If minimum wage goes up to 15 bucks an hour?

My parents were professional victims. Everyone was always screwing them somehow. Must be why they had to move every couple of months. My dad had it GOOD growing up too. Had a small trust fund that paid ~800 bucks a month that we pretty much lived on when I was growing up. My mother comes at us for money periodically. Usually I resist.

As a general piece of advice to everyone out there: if someone seems like they REALLY don't like their parents don't assume that they are just being harsh and unreasonable. Some people are really crap parents who honestly deserve their kids hating them. It's called consequences and yes they earned them. Their kids don't owe them anything and will be pretty offended and/or hurt by your suggesting otherwise. Your insecurities about whether or not your own kids will hate you when you get old do not need to be vented onto some poor person who probably still wakes up in the middle of the night shaking like a Vietnam vet because of their parents. Trust me- you would know if your kids hated you that much. This isn't your 14 year old saying 'I hate you' and storming out. This is your 8 year old flinching when you try to touch them. If your kids DO hate you that much please look carefully the mirror and figure out why so you can stop hurting them. People you are routinely hurting do not owe you anything.

 

I thought that was the point of NAFTA? I thought it was working?

We could spend 1/20th as much money and our security wouldn't 'lapse'. The Koreans/Japanese/Europeans/Israelis sure would. I have the worlds smallest violin out to play for them. They can buy our guns at full price from now on.

 

Nafta, on paper looks good. Reality it isn't working. We should force all American interests back to the Americas, stop letting these same companies pay pennies on the dollar for labor to our south. Let the other hemisphere choose their own path with out us.

 

Completely agreed. I can see the argument for doing what we can to help out the America's because they are natural markets for our goods and natural sources of products we in turn would like to buy.

Eurasia and Africa really don't seem like our problem honestly. The middle east stopped mattering when we figured out how to get so much oil from fracking. I can't figure out why we don't just let China/Japan/South Korea run Asia... and Africa do what it's going to do... and let the Europeans figure out their own mess on their own.

If we just got our nose out of other people's business we'd save billions on the military/state department/ etc. We are mostly wasting that money to get basically nothing done. We claim credit for global peace when really the reason there hasn't been a real shooting war between major powers since WW2 is that we've all got nukes now and it's pretty much unthinkable to volunteer our cities for nuclear strikes. That's not because of any part of our military but the parts that have nuclear weapons... And we have way more than enough of those for a deterrent.

 

Because if we did that then we wouldn't fit the definition of an empire. Empires don't relinquish control voluntarily. They either get squashed by a stronger empire, or else they self-destruct. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

Hmm. Maybe their parents were narcissists.

 

Wow-you are one angry dude.

 

The same concept is applied to corporate welfare. If you own a business at multiple locations, you can't under pay your workers. They have to earn enough to pay their rent and utilities or you can't open up at another location. No more government welfare, the company's pay enough to workers at a livable wage rate or do not set up shop in the USA

 

Nah he's got a point. If you need the state to help feed you reproducing might not be the best decision for society. What was good for society started mattering when you came to society with your hand out. Sorry that's how money works... It's money for something. Even money for doing nothing is paying someone to do nothing instead of something else.

I'd take it several steps further and offer people a reproductive buyout. Most of the extremely poor would voluntarily get sterilized for some amount of money. I think 15k is a pretty solid number both because it's viable (people would do it) and because it's cost effective (what the state is getting is worth more than 15k).

No matter how you slice it poor children are a serious problem. They have radically worse outcomes than the children of even sort of responsible people. The reality is that having a child before you're ready is a huge mistake that you pay a price for... that is much less than the total price society pays. Poor children use vastly more government services than normal children over their lifetimes and pay a huge amount less in taxes over their lifetimes as well. Add to that the fact that they are basically a toxin in the educational system (put too many of them in one school and you have a failing school basically) and it's all a pretty big societal win when one of them isn't born.

The issue isn't even that those people never have kids. If they waited until they were 30 and stable to have kids the whole situation would be different. But no, they want to have kids now, and like the children they are they won't be denied something they want no matter how bad it will be for them and the child. I'd like them to make a stupid reproductive decision that doesn't commit me to spending 40k a year to incarcerate their little darling for 5-10 years, + public school (including the negative effects they have on others education including each other), free healthcare for at least 18 years but quite possibly more, and as many welfare payments as they can absorb...

There need to stop being so many poor people that it's practical to make them live in their own neighborhoods. Poor people should be surrounded with people who are not poor so that they can see how to not be poor. Currently they are mostly surrounded with similar people and their bad behaviors reinforce each other.

Go into any poor neighborhood (except recent immigrants and other weird exceptions that I'm sure will be brought up... you know not any normal poor areas) and I'll show you straight up hopelessness. That hopelessness is the disease that needs to be stopped.