Sorry, but I don’t understand this. It’s true that to avoid poverty, you have to make good choices, work hard, and be moral (the last one is questionable, I’ll admit).
How else would you tell people to avoid poverty?
I’d say it’s more a prioritization of belief over information.
This is a tendency that afflicts us all to varying degrees, but it’s gotten way more deeply embedded on the right.
Of course, American conservatives have the help of a cable TV network and numerous websites and talk radio programs to affirm them in their beliefs, which has helped tip the balance way past where it might have otherwise gotten to.
Being born into affluence helps. That obviously isn’t something one can choose, but it takes a lot less work to get into a good college and find a successful career if one has been born to parents who are upper middle class, have planned for you to go to college, and surrounded you with other families who are sending their kids to college. You’re practically funneled into success, and you’ll get there unless you really fuck up.
If you grow up in the coalfields of southwest Virginia or in a ghetto in Baltimore, it takes a lot more work, a lot more good choices, a lot more avoidance of easy bad choices, just to get to the place where I started from.
I know quite a few people who do not work hard or make good choices that are not poor due to their parents economic standing (I, and they, are in their 40s). Watching what happens when their parents die is going to be potentially interesting. I also know quite a few people that have worked hard and made good choices their whole lives and still are barely scraping by and are 1 act of god away from poverty.
No it’s not. Not in an environment with an unrealistic wage floor. Plus you don’t need a business to hire you if you are a sole proprietor.
What is stupid is the idea that since bad luck or bad stuff can happen one shouldn’t be expected to optimize how they personally can.
The wage floor isn’t even up to “cost-of-living” level yet-how much fucking lower do you want it to be?
Sole proprietor? What do you have in mind that wouldn’t take a good amount of start-up money?
The left underestimates the intelligence of the common man. The left is a movement populated by fools who by identifying with the elites, think themselves to be elites, when in fact those elites do all they can to isolate themselves from anyone who does not meet the requirements to join their club. The elites use their base only to maintain power but do nothing for that base except to make them feel superior to Trump voters.
-NH Gazette, Vol. CCLXII, No. 8 January 4, 2019
They are going to inherit their parents’ assets. Not all THAT interesting, really.
Wage floor should be 0.
How expensive is it to do lawn care or housecleaning or pet sitting/walking?
Now, my very first post in this thread I stated a safety net is fine in a nation with surplus productivity. I’m just totally against the idea that poor people have no agency. When I was child we were in the bottom 5% of income. Now my family is in the top 2% of income. I wouldn’t have been able to make that progress without both outside assistance and personal effort. But how many votes will one get with the message of work hard, don’t have too many kids too early, stay off the booze and drugs, and study?
We already fought that war a century and a half ago, and your side lost.
Congratulations on your ability to cut & paste someone else’s fact-free opinion in here.
No it didn’t. They just shifted their operations to China and turn a blind eye to illegal immigration.
As I’ve said before, I think one of the central pillars of conservative ideology is the belief that life is fair. Conservatives tend to believe (or if they don’t believe, they act in a manner consistent with the belief) that people get what they deserve in life. If you’re rich, it’s because you put the effort into getting rich. If you’re poor, it’s because you failed to put in the effort. And they also believe in the reverse; if you put in the effort, you will move upwards from poverty to wealth. So they see the best solution to problems of adversity is to motivate people to solve their own problems.
The opposing belief which is central to liberal ideology is that people are the products of their circumstances. Some people are rich because they were raised in a good environment which made it possible for them to become rich. Some people are poor because they were raised in a bad environment which made it nearly impossible for them to be anything but poor. A person placed in those two different environments would have achieved different outcomes in life even if they applied the same amount of effort. So they see the best solution to the problems of adversity is to change the circumstances that produce adversity.
It’s astonishing how exact a description this is of Trump’s base. It’s a movement of people who think that by identifying themselves with Trump (or Bush or Romney), they will somehow achieve some of the success those men achieved. When in fact, Trump and the men like him are isolated by choice from the working men who make up their base. They’re just using those working men to maintain their own power while doing nothing for them. And a tool they use is to tell the people in their base that they’re superior to other people.
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters, ok? It’s like incredible.” Donald Trump, mocking the gullibility of his base.
I think conservatives and liberals take away different messages when they look at poor people and their poor choices.
Liberals believe poor people make the same kind of poor choices that everyone else makes, but they are hit harder by those mistakes since they lack the resources to recover from them. Liberals may also believe that poverty itself breeds poor choices due to lack of education or maladaptive coping mechanisms.
Conservatives believe that poor people make worse choices than everyone else, which is why they are poor in the first place. Some will acknowledge that there are “salt of the earth” poor people who are good and law-abiding, like old people living on fixed incomes and simple country folk who live off the land. But all the others are ne’er-do-wells who just want freebies and handouts. If you give them more freebies and handouts, they’ll never have an incentive to better themselves. They will just keep making the same shitty choices.
I don’t believe that the desire to “better oneself” is a function of how desperate and needy someone is. If desperation drove self-improvement, you would see a lot more people born into middle- and upper-middle classes falling into poverty once they reached adulthood, since they would lack the motivation to go to school and do anything with their lives. No, I believe the desire for self-improvement is a function of how hopeful a person is about their future and their own agency. If a person believes they have the ability to do well in college and they believe they have the wherewithal to get a good job afterwards, then they will choose a path that sets themselves up for this dream. But if they are too busy trying to take care of the basics of survival to even worry about school, then self-improvement isn’t going to be on their radar. Tomorrow won’t even be on their radar.
I believe that reducing existential insecurity would go a long way to reducing the bad decision-making that entrenches poverty. I believe we have the power to create a society where everyone, not just the comfortable, plans for the future. But such a society would require a guarantee for the basics of life (food, shelter, healthcare). For this to happen, conservatives would need to worry less about the moral hazard created by “freebies and hand-outs” and spend more energy worrying about the social and economic costs of a large hungry, sick, homeless sub-population. If crime is substantially lower when no one is worried about food or homelessness or untreated toothaches, then why should anyone care about someone else’s lack of “self-improvement”?
Right. Trump isn’t doing shit to help the “common man.” It’s all just a show–an extension of the same bullshit he delivered with The Apprentice. The employment rate was already going up when he came in, but even then, it’s mostly just jobs which barely support people. People think the president can just magically make the economy turn on dime, and he exploits that. It won’t be a while until they finally realize he’s full of shit, and then it will be too late. Same old story of a classic politician. There’s nothing new about Trump–he’s just following in Newt Gingrich’s foot steps, adding some Hollywood techniques to dupe the suckers that believe everything they see and hear on TV.
Be born to rich parents. Because if your parents are multi-millionaires you don’t have to make good choices, work hard, or be moral to remain wealthy (look at Trump - multiple bankruptcies and extramarital affairs, among other faults)
But being born to rich parents takes luck - conservatives don’t want to acknowledge unearned luck because it messes with their world view.
If you don’t have the luck to be born to rich parents then at least be born to middle-class parents who will have some financial means to help with your education and/or business start-up costs and will be able to send you to a decent school, provide a stable home environment in which you can do homework and adequate food and medical care. You’ll still have to make correct choices, work hard, and avoid the worst vices but if you make a misstep here or there you’ll have the means to recover and get back on track.
But if you have bad luck - you’re born in a ghetto or the projects or rural poverty to dysfunctional parents who are barely educated themselves, exist in a chaotic home environment, there’s nothing extra, some days the only food you get is the free breakfast and lunch at school… all the hard work in the world might be for naught if you’re in a shitty school, if you need eyeglasses but can’t get them, your family is homeless so you’re constantly moving from shelter to shelter, one school to another, and momma was told to get to work you lazy bitch but the only work she could find or do was fucking johns for money to pay the rent on the cockroach-laden apartment with on-again off-again utilities.
Or… what hard work do you propose a 7 or 8 or 10 year old kid do to get out of those circumstances? They’ve already been tossed on the “discard” pile by society.
I am fully willing to acknowledge the roles of education, decision making, frugality, and morality in financial well being - but conservatives are not willing to acknowledge the role of luck and environment.
Yes, encourage people to work and make good choices but ALSO repair the dysfunctional environments that result in lack of available jobs and encourage poor choices.
Nonsense. How to you propose to “force” businesses to hire them? At gunpoint, perhaps?
How do you force somebody to get a job, then?
That’s a strawman. Of course conservatives acknowledge luck and the environment. Conservatives also acknowledge intrinsic factors and individual efforts.