that as incredibly limited thinking, but that's what passes for intellectualism on the Left. "Don't support our solution? Then you just don't care!"

Lol!




Again, your problem is that you can't see past the assumption that only government can solve problems. "We" is more than "government". "We" can include all of us, collectively, not burdened so much by taxes used to fund these ridiculously bloated programs, who would have more money to spend on helping people actually in need. I'm not limiting my thinking to any specific methodology. It could be more people donating to organizations that provide services for people with vision problems, for example. Or, it could even be funding for a government program that helps people with disabilities (gasp!).

The problem is that you just want to lump "opposition to spending" as one single monolithic thing. You automatically go to the most needy people when assuming who will be negatively impacted by spending cuts, while ignoring the constant argument by conservatives like myself about how our opposition is to the wasteful spending on people who don't really need it. What part of that aren't you getting? If the only money government spent helping people went just to those who truly needed it, I'd have no problem funding that. And most conservatives would have no problem with it either. Because the total cost would probably be around 1/10th of what we currently spend.

Government is just awfully bad at doing that though. Always has been.



And wouldn't it be wonderful if just once the response from the Left to us conservatives talking about wasteful spending was "Ok. Let's work together and go through these programs and figure out how we can trim them in ways that only affect those who don't really need help, while ensuring those who do need help get it.". You know. Just once. What we get instead? "OMG! The Conservatives want to throw grandma off a cliff!", followed by a refusal to cut a single dime of any spending on any of their precious programs. And when it's not that, it's "Only if you agree to spending cuts for military first". Then followed by complete reneging on that promise when it comes time to cut domestic spending.

We've been around this dance a few times Joph. It's abundantly obvious that the Left will not allow any cut to any domestic spending program, no matter how wasteful. On the rare occasions that we evil conservatives have actually forced such cuts, the result was overwhelmingly positive (such as the replacement of the old AFDC with TANF). Of course, despite this working relatively well, the Obama administration couldn't help but toss an fly into that ointment anyway, in the form of removing the work requirements (which were kind of a necessary part of the whole thing).

It's just hard not to come to the conclusion that the Left just wants as many people as possible to be poor and dependent on government. Silly conservatives for wanting people to *not* be poor and *not* be dependent on government. Heaven forbid we allow people to live their lives on their own terms and stand on their own feet and actually maybe have a sense of pride and accomplishment. But when we do that, or even just propose doing something that might lead to that, we're accused of letting people starve, or putting them out on the streets (or slamming the lid on their pot of food). Sorry, I'm not buying that assumption.


And it really doesn't help that the Left uses this as a political tool. Obama clearly lifted the work requirement so that it would force Republican opposition, so that his party could claim that the GOP was against helping people in need. There's no other reason for his action. Unfortunately, a whole lot of these spending programs are used as political footballs, with the people who are supposedly being helped basically used as pawns. Which, again, is part of the whole reason for not doing this sort of thing in the first place. Dependence on a government program means that those people can be used politically just by talking about the program or any changes to it.

Edited, May 21st 2015 5:25pm by gbaji

Huh. Didn't see a single indication there that the GOP is trying to cut welfare funding to help people gain medical care but lots of crying about Democrats and stuff.


You mean like Medicare and Medicaid? Huh. Sure though, you keep on typing a thousand words crying about how the mean ole Left is keeping the GOP dream down and I'll keep on pointing at the actual real life legislation the GOP supports. Shouldn't be both of us living in fantasy unicorn world.

Uh? What? That makes no sense. Of course we oppose government action that we oppose and support government action that we support. That's kinda obvious. The distinction is what actions we oppose and which we support.

What we label as "big government" is government involving itself in areas we don't think it should be involved in or doing so at a higher level than it should. We believe that government should act at the lowest level possible, so as to ensure that those governed have the most relative say in the actions taken by government which affect them. That's our methodology. So yes, the federal government kinda has to be responsible for our national defense. But it does not need to be directly involved in things like providing food and housing assistance, or yes, even health care. Those things should be handled by the state governments, or even local governments.

We don't just arbitrarily decide that we like or dislike things and then use the federal government to promote our positions. We have a quite logical system of determining which things should be done at what level of government (or not done by government at all). It's the Left that picks sides and then attempts to create federally funded programs to promote the side they like. Not us. So when we oppose that, it really is about opposition to the use of government (or misuse as the case may be), not that we dislike the group of people the Left is helping. But of course, the Left always attempts to paint it that way.



And by "create a solution", you mean "create a government solution". See my point above about how any plan that isn't a "big government" plan is automatically rejected by liberals as not being a plan/solution at all.

Again, it's not that we don't care about things, but that we don't think they rise to the level of "must be handled at the federal government level". See, the problem with doing things at the federal level is that it minimizes the amount of control each citizen has over it. It means that a majority of people, who mostly live in completely different parts of the country can impose rules on you that you don't like, and would never have been chosen by those living in your geographical region. I want the rules that affect me the most to be decided by a majority of the people living closest to me, not anonymous people living on the other side of the country who are sure they know the best solution for everyone.

BTW, this is also exactly why the whole "Romney passed something just like Obamacare" argument was completely BS. Conservatives will support something at a state level that they will oppose at the federal level. That's not hypocrisy, nor is it inconsistent. It is exactly in line with our political ideology.



You think that 11 million undocumented people living in this country is "good"? We do have to actually resolve that, but at least part of that solution, whatever it is, has to include "make it so people can't come to this country without documentation". I get that this may be easy to portray in some horrible manner, but any solution that doesn't include that isn't going to actually solve the problem. So what do we do?

What's ironic on this one, is that it's actually the exact opposite of what you are claiming. It's the GOP who are trying to create solutions to the problem, and the Dems who are just letting things go and demonizing us for trying to fix things. While I fully acknowledge that there are disagreements among Republicans about the specifics of how to go forward, the Left pretty much proposes nothing, perfectly content to have a status quo disaster that they can use to their political advantage by painting the GOP as bad guys whenever we say "this is a problem". In fact, the Dems seem to actively promote the problem by doing things like creating deportation free zones, and putting loopholes into our laws so as to make it harder to deport anyone here illegally even if/when we find them. And that's when they aren't actively telling ICE agents not to look for anyone here illegally, of course.

You can't honestly think the Dems have any kind of sane immigration policy, do you? Heck. Can you even tell me what their plan is?



You mean (again), failed to provide a government run alternative. The GOP proposed many alternatives. And that's not counting the most basic one of "let's keep the existing flawed system because it's better than the totally broken one you're proposing". That's an alternative, isn't it?

Even the most basic "Let's just fill the gaps in the existing system to cover the ~5M people who need insurance but can't get it today" would have worked better than the horrible changes in the ACA. There were *tons* of alternatives proposed by the GOP. But we had no voice in congress. When you are the minority in both houses of congress, you don't get to put anything on the agenda, so nothing appears in any official record as a proposed amendment or law. That does not mean that the GOP didn't have ideas though. They were just ignored. And there's no "uniting" when there's no vote to determine who agrees or disagrees with something, right? So that statement is meaningless.



That made no sense when you first said it, and it still makes no sense now. So let me get this straight. Before I'm allowed to ask you why you think Democratic policies are good for black Americans, I must first tell you that Democratic policies are good for "anyone"? What does that even mean? I oppose Democratic policies. Period. I told you this the last time you floated this bit of ridiculousness.

I not asking you to convince me. I'm asking you to tell me your reasoning. I think that's a quite reasonable thing to ask. Demanding that I must acknowledge that the policies of a party who's policies I disagree with are "good for anyone" is not reasonable at all. I'm sure that some people do benefit from Democratic policies. Do enough random crappy things, and some people are bound to accidentally be better off. Who those people are, I can't say though. And it's ultimately irrelevant. The issue is about the policy decisions. Why do they exist? What is their purpose? And do they actually achieve the purpose to which they are targeted?

And on that level, Dem policies really fail. Hard. Those who they most claim to be helping, have certainly not prospered as a result of their "help". And yes, that includes African Americans.

No, Liberals don't. There is far more diversity of opinion among the liberal wing. Some are communists, or socialists and believe in certain ways of problem solving. Some are technocrats who want entirely different programs. Many other subheadings are also anti-statism.

In an environment with a sizeable labor pool to draw from it's about the business man saying "how little can we pay these chumps". Doesn't matter about skill or time on the job it's "what is the minimum we can get away with". Period. If you have lots of eager people to chose from you are in no way pressured to pay them any more that you must. How do you fail to understand this?

Poor wording. In a limited labour pool, you still only pay what you must. It just happens that what you must, is much higher.

Right, but that's "letting the market decide", so it's okay. Because we all know businessmen would never import cheap labor and then cry about, say, insecure borders or the Yellow Peril. For example.

According to Gbaji, the answer is to let businesses hire ten year olds for menial labor at sub-minimum wage and then all the other employees will make more money. Because of course the first thing the owner will do with the extra cash is give it to the current minimum wage employees (well, maybe not the ones fired to be replaced by ten year olds).

Or else they'll go to the next silver mine.

Horrible. Needs better management and funding.

I might reply to the rest of the discussion, but not now since I'm in an office on my laptop.

Ok. Then you tell me what exactly about all the GOP proposals that I've raised on this forum make them "not a plan"? Cause I hear liberals repeatedly claiming that the GOP has no ideas, and no solutions, and no plans, despite me seeing tons of them. But when I point them out they're dismissed. Tell me why that is. Cause it certainly looks to me like the liberal criteria for whether something is or isn't a "plan" is based on the degree to which it directly uses federal power to accomplish some objective.

But hey, if you can tell me what criteria you guys use, I'm all ears.

In the same thread/page where two other posters triple posted.