3 out of 4 Americans have no personal financial safety net

[Indy Texas]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/76-americans-living-paycheck-paycheck-045900956.html

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I would really like for someone to emerge from the Republican Party that has something substantive to contribute to this problem. The same people who complain that the public safety net has become too expensive ignore the fact that its wide use stems from the fact that a disturbingly high proportion of Americans are unable to maintain their own safety net.

I agree with the conservative notion that the public responsibility to provide social assistance begins where individual and private assistance ends. What the Right refuses to acknowledge is that the private safety nets of the broad swath of Americans are little more than tatters at this point. The conservative solution would be one that facilitates the rebuilding of these private safety nets. Instead, a family that would be wiped out of their child broke a bone during baseball practice and had to go to the emergency room is given an agenda of domestic oil drilling that would have a negligible impact on gasoline prices, a tighter monetary policy that would increase their borrowing costs in an attempt to tame core inflation that simply isn't a problem, and tax cuts that would ultimately shift more of the fiscal burden to them and away from those of far greater means who don't face the same problems that they do.

Other than a few heretics like Josh Barro, what Republican is willing to admit that unemployment is a far greater problem at present than inflation? What Republican is willing to admit that we do have a revenue problem that has resulted from stagnant incomes? What Republican is willing to admit that their party has, in fiscal matters, nothing to offer 80% of the country?

[Indy Texas]

Well in addition to food stamps, opebo, we have unemployment insurance and medicaid that come to mind. Utility companies give a break on utility bills to low income folks. There is also Section 8 housing, which subsidizes housing costs. One can make the case that this is all inadequate perhaps, but one cannot make the case that there is no safety net at all.

Torie, the American welfare system is like something from a Victorian time warp. It's a hodgepodge of programs that vary by state out of paranoia about the federal government. It's based on the idea that the only people in society who deserve any kind of help are widows and orphans - hence the emphasis on helping women with children, or the elderly.

I'm a 25 year old single man with no children. I can't get Medicaid if I'm too poor to afford health insurance. If I can't afford a roof over my head, there's no help for me there; the limited number of vouchers go to families first. And yet I still have to pay payroll taxes to finance the healthcare and retirement of old people at a time when people over 65 have the lion's share of the money in this country.

The Right complains about the safety net encouraging broken families. If it does, it's because those are the only people they are willing to spend public money to help. In the '40s and '50s, intact families were explicitly kept out of public housing because conservatives thought it would encourage "idleness" in the husbands - the man should be out working, therefore a woman with a husband doesn't actually need help.