No, you became more conservative because you're a jaded fuck who got shit on while growing up and think that because you got shit one everyone else should too. It's fairly transparent from your rantings and your false generalizations about people who receive government assistance. I won't even begin to address the anger you directed towards children living in poverty due to no fault of their own.
I didn't get shit on, I am proud of working my way up, I didn't resent my lifestyle because it largely came from my own choices.
I'll tell you my story about that and you'll see where I'm coming from.
I moved out as a teen and got a crapola apartment, working fulltime at McDonalds. Down the street and around the corner was a public housing complex with decent (certainly roomier) townhomes and a parking lot full of lower end cars but cars none the less, the parking lot below my apartment building had far less cars (per capita), people paying for their housing obviously can afford less cars.
My first roommate, came from these townhomes, his Mom had got pregnant as a teen and lived there for a long time.
One time his Mom came over with her boyfriend and we asked him you know "what do you do for a living", I don't remember what he answered but she said she had never worked. She felt guilty, I could tell and then went on to say that she would have worked but if she got a job she would no longer qualify for public housing.
It's that kind of experience that makes me know what I am talking about and had I not seen that firsthand and say gone off to college right away and never been familiar with poverty I may have ended up as just another lefty with visions of the poor needing help and needing to do more and not thinking about the actual consequences of that help.
I am not jaded, but I can see clear unfairness when I see it, that's not to say I wanted public housing or that there should be more of it but that it would always be unfair because it is set up to reward those who do less with better/easier housing.
Welfare reform as started by the Repubs in the 90's was great but it needs to be more than just regulating a check, it needs to halt the whole welfare industry from checks to housing to healthcare to food.
People need to be self-responsible and they will be better off by being so.
More on topic though, for some reason you seem to be not OK with providing low income people with housing but you seem completely fine with providing cash and tax breaks to builders and developers to created "mixed income" developments in place of low-income housing? What do you say to Joe and Jane American . . . ?
I am not in favor of that either, I just said that to argue Darla's (false) point that they are not JUST getting rid of that public housing, they are replacing it.
