Pain is your teacher- if you fall down and scrape your knee, pain teaches you that you should not do that again. If you cut your finger, pain teaches you that was a stupid move. If you did not have pain you would continue to hurt yourself, and you ... would spiral downward shortly and die. The planet would not have the great amount and variety of life without PP. It fact PP is integral to life- without it life as we know it would cease to exist.
Economic Pain is no different, yet so many folks wish to abolish it. Why do you think the economy is any different from your body if we as a nation decide that individuals should be free of EP?

I've had back pain for 20 years now..........and I haven't learned anything.

I've had economic pain since the 2002 recession............so, clearly I haven't learned anything in that regard, either.

Maybe I'm no different than the politicians.

when I fall down, I feel the pain, and I learn the lesson.

when a bunch of greedy *********s fall down on wall street, and then my grocery bill and gas bill go up, as well as my general cost of living, I am now feeling some greedy *********'s pain.

someone i didn't vote for decides to try to make his daddy happy and bomb some foreign country. other middle eastern countries sympathize and raise oil prices. wall street uses the scare tactic of war to drum up gas prices. i would never have choses this path, i'm forced into it, and now i pay the economic price.

this is not an effective pain comparison, sorry.

i didn't make this mess, now i suffer. i'll gladly suffer due to my own poor choices, but this system is set up so that i take the fall and the greedy CEO's keep on truckin'. didn't want a bailout either, now i suffer.

this "economic pain" ownership theory is poor.

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1985 300D - 1984 Euro 280E AMG Clone (SOLD) - 1978 280CE (SOLD) - 1983 300D (SOLD) - 1981 300D (SOLD)

Pain is a great teacher if it is the result of your actions. If it's not, like arthritis, then it doesn't teach you anything.

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1984 300TD

As Squabble points out, some have already figured out how to abolish economic pain, at least for themselves. Even so, I think there is merit to MTU's economic pain theory. For example, my county went from rural to suburban almost overnight. We are (or were) among the most affluent counties in the country. For many years, we had little economic pain, so we went on a binge, building enormous, ridiculous houses on big lots. Those big ol' pieces of crap are now sitting on the market because people have figured out how idiotic they are. Maybe our current economic pain will make us smarter in the future.

Then talk about pain that is the result of your or others actions. What do you think there?

So when someone else falls down you don't want the skinned knees is what you are saying.
And so when someones actions causes him to falls down, but the gov wants to step in and give me the skinned knees, how is that different than what you are saying?


exactly what I am talking about. You agree with me and yet you think you don't.

Nothing? If you sit on the couch all day doing nothing does your back feel better or worse? Only if it feels exactly the same regardless of your actions have you learned nothing.You've learned nothing about how to deal with changing economics in 7 years?

The key thing here is that we do not want EP, but we know it is not possible to go without EP. The goal is to get everyone to fully understand the futurity of their actions with as little EP as possible.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. If you burn yourself on a stove, then it teaches you not to touch a hot stove. If I grab your hand and hold it on a hot stove, you learn not to touch a hot stove too.

If you are trying to relate this to health care, then I would say that in either stove burning case, I don't think you learn a better lesson if your burn went untreated. I also don't think a 3rd degree burn teaches you a better lesson than a 1st degree one. Whether your hand's slightly burned or extremely burned is irrelevant to the lesson taught by pain.

Also, in addition to pain, I find educators to be great teachers

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1984 300TD

If you decide to not work very much, very hard or very smart but want a flat screen, a nice house, etc- should you have that stuff even though someone else has to pay for it?

Who is going around offering free houses and free flat screen tvs?

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1984 300TD

Point taken, that's most likely a second-term program now under consideration.

Substitute health care for flat screens/free houses and answer the question.

If I was asking MTU's question though I would have worded it a bit differently.... I'd have asked the question "should our children have to pay for our "needs" today?"

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(Rochester, N.Y.) – Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks said the state school supply grants handed out to New York State food stamp and welfare recipients are not being used as intended by many families. She said the program has “widespread, rampant abuse.”

“There were better ways–You don’t have to support families to buy school supplies by giving them cash,” she said.

Brooks said the county has been overwhelmed by reports, some of them from store owners, of people using the money to buy TVs and other luxury items.

“We actually received a telephone call from WalMart on Hudson Avenue suggesting that there was welfare fraud, and indicating they were going to call the FBI because people were going in and buying X-boxes, Wii systems, flat-screen television sets,” said Kelly reed, the county’s commissioner of social services. “Wegmans has indicated people are buying tickets to Darien Lake.”

The $200 per child grants showed up in welfare accounts this week. Many recipients had no idea the money was coming, and flooded area stores and ATMs.

Need to see some federal housing stories also?

Strange story. Xboxes, Wiis, and flat screen tvs cost more than $200. I guess those people must have more than one kid. And no one was given the money for the purpose of purchasing those things.
It seems like a pretty terrible program, not telling anyone they are about to get $200/kid, and not giving it in stamp form like food stamps. I guess you could call it fraud even though no one was told what the money was for.

But fraud is committed by the haves too. I know people with a 7 figure net worth currently committing unemployment fraud. And there are thousands more that I don't personally know.


Let's go one subject at a time though. Health care is not a luxury item. And I think you'll find, if there was some way to learn it, that there are fewer people who decide not to work much or hard or smart than you think. And it again crosses the spectrum. Companies have internet policies in part because so many people spend their work day on things other than work. Again, I know several people who earn in the top 20% who barely do anything in their work day.

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1984 300TD