American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth

Good to know. How large do you think this problem is?

I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.

Numbers please. How many such people are there?

What percentage of the 15.6 million officially non-working poor do you believe are actually committing tax/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud?

Now lets compare the numbers.

They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society...

So a person who produces X resources in year 1 and 0 resources in year 2, but consumes X/2 in both year 1 and 2 is a moocher? Um, ok. That's an interesting definition, to say the least.

To acknowledge the elephant in the room, political discussion of government support policies always comes with a racial dog whistle. The subtext is that the government wants to take your money and give it to those people. It sometimes bubbles to the surface, such as with Reagan's welfare queen in a Cadillac comments, but it is almost never mentioned explicitly.

Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.

Please cite the various randomized control trials, and I would say it is far too early to draw conclusions on the effects of the medicaid expansion as it has only been two full years since rollout.

I speak from experience, as someone from a wealthy family and a wealthy area that shunned the family business and went out with nothing to seek startup fortune. I had a good start in 2009 with a success in affiliate marketing, when that dried up I put all that I had made into another venture that limped along at sub-ramen levels for a while and then I pulled the plug.

The fallout was not fun, and the effects not benign. It was pre medicaid expansion and there was no healthcare to be had, and almost no safety net to be found whatsoever.

I could have gone home and had everything I needed but I wanted to make it on my own. I had been living in Boulder, Colorado and thought a move to Austin would lower expenses and extend the runway for the company.

That was ill-advised, and another story, but it added another dimension to my troubles at the time.

Was it a stupid risk? It was but I was young and felt invincible, and in 2010 with a liberal arts education there weren't a ton of jobs waiting for me.

The wealth transfers you speak of are not easy to get. I'm not even sure where you get the 15-20k number. What else is there for a low earning single male besides SNAP, and now Medicaid.

In that time, as someone who found themselves with no assets and no income the only benefit I seemed to have qualified for was about $160 a month that could be spent at the grocery store.

Feeling a tremendous amount of shame I applied for SNAP benefits, even though I knew that they were really a subsidy for American farmers, ideology had trained me that subsidies for corporations are virtuous, while subsidies for basic human needs are shameful.

Even though I qualified, the overworked staff denied my valid claim. It took them over a month to tell me this. It would have taken another month to apply again and maybe they would get it right that time. I gave up and having good credit financed my nutrition via credit card.

I hadn't coded since elementary school, but I was able to pick up django web dev and find a high paying job in a couple months.

But that happy ending is not typical. There is no way that the stress from that period didn't shave a little bit of time off my life.

And the lack of liquidity prolonged the period by a good bit. I spent so much time doing this or that to get $200 for the rent, it was tremendously inefficient and stressful. Bad terrible memories, a place I never want to go back to. I was sad during all of this. It broke up the relationship I was in with someone I really loved.

I spent a lot of time with those who ride the bus, with those who pawn. Their lives are very different than the lives of the families from my coastal home town. Their lives do kill them slowly, which is why life expectancy is a full dozen years longer for the wealthy.

I have since moved back to the wealthy coastal town I grew up in. Life is so easy here, because there is wealth here. You can get a nice boat for almost nothing because someone just doesn't want it anymore.

Someone I knew was just gifted a boat for $1 because the owner was just happy it was going to stay on the island.

No one ever gives my former bus riding compatriots anything.

The thing is the people that live here are no different genetically than the people at the pawn shops back in Texas. The only difference is the presence of wealth, and the virtuous effects that has when it's sustained for a few generations.

If communism is to have any sort of meaning, it doesn't apply to them.

No, Im saying that almost all poor people work, they have various hustles to get by. Most of them are not illegal activities, but yes for the most part these are untaxed cash transactions.

Even the homeless man on the corner with a sign is engaged in a form of work, as it is an active process that takes time, and if they did not do it, they would not have money.

Is it productive, no not very, but the good ones provide entertainment in the form of funny signs, stories or puns. I have donated to quite a few who made me smile on my trip across America.

It does less harm than many respectable professions.

And yes, if you are living off the dividend payments from S&P 500 companies that you neither created, work in nor manage, you are mooching.

It's a respectable mooch, for sure, but a mooch none the less.

What else can we call Sam Waltons heirs other than epic mooches?

Tens of thousands of people toil everday for them, all over the world. They have expert MBA's manage the entire operation for them. The pharoahs themselves didn't have such a great system of exploitation of labor.

My main point in all of this is to be aware of class biases in our perception, and the ideology that comes from, and mainly that we should stop beating up on the poor and scolding them.