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2009 Annual Report of the SSI Program
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ssir/SSI09/EcoDemoAssumptions.html

Here is a bit of history about SSI
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2006/506/infocus/p15.htm

Although I will not deny that there is a huge amount of younger people on SSI, I cannot believe that most of them enjoy living on such small amounts of money. The fact is that it is very hard to get off of SSI when you have been introduced to it from a young age. I think that public housing with work programs are incredibly useful, yet horribly underused. Most people on SSI are given their check then thrown into some drug-ridden hotel where they quite literally have to fight to keep their housing safe for themselves.

In the Bay Area, there is little to no direct help for people through government programs. You get your money (if you are lucky enough to actually qualify through the bureaucracy) then they pretty much forget about you and hope you stay around as long as possible so they can receive funding. It is a vicious cycle that very few people have the skills to get out of, especially when you factor the amount of drug addicts (these guys are the problems, your check is not for crack cocaine, it is for food MMK!) and people with legitimate mental health issues.

I would like to know how many of you actually know a single person on SSI as a friend, and if you have actually talked to them about what they have gone through just to receive any ACTUAL help beyond a check that can barely take care of one person.

SSI was cut a few times recently, and it will be cut again by a few dollars at the end of the year I believe. Most people with housing receive around 800 dollars per month, out of which they would be lucky to be spending less than 500 dollars a month on rent. Have you ever tried to survive on 300 dollars a month and actually accomplish something besides eating? Your options are so limited it is beyond belief. You go to community college, (luckily you can receive exemption for the fees if you are low-income) and end up spending at least 50-100 dollars a month on transportation, not counting the costs of a car if you have one.
(This applies specifically to California, but there is no real hard-line for the amount of money people can receive, besides a maximum amount. The cost of living for the Bay Area specifically is next to unlivable for most low-income people. I have lived in many types of housing and all of them have attacked my wallet with a vengeance. I have usually spent more than half of any income I had at the time on rent. I know very few people with cars, and being poor without a car limits your long distance travel to the public transportation; this means that you will actually be spending what it would cost to own a car if you travel a lot. Spending even 10$ on travel is very common around here for public transportation workers, some of which do get that covered by their jobs.)

This problem applies to anyone who is extreme-low income, and the options to further yourself without huge amounts of cash are slim to none. If you work a full time job with children, and no family to help support you, your better off just getting your kid into college because at that point you have basically NO realistic option to further yourself at all. Maybe you get lucky and become a manager, and your child will not have to take out loans that will keep them hungry five years after they get out of college.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22444.html

There are taxes on people that make "the wrong" decisions, yet there is very little about how the money gets spent. Shouldn't that money represent their portion of the "extra bad-health" taxes? Or are we taxing these things for our health? Do I really care that cigarettes are heavily taxed? No, but that money should be spent on the people that paid it, or you can just take it and continue to talk badly about people that pay to make poor decisions about their health.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22444.html wrote: Still, it’s easy to see why the bad-habits tax was so tempting: Taxing tobacco, junk foods and alcohol could raise $600 billion over 10 years.

This money to be exact, the money that will fund the problems addressed in this thread. I actually find this quite amusing .

Well, here's a question. If the government increases taxes by an exhorbitant amount on fast foods to make them $20 a pop(literally) for the sole purpose of preventing people from eating them, isn't that the government more or less controlling your actions and taking away the right to decide what it is you want to eat?

Also, by making fast food so expensive you see a decrease in the number of people eating it, which means people are not BUYING it. This means that those companies will lose profits and close down shop and those who had those jobs no longer have them.

Seeing as though fast food and retail are the usual starting jobs for teenagers, you have a loss in potential experience to be gained by working at fast food chains.

If the decisions impact the entire population and we actually care about keeping corporations like Mcdonalds and Monsanto in business, we need to take action against it in some regard.

Saying that the companies themselves are not a part of this is just ludicrous. The amount of money spent on advertising fast food, and specifically sodas to kids in general is beyond my comprehension. Amounts of money so vast that I could make a swimming pool for my entire neighborhood, including ten hot tubs and a few diving boards, THEN fill all the recesses with cash. On top of this I could also make an entire wardrobe out of nothing but 100 dollar bills, then have a at least a few money napkins to liberally wipe my nose on.

After a few of these commercials, Mountain dew will look like a walk in the park, with absolutely no health strings attached.







Mmmm, just watch one more and I bet you will get thirsty... even though neither of these commercials really have anything to do with the product... at all.

Oh, and don't forget the flipside of the arguement.

My Car Insurance will be expensive when I get my own Cab. I'm on the road for longer than most drivers, will rack up more miles, thus the chances of me having an accident increase. This I accept.

However, do you really think that £200 a month in premiums will cover the costs should I have a bad accident that I caused, and the Insurance company have to cough up to repair boths cars and all occupants? I think not. That would be why your insurance premiums are also expensive.

Same with Healthcare. You're already paying for the big fatty fat fats, raging alcoholics, cancer riddled smokers etc, just in a slightly abstract way.

At least with Social Healthcare, there are no arseholes at the top of the ladder taking a chunk of your hard earned money when you have the good sense to avoid disease and injury as much as possible. Seriously, if you don't think you are paying for them already, then you are a fool!

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Same with Healthcare. You're already paying for the big fatty fat fats, raging alcoholics, cancer riddled smokers etc, just in a slightly abstract way.

The fact is that all of those things are taxed, and that money should be representing the folks that paid it. You are in essence paying for no one but yourself, as long as the taxes are appropriately raised and monitored to reflect the needs that they represent. If you are making millions of dollars every week (I know people that do...) I could honestly care less about you losing a bit of that ludicrous amount of money to taxes; insanity at it's finest, the whole I earned it argument cannot be applied to such crazy amounts of cash that are so liberally tossed around like hot-cakes.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Same with Healthcare. You're already paying for the big fatty fat fats, raging alcoholics, cancer riddled smokers etc, just in a slightly abstract way.

At least with Social Healthcare, there are no arseholes at the top of the ladder taking a chunk of your hard earned money when you have the good sense to avoid disease and injury as much as possible. Seriously, if you don't think you are paying for them already, then you are a fool!

No, there's just government bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption (nepotism and the like) instead. Have you ever heard of a well-run government agency?

Redbeard wrote:No, there's just government bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption (nepotism and the like) instead. Have you ever heard of a well-run government agency?

So... you trust the government so little that you would not let them handle health-care, but you still live in the country?

I see a much larger issue if this is the final debate point to this issue, because it speaks more about the peoples inability to take forward action in these issues, and lays the entire burden on the state. If it is THAT bad, why are we just putting up with it? Why is it that in the U.S. we manage to get up in arms about Clinton getting a little something on the side then LYING about it, but when the next president comes along and informally lies through their administration about "facts" that bring us into a war that has been going on for years now we just sit back and wait for the next president to take care of it all?

Wrexasaur wrote:

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Same with Healthcare. You're already paying for the big fatty fat fats, raging alcoholics, cancer riddled smokers etc, just in a slightly abstract way.

The fact is that all of those things are taxed, and that money should be representing the folks that paid it. You are in essence paying for no one but yourself, as long as the taxes are appropriately raised and monitored to reflect the needs that they represent. If you are making millions of dollars every week (I know people that do...) I could honestly care less about you losing a bit of that ludicrous amount of money to taxes; insanity at it's finest, the whole I earned it argument cannot be applied to such crazy amounts of cash that are so liberally tossed around like hot-cakes.

Thats the way it's done in the UK. Ciggies are heavily taxed, and every penny of that particular tax is spunked into the NHS to keep it rattling along (and rattle it does!). Drink is also quite substantially taxed (sadly to the point where many pubs are closing Boo!)

US can do the same. $20 Burgers is a stupid price of course, but add 20 cents in additional tax on every McDonalds Crappy Meal, and KER-CHING! Lots of spare cash for the Health Service.

No one criticized Dubya for the way he handled the Iraq war.

That's why Clinton had such a lower approval rating than Bush at the end of his term.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:US can do the same. $20 Burgers is a stupid price of course, but add 20 cents in additional tax on every McDonalds Crappy Meal, and KER-CHING! Lots of spare cash for the Health Service.

Of course 20$ is ludicrous, but sometime you have to ask for a lot to even receive a little. I posted an article earlier addressing this issue specifically, and I believe that there is MORE than enough opportunities to take care of any flaws the new system would encounter. I feel like a lot of U.S. citizens are willing to sit back and wait because A.) they want a perfect system or nothing at all... and B.) they have privatized health care that they have had not yet had serious problems with.

I have a bit of an issue with the B.) standpoint because most people on privatized health care HAVE encountered serious issues, but they just sit back and think of it as something standard. If you are lower-middle class and these issues of overpriced health care reach you, there is practically nothing you can do but hope to be able to afford it. With the prices that are charge out here, I cannot imagine a more effective way to make health-care an issue of the classes. The equipment is there, but screw ten thousand people if we can just profit off of the handful of rich ones.

Classism is a serious issue in the U.S. and we see it in everything from health-care to education... and now a rhyme... action needs to be taken .

Wrexasaur wrote:

Redbeard wrote:No, there's just government bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption (nepotism and the like) instead. Have you ever heard of a well-run government agency?

So... you trust the government so little that you would not let them handle health-care, but you still live in the country?

I see a much larger issue if this is the final debate point to this issue, because it speaks more about the peoples inability to take forward action in these issues, and lays the entire burden on the state. If it is THAT bad, why are we just putting up with it? Why is it that in the U.S. we manage to get up in arms about Clinton getting a little something on the side then LYING about it, but when the next president comes along and informally lies through their administration about "facts" that bring us into a war that has been going on for years now we just sit back and wait for the next president to take care of it all?

Wrexy thats what the government was based on: checks and balances; and a federal system; and the Bill of Rights because the Founders did not trust the government.
In many parts of the US the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help, " would be treated with derision.


As the old saying goes, "when seconds count the police are just minutes away."

I don't distrust the government. I trust them to do a bad job.

The IRS is a great example of this. It's so convoluted and confusing to pay your taxes that there's an entire industry dedicated to doing it for people. There are rules on top of rules on top of other rules about how you can avoid some taxes but have to pay others.

Why do I live here? Because, unfortunately, there is no where else that I could live and enjoy the freedoms that I currently enjoy, without encountering the same types of corruption and inefficiencies. The benefits outweigh the negatives.

But that doesn't mean I want the government running anymore than it already does. I believe that the healthcare crisis in this country is not due to 'who pays' but rather, 'who gets paid'. Follow the money and you'll see who is benefiting from the system we have. If they tackled this whole mess from the point-of-view of reducing the costs (it shouldn't cost me any more to see a doctor for 15 minutes than it costs me to take my car to the shop), we'd actually be getting somewhere. Problem is, there are too many vested interests in positions of power to ever accomplish that, so instead, we sit here debating who should be paying.

Redbeard wrote:The IRS is a great example of this. It's so convoluted and confusing to pay your taxes that there's an entire industry dedicated to doing it for people. There are rules on top of rules on top of other rules about how you can avoid some taxes but have to pay others.

Agreed, but I think that is a sign to start and make changes, not limit the changes that could benefit us positively and on the whole as a united nation of people.

Complaining about how bad it is only makes me want to find answers to these problems (which they obviously are) so the system can run as smoothly as it once did. Perhaps this was more than half a century ago, but blaming the circumstances more on the people than the corporations and government is just not fair. We need to get up and change the way things work, but we most definitely do not need more rifts in our culture that just work to further the inequalities that are an inherent part of life in the U.S.

Individually I can move an entire mountain, in a group of a dozen we can move the entire mountain range, as a whole people we can move the very planet itself, and we know this more than ever in our current climate of culture and science.

You know I was reading an article in forbes about healthcare.

You know the whole "america spends more than other nations and has higher infant mortality rates than other nations" argument. Apparantly america spends the same when it comes to basics(bandages, stethoscopes, etc) but spends more on research and developement. It also says that the loss in time due to being ill isn't taken in account when the US is compared. An american is treated faster than a canadian patient for example so the canadian loses more time and productivity while waiting for care.

As for the baby thing, most nations don't count infants who are born and die within a certain amount of time as an infant, they're called a stillborn for logistics. In america a stillborn is a baby that is dead when it comes out, if it dies a minute after birth it counts as an infant death.

They also said that when you compare europe and america and put them into weight classes, the american infants are much better off (according to the study done in may 2009).

Basically, the studies said that america is in fact, better than europe, we just pay more. At least that's what forbes says.

halonachos wrote:Well, here's a question. If the government increases taxes by an exhorbitant amount on fast foods to make them $20 a pop(literally) for the sole purpose of preventing people from eating them, isn't that the government more or less controlling your actions and taking away the right to decide what it is you want to eat?

Yes, and?

halonachos wrote:
Also, by making fast food so expensive you see a decrease in the number of people eating it, which means people are not BUYING it. This means that those companies will lose profits and close down shop and those who had those jobs no longer have them.

So? Creative destruction will ensure they find employment elsewhere. Huzzah! I can channel Ayn Rand too!

halonachos wrote:
Seeing as though fast food and retail are the usual starting jobs for teenagers, you have a loss in potential experience to be gained by working at fast food chains.

You've never payed for an internship, have you?

And there is no reason that quality of care would go down. You could still opt for Private Care.

What it would mean is that more people gain access to that level of care, thus the lowest paid workers (who cannot afford a Health Plan) spend less time off work when something goes biologically wrong.

Something that the U.S. also practices regularly is the whole treatment versus prevention tactics. There is a fair amount of "health-propaganda" in the U.S. but it really fails to help very much, and a more direct (and expensive) approach will undoubtedly work much better.

Schools are still serving quite wretched food out here if I am not mistaken. There are a few places that have actually changed their menus to be healthier, but the lack of funding in general takes it's toll on things like food quite drastically.

There is a middle school near here that has a very large garden which was envisioned by Alice Waters of http://www.chezpanisse.com/ and still stands relatively strong today. The interest in it as a phenomenon was quite short lived, and the last time I went by it, the whole place looked very inefficient, and more of a game than an actual community based activity.

I find these kind of lackluster community boosters all over the Bay area, and they really do not help very much at all. It is quite funny to me that nearly everyone in the U.S. would instinctively go out and pillage if the nation ever fell. No self sufficiency is actually taught to kids, especially the extremely important things like being able to feed yourself healthy, and even grow your own food; God forbid anyone actually takes the idea of growing your own veggies seriously .



Just look at all of this food! It is really quite easy to do, you just need to maintain interest in it. I have done an awful lot of volunteer work, and the only reason the community gardens seem to do badly is because no one cares enough. I helped a guy that had an HUGE orchard that he has maintained by himself for decades. He bought the lot behind his house, then changed the house into two units to cover the cost (renting one out basically); in the lot he found out that it was an old dump that had been used in the far past. He had to take out literally tons of garbage before he could start his orchard/garden. Today he has at least on of nearly every type of fruit tree (including multiple kinds of avocados, which can be very tricky to grow for fruit) as well as multiple types of berries and even a small veggie area. He waters the entire site with a well on the property, which he pumps into a home-made reservoir tank and releases through gravity on a timer.

What he did took and investment of time and dedication, but with a bit of elbow-grease the whole place has been providing a surplus of fruit for neighbors and close friends. If there were one of these on every city block, we would have more than enough food to have potlucks every season, and veggies for people the year throughout. In a group of even 100 people, a garden can be maintained with little to no effort on a collective part. One hour a week, how does that sound for 10-20$ of veggies a week? On top of this you can grow pesticide free, with natural fertilizer and maintaining the crops naturally is quite easy. Deers are about the worst thing you can have around a crop, bugs are not usually a huge issue, and they are protein to boot .

Well dogma, how many people do you see without a job and last time I checked the unemployment rate is increasing instead of decreasing. So unfortunately this wouldn't be creative destruction at all, just destruction.

Also, last time I checked you may not pay for internship directly, but the way to get an internship costs money. Whether it be for radio, medicine, or something else, you need prior education in that field.
So my surgery internship is going to cost me at least forty or so thousand dollars.

Sure I could take out a loan, but I'm not making too much income during internship so the loans may cause me to lose credit if I am unable to pay them.


MDG, although all of the good doctors that give the quality care could all go private so the quality of the "free" care could still go down. So the biologicaly deficient worker may need to wait longer than usual for care and waste more time than usual.

halonachos wrote:Well dogma, how many people do you see without a job and last time I checked the unemployment rate is increasing instead of decreasing. So unfortunately this wouldn't be creative destruction at all, just destruction.

So, you're saying that capitalism is not an analogue process?

halonachos wrote:
Also, last time I checked you may not pay for internship directly, but the way to get an internship costs money. Whether it be for radio, medicine, or something else, you need prior education in that field.
So my surgery internship is going to cost me at least forty or so thousand dollars.

I paid 12k to do an internship at State, and 19k to do an internship at CBS. Almost all internships require a financial committment of good faith. If you didn't pay, you got lucky.

Oh no, I'm not saying capitalism isn't a process or anything like that, I'm just saying that they will seek other means of income, and let's just say that I would foresee a lot of investment in brass and lead.

So dogma, you are saying that you have to pay in some way to get an internship?

Waste more time than usual? When they cannot afford Health Insurance at all?

This is what I'm driving at. How many people of working age citizens in the US are currently incapable of contributing to the economy because of a health problem they cannot afford to get sorted out?

Also, is there a firm figure (as in hasn't changed for a few days) as to the annual hike in normal taxes per person this plan is going to cost? Because as I linked to earlier, private health plans apparently average out to $7,800 a year per person (and I did flag the uncertain veracity and accuracy of the site I linked to )

halonachos wrote:Oh no, I'm not saying capitalism isn't a process or anything like that, I'm just saying that they will seek other means of income, and let's just say that I would foresee a lot of investment in brass and lead.

So you're attempting to trivialize pain.

halonachos wrote:
So dogma, you are saying that you have to pay in some way to get an internship?

To get a useful internship? Yes. At least in any field not ordinarily treated as technical.

To trivialize pain, no. Its just reality. IF you have no income and have someone to support or just feel like you really need some sort of income and there are no legal means to getting it then you may well head down the road of vice. As for the investments, well in the world of vice you need a weapon to keep you safe and to help secure income while legally one needs a weapon if they want to defend against those in the world of vice.

Its a common phenomena for a crime rate to go up in a city if the unemployment rate is getting larger, don't know why, but it does.

dogma wrote:

halonachos wrote:Oh no, I'm not saying capitalism isn't a process or anything like that, I'm just saying that they will seek other means of income, and let's just say that I would foresee a lot of investment in brass and lead.

So you're attempting to trivialize pain.

halonachos wrote:
So dogma, you are saying that you have to pay in some way to get an internship?

To get a useful internship? Yes. At least in any field not ordinarily treated as technical.

Never heard of anyone PAYING for an internship in finance or law, probably break a law there. Maybe I am mistaking what you're intending to say.

halonachos wrote:To trivialize pain, no. Its just reality.

That statement is necessarily based on the consideration of pain as trivial.

halonachos wrote:
IF you have no income and have someone to support or just feel like you really need some sort of income and there are no legal means to getting it then you may well head down the road of vice. As for the investments, well in the world of vice you need a weapon to keep you safe and to help secure income while legally one needs a weapon if they want to defend against those in the world of vice.

So you're attempting to justify vice, and thereby render the concept impotent?

halonachos wrote:
Its a common phenomena for a crime rate to go up in a city if the unemployment rate is getting larger, don't know why, but it does.

Because people need to survive. Legality has no impact on that. The law is only as sacrosanct as it is useful.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Frazzled wrote:
Never heard of anyone PAYING for an internship in finance or law, probably break a law there. Maybe I am mistaking what you're intending to say.

No, you're not. Most internships now cost as much as low-end college tuition. For example, I paid 19k to get coffee for people at CBS. You can not imagine the level of bitterness I fostered.

Frazzled wrote:
Never heard of anyone PAYING for an internship in finance or law, probably break a law there. Maybe I am mistaking what you're intending to say.

It may not be directly paying for the internship. For example, in my wife's program, she has to have so many clinical hours. They get those by interning. While they're interning, they're on the books at the college as in some sort of class. You have to pay tuition to cover those credits. So, she's not paying the place that she's working at, (they're not paying her either), but she's paying the school while she's doing her unpaid labour.

In my industry (software) interns get paid.

Redbeard wrote:

Frazzled wrote:
Never heard of anyone PAYING for an internship in finance or law, probably break a law there. Maybe I am mistaking what you're intending to say.

It may not be directly paying for the internship. For example, in my wife's program, she has to have so many clinical hours. They get those by interning. While they're interning, they're on the books at the college as in some sort of class. You have to pay tuition to cover those credits. So, she's not paying the place that she's working at, (they're not paying her either), but she's paying the school while she's doing her unpaid labour.

In my industry (software) interns get paid.

Yeah clinical hours can get pretty brutal about halfway through. And considering Techs in hospitals and nursing homes get paid at least ten an hour, you might be pulling 20 to 30 hours without pay each week along with going to classes. I like to count it as you paying the facility in the wages you'd normally be earning as a tech or something similar.

But honestly this line of discussion in this thread has strayed off topic pretty far.

Typeline wrote:
But honestly this ling of discussion in this thread has strayed off topic pretty far.

That's ok, it's the off-topic forum

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Trouble is, Obesity can be caused by poverty, as the cheaper foods tend to be the crappier convenience type foods. Thus the lardarses are unable to afford their healthcare premiums on account of not being wealthy enough.

I never bought into this, it's a bit like the notion that one mustn't mock chavs because they're poor or working class. Obesity is caused by a lack of education about how to eat and a lack of legislation on what can be sold to eat.

All to quickly the cooking skills of our parents generation have been lost, the education system needs to put these skills back into society.

Redbeard wrote:
It may not be directly paying for the internship. For example, in my wife's program, she has to have so many clinical hours. They get those by interning. While they're interning, they're on the books at the college as in some sort of class. You have to pay tuition to cover those credits. So, she's not paying the place that she's working at, (they're not paying her either), but she's paying the school while she's doing her unpaid labour.

That's the most common form of extortion. Though there are other, more egregious offenders; mostly in politics. Look up internships at the US State Department.