That's not what he said.

He said he doesn't give money to the homeless because there are government programs to take care of that absolving him of personally getting involved.

Political belief replaces personal compassion.

Taken to its logical conclusion, if government programs represent a society's compassion then the tax payer is the instrument of that compassion. Since I pay >100X in taxes than the average person, I must, therefore, be 100X as compassionate. All hail me, Draginol, lord of compassion.

 

Are you planning to donate money to children in Iraq? How about children in China? Don't liberals care about children or just American children? Where do you want to draw the line?

Why not advocate health insurance for all children worldwide?

Also, have you ignored everything I've written in this thread? Conservatives are overwhelmingly the ones who pay for and run charities that are directed to helping needy children.  In addition, conservatives overwhelmingly pay the taxes that presently go to "the needy".

How exactly can you argue that conservatives don't care about children? The evidence seems to indicate that the opposite is true.  Liberals are the ones who pay lip service to compassion but don't seem to actually do anything to back it up.

That's only a fact if you include children of illegal immigrants. Do you support our taxes providing health insurance to them as well?

The question isn't what the average is. The question is how much would an insurance plan with a high deductable cost a family of 4.

As someone in the business of paying for other people's insurance in real-life (i.e. an employer), I can tell you that $11k per year figure is totally bogus. That's nearly $1k per month and we have plans that cover families of 4 that are a fraction of that. 

 

sorry draginol i have to call you on this one maybe.

your paying insurance for company employee. when you said the above did you include the group discount.

and no i don't want taxes to pay for universal health care. i go to the VA in a small town. even tho i only usually have to spend all day when i walk in it is still a long wait for someone like me who gets bored easily.

Are you conservative Gideon? And even if you are I'll rephrase, why don't conservatives care about other people's children?

Why in the hell is it my job and/or responsibility to care about the children someone else introduces to the world?  What on god's green Earth gives you or anyone else the right to try to guilt-trip me into paying for the comfort and safety of those children as you encourage the government to take more of my money in this area that in effect robs my ability to take care of the comfort and safety of my own children?!?

I care about my children deeply, and I'm ok with spending a fair amount of money to keep the world safe for my children and others in my world, but I'll be damned if I should be paying the costs for every child that is ever born in this country -- something that, by the way, helps to encourage a bunch of people from South of the Border to drag their butts up here so they can birth their children in this country and give them an 'American' birth legacy so that they can be citizens and suck up all the more resources.

Less free stuff would be a damned good start.  Less encouragement to come to this land and live off the taxes of others.

Are you planning to donate money to children in Iraq? How about children in China? Don't liberals care about children or just American children? Where do you want to draw the line?

Actually liberals (at least the movie stars and starlets) seem to care much more about people in those foreign lands than in ours back here.  They'll trash our beliefs about not spending money here, but they'll just as quickly be out demonstrating that we should be the world's police and mommies and daddies as they buy, ooops, I mean adopt, babies from foreign lands (see Jolie/Pitt, Madonna, etc.).

 

In simple answer to the question of the headline though - some liberals have created charities, it's just that those charities don't seem to be accomplishing the necessary goals and instead are working on other priorities.  For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros and his charities, Ted Turner and the piles of money he promised to give away, and others.

Personally, I prefer people like Ralph Nader who really does put his money where his mouth is.  I don't doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Gates are trying to do some good with their money, but I expect that there is a large layer of bureaucracy involved (and seem to recall reading complaints about that) that make obtaining money from them more difficult than perhaps it should be, and less useful than it could be.

Not that I think it's a bad idea to monitor where the money goes, or a bad idea to make sure that the money is used in the best possible manner, or that it is a bad idea to follow the proverbial teach a person to fish mantra rather than just supplying the fish.  All of that is fine and dandy, but it does make it seem that the liberals aren't trying that hard to hand away their money.

Gosh, Cacto - I had no idea you were that clueless, not to mention heartless. No offense, mind you.   

your paying insurance for company employee. when you said the above did you include the group discount.

Certainly. But how does that matter? The "fact" given was the "average" cost of insurance and the "average" person is getting insurance through their employer.

I also have a decent idea of how much a high deductable catastrophic insurance plan costs for a family of 4 and it's still not anywhere near $1k per month.

The problem we see here is the slippery slope is VERY slippery. It's not enough to just have health insurance. No, prescriptions, doctors, everything is expected to be paid for without a deductable (that's how you get to the $1k per month figure as the average).

It begs the question, are human beings responsible for themselves at all anymore?

If they were born here, they are citizens and have the same right as any other citizen.

You pay to educate other people's children. Do you think only people with children enrolled in public school should have to pay taxes?

If they get their healthcare at the ER, you are paying for it whether directly or indirectly. I think subsidized insurance would be cheaper than recieving care at an ER.

Do you think only people with children enrolled in public school should have to pay taxes?

That would be a pretty good start.

If they were born here, they are citizens and have the same right as any other citizen.

And that little bonus is something that really needs to be corrected and fixed to remove that incentive for illegal immigration once and for all.

no because this is where we find out who are the hard workers and who aren't. i should say mostly.

I just spent like five minutes trying to remember my password, when the real problem was the box was asking for my e-mail address and not my username. Now I have no time to reply to anything. Except...

why I did not adopt the welfare mentality that has all but crippled my family.

Have you ever written a post about this, Gideon? Sounds interesting.

If there's one thing in life I strive to be, it's full of surprises.

And cacto? When you can show me a single government beauracracy which uses less than 10% of its revenue to cover administrative costs I'll kiss your aussie ass on main street.

The Social Security administration, which admittedly has the easiest job of any bureaucracy out there, spends 0.6% of payouts on administrative costs. Link For comparison to a charity, though, you'd have to compare the cost of fundraising to the administrative costs of the IRS. But the IRS shouldn't do too badly since it would have giant economies of scale compared to 10,000 separate charities. Coercion is also cheaper than solicitation.

Unlike national defense, which requires people to both volunteer to do it and in your analogy require people to volunteer to support it, a charity to provide health care to the "needy" simply requires people to volunteer to pay for charity.

I don't see that. If you support a war with money, you don't need volunteers necessarily. Hire Blackwater. You'll win more if you get volunteers, but they're not necessary. Same with charities. You can start one just by paying people to be caregivers, but you'll do better if you can get people to volunteer who actually care about people.

Taken to its logical conclusion, if government programs represent a society's compassion then the tax payer is the instrument of that compassion. Since I pay >100X in taxes than the average person, I must, therefore, be 100X as compassionate. All hail me, Draginol, lord of compassion.

So if you had started your business in an uncompassionate society like Saddam's Iraq, paying your taxes would make you 100x as evil as the average person?

I can't even formulate a logical argument about why someone who pays taxes for compassionate programs, railing and ranting about how much he hates those compassionate programs and wishes they didn't exist, would still think he should be thought of as more compassionate than people who support the compassion and don't do much about it. It's like the South wanting credit for ending discrimination because they were the ones who actually had to bus all the children everywhere.

Okay, I guess your point is that if it turned out that Southerners, in their free time, spent more money on charities working to end discrimination than Northerners, they should be thought of as less racist. But on the flip side, those people who leveraged their anti-racism efforts using the power of the federal government achieved a lot. It would have been a mistake for them to waste their money on charities like the Tuskegee Institute.

Well, I had to go to a different page, LW, and was actually amazed at what I found. This is also a Blue Cross company as well.

A plan with a $2500 deductible and 80% coverage through BC/BS would start at $170/month. There are several plans to choose from in the under $500/month range ($6,000/year), meaning we could get coverage for under HALF of Loca's average. Yes, it would mean limited choices of providers...but you would get that with socialized medicine as well.

Funny thing is, Loca might be inadvertently selling us health insurance (if I can get a better paying job once I'm moving on to my bachelor's). Dang liberals had me convinced I could not POSSIBLY afford health insurance, so I didn't even look!

Here's a newsflash, liberals pay taxes too.

As was recently exposed, Taxes are NOT charity.  So please respond to the question with something substantive.

Funny thing is, I'm serious. I was led to believe the "bottom line" was about $500/month. Looking at that site I see MANY packages for less than that.

I was actually quite pleased with the number of options available in that range.

There were two or three options that listed over $1,000/month, but that was it.

If you read all the comments that was in response to "liberals want to start all these programs and make ME pay for it". They are not talking about getting a bill in the mail, they are talking about their taxes. My point is that whatever goverment programs a liberal supports, they are paying taxes for it too.

Average means average. Half are more expensive, half are less expensive. This includes people with pre-existing conditions etc. that might have to pay significantly higher insurance premiums and also people with bare bones policies like the ones you are talking about that don't even cover pregnancy. The fact is that there is a huge difference in the cost of coverage for smokers, people with a chronic illness, etc. and a healthy, non-smoking, no pregnancy coverage policy.

“We’re seeing some moderation in health-cost increases, but premiums for family coverage now top $12,000 annually,” Kaiser President and CEO Drew E. Altman, Ph.D. said. “Every year health insurance becomes less affordable for families and businesses. Over the past six years, the amount families pay out of pocket for their share of premiums has increased by about $1,500.”

http://www.kff.org/insurance/ehbs091107nr.cfm


"The Frost family has a combined annual income of about $45,000, said Bonnie Frost. She and her husband have priced private health insurance, but they say it would cost them more per month than their mortgage - about $1,200 a month. Neither parent has health insurance through work."

WWW Link

"Buying coverage on the open market would cost the family about 17 percent of its income this year and more next. Government-purchased health coverage is actually cheaper because they buy it wholesale, cutting out layers of middlemen, and spread the risk over larger groups of people."

http://blog.nj.com/njv_drew_harris/2007/10/schip_fear_of_success.html


"Insurance premiums have increased 78% since 2001, compared to a 19% increase in wages and a 17% increase in inflation. A recent report showed that the average cost of coverage for a family of four is already more than $12,000 a year."

http://digital50.com/news/items/PR/2007/09/26/DCW055/nunez-and-legislators-urged-to-oppose-mandatory-purchase-of-private-health-insurance.html

the last i checked liberals want to raise taxes on the rich. are you rich loco