But muh bootstraps!

You know what's mad. My brother in law on benefits blames other people on different benefits
- Disabled veteran relative who gets mad about other disabled people parking in handicap parking....
  
  They should have ten different levels of handicap parking passes and then we could watch them all fight.
- My step dad, on disability for his knees, yelling about single mothers getting food stamps.
- This is just the Matrix working as intended.
  Probably a lot of internal shame being projected, and when he gets on his feet he's probably going to feel guilty for a long time.
  I was on the dole for a while and they do everything to make you feel like a criminal just for needing help. After I started paying taxes again I realised the the unproductive toxicity of my thinking.
  
  Normally I'd agree with you but he's been on the bru all his days. Not lazy per say but the second he sees the deduction column of the wage slip he finds excuses to quit.
  When he was diagnosed with osteoarthritis he acted like he hit the jackpot.

- Like a tortoise without a shell on.

nothing makes a rich man feel better about himself than watching peasants fight over scraps
- Hell yeah, when the food is bad in prison you don't blame the other inmates.
- HOBO FIGHT!!!!
- DAE remember Bumfights?

Same as the immigrants aren't stealing your job, the greedy capitalist are giving those jobs to immigrants to cut down their bottom line, and they love nothing more when you blame the immigrants.
- Immigrants spend less on frivolous bullshit and send money to other countries. Businesses lose out on that end, especially tech companies and wealthy industries.
  Manufacturing and manual labor jobs love immigrants because they can pay them minimum wage for horrible working conditions compared to your typical minimum wage 3rd+ generation white worker.
  
  3rd+ generation white worker.
  I'm not sure this is how it works. But I don't live in US.

At this point, the people smart enough to understand this- already get it. Those that refuse to accept it- are lost causes.
- lost causes with the power to vote...
  
  This is not the scariest part
  
  Here, nor there. The point remains. There’s no getting through to them. They’re beyond help.
- The problem will always be the people not smart enough to understand it
  
  Or never think it will ever happen to them so if they aren't ever going to benefit from it, why should they pay for anybody to have it?
  The perfect example of this is during COVID in the UK when everything locked down and the government implemented furlough payments for all workers using your wage defined by income tax. Lots of self employed are set up as a business and pay the majority of their income as the business with a token amount being actual wages so that they qualify for state benefits like the state pension. This is done to lower their tax bill. Cue loads of self employed moaning that they weren't getting enough to live on, despite making an intentional choice to pay less tax.
- I don't think so. I know otherwise intelligent people who think 40% of beneficiaries are "scroungers" who are "cheating the system" somehow.
  The more we can circulate this message the better: there is still plenty of people who could be brought around.

"Benefits" is a grotesque use of the word. Whoever came up with the idea of calling social security "Benefits" is an evil genius.
- there's nothing inherently wrong with the word "benefits" anyway. It's a positive word. people have come to villianize the word, associating it with those who mooch off the government. But no. benefits are not a bad thing, and people who receive them are not bad people. I agree with the John krasinski meme up there. Rich people are the enemy. poor people are the victims and deserve all the "benefits" they can possibly get.
  edit: changed the word "demonize" to "villainize" which was on the tip of my tongue but it took me two days for the right word to come to me. I'm quite pleased with my brain for finally getting it. That's why I'm including this loquacious edit.
- Implies benefits for doing or being able to do no work. Insensitive and inflamatory.
  'Welfare' and 'income assistance' are terms more commonly used in Australia.

Can we see a version that reads “the rich refusing the pay their fair share…”?
- Make the memes you wanna see in the world!
  
  Thank you…

And the irony is that "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps" literally used to be an idiom about blatantly lying that you did something impossible before the boomers appropriated it.

fuck yeah. This is the dumbest shit. Allowing entrenched media structures, virtually always owned by corporate interests, to shape who the boogeyman is. Tip: it's never the corporate interests who control the entrenched media structures.

I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. Of course, I was privileged enough to actually have boots with straps. It seems fewer and fewer people have these anymore and that's a damn shame.

True

Can grab those bootstraps if you can’t afford boots 🤷‍♂️
- Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is physically impossible, so having boots or not doesn't change the circumstances.
  
  https://uselessetymology.com/2019/11/07/the-origins-of-the-phrase-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps/
  
  It’s a figure of speech. And I was saying that you can’t get ahead in life without a living wage. Kinda surprised you didn’t understand that. Hmmm.

I mean, certain people in my life who were on benefits have negatively impacted me...
Though, the benefits had nothing to do with it. They were just shitty coworkers, and for the majority of them, just shitty people in general.

Sadly, not entirely true. When too many people have to depend on welfare money because rich people demand too much rent and pay too low wages, then everyone will get less.
But it's still rich people's fault so it's the same picture.
- This.
  Technically, welfare is an expense, but, it:
  a)is caused by the economic situation caused by the rich; b)makes people more economically secure, thereby improving, for everyone, the salary negotiating power and ability to build new enterprises, which return money to the economy; c)may save you personally if things turn south. And they always can.
  All that right-wing bullshit about economic freedom and not having to pay for losers has been disproven two centuries ago, yet people prefer to listen to talking heads that will never mention this nuance.
- True when everyone is desperate it is bad for everyone who knew 🤷‍♂️.

I support welfare for people who are willing to help themselves.
I'd be fine with giving free housing to people who work at least 32 hours per week, hit the gym and take care of themselves.

People being on benefits maybe.
I've had occasion in my life to spend some time around people who are on benefits because of mental health and drug abuse, and some of those persons were a nightmare to deal with, and absolutely affected my life negatively. Many conditions that put people on benefits also make them very unpleasant to be around. The key is to understand that they would still be difficult to deal with if they weren't on benefits, and desperation would only make them more of a nuisance.
- Sounds like they don't have enough benefits.
  
  There are problems no amount of money can solve

This is a hilarious take considering the Bedlam unfolding in Dublin tonight.
Scumbags living their entire lives on some of the most generous benefits in Europe decide to burn the city because.... ? Racism?
Nothing to do with Billionaires.
Just generational scumbags trying to 1up their parents.
Get a grip.
- After checking the news it only mentions that the protests were due to children being stabbed?
  
  I don't know if there was a rumour that the suspect was a non-white person, or just that the stabbing of multiple people resembles that of an Islamic terrorist attack, but all the rioters appear to be pushing anti-immigration rhetoric (which usually directly translates as anti-POC/Islamic immigration rhetoric).
- Rightwingers aren't people. They're lucky beating them in public still counts as a crime.

If you think they dont negatively affect you then you probably havent lived around them. You have neighbors getting drunk every night staying up late because they have no job and then when you go to work they rob your house. They're overly aggressive and they treat the house/area like shit by smashing bottles and littering. Obviously not everyone on the benefit does this since I'm on the benefit and I don't do this.
If there were no billionaires it wouldn't change my life. Corporations would still dominate the world as hard as they do.
- If there weren't any billionaires, your net worth would be about $100K higher than it currently is ($400K for a family of four). And that would provide you about $4K in yearly passive income ($16K for family of four).
  You would own a part of those corporations worth that $100K and would have a say in how they operate.
  
  Based on what?
- ...since I’m on the benefit...
  You are literally this meme, bruv.
- Aside from the fact that your life would be dramatically different without billionaires, you'll find that employed people do that shit too.
- I think you are mixing different groups of people and pinning that on receiving benefits. As if receiving benefits is what caused them to be alcoholics or receiving benefits makes them steal from others.
  There are good and there are shitty people, on the other hand social benefits are a safety net when you experience a bad life situation you can survive it without doing on the street. Disability, unemployment. Do you think you can receive unemployment forever? It's value is based on how much you were making in previous job (I think it is 2/3 of income (in more generous states) and has a hard limit on the maximum which is relatively low) and it has a time limit (I think 6 months or less).
  Somebody who breaks to other people's homes don't need unemployment and to them that amount of money is laughable.
  
  I'm not saying the benefit causes this. I'm saying that people on the benefit negatively affect my life slightly and I don't think someone who interacts with people on the benefit would make such a statements.
- Yes, but don't blame the benefits for terrible people being terrible. Good people and terrible people can both use benefits the same way they can both drive on the freeway.
- Holy shit lol
- I truly hope no one in your household ever becomes severely disabled and unable to work. Without those benefits, many more disabled people would be homeless and starving (too many already are). It’s already prohibitively expensive to be sick in the US, and people who have worked hard routinely lose their health benefits when they can no longer work, forcing them to ration healthcare and make hard choices between medicine and housing/food.
  Even if you personally are able to work and keep your insurance, having a disabled child can utterly destroy your financial security and future.
  You’re judging all benefits recipients based on the behaviour of a small minority, when without those benefits, many disabled and elderly people would starve and die.
  
  Where did I say the benefit should be removed? Where did I say this applies to all people on the benefit? All I disagreed with was that people on the benefit negatively affect my life because they do. I almost never see this behavior from people who work.
- If they have to rob your house to be able to live, then their benefits probably don't sustain them.
- "People" like you should be forced to leave society.
  
  Completely sane response 👏
- Redditors on reddit be like: "redditors are SO terrible!!!" What mechanism do you think the billionaires used to take the value of all the actual labor you absolute genius
  
  Ok, sorry for being an idiot. I'm pretty sure you're not saying billionaires use reddit to exploit people's labor, but I can't figure out what you are saying.