47% of Americans don't even pay income taxes......stfu

You not only have no source for this, but I'm pretty sure it's dead wrong. Even if it was true, however, they still pay into Social Security, property taxes, sales tax, etc.

Government handouts don't get you better jobs though.

Not necessarily, but public works projects stimulate the economy and provide jobs to those without them. Government handouts are there for when you DON'T have a job and don't have enough money to eat. They are completely necessary unless you want thousands of people (well, thousands more than the thousands of people who ALREADY die of starvation in America) dropping dead in the street.

Government handouts don't stop poor families from having large families.

No, but better education does. Provide poor people with a better-than-shit education (ie, actually put money into education instead of *insert failed Middle Eastern war here*) and get rid of Puritanical abstinence-only sex ed, along with providing condoms for free to the poor will all help curtail birthrates.

Government handouts help to keep people DEPENDANT(sic) on the system.

This does not happen. People WANT to provide for themselves. Until you stop living in your fantasy land of hard work and bootstraps, you won't realize this. Social safety nets benefit all of society. What don't you get about this?

dasfury do you have any actual criticism of the HDI on your own or are you just going to copy/paste bullshit from Wikipedia without adding anything of your own work?

earthship65 the fact that you legitimately think we are all born equal shows how little you know about this topic. Go back two or three pages and look at the actual statistics (something all of you arguing against me are lacking) that show how unlikely you are to be socially mobile in America.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/1410.html

My apologies...the 47% was for something else; however, the above link shows 32% that pay zero in federal income taxes........though some states are 40% or higher.

Actually, here, I did it for you:


Hemingway wrote
at 11:27 AM, Thursday July 8, 2010 CDT
Actually I know none of you are going to read that link so I'm just going to copy/paste the important parts:



*
Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
*
Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.
*
Education, race, health and state of residence are four key channels by which economic status is transmitted from parent to child.
*
African American children who are born in the bottom quartile are nearly twice as likely to remain there as adults than are white children whose parents had identical incomes, and are four times less likely to attain the top quartile.
*
The difference in mobility for blacks and whites persists even after controlling for a host of parental background factors, children’s education and health, as well as whether the household was female-headed or receiving public assistance.
*
After controlling for a host of parental background variables, upward mobility varied by region of origin, and is highest (in percentage terms) for those who grew up in the South Atlantic and East South Central regions, and lowest for those raised in the West South Central and Mountain regions.
*
By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

We are not born equal. Not even close.

Yes......that's 42 million Americans (as of 2006) that pay NO FEDERAL INCOME TAX.

Yeah but any time those people buy anything at a store, they are paying sales tax. If they work a job and are not being paid under the table, they pay into Social Security. If they bought a house they probably paid property tax.

Income tax isn't the only kind of tax you can pay.

Just 25 hours to get this thread to 100. Man I'm getting good at this.

Congrats spec!

Make that 24 hours........damn time zone difference threw me off...

100!