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fragmede an hour ago

There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.

Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.

slowin an hour ago | parent [-]

Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.

I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.

loeg 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.

ChrisMarshallNY 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Not 90%[0].

Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

slowin 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Not if you're in the US. Social security is ~22% https://govbase.com/blog/where-your-tax-dollars-go