I would like to know the whole story of Guzman. Did she and hubby get any kind of public assistance while married? When was youngest child conceived? What lengths has she gone to to collect from deadbeat dad?
Is this a case of a large family doing well then hubby skipped out in '08 recession? Knowing the WHOLE story before we praise or condemn her is a good idea. Please give us the rest of the story.
Her complaint in the story is about how her employer is treating workers, and she has some valid points. My first W-2 job was at a different fast food place back in the 1970s, and it looks like a lot of things haven’t changed. Expecting employees to stay around after hours for no pay, robberies late at night in areas with inadequate security, on-call or erratic scheduling. If she and her co-workers get attention directed at remedies to those abuses I’m all in favor of it.
Also I would be in favor of continuous court pressure on the father of the children to provide support.
Yes, I heard her story that years ago she had to step back from higher paying management training to better care for her children. Maybe now that some time has passed her childcare needs are easier, since kids are older? One can hope. Maybe she could re-enter the program?
Strongly agree w/ momJandL for more court pressure on Dad. Where is this guy? Why is he not paying?
I think there are too many unanswered questions in her story to determine she is a saint or a sinner(figuratively).
That has been tried before along with serious cuts to public assistance within recent history…say the 1980’s and the early '00s. “Trickle down economics” was one name that denoted such policies.
End result was employees salaries stagnated or even continued to decline in real dollars when inflation was factored. That and there were instances when unemployment increased as underscored by the industrial hollowing out in the rust belt areas like parts of upstate NY or the area around my NE Ohio college town in the '80’s and '90s.
According to accounts I heard from the townies in my rural college town, the economy and chronic unemployment INCREASED through the 80s and well into the late '90s when I was an undergrad. Same was the case with some rust-belt areas of upstate NY.
And to top it all off, both periods cited above when such policies were enacted ended with the presiding president passing on far larger debt loads to his respective successors than had existed before such policies were passed.
Don’t look now but cows are eating sweets. Better cut the farm subsidies. 
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/19/health/spilled-skittles-road-trnd/index.html
It’s all the cow’s fault for making bad choices!!
Also, gives new meaning to the concept of “sweetmeats”.
That is true only if you ignore benefits, such as health care, which has been an ever increasing part of total compensation. When looking at total compensation, there has been a notable rise since 1979. Not all good news though as the gains go mostly to women and those with college educations.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/06/just-how-stagnant-are-wages-anyway/
Companies might leave an area for any number of reasons – tax havens in other states, cheaper labor elsewhere, geographical/weather reasons among them. That first reason points to lower taxation being an incentive.
In terms of companies leaving the country, I think it goes back mainly to taxes/regs and labor cost . I’m not sure we can do anything about the latter, but we could do something about the former, and make it at least somewhat easier to operate here (for businesses of all sizes). A tax cut would probably benefit smaller businesses the most, as they are more likely to feel the pain of high taxation than are large companies that probably pay just a fraction of it to begin with.
Nationally, aside from bookend minor recessions, the 80s were a boom decade, with skyrocketing GDP and relatively high inflation. Within a nation, of course, there are bound to be places that fare better than others, and that was doubtless the case in that decade.
As for the 2000s, three things made it a hard decade:
- The Tech Bubble burst
- 9/11
- Sub-prime lending
“I would like to know the whole story of Guzman. Did she and hubby get any kind of public assistance while married? When was youngest child conceived? What lengths has she gone to to collect from deadbeat dad?
Is this a case of a large family doing well then hubby skipped out in '08 recession? Knowing the WHOLE story before we praise or condemn her is a good idea. Please give us the rest of the story.”
But you DID condemn her did you not in your prior posts? And before you go off and say I “praised” her, I did not praise her but used her as an example of someone who IS working full-time, who lost a job during the recession, who is now a single parent, who has 6 mouths to feed, mouths that DID not make any choices themselves. Unlike you, I don’t need to know the whole story to feel sympathy for this family and recognize that they need some assistance. The details are none of my business. Neither are the details of the family receiving need based aid for their child’s college tuition.
“I think there are too many unanswered questions in her story to determine she is a saint or a sinner(figuratively).”
She’s neither. She’s human just like the rest of us - a mixture of good and bad decisions, good and bad luck. Personally, I don’t need to put someone’s life on a scale of sinner/saint to realize our own humanity and lend a helping hand. I count my own blessings and feel lucky I have been blessed by being born to the family I was and in the time and place that I was and was afforded the opportunities to pay taxes to provide safety nets for others. I guess we tick differently.
A large portion of that not only mainly benefited those in upper echelons of the upper-class, but also was largely due to heavy defense spending because the US and the Soviet Union when it existed were playing a game of defense spending chicken.
A game the Soviets lost due to having a far more inefficient economy, cumulative effects of Brezhnev stagnation, and the war in Afghanistan which proved to be their “Vietnam”.
For most employees who aren’t part of the upper-middle class/middle class professional set, their wages actually stagnated or even declined in real dollar terms.
And that’s assuming they still had jobs which wasn’t necessarily the case…especially in large chronically economically depressed areas such as the rust belt areas of the midwest and upstate NY.
@prezbucky - you’re talking about trickle-down/supply-side economics (or, back in the 1890s, “horse and sparrow theory!”). It’s been pretty roundly savaged and has never worked at all.
More like: anecdotes may have rhetorical power but they have no evidential power.
In this case, the truth doesn’t lie in the middle at all. We know (as I’ve already posted) that the NYTimes article this thread started with is woefully dishonest. We also know that the SNAP program is a benefit for the economy and thus regular taxpayers ($1 SNAP produces $1.84 in economic activity!). We also know that the average taxpayer contributes something like $36/year to SNAP.
Those non-anecdotal empirical facts should make clear that all the pearl clutching and hand wringing about SNAP is misguided at best.
Because of increased government spending and quadrupling of the federal deficit.
Arguments that “the government” takes money away from taxpayers involuntarily and gives it to others hold little weight for me. “The government” takes money away from taxpayers and gives it to others all the time. The military industrial complex being the largest recipient. We elect our representatives. If you don’t like what taxes are spent on, take it up with them. We don’t all get exactly the spending that each of us would prefer.
I am disappointed you missed the point.
Can you point out where I suggested that SNAP benefits should be cut? For that matter, I am not sure you can find anyone on this thread that suggests it should be cut. Instead, I think you will find widespread support for the goals of SNAP–which is to provide funds for nutritious foods for families that could otherwise not afford it.
Instead, the focus here is on helping SNAP achieve its goals of buying nutritious foods, by not allowing it to be used for things that are nutritious. Obesity is a problem nationwide, but is much more prevalent among the poor. Soda has no nutritional value.
If everyone was just as unselfish as you suggest, there would be no need to specify any restrictions. All recipients would just buy the wholesome foods that SNAP was intended for. But the current restrictions prohibit spending on alcohol and cigarettes (among other things). Should those restrictions be abolished as well, given the given the economic benefit and low costs you cite? If you think they should be abolished as well, you are at least being consistent, although IMO misguided. Otherwise, we are just discussing what the restrictions should be.
Where’s your evidence that SNAP is being used to buy soda (or at least to do so in any meaningful quantities)? The data in the NYTimes article is flawed–and deeply so–and, more importantly, is based not on SNAP purchases, but on total purchases by SNAP recipients.
And you missed my point, which wasn’t necessarily a claim that you or anyone else in this thread is asking for cuts to SNAP (although it’s misleading and false reporting like the Times article that is consistently used to cut SNAP benefits!). The problem is that people feel they have the right to micro-manage SNAP recipients’ shopping, and justifying that feeling on false pretenses.
I mean, if we’re talking about utilitarian “health,” after all, we should outlaw SNAP for meat–it’s been unequivocally shown that a vegetarian diet is healthier and better for the environment. Or if that’s too far, maybe we should mandate an “eat real food, mostly plants” law for SNAP, holding meat purchases to, say, a few ounces per person per week. Or if you’re a veggi skeptic, how about a Paleo diet for all SNAPpers? Heck, we could ration MREs instead, and the poor could properly show their penitence for their “poor choices” by standing in grub lines! Or, better yet, why not just feed the poor with a single superfood source, like super blue-green algae, spirulina, or [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)]Soylent[/url]?
All claims that it needs “help” are woefully misleading or outright false:
https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/reflecting-on-snap-purposes-spending-and-potential-savings/
And require any single mother on government subsidies with six kids, put her kids up for adoption for the bad choices she made.
Yes! The punishment can be intergenerational! That’ll teach those poors!
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Otherwise, we are just discussing what the restrictions should be.
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Exactly!
This same discussion is going on in other forums. The argument against using SNAP for - say - premade bakery items - is, “gee, can’t the poor buy birthday cakes like everyone else?” (Ignoring that many middle class folks probably bake their bday cakes for $3 rather than spending $10 on a purchased one.).
Well, if the argument is," gee, can’t the poor buy XXXX like everyone else," then why stop at any restriction? Why not allow food stamps to be used for champagne (so they can celebrate New Years like everyone else), or why not allow food stamps for beer, so they can have enjoy the 4th of July like the rest of the country. Hey, why not let them use SNAP at McDonalds, so that their kids can have a Happy Meal and play in the ball pit? Why not let them use food stamps at the movie concessions, so they can have popcorn and soda! while watching the latest Disney movie?
One reason that there are restrictions is because the total dollar amount of food stamps isn’t huge. The monthly allotment is about $126 per month per person. That’s not much per meal. If someone buys a tray of bakery cookies for $7, that’s equivalent to about 4-5 meals! No wonder there are people that question the purchase of bakery items (or other non-nutritional items) with food stamps.
We do have restrictions, so this is just a discussion as to where the lines should be drawn.