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Life, Liberty, and the "Pursuit" of Happiness?

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Raichu Mistress

Raichu Training Mermaid
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America is known for this line discribing the American Dream, but what does it mean to you?

To me, it says "persuit" as in, the freedom to persue happiness, not automatic happiness. As in, you should work, and you have the freedom to try to get however much money or whatever job you like.

Welfare (at least the way many people use it) seems to kill this idea completely, and that's why I'm a republican and not a democrat. Now, IMHO, welfare should only be given to the disabled, laid off, or homeless, BUT some people in my town apply immediately at 18 and start having kids to earn more. I don't believe they should get paid/rewarded for having 6 kids, especially when they aren't even married! But that becomes their job, more babies = more money, and that can't be happiness for the kids, and they never learn to care about working so they do it too. That's what makes poverty, I believe. Big business support = more and more jobs = a better economy and standard of living

I know that's just my view but what are y'all's?
 
Which rotten part of the country do you live in? Those people in your town are the perfect example of why socialism gets such a bad rap. Of course, I believe that family sizes should be legally limited, and that parents should pay more taxes than childless folks.
As for "big business support," I cannot agree 100%. Places like Walmart pay too little for anything much.
 
RM, can I marry you, or perhaps buy you dinner?
 
Wow, just wow. You've taken issue that neither side has done squat about and that's why you're a Republican? I'm speechless.
 
Tsing Shi Tao said:
Which rotten part of the country do you live in? Those people in your town are the perfect example of why socialism gets such a bad rap. Of course, I believe that family sizes should be legally limited, and that parents should pay more taxes than childless folks.
As for "big business support," I cannot agree 100%. Places like Walmart pay too little for anything much.
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It's called a free market. Walmart can set its prices to whatever the hell it wants, and it happens to set them at the point of maximum profits.
 
Actually, Wal-Mart just buys the cheapest products and sets them to a "fair" price. They give shit about human rights, shit about what they pay people, and shit about everything else. If they WANTED to, they could set prices higher, but they have to undercut everyone so they make up the cash they could be making by charging a higher price.

As for welfare, I have to agree. Beyond a certain point it IS more of a hinder than a help. But, like most government programs, it was set up at a different time and hasn't been updated to meet today's standards. Like social security, there are a LOT of problems that need to addressed, but for reasons that I won't attempt to go into, they haven't.

As for what the "American dream" is? Raping and pillaging in the name of manifest destiny. That's MY American dream.
 
You're retarded.

Do you even have any idea how much a welfare check is?

Having more kids does NOT make you more money. Yes, the more kids you get, the more welfare you get, but the amount of welfare you get is so small that it's not anywhere NEAR enough to pay to raise a kid! It's not like welfare is so much that you can use the extra amount to feed your kid and still have a profit left over! Your child would starve and die!

Mozz, don't tell me you actually believe that people keep having more babies as some kind of profit making scheme. It's ridiculous.

Man none of you have any idea what it's like to be poor and on welfare.

Plus do you know how much work it is to raise a kid, and how hard it is to be pregnant? You seriously believe anyone would go through that to get $150 extra a month?! Which will all be gone and more just paying for the kid?

I mean I don't have kids and have never been pregnant myself, but I have friends who do, and being poor I've had a lot of poor friends. If you really want to know why poor people have so many kids, it's because frankly a lot of them are stupid. Obviously there are exceptions, like me. But seriously a lot of poor people are just really nice people but not very bright. Which is why they're poor, because they're really not smart enough to get better than a minimum wage job. They can't help it. But like there's this one girl I've been friends with for like 12 years, and she's a single mother with 3 kids and she's also had like 10 abortions. She doesn't get pregnant all the time on purpose, she just basically hasn't got enough sense to use condoms. And she certainly doesn't have babies to get more welfare, she aborts most of them because she knows the more kids she has, the LESS money she'll have because kids are expensive!
 
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Girafarig_Magcargo said:
It's called a free market. Walmart can set its prices to whatever the hell it wants, and it happens to set them at the point of maximum profits.
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I was talking about their wages, not their prices. Not that it matters much, since neither would contribute much to a better economy if rich executives get the money, though dirt poor people get lower prices.
 
But like there's this one girl I've been friends with for like 12 years, and she's a single mother with 3 kids and she's also had like 10 abortions. She doesn't get pregnant all the time on purpose, she just basically hasn't got enough sense to use condoms. And she certainly doesn't have babies to get more welfare, she aborts most of them because she knows the more kids she has, the LESS money she'll have because kids are expensive!

I would say that the words 'you're retarded' apply to your friend more than they do to Raichu Mistress.
 
I live in a small town in La. You don't know how stupid they actually are here. The kids that I went to school with purposefully disrupted class because they didn't need edjucation because they'd just use welfare like their parents did.
 
ChaosRocket said:
Mozz, don't tell me you actually believe that people keep having more babies as some kind of profit making scheme. It's ridiculous.

Man none of you have any idea what it's like to be poor and on welfare.

Plus do you know how much work it is to raise a kid, and how hard it is to be pregnant? You seriously believe anyone would go through that to get $150 extra a month?! Which will all be gone and more just paying for the kid?
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People are dumb. All they care about is that the check is higher than the prior month because they have another kid. The vast majority of parents receiving welfare are bad parents who don't care about their children. They're also below average intelligence for the most part, unable to make sound financial decisions.

Moreover, like all of us, they love sex. So they bang and get money?? What a country!
 
Barb said:
I would say that the words 'you're retarded' apply to your friend more than they do to Raichu Mistress.
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Well I said she wasn't very bright. But she's a really nice person and she takes care of her kids well, the ones she didn't kill anyways.

I mean people really can't help being stupid. Intelligence is determined by a combination of genetics, and how much attention you got during your formative years. IQ changes very little from teenagerhood on. It's wrong to dislike someone because they're unintelligent, they can't help it, it's basically like a disability. Those people should be taken care of just like anyone else with a disability.

People are dumb. All they care about is that the check is higher than the prior month because they have another kid. The vast majority of parents receiving welfare are bad parents who don't care about their children. They're also below average intelligence for the most part, unable to make sound financial decisions.

Moreover, like all of us, they love sex. So they bang and get money?? What a country!
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Well I've known tons of poor people, and none of them had more babies to get more welfare. Like I said all the poor people I've known are always getting abortions and giving kids up for adoption. I mean once someone has their first kid, they realize that the kid costs a lot more than the extra they're getting in welfare and they end up with LESS money.

I'll grant you that some people are too stupid to *care* enough about the fact that having more kids means they'll be poorer. But I've never known anyone stupid enough to not realize that having more kids=being poorer. No one actually has more kids on purpose just to get more welfare.
 
I don't know what they do down there, up her in MI our welfare system is screwed up. You have work to get it. Hello, welfare is for people who can't work. Thank you Engler for screwing my state over for twelve years.

Man, my state is screwed up.
 
ChaosRocket said:
I mean people really can't help being stupid. Intelligence is determined by a combination of genetics, and how much attention you got during your formative years. IQ changes very little from teenagerhood on. It's wrong to dislike someone because they're unintelligent, they can't help it, it's basically like a disability. Those people should be taken care of just like anyone else with a disability.
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To hell they should be. Handicapped people get cheated enough and made fun of enough without "stupid" people mooching off of the government for money. And comparing stupid people to handicapped people? That's just ignorant to say. Many handicapped people are smart and the mentally challenged ones who aren't smart aren't stupid either. They have no choice, therefor it's not stupidity.
 
Raichu Mistress said:
I live in a small town in La. You don't know how stupid they actually are here. The kids that I went to school with purposefully disrupted class because they didn't need edjucation because they'd just use welfare like their parents did.
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Though I never take apocryphal stories as evidence, I've had some experiences similar to yours.
 
Intelligence is determined by a combination of genetics, and how much attention you got during your formative years. IQ changes very little from teenagerhood on. It's wrong to dislike someone because they're unintelligent, they can't help it, it's basically like a disability. Those people should be taken care of just like anyone else with a disability.

Complete and utter b.s. What about schooling? Everyone is expected to attend school for at least 12 years in the United States. Calling stupidity a disability is an insult to those with *real* disabilities.

You're arguing that your IQ is set by the time you reach adulthood? Really? Your medical and/or scientific evidence for this is...where? What about the adults who are going back to school to get MBAs, PhDs, and doctoral degrees?
 
IQ scores are expressed as a number normalized so that the average IQ in an age group is 100. In other words, an individual scoring 115 is above average when compared to people in the same age group. It is common practice to standardize so that the standard deviation (σ) of scores is 15 or 16 ( 24 is used occasionally as well ). Tests are designed so that the distribution of IQ scores is Gaussian, that is to say that it follows a bell curve. A difference has been documented between the IQ score distributions of left-handed and right-handed test subjects; the distribution in left-handed people tends to cluster at the two extremes of the IQ scale.

(The following numbers apply to IQ scales standard deviation σ = 15.) Roughly 68% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Genetics_vs_environment
 
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