Welfare - what is it and who benefits

What would be the point of such a classification? What if it turned out that 50% of married women were stay-at-home moms? Would that be a bad thing?Being a stay-at-home parent is only a negative thing if the parents have not decided that staying at home is in the interest of their family.

That's understood. But unless the reasons are explored, and parsed out, that 1.3 million figure really does not tell us all that much. Some of these reasons are things that we ought to deal with, while other reasons are strictly personal.

In fact, the ratio has nothing to do with those hidden unemployed folk. If you were able to get those folks out on the pavement with resumes in hand, the ratio of seekers to jobs would become even larger.Yeah, I get your point. The official number in the US is much lower. With ratios as high as you say, a safety net is imperative.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No, they don't.I don't get compensated for making my bed or doing my laundry either. I think it is difficult to make the case that you should be compensated for raising your own kids.

Yeah. They have to walk over to the waste basket and 86 all of those resumes that they are not even going to read. Often in situations where an employer gets hundreds of resumes, HR reduces the pile by using some kind of software screening, perhaps based on keywords, to reduce the pile to something manageable.

There are some tax breaks for raising a family, but you talked about compensation. But no I don't think you should be compensated for raising your own kids. So do I. It's also the case that parents see a benefit in having healthy kids, so they have an incentive to spend money on accomplishing that.Quite frankly, what we are arguing about here is socialism vs socialized democracy to some extent. You may be a bit further to the left than I. If folks are paid a living wage for what they do, then they are able to take care of their families. I'm all for that. But that does not mean that when parents make personal decisions about how many kids they want to have, or whether to use daycare or stay at home, that society ought to pick up the tab for every possible option.Now things might be different if we as a society want to manage or maximize the number of kids that are born for some reason.

Quite obviously that is what you prefer for some things. I suspect that you don't want to build your own roads, raise your own army, and I suspect that you don't home school your kids. Isn't it really the idea that people are getting money that you don't think they deserve a fairly significant part of why public welfare is different from spending on a public road?

I don't think your statement accurately described my response. I did not characterize you in any way. You are demonizing yourself. So you did not write a post comparing welfare to a person in a group laying about while the rest of the folks did the work? Let's see: So does it matter whether or not the person is a bum or not or was the bum part just for show? Are you suggesting that you don't want or need any army? Because I did not suggest that we should not finance only the military. It looks like you are pushing me towards demonizing you. So private roads are not the be-all solution, eh? So I can take it that public spending for some things is okay and your identification of your favorite few roads is an attempt to pretend otherwise. That's how I read what you say. Apparently, when I describe someone whose opinion matches what you've expresses the description constitutes demonizing.Now for your own accusation: I know I cannot convince you. That much is true. But petitioning government to carry out functions that constitute a working society is not immoral. We can agree or disagree about what those functions are. I understand that folks differ on that issue. But when I read a post from you challenging the idea that government should be involved in basic functions like building roads or defense, I understand that you are on the extreme part of the spectrum. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

You are capable. But you need to sort out your position first.

I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with you slightly in the details.Those possible outcomes you list are not unforeseen perils and that is rather the point. An efficient capitalist system requires that businesses be able to shrink and grow, or blossom or die in response to market forces. Yet people cannot be retrained and/or redeployed with the same rapidity. Unemployment and other policies are readily viewed as insurance systems, and like all insurance, those policies rely on group participation.