well, brenda, i think when you give people something for free, they re apt to do what most of us would do and that s become lazy. i m not saying that everyone getting the food stamps is lazy. but let s look at something like unemployment benefits. when are people most likely to get a job that have unemployment benefits? just when unemployment benefits run out. what is the correlation between shortening unemployment and unemployment? it goes down. so you can and study after study has shown that when you increase unemployment benefits, the length of time a person stays unemployed is longer. so there s a very direct correlation between increasing this quote, unquote, free money and a time a person sits back and i hate to say it becomes lazy. i m not saying there s a certain percentage of people out there who don t really desperately need it or in the case that jehmu points out, they are desperate for food stamps. yeah, but there s a big gap
slash that money and remove that safety net as folks are still struggling in this tepid economy. well, jehmu person with the minimum wage average person in america is making $53,000 a year with a minimum wage worker, that s over two times the poverty rate. minimum wage has little to do with poverty. in fact, tracy, it s not the recession that americans are pointing to about why it s wrong to be dependent on government. but, in fact, it s the ease of getting a system. it s not the recession. you can get food stamps quite easily. look, i agree with jehmu. there was a time when it was embarrassing. my family immigrated, they would never in a million years take a government handout. things have changed, jehmu since you were a kid. hey, my neighbor s getting a check, i want one too. how come i didn t get a first-time home buyers check. everyone else got something i didn t. now we re starting to feel like, hey, where s my cut.
we are privately funded. we help minority kids get through school. and not every very few of our kids could afford to be in our program. that s why we re privately funded. in inner cities, we have 50% of minorities dropping out of school. this is a problem on society. and that s where you have to have the government step in. and as jehmu says, you cannot cut funding to these schools. we ve got to do something with this horrible education system and these horrible teachers that we have that need to be fired. okay. guys, great debate. a multibillion dollar plan to build up home prices by knocking down houses. but will this be another knockout for taxpayers? and it s three months to the day since the irs scandal exploded. yet, still no answers. well, we have one that could finally fix the tax agency. mine was earned in djibouti, africa. 2004.
poorly run. but i would rather pay to put my kid on the sports team and know that the money is going at least towards the education process. jehmu, a lot of this is because states are not able to balance their budgets and so school funding is getting cut. school funding is absolutely getting cut. and, brenda, i think it s outrageous that parents should be paying these fees. i don t want to bust out the violin here and have this be a woe is me show, but when i was in elementary school, my parents couldn t afford the $3 fee for the musical class that we were taking to buy a recorder. and so i can t imagine these hundreds of dollars of fees. but privatizing education is not the answer. we can t say that when you re looking at school budgets right now. what is happening when children are getting private school vouchers and they re leaving those schools, then the schools are losing that money and that is why these fees are going in. so you have to have like an all