They will always be with us

You don’t think you and your reactionary allies can push any bills through? Well kind of true in the current situation, all you can do is block things in the house. Reminds me of the old joke where the body parts argued who was to rule the body, and the brain the muscles and the heart all thought it should be them, but strangely enough so did the sphincter, which made all the other parts laugh at him, so he said ok, I’ll show you and he refused to function. Eventually the rest of the body couldn’t stand the constipation and had to give in, which all proves that in order to be the boss, you don’t have to be smart, or strong, or compassionate, you just have to be an asshole.

Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty didn’t work, well how about the several wars we’ve had on drugs, and I believe we even had a war on inflation at some point.

Surely you are not claiming that the war on poverty caused the current situation where the richer are richer and the poor are poorer. That was like fifty years ago, and the laws have changed over the ten or so presidents elected since, and I don’t think you can blame a long term trend on some bills passed fifty years ago.

One thing I like about the war on poverty is that it sounds like it cares about poor people. You don’t see that anymore. Anytime they want to help out people in the country it is always the middle class. Nobody wants to say anything about helping the poor anymore, because nobody would vote for them because nobody wants to help the Goddamn poor. Years ago you would pass by the projects and think oh those poor poverty stricken wretches, anymore what you think is oh those lousy drug dealing crack heads.

We have the homeless now and they have largely usurped the place of the poor. If we find out a poor person has a place to live, we think, ah, they don’t have it so bad.

Seems to me that it is logical that some people benefitted from Johnson’s programs, raised their families out of poverty, but I can’t give you any numbers on this.

Well it’s like I said before some of the poor are unfortunate, and some are lazy, and some have something wrong with them. I guess we want to give to the unfortunate because that will help them through the hard times and then they can succeed, and I think we have to give it to those with something wrong with them because they can’t do much and we can’t let them starve. I guess it’s the lazy ones where the problem is.

You know these are the guys that piss people off. People feel good about giving an unfortunate guy a helping hand, and nobody wants to see some handicapped guy freeze in the snow, but nobody wants to give to some lazy guy who is going to laugh at you on the way to the liquor store or the crack corner. This really pisses people off and sometimes they would just as soon not offer a helping hand, or house that handicapped guy as long as they didn’t have to pay off that lazy guy either. People don’t mind sharing their money sometimes or even losing it, but nobody, nobody, wants to think that they are a sucker.

That culture of dependency, I think that is a problem, but I don’t know what you do. They try to force them to get jobs or go to school, but those are hard things to force people to do. And then they have children. Are you going to punish the children too? Couldn’t you just give them the money and let it trickle down to the kids? If we can give money to rich people and have it trickle down to us, why can’t we give it poor people?