Which I responded:

Wow, you entirely missed the entire point of so much. The problem is that there are people working and they aren't making it. I don't know where all of you came from or grew up. I would be willing to guess that you were not born in to wealth. I would imagine that your parents worked hard. I am almost certain that your parents are counting on Medicare and Social Security like so many others. There are so many Americans that have worked and do work that do need government help. I don't understand how any of us, coming from working families, can not understand the desperation of these people as they try harder and harder but still need help. As far as Biblical models....I would urge you to open the bible and read it some more. I honestly can't see where you find Biblical support for letting the poor suffer. Especially, how you could find that and miss so much of what is the most fundamental message that is delivered in teaching after teaching...

Acts 20:35 In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

Proverbs 11:24-25 One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.

1 John 3:17 But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?

Matthew 7:12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Deuteronomy 15:7-8 “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.

Luke 21:1-4 Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”

Proverbs 21:13 Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.

Acts 20:33-35 I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

Acts 4:32-35 Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Luke 10:27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Psalms 140:12. I know that the LORD will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and justice for the poor.

James 2:5. Did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?

Matthew 25:41-45 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.' They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.'"

Proverbs 17:5 "He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished."

Proverbs 22:16 "He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich--both come to poverty."

Proverbs 28:27 "He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses."

Ezekiel 16:49 "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."

Proverbs 28:6 "Better a poor man whose walk is blameless than a rich man whose ways are perverse."

Proverbs 28:20 "A faithful man will be richly blessed, but one eager to get rich will not go unpunished."

Proverbs 29:7 "The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern."

Proverbs 11:4 "Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death."

Proverbs 22:22-23 "Do not exploit the poor because they are poor and do not crush the needy in court, for the LORD will take up their case and will plunder those who plunder them."

Deuteronomy 15:11 "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land."

Proverbs 28:11 "A rich man may be wise in his own eyes, but a poor man who has discernment sees through him."

This earned me the following responses:

“No Randy, I don't think I missed your point. The problem is that our definitions of poverty are very different. Is anybody really "poor" in America anyway? "Poor", as was meant in the Bible, or even "poor" like we see in the third world today? Can you even be "poor" in the world's largest economy? The "poor" in the Bible, and the "poor" in the developing world experience debilitating poverty on a scale the most people in the first world could not even conceive of. We're talking about a level of poverty that robs you of your basic human dignity and rights and prevents you from experiencing what being a complete human being really is. Oppressive, evil poverty. Is anybody in the US really "poor" then? To many Americans, you're poor if you can only buy a 40 inch HDTV, and not a 50 inch one, can't take a European vacation, or if you can't buy the SUV you want. Many Americans say they have no health insurance, but drive a Mercedes(I've seen this firsthand around DC, and Chicago). Does anybody in the US really experience poverty as it was meant in the Bible, or as the 3rd world experiences it? Give me a break!!!! In the US, you don't see kids bathing in puddles like you do in the Philippines, or squatters all over the place(certainly, we have our homeless, but nothing like we see in developing countries). Now, that's real poverty to me. Those people I help by contributing to Catholic Charities every month, and I don't think twice about it. But when you ask me to give more of my money away to people who just need to get off their ass and go find a job, I'll fight like hell not to. I don't think that's what the Bible intends when it implores us to help "the poor". We in America have become so spoiled, that we don't know what real suffering or poverty is anymore. We experience the slightest misfortune and difficulty in life then cry out about the cosmic injustice of it all. So, it's not that I don't want to help the poor, but our relative definitions of poverty are very different. SO PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE ME. I am only one generation removed from real poverty. My Dad grew up on a pig farm in the Philippines. Finally, I want to say that one of the fundamentals of real justice is that people should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labors. When the government forcibly takes what is rightfully ours and gives it to someone else then, that is Injustice in every sense of the word.”

“the bible implores us to help the poor, to give on our own volition. On the other hand, the government forces us to give, and if we don't, personal possessions are seized, and we go to prison. That's not charity by any means, that's plan robbery under the guise of helping others less fortunate. It's the equivalent of robbing someone to help some old man. Try that and see what happens. And with $9 trillion spent on the "war on poverty" and more people in the US more dependent on Uncle Sugar than ever in our history, it's time for a course change.”

“Government-mandated social engineering has always failed historically - National Socialism, Communism, the French Revolution, the socialist governments of Europe bankrupting the rest of the EU ...etc. That's because real change (or "Hope") does not come from the any government - it has to come from within, from the Heart. The Founding Fathers realized this when they mandated(and limited) the role of government as solely to protect the individual citizen's ability to have "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it is the government's role to provide national health care, bailouts, and welfare for deadbeats.”

So with those points made, I provided one last attempt at persuasion, or at least education.

OK, I am going to respond to this just one more time. There are some glaring errors that I want to address then I'm done and I will just have to hope that you will read some academic peer reviewed information and not rely on Conservative talking points. So here goes...

Conservatives are always trying to put the founding fathers and Jesus Christ in to their song and dance. The ironic thing is that they can provide great propaganda and spin that many will eat up, but they almost always are exaggerated or incorrect in their assertions. Typically, they achieve their greatest successes through repetition of their propaganda till the common folks start to believe it as true.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over” Joseph Goebbels

“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, October 26, 1939

One of the biggest assertions that have come to be among Conservatives is that the common people are just like the founding fathers. Bill Maher had a great narrative where he explained the flaw in that, I’m going to barrow some of the research that he had. The founding fathers were not the common men of their time: Alexander Hamilton, Constitutional lawyer; James Madison, lawyer; John Adams, Constitutional lawyer. Ben Franklin studied scientific phenomena like lightning and the Aurora Borealis. James Madison was fluent in Greek and Latin. Thomas Jefferson, lawyer as well as an astronomer and a physicist who founded the University of Virginia, played the violin and spoke six languages. What’s more, for the most part they were not religious, as Conservatives like to claim. Thomas Paine was an atheist who said churches were human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind. John Adams said this would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.

As far as what the founding fathers wrote, there is basis for social safety nets:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“Article. I.Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and GENERAL WELFARE OF THE UNITED STATES; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”

Even after the Constitution was created, with basis for Social Safety Nets, there was further support for their existence. There is a website that I found pretty interesting. I will quickly paraphrase it and use some of the great quotes.

Thomas Paine created a pamphlet that he addressed to the French Legislature but stated was for any country. Within that pamphlet he said:

“Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science and manufactures.”

In regards to the disparity of income, he used words that sound allot like those of Liberals today:

“Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.”

“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.”

Thomas Paine felt that problem should be resolved:

“Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.

The property owners owe rent to those who do not own property for the privilege of cultivating the land, and taking away the natural ownership that all people have.”

Paine viewed land ownership and wealth as unnatural. He challenged the pure privatization of land especially:

“There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.”

“Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before…”

Paine actually did not even view it as a charitable move, as stated here:

“In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwords till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings…”

“I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.”

Many on the right call for charity to help the poor rather than society. While it has it’s good intentions, it is simply not enough.”

“There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.”

Social welfare has existed in some form since the beginning of our country. The Poor Laws of the British were imported with the colonies. They established two categories, those unable to work and those merely unemployed. Those unable to work were given cash or alternative assistance from the government. The unemployed were given public service employment. In 1862 Congress even passed a Pension Plan for Veterans of the Civil War and their families.

Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who led us through the Depression and most of World War II, saw as much as 25% of the population unemployed and suffering. He led the government in action to help. The Social Security Act was passed with his leadership and families have had at least somewhat of a Social Safety Net since.

As far as the argument that the poor of America are not at the level of other poor in other nations, I first suggest that is because the Social Safety Nets, while flawed, are sustaining these impoverished individuals just above that level. So should we then not help someone until they are in the most desperate of circumstances? If that is the belief, then should we then not also wait to provide a fire department until the city is burning, or help the sick until they are dying, or provide for our defense until we are invaded?

In the cases of individuals with ill prioritization of their responsibilities and needs, and choosing luxuries over clear necessities, that is what is called in statistics an outlier. It occurs, it is real, but it is not the norm. To apply the outlier to all of the population would be unfair and inaccurate. To use that reasoning, it would be to also say that anyone with money is funneling their assets to off shore bank accounts and not paying their taxes. After all, it was just in the news that Ozzy Osbourne has millions in unpaid taxes, and GE made billions without paying taxes and even got a tax refund.

Much of the belief that all welfare recipients are bums is an over-hyped propaganda that the far right has been pushing for years. It is a systematic list of talking points that are used to stir up the discontent and gear their passion in the direction that will benefit the Conservative agenda. Talking heads like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh feed on the discontentment of the working class in the more traditional demographics. They show manufactured empathy and then tell these people that the cause of their problems is these other people. The talking heads tell them stories of people living like kings on welfare, when in fact, some may be scamming welfare but have other sources of income that provide their luxuries. The other favorite fire starter is to tell these people that the government is going to take away their guns. I know people in Kansas were talking about taking their guns and sealing them in PVC pipe and burying them in their backyards. In reality, Obama has only said on one occasion that their needs to be a discussion about gun laws, nothing else…

The current day Conservative Agenda is seeking to turn the United States in to a corporation with extensive privatization of things that have never been privatized in the past. Conservatives in Michigan have even gone so far as to pass legislation that gives the Governor the right under very loose guidelines to declare a local governing body ineffective or failed and take it over. With this law, the officials serving on school boards, city and county commissions and even mayors can be thrown out by the governor and replaced by private “consultants”. This is just one of many examples of the move of our country toward privatization to the point of corporate oligarchy.

The pursuit of happiness through wealth is guiding so many that the vast majority of Americans will ultimately find neither, happiness or wealth. Instead, this pursuit will ultimately lead to our enslavement by the few with much, as we hope that the sowing of our blood and sweat will somehow earn us crumbs that remain as the wealthiest few continuously reap that which we have sowed. You complain about the percentage that our government takes so that it may operate and tend to the people that it is of, by and for. The corporations will have no such mercy as to what they choose to take. They will continue to take all they can and then send your job to some far corner of the world where they can take advantage of a people’s desperation, and get your job performed for pennies on the dollar that they charge for the service.

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen." - Samuel Adams (1722-1803) American Revolutionary, Statesman

This is actually one piece of the overall puzzle of where the global economic state is today. Those Socialist Democracies were actually doing quite well. Their deficit to GDP was relatively stable over the last 25 years. Greece made some decisions of excess in conjunction with Goldman-Sachs, much like most of America, but most of the EU was doing really great. Their problems were actually triggered through actions of the United States, China and the Middle East.

The United States and its irresponsible deregulation of the banking industry, along with the pushed housing boom and the initiation of two wars, not only triggered our own fall but that of other G7 nations who invested in the Dollar as a stable monetary asset. As the wars began we needed two things, money and oil. We borrowed from China and bought from the Middle East which provided another set of factors that caused this.

China was already in a period of accelerating economic growth since it reacquired Hong Kong and adapted some of its existing business structure to the rest of China. The injection of US debt to their economy was fuel to a fire. With US and European Capitalists shipping jobs to China and other low income nations, for greater profits, developing nations in Asia were operating with a savings over their GDP. China further leveraged against the western world by devaluing its currency which made its products the cheapest in those nations and also made the products imported from those nations too expensive for the Chinese people. Similar things were taking place in the developing nations of the Middle East as we spent money there as well.

As our deficit to GDP peaked in 2005 and 2006, we started a spiral effect with our economy and any economies that had invested in the US for stability. When the housing bubble burst and the banks subsequently collapsed it accelerated the downward spiral of us and our allies. That is what ultimately caused the Socialist Democracies to go in to a state of crisis. It wasn’t the socialism part; it was the capitalism part, most specifically our capitalism.

Also, it should be noted that the conservatives like to bind socialism and communism together, though they are fundamentally different. However, communist China is kicking our asses right now. Moreover, the education rankings of world nations are primarily dominated by communist and socialist nations. So apparently they are doing something much better than we are. Their economies are doing better, with less debt, more support for their people and better education for their children.