The "Sliding scale" of socialism to communism.

[velvetpage]

This was in a comment to something that was said to me in someone else's journal. The post has been taken down, so my well-thought-out and balanced response couldn't actually be posted.

Aren't you lucky? That means you get to read it!



You know, I'm in the position to see some of the effects of that money (The original commenter posted links to a federal grant for Toronto homeless people and Hamilton's subsidized housing budget) because of the job I do and some of the jobs my family has done in the past, so let me take your specific examples.

First, the grant to alleviate homelessness. Much of the homelessness in Toronto and Hamilton is not a result of people who don't want to find jobs; it's more often people who are unemployable due to mental illness of various types, who have no family to look after them or who have fallen through the major crack in the health care system called "informed consent." People who choose not to find jobs because they don't want to work usually don't end up homeless. They end up on welfare, which is a totally separate problem.

Shelters such as the one in which my stepfather works see the effects of this kind of homelessness all the time. Who takes care of those whose mental illnesses leave them too sick to work and too poor to get help, in the States? Are they left to starve on the streets, or die of the cold? Oh, wait. You're in Georgia. You don't often have to worry about that, do you? (Note: What is it with me and Georgians, anyway?)

Now, the housing budget. I work for the public school board in Hamilton, in a medium-needs school where about half the kids come from subsidized housing. To correct your biggest assumption, most of their families work, but the jobs they work at are insufficient to pay the bills if they don't have the subsidized housing. They either work to the point where they never see their kids, which doesn't exactly do good things for their family or for society, when the kids are running wild, or they take the job they can get and make ends meet with the help of the government. As a teacher, I'd rather subsidize these families in the hope that their kids will actually get parents out of the deal, than see the parents working themselves to the bone and the kids running wild.

As for the dole, there are levels to that. Unemployment insurance paid for me to stay home from my excellent job in order to be with my newborn for the first eleven months of her life. Which family is likely to be healthier and happier, the one where the mother goes back to work six weeks postpartum, or the one that has a parent at home for that crucial first year? Which family is more likely to raise kids that value both the work ethic of the working mother, and the social ethic of looking after each other? That's assuming you believe in the Golden Rule, of course.

There was a study done that I read about once, a long time ago, in our local paper. It surveyed a wide swath of welfare recipients in the Hamilton area. You know what it found out? The stereotype of people being on welfare because they're too lazy to get a job is rarer than most people think, representing about one in twenty of the people on welfare. Most were there because 1) they did not have the skills to find a job in our increasingly skills-based economy; 2) they had small children, and the costs of daycare completely ate up anything they had been earning from their minimum-wage jobs; 3) they were in transition from one job to the next, taking advantage of training programs to fit them for a new job. If I have to subsidize one lazy lout to help out nineteen people who could use a leg up and take advantage of it, I'm willing to do that.

I'm not saying the social safety net is perfect. I am saying it beats having kids that grow up never seeing their parents, a huge number of people with no access to basic medical care, and the poor mentally ill starving on the streets.

As I said, I'm prepared to subsidize the social programs because for me, and for most Canadians, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Comments

[kianir.livejournal.com]

What were the points of the original poster? I assume it was some typical "slippery slope" argument.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Basically, he made a vague point about the USSR spending a lot of money on bribes instead of infrastructure. When I asked him if he was comparing Canada's democratic socialism to the USSR's totalitarian communism, he said not exactly, but it was a slippery slope. I have to hand it to him, he did the research - found out where I was and googled some social spending on government websites. He asked how many replaced sewers (my original gripe was about the state of city infrastructures) would be bought with the $53 million federal grant for homelessness in Toronto, or with Hamilton's $104 million budget for subsidized housing. He touched on two of my buttons, so I answered as you see above.