Why should the government "help" people with Aspergers?

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There is absolutely nothing shameful asking for help when you need it. I'm sorry that others made you feel that way.

Yes, it is in the best interest of the government to help it's own citizens and its duty!

Many countries have programs to help their citizens get hired regardless of disability and issue.

If you can't work, then you should allowed to collect disability.

People who are stable in life and have enough money to get by, are less likely to commit crimes and be a burden on society.

With that said, we are currently subsidizing many companies by allowing their full time workers to collect government benefits.

Walmart is the biggest offender, they literally still give out welfare and medicad applications as part of the packet you get when you start your first day of work, in most states.
They literally help their employees get on government benefits and have actual employees who specialize in this.
This allows their employees to collect the minimum wage with no benefits, while allowing Walmart to be one of the most profitable companies in history.

This one if the biggest reasons why Walmart keeps their prices that low.

You do get good pay and benefits if you are district level or higher in management.

Many other companies have adopted this model, including Target and other major retailers.
Many agriculture companies do this as well.

We also spent $1.4 Trillion on the military, yet the military doesn't need that much money to operate (it is also more than ever other country put together now)
Instead the spent the money on $900 toilets, $1k hammers, and other expensive crap.

We give the oil companies tens of billions in money to build more oil refineries and they haven't done it yet.

We bailed out the banks at the tune of $1 Trillion in 2008 to prevent as massive banking crisis at the tax payer expense.

There is no excuse on why we can't help people with ASDs.

tell that to the tools who keep voting for more military/industrial complex. in the war of guns versus butter, it seems to me that the status quo has devolved to more butter for the 1% and more guns aimed at the 99%.

The voters are easily swayed time and again.
Voting turn out is really low during mid terms as well.

The military industrial complex for better or for worse has helped keep the U.S. the #1 economy and the most advanced military.

I mean things will change eventually, hopefully 2016 will energize the left to let it happen.

Though it could easily go the other way, just like Israel did on Tuesday.
They only voted for BiBi out of fear...

I think there is a lot of the Victorian idea of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor in our country. Back then they believed that God put you in the class you were in, but He put some people in the poorer class who were good people at heart and those who were wealthy should help them because it's a Christian virtue, but most of the poor were put there because they were bad at heart. It was possible to fall in class by losing money or committing flagrant immoral acts but it was almost impossible to rise in class because it was believed that God wanted you there for a reason. If you fell in class then it was believed that you had somehow mistakenly been elevated to the better class and it was deserved for you to fall. It wasn't economics, it was what kind of soul they thought you had and what kind of person they believed you were. Your virtue or lack of it was directly reflected in your worldly possessions.

We don't think that way anymore, but some do have a reflex response that the poor have somehow put or kept themselves there. If they aren't poor because they are lazy, maybe it's because they are on drugs or drink. Maybe they are too horny and irresponsible and have too many kids. Maybe they just didn't work hard enough in school to be able to hold a job. Maybe it's bad attitude. These people are quicker to look for those things than they are to look for unfortunate circumstances or the fact that some people only get so far and then hit the wall and have to stay there at that one spot and work to sustain it for the rest of their lives because they can't make more at their job, or they can't save, etc. They don't want to believe bad luck or even lack of opportunity because if that can happen to the poor people who did nothing to deserve it, then it could happen to the wealthier people too. Overall they tend to believe that the poor people somehow brought it on themselves and if they want to have anything they need to work ten times as hard as everybody else just to get half as much, because they were in the situation to begin with.

There are people on the opposite end of the seesaw as well. Some people believe that people are only poor because of circumstances, prejudice, the governments lack of giving them help, the lack of more social programs, etc. Any suggestion that some people are poor because they put the better part of each day's pay up their arms will be met with protests and when you give them proof that it's true for some, you will be told that they were driven to drugs because of society so it's still not their own faults. These people will find an excuse for every person out there near or below the poverty level no matter what the person did to put themselves in the situation. It's always society's fault and never the natural consequences of bad decisions, which aren't always immoral or irresponsible, just not as good as what the other choice was.

Then you have people in the middle ground who know that both cases are sometimes true and neither is always true. Sometimes these people have been poor themselves and gotten ahead, they have friends or relatives who are poor, or they just have common sense and aren't afraid to use it.

Of course if you ask the poor themselves they will tell you that there are some people who are poor because of every variety of reason from the most self imposed to the craziest out of the blue hammer from the sky for no reason. I'm pretty poor myself but I live ok because we budget well and we have been helped by my inlaws. I know people who scam the government for benefits and admit it to me because I'm poor too, I know people who work harder than we do and are more careful and cut out almost all extras and still can't make ends meet, let alone get ahead, and people who work for daily cash payments and spend most of it on drugs while constantly talking about how they plan to get off the s**t soon and go to the suboxone clinic but just never manage to do it. It's some of everything, and there is no one answer.

So, I don't know really. Poor folks aren't noble saints nor destroyer devils, most are in between and just keeping on keeping on.

Screw deserving and undeserving. The poor are the poor, and need help.

walmart isn't the cheapest here. winco is employee owned pays good, benefits, and has lower prices on stuff.
best buy is cheaper for tvs and some other things. video games are same price everywhere. what they do do is have a large selection and price match. makes it easier to get everything at one place rather than going to 10 stores.
also here they pay their employees above min wage by a dollar. not great but not as bad as other places.

lot of the military personal are on welfare/food stamps. yet we wast money.

we have these apcs that cost millions should we A. sell them to other countries to make back money we spent, or B. give them to police so they can act like a military.
military, DHS,FBI, etc waste tons and tons of money every year. the treasuray they don't care to even check how its spent they just send the money out. we could save so much if we just cut back on wastes and did bi yearly audits. they end up with expensive stuff the didn't need, while personal lack cheaper things the do need. but lets not provide for our less well off citizens, while pouring billions into aid for other nations less off people.

whole government is full of wasteful spending, why do congress keep getting promotions to already high pay checks? why can then give themselves promotions.o.O

agree with sweetleaf and oly.
like if people see someone with iphone they jump on them saying they don't need aid then. you do know you can pay an iphone off over time right? so you pay 20 a month for years. isn't the same as someone dropping 800 in a month. just about everyone has a smartphone nowadays. its the modern tech and becoming cheaper and cheaper. like having a hdtv, use to cost thousands now can be had for under 100. which can be accomplished by saving up for stuff.

The problem is the majority of poor aren't poor because they brought it on themselves.

The majority of the poor in the U.S. are in the South and are mostly white, followed by blacks.

The main problem is the system is very unforgiving that one external problem can do you in with no chance of recovering.
Poverty is a very hard cycle to break, not impossible, but damn near impossible.

If your parents are poor, you are most likely going to be poor yourself.
If your parents are rich, you are most likely going to be rich yourself

Why is this?

When you are poor, you are denied access to resources you need to move up in life.
You cannot afford a decent K-12 education, let alone do well enough to get to college and/or vocational training.
School district income mainly comes from the people living in the district, thus poor districts are full of poor people.

Not only are you getting a minimal education, you aren't able to do the extra activities to further your networking and learning because they either don't exist due to funding issues, you are needed at home to help your parents make ends meat, and/or cannot afford to be in said activity (it costs money for school clubs and stuff).

Instead of playing with kids your own age, you are taking care of your own siblings while trying to keep up on your school work. Your parents are busy working all the hours they can get not being at home.

You also don't get the nutrition and healthcare your richer peers receive because you cannot afford it.
It's cheaper to get junk food and fast food than real food by a huge margin.

As the years go by, you fall further behind your richer peers in education.
When it comes to high school graduation, you aren't good enough to get into most colleges, let alone past the tests to get into community colleges (if they exist in your area).

You also lack the computing skills your peers have because you cannot afford the basic technology the world runs on. You probably can't afford dial up internet.

Then when you turn 18, you end up working to help support your family (unless you started at 16) while trying to better yourself. Though decent jobs have requirements, you don't meet. So you are stuck doing low end jobs which pay very little. You are also lucky if you can afford basic utilities to live on as well.

Then you or your family member gets sick with a strong illness.This causes them to miss work and be fired, causing you to lose the place you were living in. This forces you to find some other place or live in the car.
Then you get hit with the huge medical bills, you cannot afford to pay, thus having it taken out of your pay checks on regular basis.

Or the breaks down and you cannot afford to repair it or get a new one, thus making getting to work very hard if not impossible. If you are still in high school you may end up moving out of district or forced to drop out to help family.

If you do make it to college, you probably are struggling with helping family and doing the necessary stuff better yourself.
If something happens to family, you may have to drop out of college and work to help support family.

Your area may not even have good social services to help.

Now when you are finally making headway in life you are in your 30s or 40s, but still too poor to go back to school. You probably have fallen in love or have kid on the way which keeps the cycle going (most kids aren't planned).

---

I know from personal experience what it is like to go from lower middle class to poverty in a very short time in childhood.
Between my step dad constantly getting fired due to his behavior, him getting into drugs and being an alcoholic, money was always very tight.
My mother after the divorce quickly had a mental break down forcing her out of her teaching job, which she has never fully recovered from.
We were forced to move out as the house was foreclosed, though we did just move down the road.

My dad has always had a good middle class job, but due to my step moms spending habits and my dad's refusal to balance budget as made them "broke".

So yeah I didn't get to take part in a lot of activities and stuff due to a "lack of money".... Though my sisters have always gotten whatever their hearts desired as general rule...

^^^
JFK said "life is unfair." this being the case, I'd much rather live in a culture that recognized the essential goodness [and ultimate societal utility] of trying to at least file the rough edges off of this existential unfairness. but there are many who want to go in the opposite direction and make things even more unfair, to benefit only themselves at the expense of the rest, come what may.

This is heresy. The Bible does not support prosperity theology, a major heretical view in the Christian world, unfortunately.

The rest of your post says it has disappeared, but I saw it from my own eyes at a Christian food bank. The preacher gave a speech about how he just knew that when this man was sicker, that meant he was sinning more and turning away from God, and then when this man was not as sick, that meant faithfulness and turning back to God.

Before I picked up my food, a woman interviewed me, who told me that converting to Christianity would mean I would have my every desire fulfilled.

From this, I conclude that the heretical prosperity theology still has a major following in the United States. As I understand it, many megachurches harp it as well, while the mainstream Christian Church associations correctly dismiss it as heresy.

^^^
and for people who can't quite stomach the overt religiosity of such, there is the "just world theory" to make themselves feel properly ethical. there is an existential meme for every preference, it would seem.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."[john kenneth galbraith]

Help is a loaded word, it depends what kind of help. Help can be the sunny face of social control. In the UK unemployed people are being "helped" by referral to behaviourist CBT psychologists - they are to be reprogrammed out of their "wrong" thoughts and reconditioned to have the right thoughts - the thoughts that politicians want them to have. If you mean financial help, then yes if it is necessary to live adequately, we are all part of the wider social fabric, and the true measure of a decent society is how it treats its weaker and neediest members. There is no level playing field, and even the fittest don't know that they won't need help in the future. S..t happens, even to the strongest.

But help comes in many forms. People were given lobotomies in my lifetime to "help" them - the idea behind the help was "slice up their brain and they won't cause any bother to anyone else again". Scientists did that.. Children are being tortured with electric shocks to help them because the USA government permits this form of "help" to be perpetrated on them. (Scientists again, acting with the collusion of state governments and adults who want more biddable children).

Help comes with fishhooks a lot of the time, and where there is a clash of interests, and unequal power, the outcome is not always what the "helpee" sought or imagined.

I wasn't saying that some do and some dont deserve help. I was talking about how people tend to think about poor folks. Well, how people who aren't or haven't been poverty level poor tend to think it is. My point was that there aren't deserving and undeserving, that it's a Victorian idea that is still around a bit.

I think that some need direct help like benefits, others need help that will allow them to work and take care of themselves such as medical treatment or rehab or psych treatment, and others need more opportunities so they can go ahead and get a leg up. I think that free financial planning and budgeting courses should be offered to everyone who gets benefits, although some won't care about taking them there are others that will. I think that there should be homemaking and cooking courses offered too, especially for young women who may not have skills that previous generations have had. A nutrition and frugal cooking course would be great for those on food stamps too because it's really hard to stretch a food dollar and to serve something other than hamburger helper and other just crap food. It's easier to cook than scratch cooking, but there are also things in between the two that you can do. Parenting courses for new moms and dads are a good idea as well, because a new baby can be overwhelming if you don't have experience with them and don't have family to help out. Programs and testing similar to Sylvan that are offered free would be wonderful for low income kids in public school, so they can get ahead or caught up when the school isn't able to do enough to get them caught up to grade level. There are lots of things I see that should be offered, but aren't. Lots aren't thought of.

I wouldn't want them mandatory for getting benefits because then most people would resent them and not really learn anything, they would just listen and repeat it out on a test to get through the class and then forget it afterwards. Also, they can't be offered condescendingly. I remember several years ago when I went to the food stamp office for my yearly certification and had a visit with my worker and went over my form with her and gave her copies of the documents she needed. She was a young girl who had obviously not been there very long. Very early 20s about the age just out of college. Now, she had no idea about anything I do or how I keep my house and take care of my family, and she didn't ask either. After we went over the form she told me she wanted to give me something and it was a nutrition chart and she went over it very slowly to me and she explained to me that I shouldn't feed my family things like hot dogs and sandwiches every night, how important it was to cook and gave me a few recipe booklets of really simple s**t. I smiled at her and gave them back and told her thank you but I've been cooking from scratch for years and I'm very good at stretching my money and getting the right foods and then offered to type up a few recipes for her if she wanted to add them to her information packet. I wouldn't have been offended if she hadn't talked to me like I was a slow child to who she was explaining that they must stop doing something wrong and how to do it right. There is a big risk of those kinds of classes coming across that way. If they are voluntary then you will have people who are interested in the topic and who are willing to go to the trouble to learn about it and follow through, and they will be smaller classes as well and the teacher would have time to talk to each person and find out a little about them and tailor her presentation to her audience. Not the usual "This is the right way to do things, we know you have been doing them wrong, now straighten up and do it right!" tone of mandatory classes and such.

Ways to encourage college for kids from poor households where the parents are either unemployed or who do manual labor type jobs or day labor would be great. Schools do it already but they have a lot of kids to focus on and usually focus on the kids who want to try to go on to college and if a kid says they don't want it they don't push it. Kids who see their parents not being successful in life may not start out with a goal or a plan for success in their own lives, many tend to just see getting by right now as the goal and let later in life take care of itself. Lots of them drop out and some get GED's and other's don't get them. There aren't a lot of people encouraging those kids to push themselves and try for more than their parents have.

Free drug treatment would be great for some. I have a best friend who is a heroin addict. I've talked about her before. She's thrown her life away for years and she's always trying to get on suboxone but can't pay for it and the state won't pay. She doesn't work and hasn't since last October. She waits on her bf to do some day labor and then they go score, put gas in the car so he can get back to work the next morning and then go sleep at whoever's house they are sleeping at. He says he wants to get clean but doesn't. He never tries, but she does. I'd like to see a place for people like her to get suboxone, not methadone because that doesn't get you off it, you just get another addiction.

I could type all day about things I think are needed, but it won't do any good. But my point wasn't that there was a deserving and undeserving poor. I was talking about the Victorian idea and how it's still around in pieces today.

I never said it was from the Bible, I said it was from Christianity in Victorian times. A lot of opinions that were held by Christian groups over the years weren't at all Biblical.

Although, the idea that God put people where they are comes from the idea of the Divine Rights of Kings which is based on Biblical texts. That's been around since long before the Victorians though. It's an interpretation of what is said in the Bible, while the Victorian idea of deserving and undeserving poor was co-opted into Christian culture and thought, but not doctrine and it was an extension of the DRoK and wasn't found directly in the Bible but was considered correct Christian thought because it was the logical progression.

It actually wasn't heresy, it was extra-Christian thought, which is a belief that isn't essential to salvation but also isn't found in Scripture and came about by extending accepted doctrine and beliefs to what seems to be their logical conclusion. As for the DRoK, some churches still hold the doctrine. I believe the Church of England does, but I'm not absolutely sure.

I never said the deserving poor idea was accepted in all Christianity today, although many small churches practice a similar belief and base what is deserving and undeserving on the rules of their sect.

The very idea of "prosperity theology" sickens me. Christianity is supposed to teach love and tolerance, and prosperity theology pretty much runs counter to that. It seems like the very sort of thing that greasy televangelists and corrupt church officials from the dark ages would believe. Definitely not shining beacons of their supposed faith.

I'm kind of one to talk, as I'm not a practicing Christian myself, but it just irritates the hell out of me whenever I hear about people who claim to be religious, and act like smug, selfish as*holes because of it.

No. Prosperity theology is heresy; many Christian leaders say that. In addition, it runs so contrary to so many important teachings, such as, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven," the suffering brought to Job to test his faith, and the perpetual state of poverty and deprivation that Jesus and his disciples lived, Jesus message not to [i]lay up your treasures not in the world, but in heaven," and Paul the Apostle saying followers must give up their material wealth, there's really no other way to view it.