[DanDaMan]

Surprised? No.
You have good ideals.
Problems is your ideals ignore mans self interest for power.
More so in places like China and North Korea.
Not to mention Russia's nuclear weapons still pointed at us

.

So you are expecting extinction? Or at least mass conflict? That perspective will only lead us down that very road. People may want to be powerful, everyone likes the feeling of power, but the question is what we do with that power, what values we hold dear to us, and, ultimately, it depends on how far ahead we're looking.

Unlike what you're implying... I want a society free of Neville Chamberlain type politicians.

[Zerogouki]

1) People who are going to be artists, athletes, and thinkers will become those things regardless of how much of my money you spend on educating them.

That's absurd. You think a person who's grew up with the kind of infrastructure I described and became an engineer would have done the same if he was malnourished and uneducated? Give me a break.

I said artists, athletes, and thinkers. I did not mention engineers. Read before responding.

That's exactly what the glazier said.

What?

Glazier = glassmaker = the guy who profits from the broken window.

Setting up poverty and crime as being equally ridiculous as pirates and global warming isn't a strawman...?

Nope. A strawman is saying "your argument X is stupid" when the opponent never argued X to begin with. I said "your argument Y is based on a well-known logical fallacy that could just as easily be used to argue X", when you did argue Y.

the theories I've supplied and the data they've collected should adequately explain the cause/effect of poverty/crime

But they don't.

Perhaps "sky-rocket" is the wrong term, but a 5% increase in such as narrow of a field as financially-driven crime, and just for 20 days, is...

...cherry-picked and statistically meaningless.

Basically, if I had to sum up why welfare should be funded in one sentence, I would say that the impact on the individuals paying the taxes are impacted less than those that would not collect the welfare benefit.

True. This is a very common "justification" for theft.

However this moral is, in my opinion, valid to everyone because as research and natural instinct to provide for oneself and family, has shown that illegal means will subsitute legal means when money is short

Again, you're talking about forcibly taking money from people who have it and giving it to those who don't, in order to prevent money being forcibly taken from those who have it by those who don't. I don't see the logic here.

[grassroots1]

I said artists, athletes, and thinkers. I did not mention engineers. Read before responding.

I haven't encountered too many malnourished athletes and thinkers either. Artists, I can't say.

Glazier = glassmaker = the guy who profits from the broken window.

I don't think the glazier was too interested in infrastructure spending.

[Infidelis]

Nope. A strawman is saying "your argument X is stupid" when the opponent never argued X to begin with. I said "your argument Y is based on a well-known logical fallacy that could just as easily be used to argue X", when you did argue Y.

I initially said:

The long and the short of it is that a welfare state has to exist in order to keep a degree of social order in tact. Without throwing a minimal amount of money at those who are down on their luck, a door is left open for robberies, murder, assault and other personal crimes because of an exceeding amount of social strain in those populations.

But at this point, getting someone who not only set up a strawman to blow down, but also resorts to belittling other posters' comments by filling in "blah blah blah" and other cutsie comments into their quotes and makes curse-word-saturated, inconsequential statements to either be open-minded or a decent instructor is proving fruitless. I may not write criminological textbook material when I post on this topic, but there's enough for you to comment on, but instead you opt to resort to one-liners, reiterating your commitment to selfishness and apathy to a civilized society.

These are what I'm talking about:

But they don't.

How don't they?

...cherry-picked and statistically meaningless.

How are they cherry-picked and how can you deny the impact of the spikes?

Again, you're talking about forcibly taking money from people who have it and giving it to those who don't, in order to prevent money being forcibly taken from those who have it by those who don't. I don't see the logic here.

Traveling through this mind-maze of equating robbery, burglary, shoplifting, auto-theft and other avenues of theft to taxation would take a lot of hallucinogens. How does taxation impact a person like these crimes? How does one have to restructure their life after the government "steals" a portion of their paycheck?

Also, other crimes, as I posted earlier, are a result of poverty, not just property.

[Zerogouki]

How don't they?

Because they're...

...cherry-picked and statistically meaningless.

How are they cherry-picked and how can you deny the impact of the spikes?

We're talking about a time period measured in days and an increase of only 5%. Such a small difference in such a small sample period is just noise.