How do people end up so poor?

Broomstick,

You’re clearly perfectly content to judge certain people (the infertile) while demanding we not judge others (the poor).

Under your scenario person A can drop out of high school and have as many children as she wants even if she can’t afford them. But person B who waits until she’s completed her education and saved up some money AND then tries to have children only to find out she can’t without IVF shouldn’t have them at all and certainly shouldn’t get any kind of help from her insurance plan. Instead she should be perfectly content to have her paycheck docked to pay for birthing, feeding and educating person A’s kids and give up any thoughts of having her own children.

How is that fair?

Should we not treat endometriosis or PCOS as well because you’re not going to die?

Look I am extremely sympathetic to poor people. I don’t want to deny anyone access to medical care or shelter or food. I don’t think anyone should be forced to live on rice and beans nor do I have a hissy fit when I see someone pay for items with food stamps. I understand the job market sucks right now. I hear horror stories all the time. As far as I’m concerned most CEOs should be jailed for being a menace to society. But I’m not particularly sympathetic to certain choices that are just plain stupid that often increase your chances of poverty like dropping out of school or having more than one or two kids or breeding with a guy in jail or on drugs or someone who is just fucking stupid and does not have Paris Hilton’s money to compensate.

FYI, I sent you three pms. Two of them were in the last year. The last one was last night. I can’t find it and I’m too tired to go looking for the content I want to include. Good night.

Latest statistics show that the majority of women who get abortions were using contraceptives in the month when they conceived. They may not have used them effectively, but they are attempting their use. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority – perhaps not vast, but a majority – of poor women who continue their pregnancies are in the same position.

No, but in some states, having a child is the only way you can get access to certain aid at all. For example, as a single, childless woman in Pennsylvania, I have zero access to Medical Assistance. I do not qualify, even with zero assets and zero income, unless I’m in an emergency life or death situation, then I’m situationally covered, and as soon as I’m stabilized/treated for that situation, the coverage ends. And of course, of the triumvirate of basic assistance Medicaid is, in its way, the most important form of assistance given the cost of medical care. There are ways to live on a very low income, especially if you have a safe place to stay. There are ways to get food if you cannot afford it, or afford much, but low-cost or free medical care? No.

This isn’t to reinforce the “welfare queen” stereotype at all, but only to point out that in many ways, the safety net is a lot easier to access or only available to access if you’re a “family” which means having minor kids in the home.

The irony is, that means that poor people who have been responsible and haven’t had kids that they can’t afford on their own are told that their lives aren’t worth making it possible for them to see doctors in non-emergency situations because they don’t have kids relying upon them.

We should treat endometriosis and PCOS because they’re both painful conditions that can have a significant negative impact on a person’s health, and complications of both can cause very serious ailments. We shouldn’t treat them just because they impact fertility.

You are exactly right on this, but the average, non-welfare recipient, needs to realize that welfare benefits DO NOT EQUAL RICHES, or even a “decent standard of living”. They mean being able to feed your child macaroni and cheese (Kraft, if you’re lucky), and having health care benefits FOR THE KID. ONLY.
So, keep having those welfare babies. They’re a huge cash cow.:rolleyes:
Do YOU want to live on less than $1000 per month, $5-700 in food stamps, maybe some subsidized housing a couple years down the road, and medical for the kid? If yo’r’e extremely lucky, you can get subsidized housing and medical for Mom past the post partum period. Dad? He’s shit out of luck in most scenarios.
Now, think about that. And then, think about us pondering on the quandary of relatively well-off couples getting their insurance to cover their infertitility treatments. Aren’t they special? Have special names/genes to pass on? WTF ever.

I have been as polite and as articulate as I can be on this tonight. I am tired. I have three bushels of plums and about five pound of jalapenos to preserve tomorrow. As well as having NO MONEY.

I am cussing furiously at my monitor about people who think they can comprehend what poverty feels like, and try to dictate from that position. Come here, feel the pain of pointing fingers. I promise, you won’t like it.

Guess what? I am 47. I don’t have (not one) kid. I have a high school and a college degreee. I have had 3 excellent jobs, with excellent benefits and excellent emplyee reviews in my 47 years. Every last fucking one of them - they closed the whole damned department. Apparently, I suck as a manager (or possibley, I am part of a larger trend towanrd outsourcing, technology and fuck the people, increased profits for shareholders? YAY ME@!@$#$$%!)

Am I bitter? Yeah, a little. Am I determined. Hell Yeah, if for no other reason than to show you (and my uppity ass sister) that NOT ALL WELFARE RECIPIENTS ARE STUPID. *[SIZE=“1”]Oh look, isn’t it cute…the welfare lady can spell, type, and has an internet connection…shouldn’t she have a job?

*Fthe metaphoricalU and your sanctimonious horse. (Yeah she knows this is GD and not the Pit. Thus, the little letters.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=“3”]LOSHAN Slinks away to go to bed (furniture, YAY!) with her tail between her (statistically fertile) legs.[/SIZE]

Nite peeps.

Wow, this has really gone on for 5 pages…

The simple answer to the OP is that generally people don’t “end up” poor so much as start out that way and never really get off the bottom.
The difficulty in getting from below, to significantly above the poverty line, varies from place to place. People get a hard-on for the american dream but social mobility is actually quite low in the US compared to other developed nations.

That’s the simple response. Beyond that we could go into culture and the social reasons why some groups have low self-esteem / aspiration. I grew up in a poor neighbourhood and it’s only a slight exaggeration to say all my peers thought if they failed to become a professional football player, the only other option was a minimum wage job.

I’ve had to deal with infertility in my marriage and being poor in my life. Have you experienced either? If you haven’t you are NOT as qualified as I am judge people in those categories.

If having children was so important to person B she shouldn’t have waited so long to start having children. Plenty of women have juggled kids and education at the same time, it’s stressful and tiring but hardly rocket science. My oldest sister got her second, third, and fourth degrees AFTER she had kids, one of them with a serious chronic health issue. Sure, she wound up going to medical school later than most medical students but she had a family AND she’s a doctor so in the end she had it all, didn’t she? But if she had done medical school early and didn’t try to have kids until after 40 she likely wouldn’t have the kids. Instead, she had the kids first THEN went to medical school after 40

I’m not saying an infertile woman shouldn’t have IVF, I’m saying if she wants it she has to pay for it. A poor infertile woman - even one who CAN afford a kid - doesn’t get help for HER infertility, why should anyone else? Is it any less a medical condition because woman is poor?

Yes, I think IVF is a poor decision - but that’s my opinion. I think a lot of things people spend their money on are stupid, but if it’s their money and they can meet their basic bills I don’t care and it’s none of my business.

No one’s paycheck is “docked”. And the idea is not to generate another person but to feed people already here and alive. Your taxes pay for public school for everyone, not just the poor kids. If you lobbied your legislature to let medicaid pay for birth control and abortions maybe more poor women would take those options. And, oh horrors - feeding people who have nothing is bleeding you dry?

And no, she doesn’t have have to give up having children - she might just have to raise a child who isn’t biologically related. Millions of people have adopted, some of them perfectly capable of having children themselves.

It’s not fair that a woman only has a relatively short window of time in which to conceive - from menarche to about 35-40. It’s not about “fair”, it’s about biological facts.

We treat those not primarily because of infertility (which isn’t universal in either case) but because the have wide-ranging health effects. “Too old for viable eggs” is a state all women inevitably reach.

No, you’re not. You THINK you are, but you treat them as less than yourself.

Unless you promoted universal health coverage yes, you ARE denying people health care. I don’t know your position on that, are you for or against? (If you don’t want to add that tangent I’m OK with that, too)

What is your local government’s position on the homeless and/or tent cities? Do they try to provide services for those people, or do they have the police pick them up and foist them on some other community, or go to their tent cities and cut their tents apart to “discourage” them from camping, destroying those peoples’ only shelter? Do you even know how the homeless and poor are treated in your area?

Do you support your local food pantries? They’re all overstretched these days. Or, alternatively, do you help individuals? I’m poor as dirt, but I have enough dirt to garden - I not only harvest it for me, since mid-summer I’ve been dropping off a grocery bag full of vegetables every week or two to four other people who are even worse off than I am (two are disabled, two are a mother-daughter family. By the way - the mother didn’t give birth to her daughter, she adopted her.. Then the economy fell out from under them). Do you campaign for better school lunches for the poor kids in your area? What do you DO to help the less fortunate? Really, I want to hear that you’re helping others.

Good.

Did you know that food stamp benefits were reduced at one point last year? Despite rising food prices? Because, you know, it’s more important to balance the budget by trimming a food benefit for the poor than letting a tax cut for millionaires expire.

Sure - but loshan and I are living that horror story. It can make us cranky some days. Hearing about it is very different than actually experiencing it.

Once again - you are under the impression that that is a far higher percentage of the poor than is the actual case. Particularly since 2007.

Hey, my spouse never finished high school - he got a GED, then a bachelor’s, then a master’s. Unfortunately, then he also got disabled. But maybe you shouldn’t give up too soon on people. Yeah, sometimes people make a bad choice when they’re young. Rather than throw them on the trash heap, though, I’d rather society support them trying again, trying to fix the mistake, trying a different choice, having a second chance. Or yes, even a third.

Blocking access to BOTH birth control and abortion is not helping poor women control their fertility.

We should fund drug *treatment *far more generously than we do - but our society would rather build prisons.

I could go on, but this post is long enough.

OK, fine - you sent them. They just never arrived in my box. If you’re too busy maybe loshan can forward me a copy of what you sent.

Oh, please - the poverty rate has DOUBLED in the last few years. Unless some evil aliens invented a cloning ray and used it just on poor people that’s a lot of people falling from the middle class and above into poverty, not people starting out poor and staying there. More and more in this country people are starting off middle class and ending up poor.

The situation has changed, please update your knowledge.

Cite?

All I’m seeing are the Census Bureau figures saying that there were 35m poor in 2001 and 39m poor in 2011. That’s an increase, but far from a doubling and hardly surprising given the financial crisis.

First of all there are income levels between the usual definitions of “poor” and “middle class”. To straight away be framing this as the middle class (and above) becoming poor is misleading.

Secondly I obviously wasn’t trying to say income levels are static. I did say generally. Obviously some poor people are going to become wealthier and vice versa. This doesn’t take away from the fact that current wealth is a good indicator of rough future wealth of US citizens, because of the low social mobility.

Sorry I’m seeing 46 million now. Guess it really depends on how you count poverty but that appears to be the most headline figure in the report.

Oh get over yourself.

You’re poor and you’ve had a tough life; no one said it would be easy. I’m seriously annoyed by your general “butthurt” attitude towards anyone in this thread that may have any sort of differing opinion simply because you lived it, you must know better than us. If you know the situation so well, explain your current predicament. You’re presumably older than myself and presumably know the way the world works better than I, what’s your excuse for not making it? Who held you down? Who is to blame?

I didn’t have a problem going to school (which I paid for without assistance from my parents or family - had loans but paid them off), I didn’t have a problem analyzing what paid and what had a positive outlook in terms of careers and set my path accordingly, and I didn’t have a problem finding a well-paying job (due to my homework). What’s your partners degree(s) in?

Quit trying to paint anyone that doesn’t whole heartedly agree with you as unsympathetic or inhumane. We have our own problems, sorry if we’re not clamoring to help your plight.

I cannot fathom why a minority should be the catalyst for an overhaul of health care in this country. A majority of Americans have health insurance (253.6 million in 2009, for example and 73% of households making under $25,000 annually had it). (Cite)

Perhaps because as a society we have an ethical responsibility to protect the minority from the majority? To care for those less fortunate than we are? And to acknowledge that “there, but for the Grace of God, go I”? Because there is something really disturbing about “every man for himself” and “I’ve got mine?” Because I’m not an island and because my brother in law has an inadequate social safety net, I’m having to help support him and frankly, I’d rather just pay taxes and not be in a situation where my brother in law is dependent on me (he is disabled with terminal cancer - it isn’t like he’s a lazy good for nothing), but that isn’t an option.

My brother in law is one of those Americans making under $25k that has insurance. He only has it because Minnesota has pretty good insurance laws and subsidies to enable the poor and those with chronic conditions to get insurance. In some other states, he’d be dead by now.

Yes, there are different ways of defining “poverty”, some more stringent than others.

Sorry, massa, I got uppity and forgot we’s po’ people are supposed to be all humil’ated and proper humble.

No, actually until 4 years ago I DIDN’T have a tough life. Until four years ago I was solidly middle class, if not upper middle class. That’s the point - not everyone who is poor today was poor yesterday, and there are a LOT of formerly middle-class people down here on the bottom.

Experience counts. And I have just as much right to an opinion that differs as anyone else.

I was going along just fine until I was laid off in 2007. Due to advancing technology, the skills I acquired 25-30 years ago have in many ways been rendered obsolete. Therefore, I am having to start at the bottom again, with entry-level work which - SURPRISE! - doesn’t pay nearly as much as my former employment.

Yes, it’s that simple.

Up until four years ago I was very much “making it”. I made it, then four years ago I lost it - because my company downsized at the same time the economy tanked and other businesses largely stopped hiring.

No one “held me down”, it’s just the way things are right now. BLAMING people - the poor, “the Man”, the CEO, the companies, whoever - is not productive. It’s like saying who is at fault for a flood or hurricane. It just happened and a lot of people got caught in the mess.

But, like I said - it’s so much more comforting to think someone poor MUST have done something wrong and luck had nothing to do with it.

Neither did I - graduated from high school, got a four year college degree, no problem. Are you assuming that I didn’t get educated? I went to school on a scholarship, which might imply I’m actually a better student than average.

Yeah, well, you see, about 30 years ago I did that, too. I acquired skills that, at the time looked like sure things, guaranteed to always get you SOME sort of decent work. And for 30 years they were. Then things changed and now computers and automation do quite a bit of that.

So don’t be too sure that the skills that serve you now will be equally useful in the future.

Mechanical design and robotics. He also holds several patents. Unfortunately, due to advancing technology, none of those are profitable anymore because the items are now considered obsolete and no one wants them anymore.

He is also disabled, which definitely interferes with getting paying work.

People who are condescending are not sympathetic.

I not asking you to help me, I asking you to NOT HINDER me.

Because whether you realize it or not it’s NOT a minority that’s impacted. Americans don’t realize how craptastic and inadequate their health insurance is until they get hit with a catastrophic illness or injury.

60% of bankruptcies in the US are due to medical bills and MOST of those people had health insurance - it just wasn’t nearly as good as they thought it was.

Do you know how many people in, say, Germany go bankrupt due to medical bills? Zero. Sweden? Zero. The UK? Zero. Canada? Zero. And in those countries EVERYBODY is covered, nobody loses their coverage because they lose a job or a company goes out of business, they do it for less money per person and they get better results in so many basic, basic areas - like infant mortality. The infant mortality in the US is closer to the third world than Europe or Australia.

Universal coverage wouldn’t just help the poor - it would be an improvement for everyone. But so many people have swallowed the Kool-Aid propaganda that we have the “best” healthcare that they don’t realize that propaganda is wrong, they’ve been had, and they’ve been persuaded to act against their own self-interests.

There is a difference between opinion and berating. You berated someone who held an opinion or stance different from your own and then used your “experience” as validation to effectively tell him/her to shut up.

Oh well.

That’s anyone else’s problem because? You made the choice, live with the consequences. I’m sure you had no problems when you were making it. Never thought to branch out or consider that the bottom may fall out one day?

I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t lose my job, in fact I’ve doubled my income. I entered the job market in 2007, when this stuff really kicked in. Careful planning goes a long, long way.

Apparently you did do something wrong. You didn’t anticipate on someone not wanting your antiquated and useless skills. Times change, did you not go with them?

You stuck in a field that’s apparently no longer needed. Upper middle class, right? Never had the insight to think, “maybe this won’t be as profitable some day”?

Key phrase: At the time.

Oh, but you’re wrong.

It’s been used extensively for over a thousand years. My industry continues to post and post and post profits. It’s needed; it’s mandatory given building codes as well (hint, hint). The only time I’ll ever be without a job is if my employer ceases to exist because I’m the only one doing it here, and as I stated earlier, I’ll just go to the other 2 positions in the city that have been open for months because there is no one to fill them.

Oh, and don’t forget about the $4,000~ I’ve spent during the past 4 years traveling across the country to take classes to learn new things pertaining to my industry. Certifications, licensing, education costs money to obtain and maintain. Maybe I should whine to the government to pay these costs because they keep me relevant in the work force? Yeah, I don’t think so.

This is why research pays. I researched possible career paths and looked not necessarily for the highest paying but for the most recession-proof and valued career. But, because I made the right choice, I need to be sympathetic to you and your wrong choices. Furthermore, I should pay more in taxes to help you out, huh?

I hold a patent as well. I sold it to a company for $1. I didn’t want the money; just the good feeling that I contributed something to history, but that’s justt me. I’m proud of him. I don’t want to ever go through that process again so I can respect what I presume he went through, multiple times.

I’m sorry they’re obsolete.

That sounds like your problem, not mine. UHC, right? No thanks. I didn’t look towards anyone when I got in a car accident and had medical bills. I paid them and that was that. In before it wasn’t serious, it definitely was.

Oh well, deal with it.

How am I hindering you?

Oh save me. I suffered a catastrophic injury. Insurance served me well and I was back at it within the year.

Then I guess they should have done their research a bit more carefully, huh? What’s next? We pay for your car repairs because the manufacturer’s warranty wasn’t as comprehensive as you thought?

Ignorance to coverage is no excuse for a revamp to the system. I have no sympathy towards anyone that didn’t have the foresight to research or question coverage that’s pertains to their health.

Did you say you’re 24, kid?

I sincerely hope that life continues to treat you this well. And that someday you achieve the maturity and empathy necessary to be proud of your accomplishments AND appreciate the extent of your luck.

Oh, you’re cute.

Strike a nerve?

And you’re adorable, if you think that I’d have to be poor to find your confidence in your ability to always end up on top a little, well… premature.

To each their own.

I understand that, I meant ‘sitting pretty’ compared to what a single adult with no kid, who works part time and lives in a friend’s spare room, would get. She went to the welfare office to see what, if any help she could get, and all she got was a pittance for food stamps once a month. That was it. She was put on a list for Section 8 housing, which would take 4-5 years. She was turned down for Medicaid by making $10 a month too much. If you are a young woman and have kids, those kids at least get some kind of medical, food stamps, free lunch, and something toward housing. Not a lot, but something. (not to mention,a lot of the young women with kids come from big families who have been in the system for years, know how to work it, and are most certainly helping out their daughters and grandbabies under the table.) A lone adult? - food stamps, maybe $20 a week. You’re given the phone numbers for homeless shelters if you need a place to stay, and if you get sick, they give you the address of the nearest teaching hospital where you can go to the emergency room and wait, 6 hours or more. Now I’m not saying my friend should have all her needs taken care of, but if she had young kids, at least their most basic needs would be met. I keep telling her to not argue with the friend she’s staying with, not to argue with her boyfriend - and she has no family to lean on! She’s Depending on the kindness of friends, and hoping for help from strangers, i.e., social services. Grim.

Interesting combination of threads

I have a friend - a former coworker - who was very libertarian. Ranted about “why should I…” And was certain he was an island unto himself. And you see where this is going…

He was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve disease and became disabled and unable to work. Although he had disability insurance, it - like most disability insurance - only paid 2/3rds his salary and is taxable. His medical costs skyrocketed. He no longer qualified for his employers subsidized insurance and had to buy a much more expensive policy with much higher deductibles.

He lost his house. Went bankrupt. And is living on disability and SSDI at a reduced standard of living.

No longer on top.