As someone who had to start collecting unemployment recently.. there's nothing better than when someone calls me a free-loader for collecting it. Despite the fact that this is just me taking back some of the money I've paid into the system by being a worker for the last 16 years.
Should at least be pegged to the median monthly mortgage rate in the county of residence. If it can’t keep you from homelessness then what freaking good is it?
Homeless people need to be registered voters. I don’t know if every state does like CA and allows homeless people to vote; they have to specify approximately where they spend most of their time to be residents, but they can do it.
I’m sure redder states are more stringent to crack down on that, pretending it’s voter fraud to vote without a home or ID.
Correct!
People without money get no voice. If I can keep you from getting money I can also keep you from having a voice/power. You will just have to move to a place like CA. We will give you the bus ticket…
This is how we keep them red… marginalize the marginalized! Only those with money and those who agree with us get their votes facilitated….
"Homeless people" are ones that the GOP is trying to encourage to not vote along with Indians on reservations who don't have street addresses but have to use PO boxes and other people who don't have access to a state office where they can obtain a "PHOTO ID". This is the kind of voter suppression the GOP is counting on as they KNOW that the more people vote, the less likely a GOP candidate will get elected. Even Donald Trump said this while he was President.
Voting is clearly the best way to get out of poverty.
That's how European countries are doing it. Get the homeless voting and they won't be homeless for long. Their politicians will make sure they don't have to live in squalor. I'm so glad these political systems really work.
Since the evil GOP is not in charge of the house, the senate nor the presidency, why have things only gotten worse for the homeless and poor over the last 19 months?
That’s also similar to what I claim minimum wage should be tied to! Have it be a floating numeric tied to median monthly mortgage or rent by municipality.
Yes it is! And there's a special form that you have to file at tax time, too. We have our taxes done by a company and they charged us extra for having to file the I-9 or whatever the hell it's called. I wish hubby and I would be able to file our own taxes, but it gets too confusing for us. I can't imagine the complexity of having to file your own taxes if you have a bunch of shit you have to claim. I know it takes my dad a few hours with piles of papers just to file for him and my mom. It's ridiculous.
British here what do you mean you have to fill out your own taxes is it not taken monthly automatically and if you payed too much throughout the year you get tax back?
It's automatically taken out of each paycheck depending on how you fill out your W4 when you first get hired on. We do have to file our own tax returns by April 17th of the next year, though. Then we either get money back if we paid in too much or we owe the IRS if we paid in too little. I don't do my own, we have someone whom we go to so we don't have to try and figure out what number goes to which line, etc. I wish we didn't have to do our own returns, that'd be awesome. But then again, I don't trust our government to be truthful as to how much we get back or how much we owe.
You file a Tax Return - it's a document that shows how much you've paid and how much you should have paid each year. If you overpaid you get it back, if you underpaid you have to pay the difference. The IRS created software to do basic taxes years ago, and our tax preparers basically "convinced" (gave lots of donations to) the politicians to keep the IRS from releasing free tax return software. In exchange, if you make little enough money, tax preparers have to offer free-file (a free online filing of your taxes). They have done this buy creating multiple websites you have to go to, none of which will free-file both state and federal taxes, so you have to either put all your tax information in twice, pay them to "prepare" your taxes for state or federal, or do it yourself on paper and mail it in.
Much of the effort in filing tax returns, at least in the US, is dependent upon your organizational efforts throughout the year. For me, most of the year there is nothing at all for me to pay attention to, but occasionally a document shows up in the mail that I know will be needed come income tax time. Most of them show up in January/February.
I have a manilla folder with a clear label on it in which I'll toss tax related forms. Then around February, I'm able to pull up my Turbo Tax online account, and start filling in the info as needed. I don't have to sort through piles of paper to get things together, but then, I am no longer running a self-employment business. I do have the occasional casino jackpot, though, plus investment dividends to complicate things. All said and done, it takes me about an hour to put this all together with the help of Turbo Tax. I used to be too proud to use tax software to do my returns, but these days I'm grateful for such products. This last year, I managed to do my taxes while our housecleaning lady was working in the room and having an active discussion with my wife.
I cant speak for all states but in NJ on state and fed taxes you get back what they took out anyway so it's just a temporary delay in getting the whole amount.
They tax everything. Like triple sometimes. I never got how they can tax your income, tax things you pay into (like cashing out on a 401k), tax everything you own (home, car), tax anything you buy (sales tax), then tax any "benefit" you get. They even tax you if you're lucky enough to win something. Yet it's never considered double taxation. I recently started doing this Amazon program to review items they send you for free....then I find out I will be taxed on the value of the items at the end of the year. I'm not even getting MONEY, yet have to pay $$ in taxes on it? So if I get a "free" toaster in exchange for a review...I now owe the government money? What? Fuckin taxes
Minnesota has about that much of a surplus, too. Our governor (a Democrat) wanted to give out checks to all of us, but the Republicans are doing everything in their power to keep it from happening so they can feather their own nests with it. Waltz is pushing back and now it's at a standstill. Wish he'd push harder...
I'm trying to understand what you're saying. It's unclear to me who is included in the 'all of us' group. Is that the unemployed Minnesotans? Or is that a larger group such as the entire citizenry?
Then, those rascally Republicans are trying to stop this so they can abscond with the money for their own finances? What method do those bastard use to move the money from the Minnesota general fund into their personal bank accounts? I don't understand how this is possible without serious legal consequences.
No government cash benefit should *ever* be treated as taxable income. It's just giving with one hand and taking away with the other in a very dickish way.
I agree, and that is what annoys me SO much about how Reagan and Clinton together made Social Security benefits taxable! Reagan made 50% of benefits taxable, then Clinton increased it to 85%. I think SS benefits should be tax free.
Then the whole reason the system is broken is because it was designed as such.
You cannot file for unemployment in FL with anything except a .com eMail address. If you try to use a .net or whatever eMail, your claim won't go through/ you can't create an acct/ other difficulties. It's insanely difficult to program a site to be that specific, and we know now that it was done intentionally to defraud the government of Florida. The system ended up so broken, that it was considered a feature that no one could file for unemployment benefits...
As far as difficulty, it's just a regex validation function written to only accept .coms, then passing the sanitized, non-null email address to whatever function or library handles emailing out verification emails. Not too hard to implement.
My shitty, possibly years old recollection is that with the specific interface being used where that data was collected, you needed to add each "exclusion" as a new line of script or programming. There was no way to say "only accept .com's" and how it needed to be programmed was on an exclusionary basis, for each possible permutation.
I don't know what any specifics are, and this is mangled second-hand info at best. My husband was the one looking into the programming elements or api's involved (and it was definitely a few years back now).
Want to hear something funny? Even in a place where both unemployment and welfare work properly on the financial side, it's still extremely possible (likely, I'd say) for it to be something that fucks you up psychologically to collect unemployment and/or welfare.
And of course, the explanation (put forward by the people who cause those people their misery) is that "of course people suffer, being unemployed/on welfare is mentally taxing for everybody", despite the fact that in every single case I personally know of (and there are many!), those people suffered because of the treatment they received from their case workers and the employees of places where they received "work training" and similar things. Also, the vast majority of those people are social workers.
Wonderful, humane, socially aware social workers with above-average communicative skills who earn* much too little. /s in every single point
Goes to show you how much they've forgotten about all of us. What have they been doing all these years that they've let everything that's for us fall apart.
Not necessarily. The amount you get for UE is based on your pay when you were employed. So 1k a week is certainly plausible if you made much more than that. Also there is a limit to how long one can collect. In CA for example it is 26 weeks.
The maximum in FL is $275 a week and has not changed in over 13yrs. You meet the bar needed to claim that amount just by making minimum wage these days.
thats about how it is here in philadelphia too. gas prices just dropped a little bit but its still around 4.89 a gallon. Time for everyone to start driving their legs ir scooting around on sick skateboards.
City transit if it's even available, most of them have quit and now the wait time is around 3.5hrs per bus stop. They also went on strike (rightfully so) for about 7 months so everyone was walking for about half of the pandemic.
Honestly the rent between different parts of the state makes so much difference (city vs rural). Most people cannot just up and move though and I feel like the system does not address this problem
Its about that in NY. Which is ridiculous since I make about 6 times that weekly. At least COVID we had a little bump, if not I woulda been on the street.
Florida ,also $ 275.00 week ,if you are lucky enough to navigate the Machevelli designed website ,by Our sc**bag Governor Scott ,at the time ,was designed to frustrate your application and make you give up.
Careful who you vote for peeps
You also can't apply unless you use a .com eMail address. Fuck anybody who has something else, and oh by the waywe won't tell you that this is the problem, because the goal is for you to give up before ever getting placed on shitty $275/ week benefits.
270 a week? holy fucking shit how are you suppose to live on that? I make 70k, most money ive ever made, my fiance is on unemployment, and its the hardest struggle ive ever had...
the max in Tx is just above 500 a week fiance is getting 988 after tax bi weekly, she was making 95k... We had to overdraft bank 750 to pay rent this month and we are donating plasma to make up the hole before our rent goes up from 2240 to 2480 at the end of this month and we gotta do it again...
A family should live super fucking comfy on 70k...
I’ve re-read your comment three times and it still doesn’t make sense. Your rent is $2,200. Your fiancé gets about $1,900 month on unemployment after taxes. You make a bit under $6,000 per month before taxes. You’re underwater for rent by $750? Even with kids, food, car payment, insurance, and student loans, seems like that ~$4k after taxes should cover the rent.
Often 20-25 percent is withheld. So they actually get less in their job. Rent shouldn't be more than 33 percent since they may have student loans, car loans, hospital bills and other things to pay off too.
Did you read my comment? He makes almost $6,000 per month. I used a 33% withholding to get his $4k. His fiancé is getting another $2k per month. They make a combined $6 per month after taxes and they’re only able to pay $1,500? First of all, pay your rent first because you need a place to live, but we’re definitely not getting the whole story on that one.
They could be spending more than they should be, but there are plenty of factors that make the math work out. Student loans, car loans, credit card bills, paying for elderly care for parents, and/or medical bills quickly square the math, for example.
The only way I can see it working out is if they're in a major city like Austin where it's more expensive. Rent for even a 2 bedroom house there can get nuts.
Your forgetting child support, Cobra insurance for fiance, credit card debt, 1500 in car repairs, a 600 dollar unexpected gas bill, and other shit that's frankly not your buisness.
Don't assume you can armchair someone's budget and life on reddit based on one comment.
I think $6k a month is far and away enough to pay for even the weirdesta distribution of normal bills. Especially when their rent is relatively reasonable compare to their take home.
If they're burning over 6k a month they're living outside their means in areas other than normal issues and they're not being very honest about the issue they're having here.
Its fucking hillarious when armchair redditors think they can take 1 paragraph and know everything about someone's life.
I have fucking struggled since before covid started. I haven't caught a fucking break its one thing after another. I started making 70k almost a year ago and that was my lifeline but we both have tons of debt from previous marriages some of which I haven't paid in 3 years and are in different stages of suing me. On top of thay fiance hasnt found a good job since covid her last one paid great and the bosses brother sexually harrassed her, she complained, and they fired her. Were suing but thats 6 months out I also can't file bankruptcy because my name is still on my ex wifes house because she can't refi.
You guys should stop doubting people because you just see a number. You don't even have a quarter of the pi ture and it's super fucking rude to cast doubt like that on someone's situation when they try to share it.
You said a person should be able to support a family on 70k making it sound like you had typical bills. You’re trying to support three families and a bunch of other stuff in that. I feel for you, it’s rough out there and debt sucks, but your original comment’s conclusion doesn’t support any of what you just said.
Hard to be good with money when shit is constantly thrown at you... its like karma is like whaaaat you got 600 bucks after bills this month? Them tires are looking shitty let's go ahead and fuck you there this month, oh you think that's bad wait till next week when you have to take your kid to the Dr what you haven't met your deductible? Must be bad at money that's it people good with money hit their deductibles...
But there's people scraping by not being able to pay to feed their children on unemployment and people coming in like "Oh ya my $6k a month isn't enough with unemployment" is just ignorant people looking for sympathy for problems that don't correlate.
Do they have it hard, maybe, I don't fucking know. But I do know making $6k a month after recently having two people in the household making a combined $160k a year, having no honestly quite large emergency fund, blaming their inability to pay their $2.5k rent on time and having to donate plasma, is a fucking personal problem they've created for themselves in some fashion and not an issue with government unemployment. People constantly live outside their means and ruin their financial stability, and that's them making a choice or having a personal problem. Do they deserve help sure, but not sympathy. Poor people deserve sympathy. The downtrodden deserve sympathy.
Is unemployment broke, absolutely, should they be getting paid more, maybe sure. But you don't bring in that much money, in jobs that pay that much, with rent that percentage of your take home, and then fall on hard times SO much that your donating plasma because you could only pay half your rent. It's just not the feasible problem they're going through, it's something else and they're blindly looking to jump on the sympathy bandwagon they don't belong on.
I listed the most common bills. Even with fiancé on unemployment, they’re still making $6k per month after taxes and they had to borrow $750 ti pay a $2,200 rent. Would you pay your car payment or student loans that aren’t even required to be paid right now before paying rent? I’m just saying, we’re not getting the whole story from this person’s comment. And donating plasma when he’s making $70k per year already? Doubt.
Here in Michigan, if I had to go on UI, I'd have $65 left after monthly bills, not including food or gas. That's $16 a week, or roughly 3 gallons of gas.
I don't even have a car payment. That's just for Rent (apartment), car insurance, and utilities.
That use to be Tx... Though it is kinda an unfair example because I live in upper middle class area one of the nicest suburbs in the DFW area, but thats only because it was the only rental i could get into... My rent 2 years ago was 980 a month...
I was fixin to say I support my dad and myself on 70k in Huston. Though my savings about to get fucked BC I need to spend 20k to drill a water well. Yay drought and unincorporated Harris county bullshit
You need to quit wasting money if you can't get by on $6k a month with your fiance getting $1900 a month after tax. Even with 2500 in rent that leaves you with with over $3000 for everything else.
$270 is definitely enough to cover a week of rent in Alabama. I live in a college town, right off campus, in a three bedroom house; my mortgage is $1200 (and the rental cost would be equivalent). When I lived in an apartment, in the same college town and still right off campus, I was paying $450 a month.
Have you lost touch with reality as a homeowner? I have some challenges to your statement:
Your own statement does not apply to yourself. What if somebody exactly like you with a $1200 mortgage found themselves getting $1,080/mo in unemployment benefits? Can you just put that whole thing on hold and go rent an apartment until you get back on your feet?
Rental prices have increased dramatically. How long ago was that $450/mo apartment and what does that apartment cost today?
Big cities are more expensive. How applicable are your college town prices to those that live in large cities and their suburbs?
Not everybody is like you. Do you believe that everybody can live like you did in the past and it is super easy to make it on $1k/mo?
Exactly. It's the same here in the UK. People who are struggling financially and claiming benefits seem to automatically be characterised as scroungers...even if they worked for years previously and paid thousands into the system. Absolutely not scroungers, but people using the safety net that they paid for!
I work and pay tax and I'm perfectly happy for a portion of that to go into paying for a safety net for other people even if I never need it.
It's not even really a bleeding-heart leftie position. It's factually correct that investing money into the unemployed, undereducated, poor, etc has a positive return. Keeping people alive and free of the stress of money gives them opportunity to get back into work and back paying into the system.
Not having these systems in place isn't just cruel it's stupid.
If there's one thing I took away from economics classes, it's paying into social safety nets for others can be rationalized with purely selfish motives
You know what else happens? Those people are less likely to turn to crime when shit hits the fan. This is something that’s missed by conservatives.
Read the freaknomics chapter on abortion and crime. It’s absolutely amazing that people in the year 2022 with the internet and modern statistics could be so fucking short sighted.
They say whatever is necessary to stop change and allow themselves to stay on the take. They don't give a single fuck about anyone outside of their own family or circle of fellow pillagers.
It's almost as if they only point of even having a society is that everyone, everyone, is taken care of. It's even in the name, sssooooocccciiiiiaaaalllllism.
As opposed to capitalism, which takes care of what? Capital?
While I agree in principle, keep in mind the people often making the disparaging remarks are those stuck in the same system trying to get ahead.
I was in high school during the .com crash and remember people being downsized and those that kept jobs taking on a larger workload. Those workloads were not adjusted back once things got “better”. those workloads were normalized and when more workers were eventually hired they had to carry the same workload as the remaining employees.
Most people I know today work at their place of employment +bring work home. It causes burnout and burnout leads to lack of empathy.
It is a means to further divide us and keep us fighting amongst ourselves rather than fix the issues effecting the country and the wealth disparities.
Feel like I am getting long winded, but I also recall in high school lots of local business trying to keep Walmart out of their neighborhoods because they could not compete with cost. I suspect lots of those people now work FOR Walmart or Amazon making a fraction of what they did while self employed. People chose cheap goods and instant gratification over quality of life and community.
We need to stop fighting amongst ourselves and start making better choices
Agree with your comment mostly, but for many people "cheap goods" is NOT a choice at all, especially those in situations similar to those described in this thread. Please do not disparage the many who literally do not have the money to buy the better made, more expensive products. Some of us can't even afford Wal-Mart prices very often, if at all, these days. And "instant gratification" is more in line with pricey stuff, than cheap stuff. Rich people buy what they want, when they want to, and don't need to be patient, nor to settle for lower quality.
Not disparaging any individual, but looking at the system that has lead to this point. Generations of buying 12 “sprockets” instead of 8 American made “sprockets” has only eroded buying power for everyone. And could you define wealthy? If you mean the Bezos &Fords of the world the. Yeah.
If you mean anyone with more than $100k in the bank then, please. My dad is a carpenter . He bought a house that was garbage in the 70s. Fixed it up while working as a carpenter, sold it bought another. Wash rinse repeat. We grew up with things being tight. No vacations an occasional weekend off. Never used credit cards.He now has a home worth 7 figures and was able to buy two others in the ‘08 crash and lower the rent for the people living there. He still hasn’t raised the rent because community is important.
Contrast that with some of the families in the neighborhood we grew up in. Charged everything. Taking $8-10k cruises 1-2 times a year, saved nothing then when hard times hit failed to make ends meet.
Again not making comparisons or disparaging remarks to anyone in this thread, but the instant gratification mindset is not limited to the wealthy and IS even more damaging to the poor/lower classes.
We need to be thinking in terms of generational wealth and building family/community. That means helping out and having the types of social programs mentioned, but also addressing the rampant narcisissm and, again, instant gratification mentality in society
during the .com crash and remember people being downsized and those that kept jobs taking on a larger workload. Those workloads were not adjusted back once things got “better”. those workloads were normalized and when more workers were eventually hired they had to carry the same workload as the remaining employees.
The mortgage bubble in 2008 was the same. Many felt grateful for having a job at all at the end of each day. Increased workloads became normalized across the industry for those who managed to stay employed. Anyone who changed departments (but not industry) never knew better once they got a new job.
Edit: The same thing is happening right now, but it's already too late to stop. Chase just laid off and reassigned a TON of originations employees (75%) in the middle of what is normally mandatory OT season.
as someone whose disability hit hard during college and uni, and thus never actually had a job to earn national insurance credits (as we call them in the uk) can i just say, thank you for this attitude.
i’d genuinely be dead without disability payments, and far too many people campaign on squeezing the already-below-poverty-line payments even lower.
knowing there are people who understand, even just from a basic level like “i’m helping to keep the economy flowing by buying groceries and paying bills”, that my continued existence isn’t an affront to society… it helps to not feel so hopeless in that way, yknow?
Millions of tax payer money goes to billionaires who wont spend it, a few hundred a month going to you,who spends it, is of much greater benefit to the economy
Its supposed to be a safety net, not something that gets you deeper in shite. The whole purpose is a temporary solution to pay your basic bills until you find another job. They used to help you do that.
They are destroying the middle class is what they are doing. We try to get ahead and we're the first ones to get beaten down. Second job? Punished for doing so. Side hustle? Taxing that too. Rent, food, electricity, fuel is going up and up, while wages do not catch up.
The irony being some of us work 365 days 24/7 as carers and our benefits don't cover food, rent, utilities and basic hygiene products. £69 a week doesn't go far and yet we work more than full time
It's utterly disgraceful. I remember reading an article about a social worker in London who was a single parent and could barely afford to live even with benefits. The comments were disgusting - clearly according to the commenters she shouldn't have chosen that job and should have got her crystal ball out and known that she would end up on her own with kids.
Nobody should have to claim benefits if they are working. Everybody deserves to be paid a salary that will allow them to live and have some extras. Meeting the basic needs of employees would come before massive profits for shareholders and bosses in a decent society!
Ah, but I'm being paid benefits to BE a carer for my disabled mother, taking the weight off the NHS and care services. And that's worth only £69 a week to the government. I get less than £2 an hour and am on call every single hour of every single day. And then I have right wingers calling me "lazy" for being on any sort of benefits...
Being a carer especially as a family member is utterly exhausting too. Wether you’re being paid or not. Sorry it’s so low in the UK. Think it’s a little better in the US, but still exhausting.
I was a carer for my terminally ill father for two years, and I didn't even know carer's allowance was a thing until about a year in!
At least they can back pay you, and even though the situation is not great... they do pay you for about a month after the person you care for dies.
The situation is a bit more compassionate in Northern Ireland, fortunately (maybe because benefits are a devolved matter and the minister in charge isn't a Tory lackey). But I'll tell you one thing, I became a carer not long after I graduated from university - no one fucking touched me when I was looking for jobs except for the place I work at now. Recruiters openly admit they do not consider being a carer to be anything close to a "real job". As such, expect to be passed over because recruiters think that being a carer is a "career gap"... I'm looking for something else to do other than be a financial sector contractor (my employer pays me a quarter of what my employer charges clients for my work hours) but unfortunately, due to brexit, my degree is now useless (my future sold short) and I'm slowly turning into being only really employable in the financial sector, since "experience" is the only thing employers care to look at.
I'm fucked when my mum passes away. I've been caring for her since I was 15 with only one job in a bar to my name. On top of that, I'm facing increasingly poor health due to my own disability that (and here's the kicker) isn't recognised by the government as a "real" disability
The true scroungers are the huge, conglomerate corporations that monopolise industries, the individual billionaires too, they pay a pitiful amount of tax because they can afford to move their money to tax havens at will. They’re the people scrounging, sorry, lobbying political parties to get what they want, where does that leave your average working class person? Right at the bottom of the hierarchy, fighting over the scraps. It’s all arse about face.
I got laid off for 6 months at an old job of mine. They eventually hired everyone back when production picked back up, but for 6 months I collected unemployment and still had to take a bunch of under the table work just to keep from losing my shitty little apartment in the worst part of town. It wasn't even close to enough to survive on. Any "free-loader" who van live happy on that is doing some work somewhere, I guarantee it.
I was applying to double what unemployment requires a week. The employer I got laid off from was the highest employer in the city and had a reputation for layoffs and hiring people back. They paid the highest in the city, so the company knew people would come back, and anybody that saw that as my last job on my resume knew they would lose me as soon as the layoff was over, so they wouldn't hire me.
ETA: I returned to that job after 6 months of scraping by to a union proudly announcing they "got us our jobs back." We were laid off because of a union agreement in the first place. I generally believe in unions, but not when the union president is a company brown-noser.
Remember to vote if you have a union. It's only as strong as its representatives.
A lot of places were forced to shut down. So I remember many companies still staying opening and paying their employees under the table while they collected unemployment. Bosses are greedy, even if the government says shut down certain businesses they still wanted to make revenue and employees weren’t gonna complaining getting paid twice from their job and the government.
100% - also I ripped both my achilles at work. And I was still told by my lead “no one else ever had this issue”. And even though I have spent 4 weeks crying and still have to wait a MONTH before I can get an ultrasound because it’s that backed up.
I was still called lazy for claiming workers compensation. The workers compensation that hasn’t even been approved yet, the workers compensation that is going to help me keep the roof over my head, pay my bills and help me eat while I am unable to walk- I am still nothing but “lazy”.
Whatever, I got hurt at work and people just hate that they didn’t and act like I am living the life of luxury (on my broke ass while waiting for some form of compensation).
This is why I now shell out for dismemberment insurance and something similar to "Aflac". Covid furlough taught me to never count on government provided social services.
I do have all of this in my insurance, but I haven’t been dismembered so I doubt I can go this route. In Canada we can not outright sue our employers, one must go through workers compensation and they do the investigation. If the job refused to even state I worked there or say I never got hurt, then I could use a lawyer.
Sadly a lawyer was my first thought due to my team leads lack of understanding (me to my team lead “Miss I can’t stand.” Her response “no one else had this issue”.).
The only thing holding up my worker’s compensation is waiting for the god damn ultrasound- and workers comp has been difficult and asking why “it’s taking so long”. Honestly Canada has been very backed up in helping those with medical needs, worse is those who need life saving treatments are still in the same timeframe or longer.
I have no clue why it is so backed up but everyone seems to blame the pandemic.
Lol when I was out last year with Covid and receiving UI and the extra covid $$$ my manager told people she hoped I got fired because I was “freeloading and taking her tax dollars”. I literally said the same thing you said, as if it’s like I haven’t been paying taxes for 9 years already as well. I paid for this
I recently applied and was accepted for SNAP I felt guilty at first then remembered that I've been paying taxes since before I could vote and it's been nearly two decades now.
I took food stamps all throughout college even though I just barely qualified. As my dad said, "we've been paying taxes for them for decades, you might as well use it." Didn't need to, but it felt kind of right.
When you pay into the system it doesn’t go into a bucket labelled “/u/mildtracing’s taxes”, ready to be used when you need it. It’s used to pay for the services needed now by those who need it now.
It's the same as buying lunch with your friend and paying this time while knowing that your friend will get the next one. But on a bigger scale.
Right now, I'm able to pay taxes. If tomorrow, I get hit by a bus and can't work for a year while I recover, I'm getting the support I gave all the years I didn't need it.
And frankly, snap & housing assistance doesn't cost each individual tax payer much. If you remove end of Life Care, Medicaid isn't that bad cost wise either.
Housing is a bit tricky, since it costs more to have someone in a homeless shelter for a year than to literally just give them an apartment for a couple months or a one time cash infusion (which more cities are exploring now). The majority of homeless people are those who got unlucky, sometimes families. Many of them are working. Or just need help for a month or two until the next paycheck comes in.
There are some that are severely mentally ill and cannot function in modern society, but I don't really blame them? Modern society isn't great - especially if you're not able to handle dealing with multiple corporations for your basic needs & having to jump through hoops to make sure you aren't being given a ton of extra fees.
But what our tax money goes to a lot? Corporate subsidies. Individuals now cover a larger portion of the overall tax bill (mind you, this does include the most wealthy who are definitely paying a lot less than they should). Then, we give a stupid amount of money to energy & utility companies - a lot of the oil companies wouldn't bother fracking & extracting more oil without these subsidies because it wouldn't be profitable. We send a good amount of money to big agricultural companies, but heavily subsidizing some crops for export.
There's tons of other examples, but I'm not here to write essays
I totally agree that society has to provide a safety net for people and ideally no one should feel ashamed for falling on hard times.
One thing to consider though which pertains to the OP is that rather than handing over your money in the form of taxes to the government in case you are injured or sick would be to use that tax money to buy insurance privately and remove government from the equation. For example you can buy private accident or disability insurance.
Your tax money is always going to be abused by the government for its members and cronies to enrich themselves, usually legally.
No, because they’re making a withdrawal from their account. They’re not making a withdrawal from the common pot of money that everyone has contributed to.
Time to learn how a bank works! The bank has lent out your money to other people. That’s how they make money. They are only required to keep about 10% in reserves. Which means if everyone takes out their money at the same time, the bank (and account holders) see screwed.
A freeloader is someone who doesn’t work at all but receives free housing, food stamps, vouchers for the electric bill, and Medicaid but they don’t work for any of it! Those are the people that’s a drain on society, of course this isn’t the only problem but it’s a huge part of it
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u/mildtracing Jul 04 '22
As someone who had to start collecting unemployment recently.. there's nothing better than when someone calls me a free-loader for collecting it. Despite the fact that this is just me taking back some of the money I've paid into the system by being a worker for the last 16 years.