I don’t think anyone ever suggested that it should be the centerpiece. John Mace simply used it to counter point the observation that some areas have high unemployment. Yes, some do. And some don’t. On average, unemployment is relatively low. If you happen to live in a place where it is higher than average, it would be smart to get out of Dodge…that was the only point.
Thanks, doll. Actually, most of what I know I learned around here (or googling to check up on statements made around here), including from posters like John, pantom, and Sam Stone.
I guess it’s your unremitting opposition to social safety net programs that gives me that idea.
It’s quite simple. All people need to do is keep moving around until they find a job. Where’s the complication in that?
And if they can’t do that, all they need to do is find the hiring manager of a large brokerage, share a cab with him and solve his Rubik’s Cube for him by the time they reach his house.
These kind of snarky comments are so useless. For one thing, no one here, including John Mace or myself, ever said that moving entire chunks of the population was the solution to anything. Furthermore, no one ever said that the solution was “simple.” Once again, it was a response to the fact that the joblessness rate is not low everywhere in the country. That’s all.
With the attitudes I see around here sometimes, I am starting to understand why our country is in so much trouble. It’s because we don’t see people as capable adults anymore.
I’m not saying it’s “inconvenient”, I’m saying that relocation has significant costs and carries a non-trivial risk of making things worse rather than better. I gave some reasons for this above – to repeat one: if you don’t find work or housing right away, you’re now facing the problem without the benefit of whatever support network you may have had back home. It’s “not viable” in the sense that the cost/risk outweighs the likely benefits.
Maybe it’d be easier to discuss with a specific example. I’m making this up off the top of my head, but I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon situation. Let’s say you’re a single mother with two kids living in a small apartment in Detroit. You’re working a minimum wage job and struggling to make ends meet. A year ago, your car broke down and you couldn’t afford to get it fixed or buy a new one, so you’ve had to rely on the bus. Then one day you get laid off from your job.
What do you do? You know there are more jobs available in, say, Chicago than there are in Detroit. You can probably scrape together enough money to pay for bus fare, but you can’t afford to move all your possessions so you’d have to pick and choose what to leave behind. Also, you don’t know anyone in Chicago. And housing is more expensive there than in Detroit, at least if you don’t want to move your kids into the worst neighborhood in town. Plus, it’s not as if there’s no unemployment in Chicago, either, and you won’t be able to afford to move twice.
So do you make the move, or do you stay behind, hoping to get by for a while on welfare? Maybe one of your friends will hear about a job opening and let you know. Maybe your landlord will let you get away with a late rent payment, since you’re an established tenant. And if you do get evicted, maybe one of your friends will let you and the kids crash at her place for a few days while you’re trying to figure out what to do next.
I’m not saying staying is definitely the better option, but neither one seems like a surefire guarantee of success, and I wouldn’t say that just because someone thinks they’re better off staying put, that they’re somehow choosing to stay poor.
Regarding your comment that millions of “desperately poor Mexican peasants” have managed to cross the border and find work, my point is that’s not really a valid comparison. Sure, someone like my hypothetical poor single mother from Detroit could take the kids and whatever she can carry and hitchhike down South to go pick crops at an undocumented job for sub-minimum wage. But in terms of financial stability that’s more of a step down than a step up.
I’m not going to advocate for “snarkiness”, but I don’t think it would be inaccurate to summarize some of the comments in this thread as “If someone is poor in a state with a bad economy, it’s their fault for not moving to a state with a good economy.” My point, in equally condensed form, is, “If you’re poor in a state with a bad economy, you may already be in a deep enough hole that moving somewhere else won’t fix it.”
Anticipating the reply of “well, then you should have moved sooner”: If all you have is a crummy minimum wage job and no savings, you’d be taking a pretty massive risk to quit that job and move without knowing for sure you’d find a new job immediately. And if you wait until you lose that minimum wage job, you’re already in pretty deep trouble.
I don’t think the problem in this country (with regard to our response to poverty) is that we aren’t “treating people like adults.” I think the problem (or a large part of it) is we’re too willing to tell ourselves “it’s a person’s own fault if they’re poor”, and to use that as an excuse not to do as much as we could to help them.
But the reality, at least as I see it, is that while poor people may have some options, there often aren’t any obvious “good” options, and each time the option they choose doesn’t pan out they’ve made improving their situation that much harder. Just because someone hasn’t managed to escape poverty doesn’t mean they aren’t trying their hardest or that they somehow deserve it.
Sure, we see people as capable adults. We just don’t like to see them homeless, without medical care or starving, however capable or incapable they may be. We recognize that even capable adults can get caught up in situations that leave them at risk for any of these condition in our Great Society that is so wonderful and all.
You however, seek to honor people’s capability by letting them starve, go without shelter, and go without medical care. I’m sure the recipients of your honor are deeply grateful and would suitably reward you if given the opportunity.
Funny, but I think you have it all the wrong way around. Sarahfeena is the one who wants to actually help people directly rather than stuffing her money into a black hole of bureaucracy to see what happens. It seems to me that your credo is “out of sight, out of mind”. You pay your taxes gladly so you won’t have to deal with the ugliness that you say you care about. What you advocate is nothing more than a way to assuage your conscience. Even though you know that there are people starving, you still want to put the problem off on some third party — a faceless structure of red tape thousands of miles away. You know that children are falling through the cracks of child welfare programs. You know that families are living in homeless shelters, many of which are provided by private charity. You know all these things, and you’re willing to pay good money to make them worse.
Lib, your entire point is predicated on the assumption that those who think differently than you are frauds and hypocrites. Rather a difficult proposition to prove, but you are certainly free to try.
AA and other “12 steppers” have a credo to the effect that no one is qualified to take another’s inventory. I urge you to reflect on the wisdom of that.
And yours is predicated on the assumption that those who think differently than you are selfish and greedy. Also a difficult propostion to prove, but you are also free to try.
Good advice for all of us.
Asking a person if that’s what they meant, or letting the person know that this is how they are coming off isn’t snarkiness. I am more than happy to try to clarify my position. I am not saying at all that being poor is the result of not being willing to move. Not at all. Again (for the 3rd time, I think), I was merely responding to the idea that the fact that we have overall low joblessness doesn’t help some people, because they live where joblessness is high. John Mace pointed out that he moved to where jobs were more plentiful. It’s a good solution for some.
Actually, if you are working a minimum wage job, I think you are the perfect candidate take this kind of a risk. Of course, I’d mainly recommend it for a young person with no family to be responsible for, but in all seriousness, that type of person is the kind that this kind of risk can pay off big for…and if it doesn’t pay off big, chances are, you’ll be no worse off. A minimum-wage job is usually no farther away than the nearest McDonald’s.
See, I don’t see my point quite that way. I understand being poor. Better than some people may think, in fact. I personally think that the best way to raise people out of poverty is to have high expectations of them, so they can have high expectations of themselves. This is no way means that we don’t help people when needed…it’s not the help that is a problem, it’s the attitude.
Absolutely. I agree wholeheartedly that there aren’t a lot of good options. That’s why I believe in social programs that help broaden those options. Think about it…what if a welfare program helped people find a job, and if it was necessary to relocate for it, help them with the expenses associated with it?
My completely understand all the problems inherent in a solution such as relocation. I just don’t understand the point of handwaving it away, as though the mere thought is a ridiculous one. Especially in a land of immigrants! 
Oh, gee, I forgot to mention how excited I get when I see homeless people in my neighborhood! Proves our system is working! Yipee!!!
Let me put it this way: What do you think is the better approach…to give help by trying to lift a person up, or to give help by dragging them down?
Well, I was going to say essentially what Kimstu said, all about nehru jackets and with cool numbers and ratios and words, but then she wrote it first, so all I had left was a reference to “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
Perhaps you haven’t, but likewise I didn’t argue that you did. I did read this:
I was inspired to respond, having images of modern day Joads trundling around with kit and kith and kin in a big pickup truck at $3.00 a gallon.
You keep saying out of one side of your mouth that people should just move to where the jobs are, if they are responsible adults, and out of the other side of your mouth that nobody is suggesting that the solution is that people should be moving around to find work.
Well, now we’re getting somewhere! Trouble is, they pretty much all do, all of the welfare programs (that I now of, disclaimer) have work programs attached. I have a good friend who lost his truck driving job and took training as a computer programmer (they taught him BASIC…job market for that skill is, well, thin…)
Now, I can accept on principle the notion that welfare should be restricted to people willing to work. But how in the world do we peer into another’s mind to make such a determination? How do we seperate out the worthy from the unworthy? Especially if you are reluctant to hire a whole bunch of bureaucrats to make such determinations? And how do we care for the children of the unworthy, who are guilty of nothing more than poor choice of parents? (Paris Hilton was smart, me, not so much…)
Right now, we have a shortage of nurses. OK, so we train thousands upon thousands of nurses from the welfare rolls. Well, not so fast. A nursing education depends on a degree of education already present, don’t you think? A high school drop out is not likely to be so equipped. So a program like this would get the “low hanging fruit”, those persons eminently trainable.
A program like this takes some years. How to we ensure that by the time our trainees graduate, our program hasn’t produced a glut of nurses? By hiring a huge government bureacracy to oversee?
There is no good solution here, anything we do is going to be a “muddle through and improvise” solution. But if we are going to make mistakes, and we are, I suggest that we are best served by making generous mistakes, rather than stingy ones. The one wastes money, the other, people.
A bit off target, apologies to Sarah: more to her point, wouldn’t such a relocation program have to cooperate with the “target” community? Can you see a govt* apparatchik* in Minnesota calling his counterpart in Oklahoma and saying “Hey, you got a labor shortage! Howzabout we send you a couple hundred thousand of our welfare cases? Well, sure, one way tickets. Hello? Hello?..”
No, I’m saying that it can be a solution in some cases, and that there’s no reason to consider it to be an absurd suggestion.
It’s not so much the worthy and unworthy…I would never use those terms. I think welfare (in the sense of free cash payment) is for people who are unable to work, not for those who are unwilling to work, and I don’t consider “unable” to mean, “can’t find a job, or won’t take a minimum wage job,” at least, not in a strong economy. I believe that the major function of social services should be to find people jobs, and then to supplement the earned income if necessary. If the jobs require relocation, then that’s just part of the deal. I agree with your second post that it could cause inter-state issues, and I’m not sure how that could be worked out. Certainly, it would require some sort of bureaucracy to run it. As contrary to my black little heart as that may be, I do recognize that it is necessary. Better than a bureaucracy that does nothing but cut checks, though.
And I have never, ever said that children should be left to go hungry. I actually think that WIC is one of the few programs in this country that works the way it is supposed to, and that I fully support without too many changes.
True, but nursing is a highly skilled job. There are plenty of good jobs out there that don’t require a strong background in science to be successful.
This is where controlled economies fail, isn’t it? It’s very difficult to centrally plan this kind of thing. But an attempt to do so with a relatively small population such as those welfare recipients who are able to work should at least be attempted.
Where have I ever said anything otherwise?
You lost me. You don’t consider “can’t find a job” the same as “unable to work”? So what do they do, just show up some place and start working? I realise thats a silly suggestion, but, well, whaaa?
It can’t. Nobody, but nobody is going to willingly open themselves to a flood of welfare cases. Minnesota is pretty darn liberal, but only a Dem admin would do it, and if they did, the local Pubbies would collapse in deleriums of joy, rolling about on the floor twitching with multiple orgasms…
Duly noted. If I seem to have insinuated such, it is entirely a misunderstanding, one merely hopes to point out unintended consequences visited upon the helpless.
Well, OK, what are they, if they are so plentiful? I don’t mean to badger, but I think you haven’t examined this premise closely enough. True enough, if there are plenty of good jobs available, anyone who doesn’t get one is likely nodamngood. But are they? Convince me.
It is. I daresay every state that has a welfare program has a work training program. But if you are going to train people to work productively and successfully, you either control the economy to accept them, or just take your chances. If your going to take your chances with other people’s lives, decency demands you offer them support while you experiment upon them, don’t you think? And you will be spending oodles of bucks, hiring teachers, administrators. You might even be spending more than you would just giving them money, I sure don’t know.
Not everything in that post is a direct rebuttal, nor most certainly not a rebuke.
But note your scorn for an agency that simply writes checks, compared with your (entirely sensible) support for the WIC Program (with which I heartily agree).
OK, you don’t like the idea of just giving away money. But is that based on practicality, or you just don’t like it? After all, we dole out buckets of money for military procurement, are we to imagine that money is carefully spent? We are spending a gazillion dollars on Iraq, are the beneficiaries of this largesse volunterring to work on a non-profit basis? Or are they stuffing it in their pockets and sticking a magnetic ribbon on their Lexus? If they are patriots, shouldn’t they offer to forego profit? Not costs, mind you, profit. What makes them worthy, and the welfare “bum” unworthy?
And doesn’t the money so doled go straight to the local economy, the liquor store, the crack dealer… Snark aside, the money spent at the grocery store will wend its way to the eminently deserving, your Archer Daniels Midlands, etc.
We are not after your little black heart, but your big grey brain. And such other parts as may prove interesting…
Meaning that if they were able to find one, or be set up with one, they would be able to work it. That is, not disabled.
True that no one state is going to take a ton of welfare cases from another, but deals could be worked out.
It is never far from my mind that there are truly unfortunate people in this world who need assistance. To be quite honest, I would hope that this would be such a given that it need not be a caveat to every argument I make here, but perhaps I’m wrong about that.
What I mean is, there is a huge gulf between high school dropout/no skills at all, and some college/strong background in science. You mentioned yourself your friend who got training in computer programming. Obviously, a half-assed attempt to help him out, if they trained him in BASIC, but real training as a real programmer would not necessarily be outside the abilities of even a high school dropout. There is also office work, bookkeeping, construction, maintenance, and many other jobs that need some training, but not a full college degree or more.
Please note that I am not saying that any of these jobs are currently ones that we have a huge dearth of applicants for, I’m merely pointing out that 1) you don’t have to train everyone for the same job, and 2) you don’t have to train people in jobs that require a lot of higher education.
I don’t think it’s experimenting with lives to say, “OK, we are going to set you up with some aid. Your part of the bargain is to choose one of these job training programs to enroll in, and when you have completed it, we will help you find a job.” I don’t think you can necessarily promise jobs, unless the government creates them, but finding a college or job training program is what millions upon millions of people do on their own, in order to have a way to support themselves. I don’t have a cite for this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that people who have such job training aren’t the types who typically end up on welfare. If for some reason, circumstances have proven to cause difficulties, there is nothing wrong with the government helping a person get through that phase of life.
I think that government agencies are inherently wasteful…I can live with that. My problem with just giving away free money is that it, IMO, ruins peoples’ lives. It destroys dignity, and makes it less likely that a person will get back on their feet.
I don’t care if it gets flushed down the toilet…that’s not at all my issue with it.
Well, my most interesting parts, I’ll save for my husband. My brain, on the other hand, was once much like yours, and I reformed it. Not much chance of my going back.