The Men Who Want AIDS—and How It Improved Their Lives

Is this some new turn of phrase I haven't heard before?

I spent some time in Southeast Asia. The government-supplied social net of the US is absolutely fantastic in comparison, though culturally I found that there the social safety net is the extended family. One didn't need to be a certain socioeconomic level to get help if necessary.

You don't have to actually be dying of AIDS to get social services, such as public housing, in America.

In NYC, a single person is eligible for public housing if their income is less than $48,000. [1]

For reference, the median income in NYC is $49,461. [2] That implies nearly half of NYC is eligible for public housing, not to mention a myriad of other social services. Contracting AIDS entitles one to social services in addition to what is normally available.

[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/assistance/income.shtml [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/nyregion/rich-got-richer-a...

There's a big difference between a poor person and someone who thinks contracting a fatal disease is a better approach than finding a job and actually supporting themselves.

But hey, if someone has resigned themselves to leech off society under any circumstance maybe having them contract a fatal disease willingly is simply natural selection at work.

*I know because I used to wash dishes.

    for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided
    by local religious institutions and local efforts.

    Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related
    to religion needs to be eradicated

    Now we tax the shit out of anything that moves 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Mariginal_Tax_R...

No, for thousands of years, we had an economic system in which the needy who were physically able to work were likely to be able to do work in the most common jobs available (largely, barely-better-than-subsistence farming), where the needy that weren't able to work might get some support from religious institutions (not necessarily local), individual authorities or, where it existed, the state, or elsewhere, but mostly just suffered and died. (And were often criminalized.)

Evolutions of property arrangements (including those that enabled capitalism), population density, and industrialization eliminate the easy access to basic work in the developed world (in exchange for more productive work where work was available) before much changed in the way that the "needy" were treated.

> Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related to religion needs to be eradicated, so we can't keep doing things the way we used to.

Neoliberalism [1] is not particularly concerned with religion, pro or con, nor does it generally support replacing private charity with public social support (it generally opposes public social support, and isn't particularly enthusiastic about private charity, though forced to choose between the two -- or just as a convenient way of selling opposition to public support -- neoliberals will back private charity, including religious.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

What I don't understand is why we don't have programs (say unemployment benefits) where when you finally get work, the money you earn above the cut off replaces need based compensation dollar for dollar until you're free of the system. It makes no sense to cut people off the soon as they get a job when the job pays less than the program.

PS, was going through the comments on out.com, and faire enough, one David Kelsey seems to express the same pov. I guess it's not a coincidence.

(I can't comment there's because I'm not on FB, nor any of the other alternatives needed for commenting. AOL, really?)