One in Eight Americans Now Receives Food Stamps

I can sympathize with Isabel Bermudez on this issue as the job market, to me, does seems quite poor (almost hopeless) out there at the moment (even for college graduates) with seemingly no hopes of improving in the foreseeable future as I see it unless something is done.

***

There is a good Chinese Proverb though that I feel sums up this situation and Mr. Linder's viewpoint which goes something like...

"Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime."

Sympathy aside, I really do think this welfare issue is becoming an ever increasing problem and, like Linder mentioned, I feel we need to give lower income individuals more motivation to succeed on their own and help weed them off government assistance.

Creating new jobs, whether by reducing taxes on small businesses, investing into the nations infrastructure (by creating new roads, bridges, or buildings, etc...) or what ever method(s) the government ultimately decides to use is far more useful in the long run than simply applying a quick fix like boosting welfare.

I do disagree with Linder in some aspects though as I feel we still need to help the lower-income families at least for the meantime until they are able to help themselves. We need almost an incentive plan of sorts to make individuals want to support themselves while at the same time supporting those who are otherwise incapable of doing it themselves.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Yeah I was thinking about the lower taxes = more jobs issue myself and was thinking it probably wouldn't achieve much in terms of creating more jobs.

I think possibly they are hoping it will inspire some sort of entrepreneurial feeling in everyday individuals which will in term perhaps lead them to start up a business which theoretically would create new jobs.

Of course lower taxes = more spending money for consumers = more spending which will possibly equate to a need for more jobs like you mentioned as well.

At the corporate level I suppose having more revenue flowing through the business, due to lower taxes, may also result in more hiring or lifting many of the hiring freezes which have seemed to have been put in place following the most recent (current?) recession.

I can sort of see the logic in this sort of mentality, but I feel investing more into construction projects and infrastructure would be a better solution for the lower income population and the country as a whole in the long run.

And I wasn't really belittling Isabel Bermudez with my initial statement, or at least I wasn't intending to. I do believe there are those individuals out there who are desperately in need of this government assistance. However, I feel that there are far more individuals than you or I can imagine Pangalin who are completely content leeching off this system. The fact that Mr. Linder seemed to express such hostility on this subject leads me to believe the numbers of these individuals are quite staggering.

There's nowhere I can't reach.