I guess, I don't mind paying for health care as long as I get the care I payed for when I need it.

Implying either that we were founded on Christian principles or that we were founded totally without them is misleading. It's somewhere in the middle.

What a lot of people need to realize is that faith is not a weapon. Do not criticize people for having it just because you don't believe in it, nor expect them to seperate their faith from their political beliefs. On the other side of the coin, do not criticize people for not having a religious faith or one that is different from you, because faith is just that...faith. You can't just throw a bible at someone and expect them to thoss their hands up and scream "I FOUND JESUS." I forget where I was going with this...

Anyways, language. That's a good issue! The language most common in America is english. I'm sorry if you want to play the Native American card, or America was created by immagrants from across the world, but that's not the point. Right now, it's the most common language. It is not too much to not only ask, but demand that people who choose to live here speak it reasonably well. My mother, for instance, is a mammographer. She does breast x-rays for breast cancer, for those that didn't know what that is. We live in Texas, and a very large part of the people she examines are hispanic and don't speak a lick of english. She can't communicate with them, but she also can't refuse them care. They could be injured or a mistake could be made, and who is legally accountable? My mother giving the x-ray. She could literally lose her job because her patient doesn't speak english. This is enforced not by the hospital, but by the government. This is a problem.

This I have to agree with. It's also worth noting that it's really only one class of immigrants (poor Latin Americans) for which this is a problem. We have a lot of immigrants, and they come from a lot of places, and most of them learn English, just like I'd be expected to learn Japanese if I moved to Japan. That's just how it is. Yes, Americans should put more emphasis on learning languages, but children of Mexican immigrants should also not be taught English as a second language or encouraged to speak Spanish at home as a form of cultural preservation. Everyone born and raised in the United States should be fluent in English, and any program or movement that interferes with that needs to die a speedy death.

Though you're being silly, I'd have to say yes, if you really think about it. Who would ever reach the age of one without the charitable welfare of parents, family members, or workers of the state to take care of them? How about the age of ten?

I was not supported by anyone but myself for my final three years as a minor, and things have been very hard in my life because of it. I would be quite well off if I had had the support most people take for granted, and better off if I had come to terms with my need for government welfare earlier than I did.

There are many things bad about how welfare is executed(I'd like to see 'No I will not have another crack baby or I forfeit my welfare and my baby' affidavits required, that would be awesome), but nothing is wrong about charity or welfare in and of themselves. Nothing at all.

Completely false. I work in health care and there are many immigrants from different countries I have met that do not know how to speak English. It isn't just poor Latin Americans. Russians, Indians, Chinese. It is never too difficult to find an interpreter. With the job market as bad as it is you'd think people would be rushing out to learn different languages in order to make themselves for qualified for all the jobs that are opening up for interpreters.


Also I was just thinking how even with people born in American from different sides of the country how they have trouble understanding each other. Those with east coast accents sound vastly different than those with the New York accents or the southern accents. Language barriers erupt there as well.

With Celina's case, I doubt that situation would come up in that setting because in a place with such a large population of Hispanic people there are -always- people on staff to interpret. Especially in a health care setting. In a health care setting there is usually a list kept of who is bilingual and what languages they speak. There are also people on call for those types of situations. I keep wondering why Americans do not take advantage of the jobs that non-english speaking people bring and just jump in and want to learn a different language.

People that work in health care are -required- to have other ways to communicate with people who cannot speak the language. The situation that Celina describes could also occur with someone newly deaf who cannot read lips, with someone who has had a stroke and cannot speak, with someone with an altered mental status. If we expect all patients to be able to speak at all in order to get the health care they need, it won't only be the people who do not speak English that suffer.

I'd just like to add, people tend to get huffy and ticked off when you have to call for an interpreter. I was working at Walmart Customer service once, and a customer came up who didn't speak a word of English. I had to call for an interpreter, and she looked like a cross between "I'm going to kill you" and "Why did I have to find the one idiot that doesn't speak Spanish." Never mind that the three of us up there, the front end supervisor, and three of the four CSMs on duty didn't speak it either. (The fourth one did, and ended up doing the transaction.) I've even had other customers in line get pissy because I have to call for an interpreter. At one point, one seriously asked me "What, you're too good to learn our language?" And there was really no response I could give, since I studied french in high school, with the intent at the time to look into culinary arts. I felt the language appropriate.

True, it's not just Latin Americans who insist on retaining their language. I also tend to run into it with many other groups, such as Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and even some French and German households. But I feel that they too should be reasonably be expected to either learn or let their family learn the language if for no other reason than the fact that our lawmaking and voting processes are conducted almost entirely in English. It's kind of hard to stay informed politically if you can't understand what your politician is saying.

1. People being unreasonably and pissy about you not knowing their language (which is stupid) doesn't mean it's fair to do the same thing back, although you're more in the right there just by virtue of so much of the population speaking it (which isn't the end of the matter, but it helps a lot, obviously).
2. Peoples' inability to keep up on lawmaking and voting processes is really their problem, not yours. There are plenty of English-speaking people who don't have any idea how it works or vote themselves either. Until you have mandatory voting they're quite right not to bother, too.

I believe I said it before, I'm okay, although not a huge fan of, with welfare for those who absolutely NEED it, and only if it has conditions and until they can get on their feet. This requires a HUGE overhaul and scaling back of today's welfare system, since it its drained by those who abuse it, which results in either less welfare for the truly needy, or more taxes for the rest of us. We need conditions such as proof that they are trying hard to get a job(if they are able-bodied of course), some sort of time-limit, depending on their situation, a requirement that if they are using alcohol/tobacco, that they take every step they can to give them up, as those are expensive habits, and too many times have I seen people trying to use welfare money to buy booze and cigs. That's not what I pay taxes for. Then, with the amount of money we could save, we could do a number of things, such as paying down the national debt, cutting taxes, or improving education. I have become more open lately to a subsidized higher education, because educated people are beneficial to the free-market system, and will pay that money back in taxes later on in life.

If you're here, learn english. End of story. If I move to mexico, i would be all over trying to learn Spanish. They have no right to demand we learn spanish here though. I'm not saying we shouldn't learn foreign languages, I'm just saying that immigrants who don't speak english are in no position to demand that we learn their language to communicate to them.

Minus the bit about alcohol and tobacco, most of that is already law. Most benefits (not all) have a lifetime cap between two and five years, regardless of conditions. Some states (Washington, California, and Nebraska, at least--haven't made effort to see how common it is, don't have time now) require you to show proof of employment applications to get continued benefits. I think you also misunderstand how much is spent on welfare. If you want to fix government spending, the axe has to go to the military.

I think you're mixing welfare and unemployment up. Perhaps in some places welfare requires you to keep job seeking, but I know of at least three states in which this simply isn't true(Edit: Forgot to add, this wasn't true in Washington as of about two years ago. Don't know which of us is more current, though). Yes, states have caps on how long you can draw welfare, but those caps are extended for certain reasons. For example, if you have a child under six years of age. I can't tell you how many people I've seen have/had a baby every four or five years, like clockwork.

As for how big a piece of the pie welfare is...yes, military spending is by far the largest budget we have, but welfare is hardly insignificant. I knew a woman in Texas a few years ago. She was in her thirties and had two teenage boys. All three of them sold drugs to make money, yet she was drawing welfare from Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, all at the same time. She received well over two thousand dollars a month just in food stamps, not to mention the benefits that dropped her rent and utilities to essentially zero, got them free healthcare, and about a thousand dollars in spending money on the side. Every month.

I HATE our welfare system, but only because it's practically designed to be abused.

The Washington stuff is current as of now. Washington and California are states with big chunks of Boeing employees, and knowing their laws as regards layoff, employment, and state benefits is part of the job description.

Not all benefits expire within five years. Some are faster, some just plain don't expire. The benefits for children are based on the children, not the parents, and some of those don't have one iota to do with income (for example, you can make $100k a year and still have the government buy your pre-natal drugs and baby formula if you're pregnant with twins).

As for government spending, because people always seem to forget what the breakdown looks like...



Because it's relevant to the discussion, if you split out Medicare and Medicaid, Medicare is 16% of the federal budget, and Medicaid is 5% (at the federal level--Medicaid is also funded by states). Also, the war effort is funded separately and not included above (although, for as expensive as the war in Iraq is, it's also not a wickedly huge chunk of cash in the big picture, so whatever. It puts defense spending at around 24%.

There are two things that actually cost the government anything substantial: guns and geezers. There generally isn't much complaint about protecting the elderly, except the knowledge that Social Security was a bit of a botch job in its conception. Republicans tell you it's unpatriotic to mention that we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. Really though, if you add up spending on education, science research, agriculture subsidies, energy subsidies, law enforcement, and pork barrel spending, you don't get to half of the defense budget.

In response to the benefits for children part, qualification is based on the children. However, the benefits are based on the family.

I would like to see defense spending become more efficient myself, but I do not want to cut down the military. Once we are out of Iraq(the cogs have started turning), we are going to need at least a majority of those boys and girls over in Afghanistan. I would like for them to make sure that the military is as cost efficient as possible however.

When I read things like this, I'm -glad- I'm in England.

... save meee.