And yet every year, middle- and upper-middle-class people vote against measures that would shore up public schools and public transit. “Everyone else” does NOT need these institutions the same way that the poor does. “Everyone else” has alternative choices they can take advantage of, but not the poor. Maybe not in NYC. But this is what happens just about everywhere else.
Seriously, how many poor people do you know are trying to make $200k? Most people, regardless of income level, are just trying to keep from drowning. The minimum wage earner doesn’t sign up for Devry or ITT so that they can make six-figures. They sign up so that they can get out from behind a register or deep-fat fryer one day.
People who are protesting in the streets for livable wages aren’t asking for enough money for luxury automobiles and fancy condos. They just want to be able to have a modicum of financial hope. If every dime you have goes to rent and groceries, how can you possibly save enough money to get out of the projects?
And you think you would have benefited from learning this in high school?
By the time an adult becomes homeless–whether due to their own fuckuppery or life’s shittiness–what they learned back in one class in the 9th grade probably is not going to help them all that much. They’d do much better having a strengthened social safety net so that homelessness isn’t something they even have to worry about.
That just means social service agencies need to do a better job of reaching out to people. I don’t think this requires changing high school curricula.
No, it really wouldn’t. You’re basically saying that people should learn to find pleasure in soggy corn flakes when everyone else sitting at the dinner table is feasting on steaks and lobster–and being really loud and obnoxious about it, too. This defies all understanding of human nature.
Out of the things you listed I think our government should help your husband find a job and keep your neighborhood safe.
I don’t think the government should ensure you have enough money to move to a safe neighborhood thought.
I agree with this.
I’m a little conflicted on housing and minimum wage because I do not believe the government can do a good job of providing affordable housing or setting the minimum wage. But I confess I do not know much about these issues to be confident in my opinion about them.
You know I was not talking about me personally teaching poor people how to handle being poor, right?
I think you can make this argument for any government service. The poor probably benefit the most from having a postal service as well, but I do not consider it a poverty issue.
Like I said up thread, this isn’t what I meant.
This is actually what I meant by teaching people to be poor. Schools should make students think about what they would do should they become homeless. Instead they teach students financial planning with the assumption everyone is middle class trying to get into the upper class. There little to no information about how to jump from poverty to lower-middle class.
No I don’t.
And there is absolutely no guidance from our schools, pop-culture, and government on how to make these decisions. You can find articles on how to save money in your IRA, but nothing about how to save when there is no money for rent.
Why do you keep pointing out that I’m not poor. How is that relevant to our conversation?
You should stop assuming I think those other folks are stupid.
The fact that the only way to understand the system is from people who have experience with the system is precisely my point. There is no education from anyone else about the system. No one is teaching poor people how to survive poverty except other poor people.
You can argue that those poor people doing the teaching are smart, but I would respond by saying they are not enough. We need people from within the social programs educating the public and we need experts on those systems educating the public. Not just the people dealing with the system for years.
As an example, take the federal student loan system. You can call their number after hours and get a good explanation of their policies. Schools also have financial advisers on staff who are experts on the student loan system. Don’t you want the same thing for all social programs?
What does “I had a boyfriend when my daughter was three” have to do with poverty?
None of the cites provided in the article are particularly solid, but I am guessing “in a relationship with” does not include “he paid his child support on time”.
“At least one of their children”- what an interesting way to put it. How widely scattered must one’s children be to need such a qualification? And again - nominations for Father of the Year includes supporting one’s children, not just visiting the ones who live with girlfriend-before-last.
I don’t think the problem is not that Jamal doesn’t come to visit. It is more that Jamal is disproportionaley likely not to be living with his children’s mother than Juan or Biff are.
If you want to bust myths, you need a bit more than this.
Nowhere in my post was I judging her. On the contrary, I was using her as an example to remind ourselves what we should be grateful for . Had I not read her tale of woe I might have taken my family a bit more for granted. For those of us who have the comfort and safety of good health and a stable income we can sometimes forget these are not necessarily the default state of affairs for everybody. Because everybody is different.
I think there’s a basic misunderstanding of the relationship between wages and prices.
First, there are fundamentally only two basic business strategies. One is to differentiate yourself from your competition in some way. The other is to compete on price.
Problem is, when you compete on price, that’s pretty much the overriding motivator- your market is that group of consumers who are looking for the cheapest price. If you go and say “We charge 10% more, but we pay our workers more.” you’ve quit competing on price, and have moved into the differentiation strategy.
Wal-Mart competes on price. They pretty much have to be the lowest price vendor for the things they sell (or at least across a typical market basket anyway), or people will tend to go elsewhere.
For most retailers, I’d suspect that the big 3 costs are the product cost, the facilities cost (rent, A/C, heat, lighting), and the payroll cost. There’s only so much they can do about each of them, but driving wages to the bare minimum to which they can attract enough qualified people is what they’re effectively doing. What Wal-Mart does for product cost is to get it at the absolute minimum, and then drive their own supply chain costs down, so that they can make the same or more profit margin per unit as the competition, while actually selling it at the lowest cost on the street.
Long story short, thinking it’s some kind of scheme to drive wages down and thereby increase profit margin is mistaken. There’s not that much to squeeze in terms of wages, and their wages aren’t materially lower than most other similar retailers. Granted, Wal-Mart sounds like a hellish, horrid place to work, but it’s not the pay that’s really at issue; it’s the conditions.
An outfit like Trader Joe’s is differentiating themselves; just about nothing that TJ’s sells is on a normal grocery’s shelves, or if it is, it’s in some other format. TJ’s also sells things at a premium because their stuff is interesting, or packaged/pre-processed or whatever in some useful way. As a result, they can afford to pay better salaries, because they can roll that into their price without jacking up their lowest cost market position. Same thing for Costco.
I suppose I might wonder why someone is earning six figures and has nothing saved up for emergencies.
Discussions about what the poor should do to be less poor are largely academic and miss the point.
Look, Broomstick is an example of what could happen to anyone. Why are you implying that is a bad thing?
It is easy for us to focus on the negatives. But maybe I should appreciate my family, my job, and my house that I will hopefully own in 7 years a lot more knowing there are people out there in their fifties with none of those things. Maybe you should think about it too, Monstro.
I somewhat agree with this because I too have been around people who for example, didnt know there kid was eligible for free lunch. Didnt know they didnt have to pay school fees if they couldnt afford to. Didnt know about programs to provide free or reduced cost dental and medical care.
Depending upon your community you’d be surprised at what programs are available. For example, programs to provide free musical instruments to children who want to be in band but cant afford it.
Plus I’m around some people with money who would be glad to help out a person if they knew of a specific need.
Another suggestion, I’ve worked with Christmas in October and other groups that go out to peoples homes and do minor repairs and upgrades. Are there such programs in your community?
Well, in my case, the Nazis eliminated a lot of my extended family. No, that’s not hyperbole, those of my father’s family that didn’t leave Europe by 1939 all died in WWII. It’s not that I have no extended family, but mine is considerably smaller than many others. There are some other issues involving extended family as well as the small size of it (I will mention some of my spouse’s extended family later as highly toxic people).
This is also why orphans have historically had a much harder lot in life than people with family. Family does matter.
Your observation about white people is spot on in my opinion - some of it is due to cultural factors, such as a lot of white folks having swallowed the kool-aid on self-reliance to an extreme degree, and the fact that family/group assistance has been vital to the survival of black people in the US from colonial days onward, both in slave times and afterward. Other cultures can also have very firm notions of group (sometimes derided as “tribal attitudes”) or value self-reliance more.
At this point I will note that the family documented in “The Wonderful Whites of West Virginia” are, in fact, my spouse’s cousins. His mother’s maiden name was “White”. All I can say is thank god those people are reluctant to travel away from their mountains. You can not rely on those sorts for support during hard times.
Indeed, when my mother-in-law died the locks on her home were changed a half dozen times in two days, each group of relatives that ran through the place removed the existing lock and then replaced it when they left. The place was stripped. Despite our dire financial situation some of those people have called us up begging for money because of this or that need, often whining “But we’re BLOOOOOOD! Blood is thicker than water! We NEEEEEED this!” Apparently, I’m the interloper who “stole” their little angel away. Actually, before we got married my spouse was seriously looking to emigrating to England, even had working papers and a job waiting for him in Britain. In retrospect, it might have been better for him if he had left the country and become British. And it would have gotten him even further away from those nutjobs.
Alright, that went on a little longer than I intended, but they are very much an example of Toxic Family You Want to Run Far Away From.
OK, I’m on board with that.
Yeah, most media “financial advice” is pretty useless for people making under $100k. I know folks (some of which have been here on the Dope) who insist financial decision making is the same for everyone. I disagree. How you manage your resources when you’re in actual poverty is different than when you are wealthy.
Such a program also needs to be flexible.
When I was first a long-term unemployed at one point I was funneled into the “jobs program” as it then existed. Which was almost entirely geared to high school drop outs and mothers with young children trying to re-enter the job market. When that was the majority of people involved in such a program that was fine, but at the time the people running the program pretty much admitted that they were suddenly seeing people like me, with college degrees and decades of stable work experience, who either didn’t have children at home or whose children were late teens/young 20’s, entering the system. Of course, their GED programs and daycare networks were a complete mismatch.
Last year, after leaving a job due to being attacked by a co-worker (because, let me tell you, lower tier jobs have even more nutcases than upper tier ones) I was, again, entered into a state-sponsored jobs program. However, by that point the system had readjusted and, while still have GED programs and the like, now had a track for people like me. Some of it was skills testing and help with resumes, but there was also a sort of group counseling component with similar people where we could both vent about our frustrations AND work on how to market ourselves in a vastly changed job market. Things like how to deal with/avoid ageism (which, let me assure you, DOES exist). Networking with people of a similar background and skillset. Whether to attempt self-employment (and how to manage that if you’d never done it before) vs. looking for traditional paycheck.
MUCH more helpful, and it had a lot to do with suddenly getting interviews and landing my current job, which is not glamorous and for which I am tremendously overqualified but which I am grateful to have nonetheless.
Sometimes there’s something nasty going on in those “loving, supportive families” you’re not aware of.
^ This is an American cultural trait - that asking for help is shameful, that there is something wrong with people who need help.
Yeah, sometimes I take quite a lickin’ for daring to speak up. Uppity poor person!
The thing is, being poor shouldn’t be humiliating. It shouldn’t be an honor, either, but it shouldn’t be something that makes a person despised by others.
*>cough< * Sometimes I do have a teeny-tiny pity party…
I don’t get upset when someone says “I’m glad I’m not in your financial situation.” I don’t want to be in this situation, either. I get upset when someone implies I somehow deserve to be in this situation. No, no one “deserves” this. Sometimes it happens anyway.
Actually, my dad has been of immense help these past few years, as were my parents-in-law. Unfortunately, my in-laws died years ago, and my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer recently so that support will be ending. My sister the doctor has pledged to help me, but the relationship of siblings is different than that of parent and child, and my sister and her husband have financial and health issues of their own. One of the problems of aging is that certain of your supportive family disappear with time.
Yes - although when we met and early in our marriage it was my disabled husband who was the primary breadwinner. Problem is, in addition to disability he now has the mounting problems of age on top of it, and a much tighter job market.
In other than dollars and sense value, though, he’s hugely important as emotional support and he takes care of a lot of things that makes it easier for me to concentrate on work or looking for work. Things like renegotiating with our phone/internet company so we’re getting better service for less money. Or taking care of the garbage and some of the cleaning. Researching major purchases so we can get the most bang for our buck. Exterminating vermin that get into the house. Keeping the vehicle maintained or finding affordable repairs. He also is amazing at making a budget we can live with when we’re making next to nothing. He does add value to the household.
There’s also the fact that we will sometimes exert more effort for our families than we would for ourselves alone.
Yes, and this is why there is no one size fits all solution to these sorts of problems. Everyone has different skills and resources to bring to the problem.
I truly do appreciate your defense of my honor, but in this particular case I was not offended. There ARE humiliating aspects to poverty.
Actually, I’m thinking of having the spouse approach soup kitchens/pantries in the future - he’s Christian and might be able to get extra sympathy for his disability. I find dealing with the religion-based charities around here maddening, as in, they make me raging angry at least half the time.
In Chicago there’s usable mass transit, too.
Where I currently live - not nearly so much. But yeah - well off people have alternatives to mass transit, whether it’s a spare vehicle or the ability to pay for a cab or rent a car. Poor people… not so much.
If you’re couch surfing or living in a relative/friend’s basement on their charity you’re still homeless. You’re just not sleeping-on-the-sidewalk homeless.
But yeah - the survival skills for 30 years ago are not entirely applicable to today. Keeping current is important. That’s also why my local library has a crap load of computers and reserves some and some days specifically for job seekers or those looking for assistance, because on-line stuff has become so important that even the poor and homeless need access now.
See my above story about job seekers support in my area.
To their credit, the local sheriff department has been VERY responsive when we call for help.
However, there is some suspicion that the folks next door are still in business due to corruption/payoffs. Hey, we’re near Chicago, government corruption is legendary in this area.
Well, if the government CAN’T keep the neighborhood safe what’s the alternative for those of us so impoverished?
Someone fronting us the security deposit might, in fact, enable us to move to a better area. That might, in fact, be cheaper than funding the police to come out on multiple 911 calls per week.
There have certainly been issues with government housing and minimum wage, however, the free market sure as hell doesn’t do a good job of that, either.
Yes.
You do know the way you phrased that was offensive and condescending?
Oddly enough… faxing is a poverty issue.
A lot of government applications for assistance have to be either mailed (requiring a significant lead time - when you need to allow 5-10 business days for mail, but you’re given only 10-14 days as a deadline to get together documentation this is an issue) or faxed, but commercial fax services are a dollar or more a page - hey, my latest food stamp application was 15 pages long! So… you had people in dire poverty winding up paying $15-25 or even more to get their application in. OK, to put that perspective, that’s a week’s worth of food for these folks. And they already can’t afford to eat.
My state solved this problem by having local “welfare” (they have a fancier name, of course) supplying free faxing for such purposes. End of problem. People can get their documentation in on time and not be constrained by free market fees for the service.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is surprisingly simple.
We do appreciate the clarification.
^ This.
Of course, this would require society to admit that poverty is not always the fault of the poor, and that poverty can happen to anyone.
^ This.
You lack the perspective of personal experience. Personal experience does count. That’s why these discussions need poor people. That’s why committees to deal with poverty need to have poor people at the table. Unless you’ve been there yourself you don’t have the whole picture. Hell, even if you have been there you don’t have the whole picture.
Sure - and most programs do have such resources, but they aren’t advertised and it’s hard to find out where to go. That’s because being poor is treated as something shameful and not to be spoken of.
A man can only pay child support when he actually has a paycheck. Long term unemployment among certain groups has a huge impact on lack of parental support for children.
There is also the problem that social programs are constructed in such a manner that a woman may be better off remaining unmarried and not having a live in boyfriend.
For example: with food stamps, all adults in the household need to be either employed or occupied caring for children under 5. If that is not the case benefits can be cut or eliminated for the entire household after three months. Well, if Jamal can’t find a job then having him live with girlfriend+kid might actually jeopardize the ability to buy food for the family.
We had that problem with my spouse’s long term lack of job. I wound up physically dragging him to the welfare office to prove he was disabled so we wouldn’t lose our foodstamps. We STILL have that issue come up periodically - why isn’t this man working? I’m looking forward to him “aging out” of that requirement. It’s orders of magnitude worse for able-bodied men.
So, yeah, can you blame Jamal if Jamal living down the block rather than with his woman and kids actually makes the food budget more stable for the woman and kids? Isn’t that, in fact, a WISE decision in that circumstance?
Maybe we should revise some of these perverse incentives before bitching quite so much about broken families and children out of wedlock.
My county has a program to help folks entirely without health insurance to get their prescriptions at a reduced rate. If it weren’t for a local pharmacist who gave a damn we would never have known about it. As an example.
There are also sites like GoFundMe were people with needs advertise that need. It helps.
I know - but it’s frustrating to keep hearing “get section 8” when the people making that suggestion have no clue about a fundamental flaw in the program, which is a 10 year delay in receiving assistance and closed waiting lists.
Yes, but since I’m not the owner I can’t authorize repairs.
There are other problems, too, but I don’t want to get bogged down in a discussion of bigotry and political influence/corruption, as well as some dumbass restrictions that make such a group working on a residence owned by a landlord who lives in another county problematic.
I hope you don’t mind me saying that this is preposterous.
This does not change the fact that the article was stupid and mendacious. Read it again, and see the statistic they tried to spin. Roughly two thirds of the mothers they mention had no ongoing relationship with their children’s father, and this was supposed to prove that single mothers weren’t the problem.
I am going to need a cite that black fathers usually abandon their children so that they will qualify for welfare before I can decide. Could you provide such a cite?
No, I dont’ think we need to wait for that. These incentives can rather easily be avoided by avoiding unwed parenthood…
Which I think is much of the problem in discussions of this kind. Most people in the US are not poor, most poor people in the US do not stay poor, and most people who become poor move out of it (like you). I mean poor, not lower income. Many people, however, were poor, at least officially, at some time in their lives, especially when starting out in life. But they didn’t stay that way, and the things they did to get out of poverty (and the rate of upward mobility in the US has not changed over the last few decades - Obama was lying when he said so) were not particularly onerous. To take the one factor of unwed motherhood - it is not something that just happens. Most people recognize this, but some speak about it as if it were the flu - it just happens. That’s not accurate.
Some people think all poor people are lazy and stupid. That’s not true. Some people think all poor people are the helpless victims of circumstance. That’s not true either. We do the public debate a disservice when we pretend either.
This doesn’t directly address your challenge, but you may be interested to know that it is a myth that black fathers abandon their children more than other fathers of similar socio-economics do.
But methinks you will say this is “preposterous” as well.
This is no better than that other ridiculously dishonest article you linked to earlier.
Most black children in the US grow up without the long-term presence of their fathers in their homes. Growing up in a father-absent home correlates with almost every social pathology known to science. These are not myths; they are established facts.
Mother Jones and ThinkProgress are lying thru their teeth.
Black fathers are more likely to be poor and unemployed. Duh.
But when these poor, shiftless, lazy niggers are compared to their upstanding, morally-upright, hard-working white brethen, they are found to be just as active in their kids’ lives. Surprise.
The same as when middle-class and upper-middle class black fathers are compared to middle-class and upper-middle class white fathers. The blacks don’t disproportionately abandon their children when socioeconomics are accounted for.
What exactly are Mother Jones and ThinkProgress lying about? And is the CDC also lying?
They are more likely not to be married to the mother of their children.
But despite this, they are just as active in their kids’ lives. Which is surprising. Can’t we agree on that, at least?
And I notice you have nothing to say about the Heritage Foundation article. Do you still have doubts about Broomstick’s assertion, or are you satisfied?
Never have children. If you made a dumb mistake at 16 or 17, it’s your own damn lookout and you should just suck those babies right back into your vagina. Cause god knows, we never made any mistakes at 17.
Stick close to your family. Even if your family is abusive. Or what if you’re an immigrant and they live 7,000 miles away? Sucks to be you.
Be smart about your money. Even if you are not that smart. I expect you to be at least as smart as me, bitch.
Get on Section 8. Even though you probably can’t.
Make sure you check all of your neighborhood resources to see if you can score free stuff. Even though you might not have a computer to check, or time to do so, what with working two jobs and taking care of your kids.
Update your skills and keep them current. Even though you might not have the money or time to go back to school. And it’s a total crapshoot what skills might be useful or necessary or what skills might have a glut in them.
Did I miss anything?
I don’t want to subsidize the army or corporations. Yet millions of dollars of tax monies go to both of these behemoths. I accept that there is a percentage of people that will always be poor, and I’d rather not have them starving in the streets. I am OK with some freeloaders as long as the kids get food. And I don’t even have kids!