Are the Poor Working Poor Working, or Working Poorly?

Great Debates
1

Yeah, parse that. :slight_smile:

Anyway. As a wussy, idealistic liberal, I tend to think that given the great prosperity of the United States, every citizen working a forty hour week ought to be able to make enough money to provide food, shelter, and a standard of living above the poverty line for themselves and their children. Failing that, I believe it is appropriate for the government to supplement the income of working poor in such a way that they have sufficient food, shelter, etcetera for themselves and their children.

Would someone care to explain to me why this should not be so?

2

I have to absolutely agree with the OP. Anyone who is willing to work should be paid enough to afford rent, food, clothing, and raise a family. I think it is a crying shame for CEOs, particularly bad ones getting golden parachutes, to make as much money as they do. After all, the workers are as important, or even more important, to a company’s success than the management.

Ack, no! Government never helps; it only hurts. Government programs are wasteful feeding troughs for bureaucrats which never help the people they were intended for.
Perhaps a new birth of the labor union is called for, but not government intervention!

3

goboy:

Government never helps?? Overly simplistic, I feel. Besides, you left off the qualifier when you quoted me. I said that failing a reasonable living wage for full-time workers, there should be some way for the government–given our prosperity–to make up the shortfall between wages and the edge of poverty. Kinda how FEMA should stay out of regions and let them handle themselves, except as a last resort when a hurricane hits and the place is a disaster area. That’s the point of FEMA; that can be the point of, say, food stamps and low-income housing.

4

Would you care to explain why you feel this? Is it just that you feel sorry for these people, or you think there would be great economic benefit to us all, or it would push us toward a great Utopia, or what?

5

Bacause a nation is just an extended form of family, and family members should look after each other.

6

As far as the OP title, both. I tend to lean toward the working poorly side, but I’m not going to pretend that many people don’t get the shaft in life.
I’m interested to see what makes you think that everyone deserves to be supported. That is, how is in the very nature of poverty that enables a person to hold a claim on non-poor people?
Goboy: “Anyone who is willing to work should be paid enough to afford rent, food, clothing, and raise a family.”
Well, then you can subsidize my 35K a year ass, too, because I eat poorly, have a very limited wardrobe and definitely cannot afford to raise a family. Half my paycheck itself goes just to rent alone (and I got a REAL cheap place). Oh, did you want to subsidize housing, too?

New labor party? What, the corrupt (not all, before anyone shits their pants) unions aren’t enough for you? There was a beating this summer and a teamster leader was charged with authorizing it…because some other union chick was moving in on his “territory.” What we need is some sort of Reformation of existing labor groups like the Church underwent some time ago. Course, ya never know, might just lead to an American ALA (American Liberal Army hardy-har-har).

You want a wealthy productive world-leader of a nation but you don’t want to take the cons that come with it…namely, an “unfair” (whatever THAT means) distribution of wealth.

Here’s a simple solution…salary caps. Why not? If it is a proposition that we put a “floor” on salaries why not a ceiling as well? What do you think…100K a year per person? 1Million? How rich is too rich for you?

7

Two reasons, one subjective and one objective. First, yeah, I happen to think that given the social standards that have been set up regarding forty-hour work weeks, it’s not unreasonable–in a prosperous society–that if you work full-time, you should be able to live above poverty; furthermore, it seems as if many of us are pretty much fine with the idea of someone working eighty hours a week to support their families…many of us would even deny them what little institutional assistance they’re receiving as is. And I consider that, personally, pretty damn tragic. That’s not the kind of society I want to live in.

My objective reason is similar to the second thing you listed above: there are tremendous economic and social benefits to be conferred by having less people in poverty. Less crime and more consumer purchasing power, to name but two.

8

ARL: Examining your posts for relevant points is like trying to find a needle in a stack of straw men. :slight_smile: I’ll respond in a bit; have to go get some breakfast.

9

Mea culpa, Gadarene; I should have included the qualifying clause. however, as a dyed in the wool Libertarian, I stand by my statement that government never helps, “overly simplistic” as it may be.

FEMA’s aid is temporary to help people get back on their feet after a disaster; however, food-stamps and Title 8 housing are seen as permanent entitlements, not as short-term help to ease an income shortfall. Making people dependent on government charity is one of the reasons for the catastrophic failure of welfare and the creation of the urban underclass.

We need to give people the means to fend for themselves, not to become permanent aid recipients; teach a man to fish vs. give a man a fish and all that.

Aynrandlover, I’m AGAINST handouts, but I am for a lving wage.
Suirely, you can’t be for the exploitation of the poor? Heck, if you’re against workers organizing to negotiate with management, why not bring back child labor? We had that in the US until 1911, and there was a considerable protest against the child labor laws from factory owners.

OK, Gadarene government rarely helps. :slight_smile:

10

Then ignore the previous post and let me give you a more efficient post to address.

  1. Why do you feel that everyone deserves to be supported?
  2. Would a salary cap be a viable option? Why not if not, and if so, at what point is a person capped?
  3. Where the hell did I set up a strawman?
    The rest is for goboy.
    Living wage = handout. That is, we must give someone something the “free” market doesn’t provide them for their own effort. You can dress it up all pretty and create a new name for it but its a hand-out.
    As well, I am against exploitation of ANYONE, rich or poor. To merely solve the poor’s problems by taking it out on the rich is not, IMO, a viable solution. But, I’m one of those everyone-should-pull-their-own-weight liberals. You know the type :wink:
    As well, I don’t see that the poor are exploited at all as a general rule. We provide public education, state schools for advanced learning, etc. You want a Janitor’s salary to be about 24 K a year so he can “make a living?” How much do you pay the undergraduate, then? You want the full-time McDonald’s worker to earn 22K a year? How much do you want to pay for a hamburger?
11

Gadarene, if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time on ARL. His name says it all…if he likes Ayn Rand, you’ll never be able to talk any sense into him. I mean, have you read any of her dreck? shudders

Anyway, I too am troubled by this…a person can work 40 hours a week & still live in abject poverty. (& that’s even if they don’t have any children to support.) I don’t know what the answer is, though I am disinclined to believe that the government is the best way to implement a solution. I used to be a social worker & I’ve seen enough abuses & lazy record-keeping to last me for my next several lifetimes. A culture of dependency gets built up over time & it all becomes so depressing that I had to quit my job at Social Services & go work for the phone company.

I agree that we need to teach people to fish, as it were, but I also know firsthand that many of them really do NOT want to learn. THAT is what we need to change. Any suggestions?

P.S. to aynrandlover - if you make 35K & still feel po’, you should move someplace with a lower cost of living.

12

Stella
Yeah, a name says it all doesn’t it? :rolleyes: If you really must know what I’m like I’m an anarchist. Because of what people are like, however, I don’t find anarchy possible (or at least not peaceful) and so my next alternative is free market capitalism.

You may perform a search on my name, if you like, and find posts where I do have my mind changed in light of new opinions/arguments. But then, that would require you to look at my arguments in the first place instead of dismissing me.
As well, if I have to move to compensate for my wages isn’t that a little unfair? :wink: I make a suggestion like that and its cold-blooded capitalism (and yes, I have been attacked for that very stance). I live where I want and I take what I have to with it. To compensate for cheaper rent I’d either have to delibertely make less money to get public housing or move about 1.5 hours away from where I work. Anyway, I’m not complaining, just pointing out that “fair” wages are much more tricky than just providing everyone with 25K a year or something.

But anyway, ouch! you went from social services to the phone company? I hope you got a desk job…the field work is terrible.
I agree as well that a culture of dependancy is very likely (though not absolute).

13

I like your goals, Gad, I just don’t see a way of getting there.

I mean, take Person A. He is a teller at a bank. He makes $25,000 a year, and lives alone. He can pay his rent, buy food, and have a little bit of fun (well, unless he lives in NYC; then he has to scrounge old pizza out of the Dumpster). His life is fine. But the next day, Person B gets hired. He is also a teller, but, having just started, he has less experience than Person A and so his work is “worth less” to the the bank. But Person B has six children, and the $22,500 he makes in no way keeps them above the poverty line. Should the company pay a less valuable employee, who has made financially unsound life decisions (six kids on a low wage), more than the more valuable employee who lives within his means? Or should the government pay to bring Person B up to a certain level? And to do so, do they raise Person A’s taxes, essentially charging him for his coworker’s lifestyle?

I realize we do this to a certain extent now with some social assistance programs, but it’s on a very limited (comparatively) scale.

And if you pay everyone more, and there is more money floating around the economy, but the same level of production, doesn’t the value of each dollar go down, thus putting Person B back in the same hole?

14

I think y’all are kind of missing something regarding the basic limits of capitalism. I’ll admit this does not apply at all times and all places, but there is a cyclicism inherent in the system and here is why.

If we assume every full-time working person can produce enought to support two people (just to simplify the math). Then there is no economic incentive to provide jobs to about 50% of the population. You subtract out children and eldery IRL of course, but you can still see the flaw. There are going to be people left over.

The leftover people are either non-value added employees (i.e. poorly working) who may or may not get paid a lot of money, or unemployeed looking for work (currently only 4% according to the government).

If you do not pay those people enough, they can’t buy what the rest produce, thus slowing the economy. You have to redistribute wealth somehow or capitalism doesn’t work.

The free market solution is to try to let the unemployeed cycle through so you don’t always have that same percent on the bottom. Currently, that might be 8% working every other month, or everyone being unemployeed at least one month out of every 25.

15

As a refutaion of the living wage=handout, let me point to the example of Henry Ford, no liberal he. Ford paid his workers enough that they could afford to buy the cars they made, reasoning that would only increase his pool of customers.

There is something wrong when a CEO who runs a company’s stock price into the ground gets a hefty severance package on top of his already bloated salary, while someone working hard 40 hours a week can’t afford to buy shoes for his kids. That’s not free market capitalism, that’s neo-feudalism.

16

I read an article in the paper yesterday which stated that one third of taxpaying households in the North Carolina aren’t making enough money to cover basic expenses (food, housing, child care, medical costs). I can’t imagine that all of these people are lazy welfare queens.

17

Here’s the trouble with the “everyone who works should be able to support a family” argument.

Some people just aren’t worth the cost. I’m sure you’ve seen teenage servers at McDonalds who didn’t even justify their $5.50. And this job should support a family of four? The only reason the job exists is because they can pay very very low wages. And the only people who take these jobs are people who have no skills. There are lots of reasons they don’t have any skills, probably the biggest is that this is their first ever job and they are 9th graders. Or they could be handicapped in some way, or never worked before, or their skill has becomoe obsolete or out of demand.

We can all look across the Atlantic ocean and see how Europe is doing. Well, they have a great safety net, etc, but they also have very high unemployment even in good economic times. And the reason is that it is impossible to hire someone cheaply over there, because everybody gets the big social benefits package.

Now, some may say this is a choice, and they prefer the european system. Well, sure, of course most Europeans prefer to do it that way, that’s why they do it that way. But, over here we feel that the tradeoff isn’t worth it, that all the taxes and social programs and labor regulations are too much, and that we would rather have economic inequality than unemployment and stagnation.

Btw…a single person with no dependents who works 40 hours a week a minimum wage is not living in abject poverty. I’ve lived for YEARS on a pitiful income. Not working at McDonalds, but working as a private tutor. I liked it, and even though it paid well, I could never get many billable hours in a week.

But the answer is that you have to live a different lifestyle from a middle class wage earner. Yes, it’s going to feel like poverty if you try to maintain a car, live by yourself, own a house, travel the world, buy consumer items, eat at restaurants, buy new clothes, etc. However, you can take the bus/bike, have room-mates, rent, stay home, get books from the library, cook your own food and shop sales at the market, and only buy second hand clothes from thrift stores.

So HOW can a person work full time and live in poverty? If we define poverty as “any income under $XXX”, then sure. But all you have to do is pay attention to your spending.

Look, I know lots of guys who live in poverty, and I’m sure you all know similar people. Typically, if they get a good paying (for blue collar work) job they’ll have a fight with the manager in a month or two and get themselves fired. And somehow, every job they’ve ever had, the boss has been a flaming jerk who went out of their way to disrespect them. Funny, but every boss I’ve had has either been nice, or an avoidable annoyance. Or it could be that they stop showing up for work for a while, and then they get fired. Could be because they were sick (hung over), or their ex girlfriend showed up, or whatever. And then they have huge fines due, because they got unfairly pulled over by the cops, who have it in for them. And of course they were driving without a license, cause they can’t pay the fines, so they get more fines, because their license was suspended for DUI a couple years ago, and they keep racking up citations.

But the point is, these guys have plenty of opportunity, they actually get new jobs all the time…but they constantly sabotage themselves. So, what should society do to help these guys? In my humble opinion, there’s nothing we can do. Job training? Sure, but you’ve got to show up for the training and not enrage the teachers. Jobs? They get jobs, but lose them. Drug/Alcohol counseling? Sure, but you’ve got to WANT to change.

The thing that would help would be a culture of work, where the only respect you get is based on your work. But how do you create that?

18

jmullaney, that is a very nice argument. I wonder what exactly you mean by “slows” the economy. These poor people aren’t consumers anyway…they aren’t what the majority of production is for. Giving them money will surely stimulate one sector of the economy…say, food purchasing, clothing, petty consumables, but it won’t by a long shot create the growth you might hope.
Wealth distribution needs to provide incentive, not a baseline. Most of our socially progressive programs now are satisfying to me. Anyone willing to put forth the effort may advance their station in life. I would like even more welfare reform and divert funds into education, but really we’ve got a fantastic system now.

19

I’m dying to coment on all this, but first I would like “your” definition of a living wage, not some vague, an obscure definintion. You tell me (and everyone else) what a living wage is (to you) before this gets too twisted. Let me say that I’m leaning towards aynrandlover and Necros views on this, but I’m not entirely opposed to redistribution (assuming that it is reasonable).

So this is my request:

  1. define a living wage
  2. explain how we provide it (the employer, minimum wage, EITC, etc. etc.)
    I would like to give my opinion, but I’d prefer to know what I’m dealing with first. My thought, in advance is that providing a short-run increase in wages of the “working poor”, will not be as difficult as you may think. Particularly if you knew the actually size of the group we label as working poor. However, the downside is that the larger group (the nonworking poor) may have the incentive to try to take advantage of these benefits and enter the labor mkt to exploit this. To give you an idea of the size of this group we are concerned with, about 4 million people earn minimum wage in the US, and a very large share of them are teenagers (btw that is a hint, to one of the problems with you living wage;)).

I’m looking forward to clarification on this, thanks.

20

Now THAT is a good point…costs of living differ dramatically in different areas. For example, aynrandlover makes 35K & feels po’. I make 40K, which is not a lot more, & I have enough disposable income that I could afford to drop $213.85 at the liquor store last week. Difference is, I live in Baltimore & aynrandlover doesn’t.

It costs less to live in Baltimore than it does to live in, say, San Francisco. So would working poor people in Baltimore get less compensation than the working poor in San Francisco would? Would the poor then congregate in those cities with higher costs of living?

Hmm.

& yes, I have a desk job (I’m a project manager)…though I have been in the field & can tell you that the field work for the phone company is inifintely easier than the field work I did when I worked for Social Services.