You can quit your job and party without going to college now, and collect welfare. If anything, requiring them to go to school, and do satisfactorily in their classes, would eliminate the lifetime leechers. Once they were done, they would be ineligible for any further benefits unless they put in a certain amount of time working, and they were downsized or something other than quitting to mooch off the system.
You fail out? you’re done.
You get fired from work in a week after finishing? you’re done.
Maintaining a job while in school makes people half ass both ends. I had a 3.9 cumulative GPA in undergrad. I worked part time one semester, 20 hours a week, and had a 3.4. Without that semester, I would have been nearly perfect. I recognized my priorities, and quit the job when I saw how it impacted my studies. I can only imagine what full-time would do. I was on a free ride and didn’t need the job.
Only because you’re in liberal welfare state like NY. I’d change that in a heartbeat with massive welfare reform. If you don’t work 40+ hours a week you won’t get anything after a certain time frame. There would be serious restrictions on how your income is spent so you wouldn’t be buying food with foodstamps and beer/cigs with cash.
Handouts end in my system. You want help, you work for it.
That’s fine as long as all of my student loans are forgiven. I’m not paying for my college AND some other fuckstick’s just because I had enough sense and ambition to go to college to begin with while he didn’t.
You don’t see any value in “earning” something? At one point I was working 3 part time jobs and was in full time engineering school. No my GPA wasn’t that good, but I took my last final on a Monday and was a full time tax paying engineer on Tuesday.
That’s honorable. Job well done. But do you think you would have learned more engineering and have been better equipped with the knowledge of the subject to start your full time job if you could focus exclusively on school, while at the same time you knew that if you screwed up in class you’d be on your own?
Jealousy is an ugly emotion. Democrats definition of “rich” = anyone earning $1 more than them. SS is already a huge income transfer. Once they label people as “rich”, then the gloves come off. It’s already unfair to high earners who will never, ever get out even a sizable fraction of what they put in. They (politicians) should just be honest and call it another welfare program, in this case for the over 65 crowd even when they don’t need it. It is a scam and believe it or not, Bush, among his many bad ideas, at least tried to open up a sensible dialog about SS and how it might be reformed. But they don’t call it the “third rail of American politics” for nothing. The moment you suggest changes, your political opposition will label you as a heartless bastard who wants old people to be starving in the streets. It’s likey to happen here when I suggest a plan, which you may read and snipe at.
Plan: eliminate SS. Phase it out gradually, so people who thought they were going to get it can plan accordingly. Substitiute a much smaller program called: Federal Welfare for the Aged, or something like that. Make it clear that it is NOT a retirement plan. Just a rescue plan for low wage earners. Pay for it honestly, from general revenues, not out of a phony trust fund. Do not use it as a vote buying program which is implemented by pitting the old against the young.
Would I have better understood my composite materials coursework? Absolutely. Would I be a more effective engineer? Absolutely not.
But that’s just me. To me, the process of earning something teaches invaluable lessons.
I see what you’re saying, and I don’t totally disagree with it. I’m all for finding ways to help people go from national liaibility to national asset. I just disagree philosophically. I am in favor of doing the bare minimum to get them headed down a better direction.
Social Security was never intended to be a sole source of income.
Flat tax would be the most ethically “fair” means of distributing wealth through the system. Asking the “rich” to pay more (% wise) into the system then anyone else is ridiculous… “Good work on establishing yourself, We realize that you are now going to supply a huge dollar amount towards a debt that you will never owe… but alot of other people owe it, so please give even more. KTHXBYE”
There are already elements in place to help your fellow americans who are less fortunate then you: SSI, SSDI, UnempI, FoodStamps, WICK, Medicare, Medicaid, & Welfare. Those who are able to earn “reasonable” wages pay into these systems for those who “cannot”, and the system works very well from the funding aspect of it.
Instead of imposing more tax on those that can, why don’t you consider helping elevate those that can’t? Having more people that are gainfully employed means that you’ll have more payors & less payees… ???.. profit.
Should working 2 full time jobs be the norm? As Americans, we already work more than every other industrialized nation. Is not wanting to work 2 full time jobs a lack of work ethic?
A full-time courseload of 15-18 credits in a non-BS major at a non-BS institution is widely considered to be equivalent to a full-time job.
I think it is just terrible that some people can afford a monkey, or even a whole colony of monkeys or even baboons.
Some people even have their own orangutans.
Others, the less fortunate, can’t even afford one single spider monkey.
What good is life without a primate pet? Let’s put a stop to this with a new Federal program. The Federal “Buy a Monkey for an Idiiot Supplemental Insurance Program”. This will allow everyone, no matter how shiftless, lazy, or unfortunate, to have their own monkey. I bet if you looked into it, you would find racial and gender disparities in monkey ownership. I think a Congressional commission is in order. After they finish investigating baseball, they could go on to monkeys.
Liberal arts majors really got the shaft. Most of my friends that got BA’s in them are making less this year than their tuition, room, and board were last year, and have to pay back student loans out of that. :eek:
hippie queers
:lol: Yeah, that’s a bitch. Probably where a chunk of the problem is: That people who have been struggling financially for years can’t/won’t take the risk of 5-6 figures of student loans with no guarantee of a well paying job on the other end.
