The disgraceful Supreme Court justice should be held accountable for his actions but probably won’t.

      • AngrilyEatingMuffins@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        You’ve never heard of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing opportunities, mental health services, food banks, soup kitchens, etc etc etc

        Like Jesus Christ with that comment. How fucking stupid are conservatives? Go hit your head with a hammer and see if it helps. Seemingly it couldn’t hurt.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          so practically speaking not much of safety net unless you are old, or single poor mother, which i support no doubt but that is [not] a safety net a vast majority of the population.

          also, note mental health services, food banks, soup kitchens >>> federal government and states hardly provide these, they are provided by private sector…

          even those have been steadily eroded under successive administration since 1980s, which share of taxes paid by working people have been increasing. so working person pays more taxes and gets no safety net for the most part.

          You need to get educated instead of vomiting generic talking points, it would help this country if everyone did the same.

          • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You know one of the parties keeps voting to take away the safety nets/keep us from getting them right? I’m all up for getting a third forth and even fifth party but its just not going to happen unless we can fix the current system and the gop is never going to let that happen.

          • QHC@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            so what is your solution, vote for the GOP and pray they will suddenly decide NOT to gut every social program they can find?

            • sadreality@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Voting for either party is providing legitimacy to the regime. you are better off voting with your feet and money since that’s the last place you still have some agency. political process is captured, voting third party is the only logical decision but none of them are really inspiring any confidence since they shill degeneracy.

              • QHC@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                If you only care about ideology and not actual people that are suffering every day, then yeah, giving up and letting other people solve the problem is the best thing you can do.

    • Strangle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Just look at the amount of people living in poverty in the 40’s and early 50’s, then the democrats started the “war on poverty” and started these programs and 70 years later, the number of people living in poverty has continued to rise

      Just look at the number of people living in poverty those stats aren’t hard to find.

      More people are living in poverty in the US today than they were 70 years ago

      You’d think after 20+ trillion dollars spent, the record on poverty would be much much better

            • Strangle@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              How is it specious? Do you know what the word even means?

              Fact: there are more people living in poverty after the war on poverty was started than there were before those policies were put in place.

              There’s nothing specious about that

              • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Fact: there are double the number of people in the country after than there were before.

                Fact: social status tends to have generational inertia.

                Specious: “misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive.”

                It’s absolutely specious, because you’re somehow suggesting those policies failed because the absolute number of individuals went up, disregarding the fact that had those policies not been in place, the number would’ve been double what it is.

                And I said at best, because it’s far more likely you’re just trolling. But, giving you the benefit of the doubt, let’s work through this.

                If a family in poverty that’s 2 people, has 3 children, that’s now 5 people.

                If this is the only family that exists, 100% of people are in poverty. If one of those children winds up getting out of poverty, you’ve gone from 2 people in poverty, to 4 people in poverty. However, you’ve gone from 100% poverty to 80% poverty.

                And you’re saying that’s a failure.

                • Strangle@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re being spacious right now, trying to cover up the fact that there are demonstrably MORE suffering people than there has ever been.

                  You need to talk about real people, not statistics. What’s 20%? Who gives a shit. More suffering is more suffering, no matter what the percentage is.

                  The reason these programs were introduced was supposed to lead to less suffering. That’s been a lie

                  I mean, what is an acceptable number of people living in poverty to you and when are there too many? Is it a percentage? Or is it a real number of real people?

                  • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    Again: because there’s more PEOPLE than there has ever been. Yes, there is more suffering. I have no idea what you expect, the political climate is such that we can’t just eradicate their suffering. But to pretend like these policies are a failure is going to cause more suffering. How do you not see that?

                    That 20% is the number that aren’t suffering because of these policies. If you were to remove them, that 20% is the added suffering you are causing.

                    Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

                    Have they accomplished everything they set out to? Absolutely not.

                    Are they failing? Absolutely not.

                    I mean, what is an acceptable number of people living in poverty to you and when are there too many? Is it a percentage? Or is it a real number of real people?

                    See, in my world, percentages are real numbers of real people. I know, that’s crazy. And I’m not going to pretend like there’s some number that’s acceptable, or enough, because that’s not the point. The point is that the policies we’re discussing have reduced the suffering.

                    You calling them a lie can only lead to more suffering. Hopefully you realize that some day.

                  • myslsl@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    You need to talk about real people, not statistics. What’s 20%? Who gives a shit. More suffering is more suffering, no matter what the percentage is.

                    We track the change in the number of people living in poverty to the total pop via these statistics. For example if last decade we had 20% of people living in poverty and this decade we have 10% of people living in poverty, that tells us relative to the total population there are less people living in poverty. In other words previously if we had randomly sampled 100 people we would have expected to find approx 20 living in poverty vs now we would expect to only find approx 10 if we randomly sample 100 people.

                    Bringing poverty down from one percentage to a smaller one as described above describes a success in the sense that poverty is more uncommon compared to the total population.

                    If P is the total number of people living in poverty, T is the total population and R is the ratio of people living in poverty to the total population then we have R=P/T, in other words P=TR.

                    Your issue is just that the number of people living in poverty P is too large. But if that’s your concern then we either need to decrease T (the total population) or decrease R (the ratio of people living in poverty to total population) or decrease both T and R.

                    You’re arguing that our efforts to decrease R aren’t working (or aren’t working well enough). So, then what should we do? If we do nothing, R remains fixed (or even increases) and P increases due to the increasing population T, which makes your issue worse. Decreasing the total population T seems tricky too, if that’s a viable solution to you, them how do you suppose we should accomplish it? As far as I can tell the only plausible solution is decreasing R, which is exactly what the person you were replying to was talking about?

                    Note: I’m also ignoring that the rates of change in T and R matter a lot. If you care to argue that we’re not decreasing R fast enough, then what would you suggest in order for us to decrease R faster?

              • QHC@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Fact: The percentage of people that are in poverty is significantly lower than it was multiple decades ago.

      • QHC@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        You are just wrong. Absolute numbers are not relevant when discussing trends because, guess what, the population of the whole world has increased in the last 70 years. Shocking news!

        Povery rates are approximately half of what it was in 1958, when the Census bureau began tracking data. The rate bottomed out in 2019 but then went back up in 2020 (bet you can guess why), and is now trending down again.

        https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/poverty-united-states/