When did you decide the government should take care of you VS giving you the freedom to take care of yourself?

Question

100 years ago the government didn’t tax it’s citizens to fund social security retirement, welfare, unemployment compensation, medicare, medicade, or universal health coverage. And at the time our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had ZERO national debt, the largest middle class in the world, and we weren’t hated by the rest of the world for sticking our nose where it didn’t belong.

So why did all this change? When did Americans decide that it’s better to pay 46 new taxes in the form of TRILLIONS of dollars in order for the government to take better care of us and create more dependency INSTEAD OF taking advantage of the freedom we have to better our own lives? Are we THAT lazy that we can’t take care of ourselves anymore?

Answer 1

I don't think you realize that times have changed!

Answer 2

Thats not the issue. 100 years ago, when people retired, they lived with relatives because they couldn't afford to live alone.
Today, with social security and company pension plans and other retirement plans, people should be okay when they retire. Example, I work with someone who is 63 and will be retiring in 3 years. At this moment, his investments are bringing in more than his annual salary of around $45,000. When he retires, his life style will change very little.
Personally, I don't mind paying taxes... to a point. However, give me the tax I have paid in social security over the course my my life and let me fund my own retirement. I don't need the government taking care of me.
However, there are some that do need help.
Oh and during the last administration, we did have a balanced budget. You can thank bush for getting us into a war and running up a huge national debt, increasing the deficit and losing 20 million manufacturing jobs.

Answer 3

Well yes, 100 years ago the country was doing great. Have you ever heard of the Great Depression? It decimated the country and made clear that safety nets were necessary to keep us from falling into such chaos.

Social services are used primarily to benefit the elderly and young children. 90 year old women and five year old kids can't just "get a job."

What you reveal is that you blame poor people for being poor and think they're getting what they deserve. You should study capitalism. The end to poverty is impossible within that system, statistically it cannot happen. I'll repeat that: within capitalism, eliminating poverty is impossible. As of right now, the top 10% wealthiest people control 70% of the nation's wealth. There are going to be decent hardworking people among the 90% of us scrambling for that remaining 30% who don't deserve what they're going to get.

If you don't believe in economic justice, then by all means, you are free not to care. But I'm personally glad that the poorest people in our country do not look like the poorest people in other countries--we see them on TV looking like skeletons, with flies buzzing on them. Please tax me to be sure that never happens here, and thank you.

Answer 4

Yes, and let's look at the conditions the people in the United States were living under 100 years ago.

No care for the poor, no labor laws, no child welfare. The conditions in the city were just wonderful. Horse crap piling up in the streets, polluted drinking water, disease. Zero concern for the environment or sustainable growth. raiment crime and a criminal justice system that was a shame at best (especially if you we're white.)

I won't even discuss the conditions of the schools.

Yeah, that was just great. The good old days.

Me, I'll pay my taxes. I like having a county that takes care of it's people.

That IS government's job.

Answer 5

Where exactly did you see where we had the largest middle class?....In 1907 the country was made up of mostly farmers eeking out a living on the family farm...the industrial revolution had not yet occurred....that was only 4 years after Henry Ford Opened his first factory...... the family farmer could hardly be considered prosperous, thats the reason left the farm and moved to city for the priveldge of working 6 ten hour days.

Answer 6

Some of us can, buddy...and some cannot.

It is the job of government to do what the people cannot do for themselves.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems.

Answer 7

$41 billion worth of no bid contracts to Halliburton and an unaudited military budget. Take care of that and then come and talk to me about the gov't taking care of me. The gov't has been doing nothing but taking my 30% and spending it on the War on Terror. I tried to get help for a disabled family member and was rejected.

Don't tell me about the gov't taking care of me.

Answer 8

I think the government should not be accepting millions in influence money from the health are industry to defraud Americans out of health care.

Answer 9

Hasn't happend yet Drew. I've never asked anyone for anything I can't do for myself.........with the exception of having my parents co-sign for my first loan--which I paid without their help. Been doing great and proud of everything I have--because I EARNED IT ALL ON MY OWN!

Answer 10

The only reason any of these programs has any difficulty is the constanst robbing of the funds.

What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors, yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.
Through the "golden years of the American middle class" - the 1940s through 1982 - the top income tax rate for the hyper-rich had been between 90 and 70 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981.
The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat axe to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn't work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much money that this year we'll pay over $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn't come up with the revenues he needed to run the government.
Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to get worried about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a "rabbit going through the python" bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same 20 year or so period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire, so instead of using current workers' money to pay for the Boomer's Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would have pre-paid for their own retirement.
Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near-doubling of the Social Security tax on the then-working Boomers. That tax created - for the first time in history - a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers' retirement.
This was a huge change. Prior to this, Social Security had always paid for today's retirees with income from today's workers (it still is today). The Boomers were the first generation that would pay Social Security taxes both to fund current retirees and save up enough money to pay for their own retirement. And, after the Boomers were all retired and the savings account - called the "Social Security Trust Fund" - was all spent, the rabbit would have finished its journey through the python and Social Security could go back to a "pay as you go" taxing system.
Thus, within the period of a few short years, Reagan dramatically dropped the income tax on America's most wealthy by more than half, and roughly doubled the Social Security tax on people earning $30,000 or less. It was, simultaneously, the largest income tax cut in America's history (almost entirely for the very wealthy), and the most massive tax increase in the history of the nation (which entirely hit working-class people).
But Reagan still had a problem. His tax cuts for the wealthy - even when moderated by subsequent tax increases - weren't generating enough money to invest properly in America's infrastructure, schools, police and fire departments, and military. The country was facing bankruptcy.
No problem, suggested Greenspan. Just borrow the Boomer's savings account - the money in the Social Security Trust Fund - and, because you're borrowing "government money" to fund "government expenditures," you don't have to list it as part of the deficit. Much of the deficit will magically seem to disappear, and nobody will know what you did for another 50 years when the Boomers begin to retire 2015.
Reagan jumped at the opportunity. As did George H. W. Bush. As did Bill Clinton (although Al Gore argued strongly that Social Security funds should not be raided, but, instead, put in a "lock box"). And so did George W. Bush.
The result is that all that money - trillions of dollars - that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax being on your first $30,000 of income to the first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. What are left behind are a special form of IOUs - an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to those the government issues to borrow money from China today to fund George W. Bush's most recent tax cuts for billionaires (George Junior is still also "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust Fund).
Former Bush Junior Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounts how Dick Cheney famously said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Cheney was either ignorant or being disingenuous - it would be more accurate to say, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter if you rip off the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for them, and don't report that borrowing from the Boomers as part of the deficit."

Answer 11

I think that happened in 1929 with the start of the great depression.