Well then, I wonder if you would be comfortable asserting that limiting the discussion to those who do not “lack the intelligence and/or physical capacity” everyone can?
Well we spend over $800 billion or 23% of the Federal budget on Medicare and Medicaid. Another $700 or so billion on Social Security. There’s the US Welfare System that’s run at the State level. There’s State Unemployment Insurance. I’m sure there’s room to manage them better, but they do exist.
Imagine you’re on the Titanic. To get off the ship, all you need to do is get on a lifeboat. Exempt from circumstances this isn’t difficult to do. But the issue is that there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone to get off. Furthermore, people in first class have been led to these boats before everyone else.
You managed to make your way out of third class and secure a spot. And yes, theoretically any able-bodied person could do so as well. But that doesn’t change the fact that not everyone can get off the ship.
Social security is a safety net for those over 65. Medicare is a safety net for those over 65. Medicaid is a safety net that mostly covers children. TANF is only for families with dependent children and has a 5 year lifetime limit. If you’re an able-bodied childless adult between 18 and 64 and you fall on hard times what safety net is there for you to get back on your feet? You can get foodstamps, how nice, you won’t starve you just won’t have anywhere to live while you struggle to look for work or retrain for a new profession or whatever the hell it is you need to climb out of the hole you’ve fallen into.
A “safety net” that allows adults in the potentially most productive years of theirs to fall through it is no safety net at all.
Quoting billions of dollars at me isn’t a convincing argument. It’s not about how much we spend, it’s about results, and from what I can see the results are crap. We take care of the old, even if they still could work they get benefits and don’t have to worry about medical coverage, and shit on the younger adults.
If everyday life were like being on the sinking Titanic that would be a good analogy. Except it’s not.
I believe that there will always be people who need to be taken care of, for whatever reason. There will always be people who just don’t function on a level where they are independent of help and handouts. And I agree with at least one poster who has said that there are people who are not living in poverty who are this way too, but these people have a cushion of money or wealth in their families, people who help them financially all of their lives. There will always be people who take advantage of social welfare programs too, people who could work, who are smart enough or sly enough to work the system, and who chose to do that instead of going out and getting a legitimate job. But, as at least one other poster has pointed out, such people also exist in the middle and upper classes as well. They are crooks whether they are poor and scamming the welfare programs or middle and upper class committing other kinds of white collar scams and getting away with it.
I also think that there is a mind set that causes people to stay in poverty, that people born in proverty, unless they are exceptional, will stay there because that is really the only thing they know. They are raised thinking the way other people live is not something attainable for them. They even resent and ridicule people who work hard, save money, stay within the law, value education, etc., because this is how they have been raised to look at the world. There are those who will rise above that, but most will not. I don’t know what can be done about it. In my heart, I believe education is the key, but so far, educators have not been able to reach the majority of the poor, whether they live in urban or rural areas, reach them in the sense of teaching them to know they can create a new reality for themselves if they just get a good education.
I believe your analogy fails drastically by assuming that there’s a real-world limit similar to the lack of physical lifeboats on the Titanic. On the Titanic, there are indeed a finite number of lifeboats and when they’re filled up, no others may use them. In the world, what limiting factor prevents others from also achieving success? How does my success limit the possibility of others’ success?
His getting into a good field was due to fortune? Ladies and gentlemen, I present…the liberal mindset.
Said the liberal.
We aren’t all in this together. I’m in it for me and mine. We can work together when it benefits both of us, like with a military, school, or road, but not when it just benefits you. Liberals love to talk about how transfer taxes keep the poor from eating the rich, but so far, no one’s gone around eating any rich folk, so I guess the system works.
Poor people that make stupid decisions stay poor. Poor people that don’t want to be poor anymore and make wise, hard decisions climb out. What’s the problem, again?
You seem to be hating enough hypothetical rich people for the lot of us.
Competition. To torture the analogy: It’s not that we aren’t constantly increasing the number and quality of the lifeboats. It’s that we have a large number of inherently crappy lifeboats we haven’t been able to get rid of yet and someone has to sit in them. The crappy lifeboats in this analogy are the necessary but low-wage jobs that just aren’t worth enough in the free market to pay non-poverty wages.
Imagine you came up with a formula for success; go to university for a four year degree, work hard and avoid drugs. On an individual level it’s a good plan, you might get unlucky but it should enable one to get a good job or acquire the skills to start a successful small business. Now imagine that everyone follows the same plan. What happens to the value of your degree?
Someone has to do the landscaping, bus the tables and mop the floors. In a meritocracy anyone can rise about the poverty-level jobs but everyone can’t, yet.
I am not a liberal. It’s just “said TriPolar”.
People get robbed and burglaraized all the time. Usually, the person doing these actions is poor and desperate. So, no the rich folk aren’t literally being eaten alive. You just happened to miss the point.
Also, if you read my post, the military, schools, and roads were exactly what I was talking about when I said, “we are all in this together.” To suggest otherwise is to laugh. I’d like to see how far “you and yours” get without the benefit of a healthy, functioning society.
Is it a stupid decision to be born poor? Because more often than not, being born into poverty is the most common factor in a lifetime of poverty. Sure, there are other factors, like making “wise” decisions that should be considered. I don’t see anyone disputing that. It’s not anywhere as simple as your making it out to be.
By all means, go ahead with your selfish attitude. Get “yours” and fuck everybody else. I prefer to help out those in need because it’s better for us all in the long run. Plus, I can recognize that I have far more in common with them than I do the top 1%.
Also, when did “me and mine” exclude other human beings in this country?
Imagine a large percentage of people went to university for science and engineering degrees. They learn how to create machines that automate those types of jobs. Sure, not all of them. But a large percentage. People get smarter, and life gets easier. It may be wishful thinking, but personally I think it is worth striving for.
Sure, technology improvements are part of what ‘increasing the quality of the lifeboats’ and ‘haven’t been able to get rid of yet’ was refering to.
We’ve eliminated a lot of crappy low-wage jobs through technology but there are still lots of them out there. And lots will still be there for decades to come (at least).
The problem with addressing the “culture of poverty” is that it doesn’t work. History shows that the nobody has any problem at all adapting to prosperity when it is there. From Ireland to China, when a country gets a functioning economy, people jump to get on that bus.
Some science tracks are actually pretty overprescribed, especially for students who don’t have the aptitude or desire to get a PhD. Film students, on average, make more money than people who studied biology in undergrad.
Not going to deny your point. But, let’s not forget that science, technology, and engineering made film possible in the first place.
It’s our foundation as a society is all I’m saying.
I found a
The poverty mentality isn’t limited to the US and certainly isn’t limited to “minorities”. I found Atlantic Canada to have a similar cultural mentality of relying on government handouts and making only the minimum effort required to avoid losing them. People joked about joing on interviews for jobs you really hoped you didn’t get but you had to go on the interview to prove that you were looking for work so you didn’t lose your “pogey”.
And for years, the only films were tech demos where they pointed the camera at nothing in particular, and people came to “oh” and “ah” over the projector itself. It actually took a significant amount of time to figure out that you could use film to tell a story, turning film into a relevant and meaningful thing.
You could play this all day, but the point is that a society needs a diverse balance of complementary skills to be innovative and prosperous.
Yeah you could play it all day, but that’s the point. If we are to talk about ways to end poverty, then IMO education is the answer.
Again, it takes tax dollars. People don’t like to pay them. So, instead we look for other short term solutions and the usual one is for poor people to simply figure it out on their own. Look at how well that is working out.