Oh don’t get me wrong – I don’t doubt that being poor in America is much better than being poor in, say, India. But I’d say the relevant question is whether being poor in America is “good enough”, given how much wealth there is in this country. Of course, what constitutes “good enough” is up for debate, but I don’t see anything wrong with saying: “We’re doing much better at helping the poor than a lot of countries, but we should still aspire to do much better than we are now.”
I also think that if we are going to compare the quality of life of our poor to the quality of life for the poor in other countries, it makes much more sense to compare to the first world countries. Third world nations aren’t in a position to do much for their poor anyway, so we should hardly be patting ourselves on the back for doing better than them.
Certainly moving to an area where jobs are more plentiful is a great option for those in a position to do so. But for some people that’s not really a viable option, whether because they can’t afford the one-time expenses associated with a move, or because they’re dependent on the support network they have back home, or because they can’t afford the risk that they won’t find work or affordable housing right away. When I moved out of my home state I had a job and an apartment lined up months in advance, but not everyone is so fortunate.
True. Funny how 10M desperately poor Mexican peasants have managed to sneak across the border to get work, though. Doesn’t that make you think it shouldn’t be too terribly difficult for most Americans to move if they don’t have job prospects where they live?
Depends what you mean by ‘welfare.’ To me, and I guess most people, welfare means an entitlement program for the poor, which is given to certain people in economically depressed areas/cultures regardless of their employment status.
I think people should either have a job, be on their way to having a job (through training, etc.) or proven sufficiently disabled to be unable to perform a job. If they are not looking for work, and are able to work, they don’t get any benefits. I guess what I’m thinking of is a more extensive version of unemployment insurance, an excellent program BTW, which would keep people from losing their homes, thier families and their ability to stay fed and clothed during those little/local jags of extensive unemployment that any capitalist system will inflict on society.
You OTOH would like to let people starve and go homeless, but you just don’t want to speak of it. I understand. If my position were so morally reprehensible, I wouldn’t want to speak of it, either.
Sorry, Sam, you conservatives have had your ‘at bat’ in the White House and you’ve blown it big time. I’m sure you would like to expand the scope of this discussion to “mistakes made by the White House” vs. “every mistake ever made by any leftist government in the history of the world” but that just ain’t gonna fly. The Bush Admin. and the Republican Congress are failures of historic proportions, and while I recognize that they may not represent your personal viewpoints in all regards, they do generally represent American conservatism as it is now manifested in American politics. Replacing them with other conservatives from the same wellspring will just give us more abject failure. It’s liberalism’s at bat now. Though I think if HRC is the Democratic nominee, you won’t see much of a change in the way things are run, as the DLC is Republican lite.
Sure, savings accounts are great and I heartily recommend them to all and sundry. The problem is, poor people’s savings accounts tend to be smaller than middle class and wealthy peoples’ savings, and hence, to run out much sooner than theirs. Sometimes they don’t have any savings. I suppose you think ti would be bracing to allow them and their children to starve and go homeless, but I think it just needlessly advances the amount of human misery in the world by a few increments. We can do better, and should do better.
Actually, since Social Security involves people putting their funds into a savings account when they work, they’re essentially saving for thier own retirement. I will be eligible for a tidy sum when I retire, having worked so long and hard, and I hope no one convinces the government that I don’t need or deserve it. I earned it, I want it.
As for temporary income loss – I’m all for people protecting themselves from it with savings, so they can survive economic “adjustments” more comfortably than they would otherwise.
Yeah, but you may have been saved from having unemployed people showing up at your house with automatic weapons because their kids have no food. Now, that’s good government in action!
I don’t know how it works in Canada, and I suspect you may have a different program there, or have confused two different programs, but in America you can’t draw funds out of unemployment unless you have put an equivalent amount of money in by working and earning wages over a certain amount of time. I get no benefit from your UI, John. Also, I don’t think UI is NEARLY as expensive here as it is in Canada. I’m not sure what my UI payments have been, but I don’t think they ever constituted more than a negligible portion of my paycheck. I’m talking 5 or 10 a paycheck.
Probably some system of getting forgiveness on home payments over a period similar to that covered by unemployment insurance.
I’ve already addressed that qujestion. This is not spin, this is a good idea.
An opportunity to quote one of my favorite authors, George Bernard Shaw. From Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle’s drunken reprobate of a father speaking: “Oh, we undeserving poor eats just as much as the deserving poor, mam, and we drinks … quite a bit more.”
Frankly, I don’t see why you hate the idea of a safety net so much. Is your motto in life, “It is not enough that I should win – others must lose!”?
Damn, that IS your motto!
Not publicly, anyway.
Most of the welfare-to-work programs we’ve had in the US have succeeded to some extent. I’m all for getting people off the dole, John. I just think it should be there if they need it. And I think if someone’s working, they should be able to make enough that they don’t need it. We don’t have those conditions in America rignt now.
I think it started out that way, but did evolve over time to be more “benign”.
Damn, I’ve been unmasked. You forget to mention that I enjoy watching people starve-- especially children. The slower the better. And then I like to kick them just before they expire.
I’m not sure that’s a valid comparison, for a few reasons. First, I’d guess the “job gradient” is a lot greater when you’re crossing a national border. (I’m making up a term here: what I mean is “the rate at which the number of jobs available changes per mile traveled”.) In other words, I’m guessing (I could be wrong) that poor people in, say, Mississippi have to travel farther than poor people in Northern Mexico in order to significantly improve their job prospects.
But what’s probably more important is this: The situation for the poor in Mexico is different (far worse, I admit) than for the poor in the U.S. Ironically, this makes it in some ways easier for Mexicans to relocate, because they have less to lose. For one thing, a poor person in the U.S. probably has more possessions, which means they have much greater moving expenses. If they leave with just “the shirts on their backs”, they’ve made their financial situation worse instead of better. Also, many of the poor in America can scrape by even if they’re unemployed for a time, in part by relying on the support of friends and family in their community. While moving to an area with more jobs gives them a chance at a better life, it also raises their risk by taking them away from whatever safety net they do have in place. Whereas I suspect that for illegal immigrants they’re basically at the point of having nearly nothing to lose; I think a person would almost have to be at that point before they’d leave their country for one where they don’t even have any legal standing.
I don’t think it’s self-contradictory for me to say that the poor in America have it good enough that they are legitimately fearful of making their situation worse – while at the same time, they don’t have it as good as they ought to given how rich their countrymen are. “Better than Mexico” isn’t saying much.
The other thing is that companies which employ illegal immigrants probably aren’t going to pay them minimum wage or provide a record of their employment, and in many situations the work isn’t guaranteed from day to day. If someone on welfare takes a sub-minimum wage job with irregular hours, and then gets kicked off welfare because they can’t show documentation that they’ve found a job, they haven’t really made their situation better. Sure, it’s still better than staying where they are, failing to find a job, and getting kicked off welfare anyway, but if they think there’s even a chance they could get a legitimate job that’s probably the better option. It’s just not a good option.
I guess it all boils down to this: Finding a job in America which is a step up from being poor in Mexico is easier than finding a job in America which is a step up from being poor in America. Of course if you’re unemployed and sleeping on the street any job would probably be an improvement, but with many of the poor the problem isn’t that they can never find work, it’s that they can’t find consistent work, or the only work they can find won’t pay enough to support their family at a reasonable level. A poor job market doesn’t just effect the people who are out of work, it means that people all the way up the ladder are having to settle for jobs that pay less than they could otherwise be making.
tim: You started by saying it wasn’t a viable option for poor people to move, and now you are saying it’s simply inconvenient. The fact is, there are jobs to be had and if you don’t think you have prospects where you live (like MI), then you need to get the hell out of there no matter how inconvenient it might be. If someone is able to relocate (and I’m unconvinced that relocation is that difficult), then I’m not very sympathetic about his “plight”. Remember that this particular discussion started in the context of the unemployment rate in the US. It’s true that some areas are depressed and others are booming. And if you want to stay in a depressed area, then you’re life is going to be pretty crappy.
And go where? If you have the wherewithal to make one move, and one move only, where do you go? And what happens if you’re wrong? A single man can afford such risks, to a certain degree, but a family man has constraints, as you are well aware.
A parallel to illegal immigration makes a horrid irony: these are probably the bravest and most self-reliant persons in all of Central America, they face horrendous risk, and all for a chance…not a guarantee, a chance!.. for Something Better. There are many such in my neighborhood. They work their asses off, they meet their children at the school bus stop, and those children are scrubbed within an inch of their lives. Family values up the wazoo!
Gee, I guess I would go where the unemployment rate was lower. But that’s just me. Of course this is not the answer for everyone-- some people really do have constraints that limit their ability to up and move. If a guy has to leave his family for a time to set himself up, that’s not so horrible. But at least he tried. This country can offer you a chance, but it can’t spoon feed you for life.
Again, remember that I am responding to your claim that unemployment in this country is a problem. It isn’t. It’s a regional problem that can be dealt with in part by people relocating. You can sit and moan about your great union job at GM disappearing or you can do something about it, because the job ain’t coming back anytime soon.
No, it just puts things in perspective. One can always think of a hundred reasons not to do something (eg, move), but if the need is really there, then those reasons tend to fade.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. What it has to do with the price of butter in Denmark I do not know.
That’s right. I think it’s strange that we have reached a point in America where someone gives a reasonable solution to an unemployment problem…move to where the jobs are…and it’s considered heartless & cruel. Historically, this is what people have done to solve this problem. People used to be grateful that there were places to go that had opportunities for them…that’s basically how this entire vast country was settled. Now people want the opportunities to come to them. It just doesn’t always work that way, I’m afraid.
Well, you see, John, sometimes I take the liberty to make comments that have little, if anything, to do with John Mace, his opinions, or his curious fixation on European dairy products.
Uhm, those comments were in the exact same sentence with your comment about my analogy. I’m sure you weren’t trying to make it seem that I thought poorly of those immigrants, but not everyone is a careful reader, you see.
May I make so bold as a book recommendation? Badlands, by Johnathan Raban. The nub of the book is how many Americans were conned by railroad propaganda into settling on “agricultural” land utterly ill-suited to agriculture (or at least, the agriculture of the family farm, as compared with the “agriculture” practiced by Archer Daniels Midland…)
I’m sure it’s an interesting read, but that’s not the point. The point is that people were willing to go, and glad to have the opportunity. The fact that some may have been conned doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a smart idea to go where the opportunity lies. These days, it’s easy to find out for sure where the best employment opportunities are…you don’t need to rely on unscrupulous developers.
Well, that’s very nice of you to say. If only it were true, I’d be less concerned. I’ve already been told just today that I “would like to let people starve and go homeless” and that my position was “morally reprehensible”. Actually, in this thread, too. Oh, and by someone you generally agree with.
Well, hell, John, not everybody’s gonna love ya, especially if you open yer mouth and expose your mind. Them’s the breaks. Not everybody likes me. Hard to believe, I know, but still…
Let’s all get together and give John a big ol’ group hug! Whaddaya say?