Reply #17: very passionate and heartfelt that

[sweetheart]

Some of the most crime ridden neighborhoods in europe are in south scotland, and
on driving round a few, what can be done?

Clinton's program of wefare-to-work was seen as a success, likely an inspiration for
blair, whether or not it was a success i frankly can't say, from a DU perspective.

Isn't the vast majority of persons on benefit, on incapacity benefit, and isn't this
statistically more likely in these more deprived areas, making "incapacity" something
that perhaps a doctor open to neighborhood extortion might sign up to.

Indeed, the rhetoric of "get a job" is nonsensical if there are no jobs, if you have
no provisions to move to a place where you can get a job, then you stay there and it
gets worse. That is what i read about constantly in britain. IN the US, those towns
are gone, "ghost towns" all over the place, where the economy dropped away, and with
it, the residents, without any welfare to rely on, without a job... people move away.

I frankly think those bad neighborhoods should become ghost towns. I don't think
the public should pay to sustain people in a failing economic area, as "jobs" don't
come from central planners like the "dole" does, but from investment and responsible
persons wishing to make a better life.

But who can build a better life, whilst surrounded by an enforced culture of poverty.
So, if they reformed the dole to raise the money much higher, would it be different
then? I don't believe so, the social-network has failed in those places. Should they
be written off american syle to become third world war zones of MS-18 (drugs gangs)?

I accept your healthy criticism of the wefare reforms that wrongly diminished benefits
below sustinance levels. As a person who's been fortunate in life not to have ever
taken state benefit, i can't say i understand. When i've been poor, there were no
benefits, i simply wound up homeless with the choice either to die of exposure or
get it together. I frankly am thankful my choice was so harsh at the time, as had i
an alternative to the tremendously difficult mountain of "getting it together", i would
have taken it.

I'm sorry about the mining towns, but i don't concede that it is the government's job
to make these towns rich. That is the citizen's job, and if the whoel project is not
working, then why invest?

You are right on, when you say that the whole thing comes down to a war on poverty, by
rich yuppes who judge the poor as too lazy to work and so much other claptrap.... including
the drugs war that the rich foist on the poor... and if the rich want to buy drugs, they
drive to a poor neightborhood as their laws export the trade-there.

Gosh, after the ravages of compassionate conservatism-1 (thathcher), and compassionate-
conservatism-II (bliar), needs the poor a third?