viral

Good judgment comes from experience.

Experience comes from bad judgment.

In 2010 the U.S. population (308.7 million) was 72.4 percent European American (223.5 million) and 12.6 percent African American (38.9 million) (http://en.wikipedia....e_and_ethnicity).

 

Out of the total population, the percentage of whites on welfare was 38.8 and the percentage of blacks on welfare was 39.8 (http://www.statistic...are-statistics/).

 

Considering that blacks are only 12.6 percent of the total population, it would seem that African Americans account for a disproportionately large chunk of welfare, the biggest percentage, in fact.

 

Can someone who is more mathematically gifted validate this?

 

Just trying to get the context right here.

Ok, the number of Americans on welfare is 12.8 million or 4.1 percent of the population. (http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/)

So that means about 5 million blacks are on welfare and 4.96 million whites are on welfare? Almost the same absolute numbers?

That's 12.5 percent of the back population being on welfare versus 2.2 percent of the white population being on welfare.

Someone help with the math please?

 

 

Speaking of good PR and slavery, I'm reminded that no party has been more successful in claiming to be the champion of civil rights than the Democratic Party, who - during the move to abolish slavery - were made up of a whole lot of anti-Semites and Ku Klux Klan members. I tend to think that they are achieving their agenda today, by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare. Statistics show that more and more black kids are born out of wedlock, with disengaged fathers. Perhaps because single moms get bigger support than if they were married and working? How's that for an incentive system?

 

In fairness, Ms. D, you do have a point about African Americans and how welfare has been impacting on them as a demographic group.

HOW THE WELFARE STATE HAS DEVASTATED AFRICAN AMERICANS

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1672

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among African Americans today is 73%, three times higher than it was prior to the War on Poverty. Children raised in fatherless homes are far more likely to grow up poor and to eventually engage in criminal behavior, than their peers who are raised in two-parent homes. In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the U.S. population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. Also as of 2010, the black poverty rate was 27.4% (about 3 times higher than the white rate), meaning that 11.5 million blacks in the U.S. were living in poverty.

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added manynew layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, "break the cycle of poverty," and make "taxpayers out of tax eaters." Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the "conditions that breed despair and violence," those being "ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs." Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,'" said Johnson.

Thus began an unprecedented commitment of federal funds to a wide range of measures aimed at redistributing wealth in the United States.[1] From 1965 to 2008, nearly $16 trillion of taxpayer money (in constant 2008 dollars) was spent onmeans-tested welfare programs for the poor.

The economic milieu in which the War on Poverty arose is noteworthy. As of 1965, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line had been declining continuously since the beginning of the decade and was only about half of what it had been fifteen years earlier. Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level, had decreased by more than 30%. The black poverty rate had been cut nearly in half between 1940 and 1960. In various skilled trades during the period of 1936-59, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled. Further, the representation of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations grew more quickly during the five years preceding the launch of the War on Poverty than during the five years thereafter.

Despite these trends, the welfare state expanded dramatically after LBJ's statement. Between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, the dollar value of public housing quintupled and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. From 1965 to 1969, government-provided benefits increased by a factor of 8; by 1974 such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965. Alsoas of 1974, federal spending on social-welfare programs amounted to 16% of America's Gross National Product, a far cry from the 8% figure of 1960. By 1977 the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.


The most devastating by-product of the mushrooming welfare state was the corrosive effect it had (along with powerful cultural phenomena such as the feminist and Black Power movements) on American family life, particularly in the black community.
 As provisions in welfare laws offered ever-increasing economic incentives for shunning marriage and avoiding the formation of two-parent families, illegitimacy rates rose dramatically.

For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Familiespenalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent. As a Cato Institute study noted, welfare programs for the poor incentivize the very behaviors that are most likely to perpetuate poverty.[2] Another Cato report observes:

The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: "When a couple's income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty—marriage and work—are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system."[3]

The aforementioned FamilyScholars.org report adds that "such a system encourages surreptitious cohabitation," where "many low-income parents will cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won't be cut." These couples "avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family."

A 2011 study conducted jointly by the Institute for American Values' Center for Marriage and Families and the University of Virginia's National Marriage Projectsuggests that "the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children's family lives." The researchers conclude that cohabiting relationships are highly prone to instability, and that children in such homes are consequently less likely to thrive, more likely to be abused, and more prone to suffering "serious emotional problems."

William Galston, President Bill Clinton's Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated that the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15% to 20% of the family disintegration in the United States. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere around 50%. By Murray's reckoning, the growth and increased liberalization of the "welfare complex" have eroded the traditional ethos of working-class communities that once held people who worked at low-wage jobs, and men who married the mothers of their children, in much higher esteem than unwed parents who became wards of the state.

The phenomenon that Murray describes has been in clear evidence for decades. Consider, for instance, a Harlem-based initiative in the 1980s known as Project Redirection, whose aim was to persuade young women who had already borne one child out of wedlock to avoid repeating that mistake. According to the Manpower Development Research Corporation's evaluation report on this project: "[M]any [beneficiaries] were beginning to view getting their own welfare grants as the next stage in their careers.... t became apparent that some participants' requests for separate grants and independent households were too often a sign of manipulation by boyfriends, in whose interest it was to have a girlfriend on welfare with an apartment of her own."

The results of welfare policies discouraging marriage and family were dramatic, as out-of-wedlock birthrates skyrocketed among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans. In the mid-1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was scarcely 3% for whites, 7.7% for Americans overall, and 24.5% among blacks. By 1976, those figures had risen to nearly 10% for whites, 24.7% for Americans as a whole, and 50.3% for blacks in particular. In 1987, for the first time in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birth rate for unmarriedblack women surpassed that for married black women. Today the illegitimacy rates stand at 41% for the nation overall, and 73% for African Americans specifically.[4]

Welfare not only increases illegitimacy and poverty in the short term, but it inflicts long-lasting, even permanent, handicaps on children who are raised in welfare-dependent homes. Dr. June O'Neill and Anne Hill, comparing children who were identical in terms of such social and economic factors as race, family structure, neighborhood, family income, and mothers' IQ and education, found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child's IQ. A similar study by Mary Corcoran and Roger Gordon of the University of Michigan concluded that the more welfare income a family received while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy's earnings as an adult.

The devastating societal consequences of family breakdown cannot be overstated. Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of America's economic ladder. According to the U.S Census, in 2008 the poverty rate for single parents with children was 35.6%; the rate for married couples with children was 6.4%. For white families in particular, the corresponding two-parent and single-parent poverty rates were 21.7% and 3.1%; for Hispanics, the figures were 37.5% and 12.8%; and for blacks, 35.3% and 6.9%. According to Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, "the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent" and thus constitutes the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass. Articulating a similar theme many years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty."

Children in single-parent households are burdened not only with economic, but also profound social and psychological, disadvantages. As a Heritage Foundation analysis notes, youngsters raised by single parents, as compared to those who grow up in intact married homes, are more likely to be physically abused; to be treated for emotional and behavioral disorders; to smoke, drink, and use drugs; to perform poorly in school; to be suspended or expelled from school; to drop out of high school; to behave aggressively and violently; to be arrested for a juvenile crime; to serve jail time before age 30; and to go on to experience poverty as adults.According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

The calamitous breakdown of the black family is a comparatively recent phenomenon, coinciding precisely with the rise of the welfare state. Throughout the epoch of slavery and into the early decades of the twentieth century, most black children grew up in two-parent households.
 Post-Civil War studies revealed that most black couples in their forties had been together for at least twenty years. In southern urban areas around 1880, nearly three-fourths of black households were husband-or father-present; in southern rural settings, the figure approached 86%. As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%—scarcely one-fifth of the current figure.
 As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.

During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution. Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that are built into the welfare system have served only to exacerbate the problem. As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams puts it: "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do. And that is to destroy the black family." Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs: "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

Just as welfare policies discourage marriage and the formation of stable families, they also discourage the development of a healthy work ethic. As Heritage Foundation scholar Michael Franc noted in 2012: "[T]he necessity of phasing out [welfare] benefits as incomes rise brings a serious moral hazard. In many cases, economists have calculated, welfare recipients who enter the work force or receive pay raises lose a dollar or more of benefits for each additional dollar they earn. The system makes fools of those who work hard." In testimony on Capitol Hill, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Kentucky) concurred that although federal welfare programs "are designed to alleviate poverty while promoting work," collectively they have "an unintended side effect of discouraging harder work and higher earnings." "The more benefits the government provides," he said, "the stronger the disincentive to work." Yet another Capitol Hill witness, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin)—herself a former welfare recipient—acknowledged in her oral testimony: "I once had a job and begged my supervisor not to give me a 50-cents-an-hour raise lest I lose Title 20 day care." The same work disincentive came into play when Moore contemplated the health coverage she was receiving through Medicaid. "I would want to work if in fact I didn't risk losing Medicaid," she said.

NOTES:

[1]Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell writes: "Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting.... The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the liberal vision of society—and of government programs as the solution to social problems."

[2] For instance, "a 1 percent increase in the welfare-dependent population in a state increases the number of births to single mothers by about 0.5 percent," and "an increase in AFDC benefits by 1 percent of average income increases the number of births to single mothers by about 2.1 percent."

[3] The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. Consider the hypothetical case, as outlined in May 2006 by Urban Institute senior fellow Eugene Steuerle, of a single mother with two children who earns $15,000 and enjoys an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefit of approximately $4,100. If she marries a man earning $10,000, thereby boosting the total household income to $25,000, the EITC benefit, which decreases incrementally for every dollar a married couple earns above a certain level, would drop precipitously to $2,200. Similarly, consider the case (also outlined by Eugene Steuerle in May 2006) of a mother of two children who earns $20,000 and thus qualifies for Medicaid. If she marries someone earning just $6,000, resulting in a combined household income of $26,000, her children's Medicaid benefits are cut off entirely.

[4] For Hispanics, whites, and Asians, the illegitimacy rates are 53%, 26%, and 17%, respectively.

"...by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare."

 

I'm not sure where you got this information, but the data from USDA which implements the Food Stamp Program (now known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) tells a different story (link to data here: http://www.fns.usda....acteristics.pdf) . If you look at Table A.21 which shows the demographics of "food stamp" recipients, the majority are white (37.6%). African-Americans on the other hand account for 23.6% of the program.

In 2010 the U.S. population (308.7 million) was 72.4 percent European American (223.5 million) and 12.6 percent African American (38.9 million) (http://en.wikipedia....e_and_ethnicity).

Out of the total population, the percentage of whites on welfare was 38.8 and the percentage of blacks on welfare was 39.8 (http://www.statistic...are-statistics/).

Considering that blacks are only 12.6 percent of the total population, it would seem that African Americans account for a disproportionately large chunk of welfare, the biggest percentage, in fact.

Can someone who is more mathematically gifted validate this?

Just trying to get the context right here.

The pursuit of power and dollars alone doesn't explain American exceptionalism. You'd have to be a complete cynic to think that that nation's citizens aren't some of the most generous in the world, and are only motivated by wealth. Well, there's also a motivated-by-guilt aspect, which has given rise to programs like Affirmative Action, but that's beside the point. America isn't perfect, their people are not always right, they are prone to human failings. But they are exceptional in their history and in their aspirations. To say that the founding fathers were merely an idealistic lot is to see them out of context, and with jaded glasses. I don't know about anyone else, but I've always thought the soldiers who gave up their lives in WWII would've made the founding fathers proud.

 

Speaking of good PR and slavery, I'm reminded that no party has been more successful in claiming to be the champion of civil rights than the Democratic Party, who - during the move to abolish slavery - were made up of a whole lot of anti-Semites and Ku Klux Klan members. I tend to think that they are achieving their agenda today, by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare. Statistics show that more and more black kids are born out of wedlock, with disengaged fathers. Perhaps because single moms get bigger support than if they were married and working? How's that for an incentive system?

 

 

 

 

It's true, equality doesn't mean you are equal in every single way. If by economics you mean that brains, talent, work ethic, passion, and vision also count, then you are absolutely correct.

Hi Ms, D!

I respectfully beg to diverge. In the end it's all realpolitik -- the unending struggle for preeminence of power and wealth, especially on the part of Americans, because precisely they are top dog and the top dog doesn't want to give up his place.

And Americans really aren't any more exceptional than any of the empires that were top dog in their time. The top dog is exceptional only because he is the top dog. And history teaches us that all top dogs become history.

Also, Americans aren't really all that generous. If you look at their foreign aid, they may have the most in terms of absolute dollar values, but the value of their foreign aid as a percentage of gross national income comes in at no. 19 among leading donor countries.

And its scandalous how Americans use a disproportionate and unsustainable amount of the world's resources. Shameful. The data is all there. According to Dave Tilford of the Sierra Club as reported in the Scientific American, the average American will inflict 13 times as much ecological damage as a Brazilian, use the resources 35 Indians will, and consume 53 times the amount of goods and resources as someone from China will over a lifetime. Already, we can see how the rest of the world is catching up and Americans, especially the middle class, are getting squeezed as a result of stronger global competition for scarce resources and wealth. Puts a certain context to their generosity. And you can see how their quality of life is deteriorating. But there's more to come, unfortunately. I personally find that Americans aren't as complacent and self-assured as they were a few decades ago.

As for the Democrats making Afro-Americans more welfare-dependent, let's face it, the latter are caught in a vicious circle - they face a lack of economic opportunity relative to other ethnic groups (Asian-Americans have things much better) - and so welfare becomes a lifeline.

My money is on China as next top dog. May not be tomorrow, but their time will come.

Peace.

The first American industrialists and capitalists were extraordinary entrepreneurs but they were no strangers to corruption. The Founding Fathers may have been idealistic but they also believed in good PR. Anyway, their tribe hasn't increased. Took almost a century before Lincoln abolished slavery. A more socialist US? Well, there's welfare and stuff, but the rich sure aren't about to roll over and play dead.

With all due respect, it's a heck of a generalization to say that Americans are bible-conscious. Dollar-conscious for sure. But bible-conscious? There was a bible belt, but I don't know if it can be equated with Americans being bible conscious. I also know quite a few American Jews and they sure don't believe in the bible, except for the books in the Torah. Temporal power and wealth are finite (the universe will end someday) but I'm not holding my breath.

Equality is a big word and all men are created equal, but equality is up until sperm and egg unite, then economics kicks in.

I worked for uncle sam close to 10 years. I'm tempted to say that in the end, its all about using power to build wealth and wealth to build power, the proverbial vicious cycle. Sorry, am being cynical right now.

My personal stand is that inequitable wealth distribution is wrong especially if it is perpetrated by corruption, influence, patronage, and not merit. There are countries where wealth is better distributed, Singapore among our neighbors, for example. They have political will. We need the same and it's a frustrating, long process, obviously, to change our system. But we have to keep making the effort.

Data from ADB puts the wealthiest 20 % of Filipinos as owning more than 50 percent of the country's wealth and the poorest 20 % have less than 5% of it. Maybe the reality is worse.

Hard to make an apples to apples comparison between the Philippines and the US because of differences in standards, including living standards, and differences in social, political and cultural conditions and practices.

Universally, it is accepted that the oligarchy in the Philippines have too much control over the allocation of resources and the means for creating wealth. Our political system is dynastic, so resources for addressing poverty are allocated inefficiently and go to the favored.

New wealth created in the country basically goes to the rich and we have the worst wealth inequities in Southeast Asia..

We clearly need systemic changes.

But so does the US. We do share some of the issues of wealth inequality.

Just please be there.

When you start giving Mercury Drug so much business buying maintenance meds, that's sickening.

When you can't remember where you put the pen you were holding just a second or two ago, that's scary.

When the waiter presumes you have a senior citizen card and asks for it, that's insulting.

When a cute young thing calls you "sir" but you know she actually means "lolo," that's depressing.

You've never lost your head, if you've never followed your heart. -- Tales From The Friend Zone

Congratulations, Filibustero, for your great insights about men, maturity and relating to women.

Maturity does result from experience and not necessarily age. Sometimes, even for a young guy, it's the emotional and psychological ability to process things and allow one's mind to appreciate a woman's pov.

They say women tend to mature faster than men, I think especially if they're intelligent and balanced individuals. That's why women can have more of an affinity for relating with older men.

♡♡♡

some women are hot and dangerous...

haha haha

 

but anyway nice experience

Lol, she sure was hot and dangerous! I still don't understand what her trip was, she wanted to hook up but then suddenly dropped me. Maybe she decided she didn't like me that much after all. Charge it to experience, the emotional equivalent of blue balls.

Whoa! You will never forget this for the rest of your life.

Hahaha! You said it, that experience was unforgettable. I felt like such a fool. But funny, before I left she made friends with me again.

When I was 21, 22 years old, I worked in a small office where one of the girls started being friendly with me. She was hot, would take me to the movies because I had no money. She taught me to finger her and that night I didn't wash my hand so I'd keep her smell. She'd let me feel the fine pubic hair that went up to her bellybutton. Then suddenly she turned cold and naive as I was, I went after her like a dog in heat. Partly I was really frustrated because she was more sexually experienced than me then and had been telling me about her adventures, and there I was with my tongue hanging out, and I never got any. Anyway, the moral of the story is that everyone at the office probably knew what was going on, and I was a fool of a dog in heat. Not a good office romance at all. Ah, women.

Sorry for the rep. January is a good month for starting - and ending - things my friend.

Maybe you should keep going your way, wherever that may be. Maybe you weren't meant to belong to anyone, to anybody, to anything. Not even yourself. That's why you'll never be found. And no one will ever really know you. So alll your attempts to connect are useless.

Maybe you should keep going your way, wherever that may be. Maybe you weren't meant to belong to anyone, to anybody, to anything. Not even yourself. That's why you'll never be found. And no one will ever really know you.

I'm so glad you're safe. Please don't ever do that again.

We've corrupted Christmas into an excuse for revelry. Pass the wine, would you?

He cannot solve robbery in his goverment so he want to start with petty crime with his partner Joshua.

LOL. He might at least make a difference by directing traffic on EDSA at 5PM on a Friday.

I know you're still out there

hiding in the darkness.

Waiting to find a chink in my fragile armor

I'll always fight you

but you scare me and I hate you

Uncaring and voracious.

I've concluded that I should use the term "ugly" more carefully. From reading your posts, I've realized that there really are no ugly people, unless it's in reference to their character, personality, attitudes and behavior. But not appearance.

Thank you all for your thoughts. Hope you keep sharing them.

As this thread evolves, it really isn't just about it's title, but the factors that make or unmake relationships, with the term "ugly" only as a point of departure.

Thanks again.

The capacity for giving can touch you so deeply, even to the core of your being.