Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BracketMaster 1480 days ago
This is sort of a braindump - so pardon me... But here goes

There are a number of reasons. I like small gov't. I'm actually not entirely against gov't programs - but having grown up 20 miles outside the hood, wellfare just seems to breed more wellfare.

Also, my parents worked their butts off to get where they are. One of my parents is an immigrant, the other grew up lower middle class. One went to MIT and did quite well.

Growing up and hearing these stories and growing up in strict discipline really instilled the value of hard work and making lemons from lemonade.

Liberal values just seem to want to coddle everybody's issues.

All this talk about hate speech and don't offend somebody else sickens me. If somebody says something racist to me in public, I don't get mad. I'll actually sit down and have a conversation with them to understand why they feel that way.

1 comments

As someone on the left, my read is that welfare programs are designed to fail, and that’s a bipartisan consensus.

Republicans don’t want to spend the money and democrats only want to help people who “need” it. So you can’t get food stamps if you have more than $2,500 in the bank, which sends the clear message: don’t even bother trying to get ahead.

I should note I'm not entirely against wellfare like programs - but like you pointed out, their current implementation doesn't help much.

I get that sometimes, people just need some cash to get through the day. But how can you make sure your program doesn't train people to be dependent on it?

I wonder if there is a clever optimization hiding to this problem somewhere.