You're free to wonder as long as you try to come up with something that works better. And just cheaper isn't better; if all you can do is spend less everyone will be justified in expecting it to do worse. Figure out how to make society better, regardless of whether you think the recipients of the help really need it.

Upon rereading, it seems to me I've come across as a bit harsh on HIV. I don't mean to say we should quarantine anybody. We don't do it for HIV for a reason, and I've never heard of someone contracting HIV without it even being traced to a contaminated needle during a blood draw.

I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps. Furthermore, funding those truly in need while preventing the kind of excess you're afraid of would take more government bureaucracy, resulting in more wasted taxpayer money. The beauty of the food stamps program is that it is cheap to administer while still mostly affecting only the people that really need it.

We as one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist have more than enough food to feed everyone. Do you have a problem with people studying the arts? Do you think it's wasteful to learn how to design pleasant visuals and work/living spaces? Is it wrong for people to want to learn how to make a difference to socially disadvantaged people? Are the arts not our only lasting message as a culture, our greatest means to reveal the realities of our own humanity and our generation in a way that informs the future and hopefully allows them to build on our successes and failures?

But even more than the fact that we can and should support those people who want to spend their lives carrying on our culture for the future is the fact that food stamps don't just benefit the people who receive them. When the government buys somebody food, that person gets food, and the food seller/maker gets paid. Agriculture is the foundation of every society and it becomes more and more difficult for our farmers to maintain their lifestyle with every passing year. Food stamps are one way that the government supports farmers by making sure that when tough times come, they don't lose huge parts of their market. It's not just about the starving children that we hope to feed (and the other hungry mouths we feed along the way). It's about the food in our markets that would otherwise waste away and be thrown away. It's about the hard working farmers and ranchers and even factory workers who depend on that food being sold. It's about the truckers and the retailers. It's about the small town communities that depend on farmers to bring capital out of the city so that they can run schools, court houses, cafes, small stores, and churches.

What I'm saying is that every government handout affects a multitude of people. The money that pays for poor people to have opportunity is the money that keeps the wide foundations of our entire economy stable. No matter how much you personally feel the beneficiaries didn't deserve it, if you take away that money, you are taking away our foundation.

Maybe you don't want welfare to be part of the foundations of our society. I don't particularly like it either. It hasn't always been this way. But the foundations we had have disappeared due to wage stagnation and the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology and automation. A lot of that foundation has also been shipped abroad, where it is slowly building the societies of places like China and Bangladesh. We've been left with no advantage but our own prosperity, and if that prosperity should falter - if our poorest people were forced to drop out of the consumer market completely - the bottom will drop out of our society and everyone will suffer. Especially the hard-working middle class, when our employers faced with dwindling markets and therefore shrinking revenues.

Let's advance the conversation beyond the righteous anger many people feel about government handouts. Clearly there are outliers to be angry about, whether or not they are representative of beneficiaries or would be worth throwing out of the programs. But what is our solution? How do we build a society where our poorest people can still find a job that keeps them from needing government handouts? We have to look into our past. We have to look at what brought our poverty down from 30% to 15%, as you said. What happened in that time? A number of things: we had a high minimum wage (relative to now); we funded millions of WWII veterans to go to college and buy a home; we faced a technological revolution focused mainly on consumer appliances and infrastructure; we built the entire interstate highway system with government money; even without education, many people could train to work as skilled laborers with incredible job security and even pensions for simple factory work; labor unions experienced their peak enrollment and influence on society. It's clear to me that a lot of government spending went into building the middle class of the 1950s and 1960s. It's also clear that the corporate landscape was far more labor-friendly, either due to labor unions or just because employers were looking to build long-term success rather than quick profits. It's also clear to me that skilled blue collar jobs, like the welding and plumbing trades you mentioned, were more common and respected than they are now.

I dream of large scale government investments in the middle class and massive cultural changes in our financial sector. I believe the the most visionary liberal politicians share this dream. I also believe that the majority of politicians on both sides are hopelessly beholden to big money interests. We need to start by getting the corrupt financial sector out of our policy decisions. Then we need to build a sense of civic duty and responsibility, based on a sense of civic empowerment, among everyone in this country. Let's build our patriotism starting on the local level. Let's make politics about solving the big issues that affect us, not about bickering over which side is right or wrong. Then let's get to work investing in the country we love. America can be great again. All it takes for our zombie-apocalypse-obsessed nation is the chance for our choices and hard work to have a real, meaningful impact on our own lives and the lives of those around us.

I think we're looking at more than 1000 to 1. If you want to imagine such a fanciful scenario, you're definitely at more risk of getting HIV from a restaurant menu than ebola. Think how many people with HIV are out every day, apparently dripping their blood on restaurant menus through unnoticed cuts. I'd be about equally concerned about getting HIV as I would ebola, since while the latter is excruciating it is curable with early enough detection and good enough medicine. HIV, not so much, and it would pretty much be guaranteed to kill eventually after years of expensive treatment to try and mitigate it. In all that time, a person with HIV could presumably transmit the disease in the same "unnoticed blood on a restaurant menu" scenario pretty much continuously for years, while the potential ebola carrier might have a few days before hospitalization became necessary, or less than a day if it's a doctor or nurse taking his or her temperature regularly because they don't want to die of untreated ebola either. You can even say that people who contracted HIV probably did not do so in such a morally righteous way as going to where there is an epidemic and treating the sick at great risk to themselves. So why are we punishing the doctors who are putting a stop to this epidemic before it gets out of hand, but not punishing the HIV carriers who have a better chance of transmitting disease?

Ooh, the food stamp boogeyman is going to steal all our money. How much does it really cost to eat roasted rabbit with butter tarragon, and sweet potatoes? Well...I don't know, because I've never seen rabbit for sale and have always assumed it's the sort of meat that you have to hunt (or breed) yourself if you really want it. Which most people wouldn't from what I've heard. Eating good food is a function of how well you can cook more than how much money you can spend on it, unless you're eating out which food stamps does not cover.

Also, it shouldn't be too incredible for a college graduate with a practical degree to feel entitled to a $80k job. Such people work hard for several years, taking on enormous debt, with the promise that they'll never be able to get a high paying job without doing so. But the entitlement is a problem, because the job market doesn't reward people for their skills and hard work. It mostly rewards them for the connections, and after that their good fortune.

You say 50 years and $22T+. It's true we've wasted a lot of money and failed to find the best solution. But every attempted solution we've had was a compromise. Social reform is big and complicated and takes a grand vision, and when you take a grand vision and cut little bits and pieces out of it so that Congress will pass it, that compromise may just completely break what would have made the vision work. So what's the solution? We take our best ideas and try them out in controlled environments. Do science with regional policy changes. Then take what we've learned and apply it at the national level. No more of this ideological horse shit.

President Obama! A man in Texas is coughing!

A quarantine suit would just instill public panic. As long as they don't go around shitting on people they won't contaminate anybody.

This is what we should be doing. These doctors and nurses coming back are probably the world's leading experts on Ebola diagnosis and treatment at this point. Let them diagnose themselves and decide when they are actually a risk. Not that I think we can trust anybody to be completely objective; we should probably mandate that they submit their twice-daily temperatures and reports of incidental symptoms to an independent health organization. Just to make sure they actually do it and they aren't biased because it's themselves. But mandatory quarantines just for having been in west Africa? Ridiculous.

This much is unfortunately very true. Ever since the civil rights movement it has become politically incorrect to talk about keeping the n*****s down, but that won't keep some people from trying anyway. So the racists have just gotten used to saying "poor people" to actually mean "black people", which is why unfortunately the more cynical and fraud-fearing political element in our society (the Republicans, based a lot on southern and rural communities with histories of racial bigotry) tends to ideologically oppose the entire concept of welfare instead of trying to figure out how to make it work. Democrats might be too trusting (and also too ideological) to make it work right, but they're usually the only ones trying.

It's one thing to make observations like you have. It's another thing completely to solve problems based on those observations. How do you expect to get people to stop having children they can't afford? Somebody who can barely afford to keep themselves in a home and not hungry usually doesn't "choose" to have a child. It happens by accident. What are you going to do about it? Go hand out free condoms?

Further, an "unquenchable drive to improve oneself" is a great character trait that most people don't have. What is going to give somebody that kind of drive? The belief that you can lift yourself out of poverty is actually statistically very unlikely, and human beings are surprisingly good at perceiving obvious trends like that. The people with that kind of drive are actually ignoring the reality of their situation and believing something that hasn't been true for anyone around them - that they can actually climb the social ladder and make a better life for their future. And just think about the logical leaps one has to make from "work really hard to improve my situation" to "send out hundreds of job applications and hope that one of these benevolent corporate overlords will by some mistake share their wealth with me for anything, anything at all that I am willing to do at this point". Dealing with the job market in this country is so far removed from anything that our animal instincts can recognize as contributing to our survival that it just beats most of us down into depressed wage slaves.

That sounds like a great way to waste taxpayer money for the benefit of the few people with enough capital to live off their investments (in this case real estate) and exert their influence on local politics. Building and maintaining an apartment complex, especially one with no need to collect rent, would be a lot cheaper than paying for the rent and multiple landlord overhead of the multitude of apartment complexes around. Most cities need more low income housing too, because low- to middle-income renters are being priced out of the market all over the country (although in San Francisco they have it pretty bad and they have a scapegoat).

Where's the will for our government to do its job the best way possible? Is it just a cynical given now that the only way we can do good anymore is if a special interest gets their cut?

Does not affect Drupal 6. Not sure about Drupal 8, but if you're concerned about the security of your website run on beta releases you're doing it wrong.

Tip to moderators: There is no mod category "Sad". The best response is to ignore it, because then those who can recognize a completely unmoderated post will appreciate the metahumor.

Do they know how?

How many teenagers (or emotionally immature adults) do you know that would decline sex if there wasn't a condom handy?

Tell that to your penis or uterus. I'm sure it will stop trying once it realizes you haven't earned it yet.

Isn't that the same thing as subsidizing the millions of excess children who have bum parents?

Then become a foster parent. Or were you kidding when you volunteered to take on all that responsibility?

It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites. That's a fact. What is racist is to suggest they somehow deserve it.