Tying into this is also Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes’ Theory of Boots: a poor man buys himself a set of cheap cardboard boots for 10 bucks. Three weeks later his feet are soggy, a year later the boots are in tatters. A rich man buys a pair of good leather boots for 150 - but they’ll last him all of his walking life. They’ll even get passed down to his son.
Same thing with today’s poor - a clunker doesn’t work well, has shit mileage and costs a fortune in repairs to get it to run a painful thousand more miles before some other shit breaks. A shit microwave, or TV, or fridge will last what, 5 years ? 3 ? Or you can take out a loan for a good car, good appliances - or rent them. That’s pretty much self-lubing though, as you’ll end up paying many times as much in the end.
The poor get fucked coming or going. If you haven’t got a starting capital, to invest with, to get you on your feet ? Good luck breaking even, let alone getting ahead.
Suppose that, magically, everybody born after some certain date was brilliant (say, above a 160 I.Q.). Say that, magically, they were all hard-working. Does this mean that they are all going to get great jobs? Well, no. The jobs that are there aren’t going to magically change to fit their intelligence and hard work. There would still be the same jobs that have to be done which don’t require a lot of talent and don’t pay well. The top jobs aren’t going to magically increase in number. There will just be more competition for them.
Intelligence, other sorts of talent, and hard work may work for any individual person, but it doesn’t work for any entire society. The standard of living for everyone has slowly (very slowly) risen all over the world for many centuries, but that doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly becoming brilliant, talented, and hard-working would mean that the standard of living would immediately rise to vastly higher levels. Each person’s talent and hard work will contribute in some small way to an increased standard of living for everyone centuries ahead of now, but it won’t cause an immediate change in the level of society.
That’s an enormous pet peeve of mine, comparing dollar-for-dollar what should be put in terms of purchasing power.
My flat cost less than 150K€, bought before the Spanish construction bubble burst. One the same size, age and distribution in Madrid would go for about 250K€ now (when prices are actually lower). Sure, other things cost the same in both places, but rental/mortgage is a big chunk of most people’s expenses - enough to make straight salary comparisons between the two locations wobbly.
I generally meant personal, although the people throwing around the numbers in the other thread that I was following weren’t specifying.
I don’t like the rise of widespread professional contracting either; it’s become pretty prevalent in IT, where I work. The mentality is that they can hire a contractor to do something menial or relatively short-term, without the hassle of having to do all the human factors stuff like, oh, insurance, a decent desk, 401k, real management, etc… They can shove the contractors in the conference room, pay them $25/hr and tell them to STFU for their 90 days, then not renew the contract.
I wasn’t saying that joining the military would be fun, risk-free or easy, but that for a young kid growing up in poverty, it’s an almost sure-fire way to have a job, get trained in something, and through the GI bill, have a path toward something beyond. To me, at least, it seems like a no-brainer when compared to the prospect of a life in poverty. Granted, the kid would have had to identify it at a relatively young age to keep decent enough grades to graduate from school, but that shouldn’t be a remarkable achievement in any event.
Yeah, and a lot of poor kids do just that, and it provides a step up for when they get out.
However, again IMHO a big factor in the generational poor is role models. For someone who has no discernible successful role models, instead only has poor folk role models, the road out is frankly invisible.
In my case, growing up I did not know of one person in my family or my parents friends who attended college. It just wasn’t a path anyone that I knew of had taken. Everyone was blue collar working class or farmers. So, it wasn’t a negative, per se, but it also wasn’t setting me out on a path to advancement. Consider the poor, whose role models are - shall we say - also not setting their kids out on a path to advancement…
I see that as well. The computer industry used to be full of college dropouts and people who got degrees in English. The supply of trained engineers was short and companies were willing to let people learn on the job. A few companies, like IBM, would only look at college grads but they were seen as stuffy.
The last time I did recruiting the search was limited to a handful of top schools and people with Masters degrees in very specific majors.
It seems as though jobs are more and more bifurcated. You either have a professional job that pays extremely well or you are making less than you need to buy a house and raise a family.
A similar bifurcation has been talked about regarding our current unemployment condition. People who have jobs are essentially still doing fine, but anyone without a job has almost zero chance of getting back to where they were. It’s as if we’ve reached a new stabilization point.
There are some very simple answers to this question, in no particular order:
Kids
Alcohol
Tobacco
Drugs
Lottery/gambling
Lack of (as well as too much) insurance
I just watched a very strange movie call Forks Over Knives and in it someone talking about the poor and nutrition said, “The poor are poor in every aspect of life.” They have poor education, poor information, make poor decisions.
So we can bitch about luck, or education, or a system that keeps people down. Or we could look at the amount of money people making under $35k will waste on a daily basis.
I am late to the thread, but I will share my own experience. I was a tech at BellSouth. I made a base of 50k a year and with overtime it wasn’t unusual for me to pull in between 65k and 80k a year. However in 2003 I took a fall from a pole and broke my back. Unfortunately I can no longer work and have to rely on Social Security Disability. My benifit is a little over $19k per year.
To sum up it is very easy to “end up poor” even though you did your best to do everything right. I worked my whole life and worked hard. A simple mishap and I am no longer seated firmly in the middle class, but am now considered close to poor. It sucks, but I for one didn’t choose to be here, I am here due to circumstances beyond my control.
Two question: did you have disability insurance, and how much of your bonus were you saving each year?
What you describe is the sort of scenario I’m terrified of, but it’s something few people consider. I remember reading a list of “how to avoid being poor” a few years ago, and the number one recommendation was simply, “don’t get sick.”
Holy crap, a short Google search turned up this: Taxing the Poor
Almost 29 percent of adults with incomes of less than $15,000 are smokers; by contrast, only 17.2 percent of people with incomes higher than $50,000 smoke. [See Figure I-2.]
Nearly 40 percent of people with only a GED [General Educational Development] certificate are smokers; just 11.7 percent of people with a college degree - and 8 percent of people with a graduate degree - are smokers. 7
People in the bottom 20 percent of income earners, as a group, spend 2.33 percent of their income on tobacco products, more than 10 times the percentage of income paid by the highest earners.
In raw numbers, “High school dropouts who smoke spend an average of $1,301 on tobacco products each year; high school graduates who smoke spend $1,453.”
"The bottom quintile of income earners spent 2.1 percent of income on alcohol products, on the average, twice the middle quintile and more than three times the highest earners. "
Lower-income earners who actually purchase alcohol spent $1,158 per year. [See Table II-3.]
The highest-income earners who actually purchase alcohol spent $1,583 per year.
The lowest earners spent some 13 percent of total income on alcohol products, compared to 1.3 percent for the highest earners.*
Someone barely above the poverty level who smokes and drinks could easily spend 5-10% of his/her pre-tax income.
You forgot to mention Gates, who doesn’t have a college degree either, since he dropped out of Harvard. However he did have a very well-to-do father and so had a nice safety net.
Who formed his company in college - and was making enough to not have to bother to graduate.
You can include the NBA stars who got signed in college and so didn’t graduate also. But making a fortune being an NBA star is so unlikely that it is fair to call it basically impossible - I trust you wouldn’t advice kids to shoot baskets instead of doing homework, right?
People have been worrying about automation for ages, and the usual response is that automation also creates jobs. Which it does, and you listed some. The problem is that the person on the bottom of his class at school could get a factory job paying good money pretty easily, while he can’t get a programming job. My mother was a bookkeeper. That job has been automated away also, but people who could do it are probably in good shape for this environment. Not so the factory guys.
And my point is: it’s not easy, it’s not pleasant, it’s not a sure shot getting in, and even if you do get in, those years spent in the military might as well have been spent in prison for all the good they do to a body.
Well, except in prison you don’t have to lift heavy things.
Coming out of the military, barring specialty MOS (which you’re probably not going to get unless you’re enlisting out of higher education anyway) the only thing you’re gonna have learned is how to assault a building or clear a trench, which have surprisingly few applications in civilian life. OK, if you’re in a supply company or in the tanks, you might get a driving license out of it, admittedly. Whooptidoo.
Except of course it’s not an alternative to a life in poverty. It is a life in poverty. With the benefit of getting shot at and scarfing MREs.
I reiterate: joining the military as anything else than an officer out of West Point is a retarded, retarded idea. It really is. Ask any enlisted man on any forum.
The poverty rate since the census has gone up. Just recently I learned that 15% of the population is living below the poverty level which is set at maybe a little more than $11,000 for an individual. Can you imagine trying to live on less than a thousand dollars a month? How do you budget for that?
Every generation has its own luxuries. I don’t recall many wealthy folks leaving off restaurant meals in 1971. And many wealthy people and poor people still don’t have air conditioning. And I wouldn’t think that many people who have incomes below a thousand dollars a month have cell phones, televisions, or air conditioners because too many of them don’t have homes.
The shame is that businesses are doing well. But the Average American isn’t benefitting from it. We give corporations tax breaks with the idea that they will hire people and they don’t. That is not working. Either we should make it contingent or do away with the tax breaks.
How do you know whether the people you see are rich or poor? Whether they have color TVs and air-conditioners or not?
I disagree with that. The military isn’t for everyone, and there’s a lot of plenty good reasons for someone not to join…but it is the reason I’ll be able to get my way into the lower-middle class. I grew up poor but I’m able to use the GI Bill to go to college, without which I’d either still be in the military or working some job in the fields.
