Maybe this will help - From Capitalism to a Welfare State

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There are many different ideas or systems of how an economy should be run. The two most common are capitalism and socialism. They are very different in how they view who runs the economy. Most economies have ideas from both systems, but tend to be more of one than the other.

Capitalism is the economic system based on private or corporate ownership of, production and distribution of goods. It has always existed to some extent in all civilizations but was written about formally by Adam Smith in his book "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776. Capitalists favor a system of free enterprise which means the government should not interfere in the economy - that the laws of supply and demand will make sure that the ecnomy runs most efficiently in meeting people's needs. Capitalism is characterized by competition in which there is rivalry in supplying or getting an economic service or good. Sellers compete with other sellers, and buyers with other buyers. The buyers seek the best possible deal in purchasing goods and the sellers look to make the best possible sale allowing them the most profit.

Socialism is an economic theory or idea that states that the government or the state should be in charge of economic planning, production and distribution of goods. This contrasts with capitalism where free markets predonimate and property is privately owned. Socielism tends to favor cooperation whereas capitalism is characterized by competition.

The theories of socialism first arose in the late eighteenth century in response to the Industrial Revolution where factory owners were becoming wealthy and the workers impoverished. Thus, workers wanted a greater share in the wealth that factories were making. Later a form of socialism called communism sprang up based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Communism advocates class struggle and revolution to establish a society of cooperation with strong government control. Communism predominated in the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe at one time. Today it predominates in China and Cuba, but its influence has lessened.

From time to time in human history, there occur events of seismic significance, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place. Today, the scale of the global financial crisis demands that we re-evaluate the economic policy and philosophy that brought us to this point.

George Soros has said that "the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock. ... The crisis was generated by the system itself." He is right. The current crisis is the culmination of a 30-year domination of economic policy by a free-market ideology that has been variously called neo-liberalism, economic liberalism or economic fundamentalism. The central thrust of this ideology has been that government activity should be constrained, and ultimately replaced, by market forces. In the past year, we have seen how unchecked market forces have brought capitalism to the precipice.

Instead of distributing risk throughout the world, the global financial system has intensified it. Neo-liberal orthodoxy held that global financial markets would ultimately self-correct - the invisible hand of unfettered market forces finding their own equilibrium. But as economist Joseph Stiglitz has caustically observed: "The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is not there."

Just as it fell to Franklin Roosevelt to rebuild American capitalism after the Depression, and to the American Democrats, strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes, to rebuild postwar domestic demand, to engineer the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and to set in place the Bretton Woods system to govern international economic engagement, so it falls to a new generation to reflect on and rebuild our national and international economic systems.

If centrist governments are to save capitalism, they must face three challenges. First is to use the agency of the state to reconstitute properly regulated markets and to rebuild domestic and global demand. With the demise of neo-liberalism, the role of the state has once more been recognized as fundamental. The state has been the primary actor in responding to three clear areas of the current crisis: in rescuing the private financial system from collapse; in providing direct stimulus to the real economy because of the collapse in private demand; and in the design of a national and global regulatory regime in which government has ultimate responsibility to determine and enforce the rules of the system.

The second challenge for social democrats is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the global financial crisis unfolds and the hard impact on jobs is felt by families across the world, the pressure will be great to retreat to some model of an all-providing state and to abandon altogether the cause of open, competitive markets both at home and abroad. Protectionism has already begun to make itself felt, albeit in softer and more subtle forms than the crudity of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Soft or hard, protectionism is a surefire way of turning recession into depression, as it exacerbates the collapse in global demand. Social democracy's continuing philosophical claim to political legitimacy is its capacity to balance the private and the public, profit and wages, the market and the state. That philosophy once again speaks with clarity and cogency to the challenges of our time.

A further challenge for governments in dealing with the current crisis is its almost unprecedented global dimensions. Governments must craft consistent global financial regulations to prevent a race to the bottom, where capital leaks out to the areas of the global economy with the weakest regulation. We must establish stronger global disclosure standards for systemically important financial institutions. We must also build stronger supervisory frameworks to provide incentives for more responsible corporate conduct, including executive remuneration.

The world has turned to co-ordinated governmental action through the Group of 20: to help provide immediate liquidity to the global financial system; to co-ordinate sufficient fiscal stimulus to respond to the growth gap arising from the global recession; to redesign global regulatory rules for the future; to reform the existing global public institutions - especially the International Monetary Fund - to provide them with the powers and resources necessary for the demands of the 21st century.

The IMF's governance arrangements must be reformed. It is only reasonable that, if we expect fast-growing developing economies such as that of China to make a greater contribution to multilateral institutions such as the IMF, they should also gain a stronger decision-making voice in these forums.

The longer-term challenge for governments is to address the imbalances that have helped to destabilize the global economy in the past decade: in particular, the imbalances between large surplus economies such as that of China, Japan and the oil-exporting nations, and large debtor nations such as America.

The magnitude of the crisis and its impact across the world means that minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do. Two unassailable truths have already been established: that financial markets are not always self-correcting or self-regulating, and that government can never abdicate responsibility for maintaining economic stability.

For governments, it is critical that we get it right - not just to save the system of open markets from self-destruction, but also to rebuild confidence in properly regulated markets, so as to prevent extreme reactions from the far left or the far right taking hold.

Governments must get it right because the stakes are so high: There are the economic and social costs of long-term unemployment; poverty once again expanding its grim reach across the developing world; and the impact on long-term power structures within the existing international political and strategic order. Success is not optional. Too much now rides on our ability to prevail.

Many people were confined against their will just because someone wanted them "out of the way." These were normal people with no mental illness - that is why it is so difficult - don't blame the liberals. Blame your state.

CONFINING THE MENTALLY ILL

In the legal space between what a society should and should not do, taking action to restrict the liberty of people who are mentally ill sits in the grayest of gray areas.

Our notions about civil and constitutional rights flow from an assumption of "normalcy." Step beyond the boundaries and arrest and prison may legally follow. Short of that, government's ability to hold people against their will is severely and properly limited. Unusual behavior on the part of someone who is mentally ill is not illegal behavior. Freedom can't be snatched away on a whim, or on the thought that a person is hard to look at, hard to hear, hard to smell.

It was only a few decades ago that the promise of new medications and a change in attitude opened the doors of the mental hospitals and sent many patients into society. There, they would somehow "normalize" and join everyone else, supported by networks of out-patient facilities, job training, special living arrangements and regular, appropriate medication. But the transition has been imperfect, long and difficult.

In some parts of urban America there is little professional support for those with mental health problems. A new generation of drug and alcohol-fueled mental illness has come on the scene. People frequently end up on the street, un-medicated and exhibiting a full range of behaviors that are discomforting at the very least and threatening at their worst.

Written last Thanksgiving: "Some would argue that two different nations actually celebrated: upright, moral, traditional red America and the dissolute, liberal blue states clustered on the periphery of the heartland. The truth, however, is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways, they were the two states competing in the last election. In the world's imagination, you couldn't have two starker opposites. One is the homeplace of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes, and social permissiveness. The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional, and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for Kerry over Bush 62 to 37 percent; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61 to 38 percent.

So ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in actual fact, Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas - which until recently made private gay sex a criminal offence - has a divorce rate of 4.1. A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates in the U.S. are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. And the states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Every single one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every single one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate, in fact, is roughly 50 percent higher than the national average.

Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt - and many clearly don't have the maturity to know what they're getting into. There's some correlation too between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging a highly educated state like Massachusetts. But the irony still holds. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that these socially troubled communities cling onto absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.

But doesn't being born again help bring down divorce rates? Jesus, after all, was mum on the subject of homosexuality, but was very clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study, however, found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not. 29 percent of Baptists have been divorced, compared to 21 percent of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23 percent of married born-agains have been divorced twice or more. Teen births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state like Texas, where the religious right is extremely strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, the teen births as a percentage of all births is 16.1 percent. In liberal, secular, gay-friendly Massachusetts, it's 7.4, almost half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas, the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent; in Massachusetts, it's 26.8 percent. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts manages a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.

Or take abortion. America is one of the few Western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It's a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc, and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it to a country like Holland, perhaps the epitome of socially liberal, relativist liberalism. So which country has the highest rate of abortion? It's not even close. America has an abortion rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?

Even a cursory look at the leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America reveals the same pattern. The top conservative talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, has had three divorces and an addiction to pain-killers. The most popular conservative television personality, Bill O'Reilly, just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life. Bill Bennett, the guru of the social right, was for many years a gambling addict. Karl Rove's chief outreach manager to conservative Catholics for the last four years, Deal Hudson, also turned out to be a man with a history of sexual harassment. Bob Barr, the conservative Georgian congressman who wrote the "Defense of Marriage Act," has had three wives so far. The states which register the highest ratings for the hot new television show, "Desperate Housewives," are all Bush-states.

The complicated truth is that America truly is a divided and conflicted country. But it's a grotesque exaggeration to say that the split is geographical, or correlated with blue and red states. Many of America's biggest "sinners" are those most intent on upholding virtue. In fact, it may be partly because they know sin so close-up that they want to prevent its occurrence among others. And some of those states which have the most liberal legal climate - the Northeast and parts of the upper MidWest - are also, in practice, among the most socially conservative. To ascribe all this to "hypocrisy" seems to me too crude an explanation. America is simply a far more complicated and diverse place than crude red and blue divisions can explain.

they are adding police and only in the big cities do they have paid firemen. The rest are volunteers.

I look at it this way: If a state can't stay in the black, then they have to cut spending some place that wouldn't jeopardize the safety of the citizens. Threats of cutting essential services like Barney Fife stated today are unjustified. Cut the non-essential services first.

Our governor talks about cutting back on services, laying off government workers, which I think is a good idea because government is too big anyway, but then he turns around and spends more money on non-essential items. Doesn't make sense.

I took my first MT job in 1974 when we were still respected hospital employees with benefits. In 1976 I had my first child and in 1980 I became a singe parent. Between 1974 and 1992, I worked between 40 and 50 hours every single week of my life, worked all holidays because I needed the extra pay and had an interval between 1986 and 1993 where I did not take one single vacation day because I bought a home to get my son away from the gang problems that became concentrated in apartment complexes. During those years, I developed hypertension at age 34 and progressive, unrelenting back pain in 1987. With the help of ibuprofen and regular exercise, I worked through it and never skipped a beat. For those who may not remember, 1986 was when outsourcing happened and in the years to follow, not one single start-up MTSO offered medical benefits.

In 1992 I began to develop significant insomnia due to the chronic pain. One morning, after tossing and turning through the night, I got out of bed and found myself unable to stand erect because of the pain. For the next week or so, I had to crawl around on my hands and knees and was unable to work. I got behind in my bills, depressed and was utterly exhausted. I had a physical and "nervous" breakdown that landed me in a psychiatric facility where I received much needed rest and treatment. I couldn't afford to pay that bill.

I lost my car, my job and my house. My son had to go to live with his father since I could not feed him and at age 40 I had to move back in with my aging mother. I tried to apply for social security disability just long enough to get job retraining and get back on my feet again. I was denied those benefits. I applied for unemployment and food stamps and entered the county medical health care system. I was not able to achieve rehabilitation and recovery sufficient to enable me to return to transcription. I ended up out of work for 7 years while I figured out my own rehabilitation and lived with my elderly mother who could not really afford to support the extra expense of feeding me on a fixed social security/retirement income. My unemployment benefits ran out, but I stayed on food stamps for 3 of those years for her sake until I returned to school on a student loan and later on scholarship. When mhy mother's health deteriorated, I became her terminal care attendant and had to leave school.

I am no slacker. It took me 7 years to recover from the disability I sustained from medical transcription and single parenthood. When I was able to return to work, I did. I still transcribe and at age 59, have developed the same back problems I had that disabled me in 1993. I am simply trying to scratch my way to retirement, which probable will commence for me one I drop dead in front of the computer. I would not wish this fate on anyone, but if any of you, your family or your friends ever do encounter such circumstances for whatever reason, (i.e., death of a spouse, for example) and need assistance, you will come to understand the importance of welfare and will never view it with the cold-blooded, icy, self-righteous indignation that some on this board have expressed.

needed a little bit of help at a rough time in their lives. It was not intended to cover those who have teeny excuses as to why they can't (won't) work. I see it in our community. Projects with gas guzzler newer cars than mine.

I drive a ྙ Buick LeSabre when hubby doesn't work. We bought that car for "free"; i.e., a friend gave us a calender for Christmas with daily numbers on it. On December 29, 2 days after my car died, our number came up and we won $100. The car cost exactly $100, blown engine, so we took the engine from my car that would not pass inspection and placed it in the $100 (free) car. We made a profit because I found $.03 cents when cleaning out the car. LOL

If I can live with a car like this, why can't they? They buy brand new or next to new. My car has 150,000 miles on it and still going strong. The engine only had 84,000 miles on it, so it will live a little longer. In the meantime, we're looking for another decent deal just in case. Do they? No, they get a new car every couple years.

What I'm trying to say is that they shouldn't be in government-subsided housing if they can afford a new car or a car that is only a couple years old. You didn't see that years ago. They drove what I'm driving now.

I studied social work and worked at children services. Welfare amounts to $115 a month for an adult which said adult has to work 40 hours for (at least in my state - Ohio). If you have small children - you do not have to work the 40 hours until they are in school. You do get food stamps. Some live in "projects" with reduced rent. You might qualify for home heating assistance in the winter (most times it will not cover the entire bill). If you get on a percentage of income plan on your electric - you still have to pay the whole bill at some point in time - it just keeps adding up. Welfare accounts for less than 15% of the income taxes we pay, politicians would like you to think it is a lot more. Welfare is no picnic - it sux. The mentally ill who are homeless cannot collect any type of benefits as they have no address (smart guy, that Reagan). If we wish to be a "community" then we must extend a helping hand to those who are less unfortunate than the rest of us.

A high-profile, corporate take-over attorney had the good life and was ruthless in his job and did it very well. Every day he had to step over this wino lying on a heat vent on the sidewalk when he walked to his office. He despised that wino. Freakin' bum. One day that attorney had a massive heart attack. He almost didn't make it. He claimed to have had a near death experience in which he was told by Jesus that the bum he stepped over every day had chosen that as his lot in life before birth so as to teach the attorney some humility and compassion. The attorney never forgot this "dream" when he recovered from his heart attack. He devoted the rest of his life advocating for the poor and walked away from all the trappings of his "elitist" life. True story - cannot validate it at this moment.

Welfare Reform Reauthorized

Healthy Marriage, Fatherhood Initiative Approved; Work Requirement Strengthened

Today, President George W. Bush signed the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which reauthorizes the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program administered by HHS� Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

"The reauthorization of the TANF program takes the next step in welfare reform by strengthening work requirements and providing the assistance families need to climb the career ladder," HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "Welfare reform is helping millions of people climb out of poverty. Now, we want to go the next step and help them climb the job ladder by creating more opportunities for education and job training."

The new law maintains the same 50 percent work participation requirement for states as before. However, prior to today�s reauthorization, a caseload reduction credit allowed states to reduce their work requirement by their caseload decline since 1996. As most states experienced dramatic caseloads declines, the credit had virtually eliminated the work participation requirements for most states.

Today's reauthorization recalibrates the base year for calculating the caseload reduction credit and also closes a loophole to include separate state programs in the work calculation. These changes effectively re-implement a meaningful state work participation rate requirement as envisioned by the architects of welfare reform back in 1996.

"The reauthorization of welfare reform, with its strengthened state work participation rate requirement, supports the Bush Administration's goal of ending the crippling cycle of welfare dependency," said HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Wade F. Horn, Ph.D. "Welfare reform is a success because more families and individuals are working and entering the economic mainstream and fewer children are growing up in poverty."

Today's reauthorization includes $150 million to support programs designed to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages. Up to $50 million of this amount may be used for programs designed to encourage responsible fatherhood. In its welfare reform law of 1996, Congress stipulated three of the four purposes of the TANF block grant to states be related to promoting healthy marriages.

"A key component of welfare reform is supporting healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood," Dr. Horn added. �Approval of these funds will help to achieve welfare reform's ultimate goal: improving the well-being of children."

The Healthy Marriage Initiative, administered by ACF, was created in 2002 by President Bush to help couples who have chosen marriage gain greater access to marriage education services, on a voluntary basis, where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage. Funding for responsible fatherhood includes initiatives to help men be more committed, involved and responsible fathers, and the development of a national media campaign to promote responsible fatherhood.

The welfare reauthorization provisions also made several improvements to the child support enforcement program, including a change that will provide more support directly to families, especially those who have left welfare.

And for those that say you HAVE to work to get welfare,...... NO YOU DON'T! I see that waaaay too much where I live...... mostly just generation after generation living off ME!!!! So, MORE government is just FINE with them!!

Maybe this will help - From Capitalism to a Welfare State

What government must do to save capitalism

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