Tag Archives: Entitlement

The Following Appeared On Facebook Today

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Posted by a friend:

WE HAVE A PROBLEM: This is a well written and thought out article written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who’s in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve…

My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!

I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.

I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it.

Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.

We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!

Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??

Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”

Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.

When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.

My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.

People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.

Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn’t see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.

We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.”

I would love to know where this young lady is going to college. She has definitely learned critical thinking skills. Kudos to her parents for raising an amazing young woman.

 

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…

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Until recently it was understood that if you immigrated to a country, you learned the language and adopted the culture. You might keep the traditions of your culture alive in your own home, but for the most part, you tried to assimilate into the culture of your new home. Unfortunately, there are many immigrants who have recently arrived in America with the idea of transforming America into the country they left. If you are happy with the culture of the country you left, please stay there–do not attempt to bring that culture here.

BizPac Review posted an article today that illustrates one of the problems immigration without assimilation creates.

The article reports:

A group of Muslims who work for Amazon would rather pray than work, and because the multinational tech giant refuses to grant them this entitlement, the Muslims are now fighting back. How? By protesting and airing their grievances to sympathetic ears in the left-wing media.

On Dec. 14 the group of Minneapolis-based East African Muslims held a protest outside the Amazon warehouse where they work to demand longer break times.

…At the moment the Muslim warehouse workers receive two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute break per shift. According to Somali immigrant Khadra Ibrahin, these breaks are too short. Why? Because they make it impossible for her and her peers to both use the restroom and pray.

“And so most of the time we choose prayer over bathroom, and have learned to balance our bodily needs,” she said to Vox, adding that to do otherwise would affect their production rate.

Each employee must pack at least 240 boxes per hour, or 4 per minute, which is possible so long as their breaks are short, i.e., under 15 or 30 minutes. But to use the restroom and pray, Ibrahin and her coworkers would need longer break times. And that’s exactly what they want.

“Workers and the community want respect,” Abdirahman Muse of the Awood Center, which reportedly organized the protest, said to Vox. “Responding to our demands for basic fairness and dignity are things we shouldn’t have had to even push Amazon on. We don’t want charity; we want respect and a fair return on the hard work that brings Amazon their profits.”

A spokesman for Amazon noted, “Associates are welcome to request an unpaid prayer break for over 20 minutes for which productivity expectations would be adjusted.” To me that seems like the perfect solution–you may have all the prayer breaks you want but you will only be paid for the breaks other employees are also paid for. Amazon has a responsibility to allow for religious practices–it does not have a responsibility to pay someone to practice their religion on company time.

I hope that Amazon stands strong on this–caving would set a very bad precedent.

The Positive Impact Of Sequestration

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On Sunday, Stephen Moore posted an article at the Wall Street Journal about the positive aspects of sequestration. The bottom line in the story is that because of sequestration the federal government is shrinking.

In fiscal 2013, the sequestration will save the government more than $50 billion.

The article explains the potential future impact of sequestration:

In other words, Mr. Obama has inadvertently chained himself to fiscal restraints that could flatten federal spending for the rest of his presidency. If the country sees any normal acceleration of economic growth (from the anemic 1.4% growth rate so far this year), the deficit is on a path to drop steadily at least through 2015. Already the deficit has fallen from its Mount Everest peak of 10.2% of gross domestic product in 2009, to about 4% this year. That’s a bullish six percentage points less of the GDP of new federal debt each year.

…Discretionary spending soared to $1.347 billion in fiscal 2011, according to the CBO, but was then cut by $62 billion in 2012 and another $72 billion this year. That’s an impressive 10% shrinkage. And these are real cuts, not pixie-dust reductions off some sham baseline. Discretionary spending as a share of the economy hit 9.4% of GDP in fiscal 2010 but fell to 7.6% this year and is scheduled to slide to 6.4% in Mr. Obama’s last year in office.

There are still major problems with entitlement programs going broke (I would like to repeat myself here and say that Social Security is not an entitlement program. If you are going to call it an entitlement program, just give everyone the money they have paid into it over the years and stop payments.). Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will eventually have to be reworked in order to make them viable, but I seriously doubt that will happen under a Democrat president. Partial privatization of all three programs would extend their viability, but would need politicians willing to take a political risk for the good of the country. Right now that’s not what we have in Washington.

 

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Just For The Record

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Social Security and Medicare are not entitlement programs! Those of us who are retirement age or rapidly approaching retirement age have been paying into Social Security since we first began working and Medicare since it was enacted. How much money has the average welfare recipient paid into welfare? What has the government done with the money we have paid into those programs over the years?

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If We Cut The Budget, There Will Be No Police, Parks, Teachers, Traffic Enforcement, Schools, Life On Earth As We Know It, Etc.

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People opposed to cutting government spending always threaten that if the cuts are made, very visible necessities will abruptly disappear. It’s an argument that goes on all the time all over the country. No one every says, “If we cut spending, five employees whose jobs overlap with five other employees will be terminated.” Well, it is the silly season in Washington, and the truth is on vacation.

Byron York at the Daily Caller posted an article yesterday pointing out that our budget problems have to do with spending–not entitlements.

The article points out:

There’s no doubt federal spending has exploded in recent years. In fiscal 2007, the last year before things went haywire, the government took in $2.568 trillion in revenues and spent $2.728 trillion, for a deficit of $160 billion. In 2011, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the government will take in $2.230 trillion and spend $3.629 trillion, for a deficit of $1.399 trillion.

Mr. York concludes:

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today’s deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they’ll do it.

This issue could be an important one in the coming presidential race. Should Republicans base their platform on entitlement reform, or should they focus on the here and now — specifically, on undoing the damage done by Obama and his Democratic allies? In coming months, the answer will likely become clear: entitlements someday, but first things first.

There will be an increase in government expenditures as the baby boomers retire. Restructuring Social Security is probably a good idea–but it has to be done in a way that keeps faith with the people who have paid into the program all of their working lives. Social Security should never be ‘means tested’–that would make it another welfare program. The people who paid into it should receive benefits from it. Remember that those who may be financially well off probably paid more into Social Security than those who made less during their lifetimes. Therefore, to ‘means test’ the program would simply make it a wealth redistribution program–not what it was originally intended to be. A large part of the problem with Social Security is the fact that Congress has spent all of the money. There is a part of me that wants to force Congress to reimburse the Social Security fund with their retirement money. It seems only fair.


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