How much of poverty is the poor persons responsiblity?

Great Debates
121

I don’t think that’s a good way to analyze the statistics. After welfare reform passed, the poverty rate dropped precipitously. It then went back up under Bush and now Obama, but that has to do with the poor employment situation. Fix that, and poverty levels will return to their late Clinton-era lows I bet.

But you and iiyandii are right to the extent that in the US, a welfare trap is now hard to get into since welfare reform passed. However, more and more working families are on food stamps, and small raises or working more hours can result in losing those food stamps for not much monetary gain. So you still have a perverse incentives problem and ACA makes it even worse. The sheer amount of benefits you lose now going from $8/hr to $10/hr is staggering.

122

Correlation does not equal causation. At the same time as welfare reform, there was a historic (and short, unfortunate) economic boom going on. I think the boom is far more responsible for the reduction in poverty than welfare reform – especially since the boom ended, and poverty went back up, but reform stuck around.

123

Whereas I’ve lived it.

The rich parents often have
-flexible work schedules (and/or 9-5 work schedules, the type best accomodated by curriculum nights
-reliable transportation
-sometimes a full-time parent (i.e., an adult whose primary job is housekeeping and child-rearing)
-positive school memories to draw on
-A career with status at least equal to a teacher’s status.

The poor parents often have
-Inflexible work schedules, including afternoon/evening shifts
-Unreliable or no transportation
-A single parent handling both all income and housekeeping and childrearing
-Negative school memories to draw on
-A career that’s lower status than teaching.

These tendencies are more than adequate to predict a different level of participation in something like parent night at a school, without proposing some sort of subhuman status for poor people (“Poor parents don’t care about their children!” are you kidding me?)

124

The the school my kids went to, which was solidly middle class or above, the teachers universally said that for the most part the parents who went to conferences are the ones who didn’t have to. Unsuprisingly, kids with parents heavily into school do better. Poverty is sometimes, but not always, correlated with caring about schools.
The town I used to live in had tons of people attending school events - but that was because many parents were working at research institutions, and the average block had at least a couple of PhDs on it.

Lets not throw the kids under the bus because their parents might not meet your high standards.

125

Not necessarily. It may be that without the extra funding they received compared to, say, Utah, they would be faring even worse, because they’re starting from so far behind. And that they do indeed need additional funding to close the gap even more.

126

There is a second aspect of the poverty policy debate that I think is missing from this discussion.

Even if we take as given that every poor person at some point in their life made a poor decision or series of poor decisions that wound them up in the position they find themselves in, what is the proper punishment?

Spray painting graffiti on a wall is a entirely a conscious choice by the perpetrator, yet most would view a 20 year prison sentence for such a crime to be excessive. Similarly, even conservatives generally believe that even if one made horrible choices in life that person should not be sentenced to starve to death. But beyond that things get a bit more controversial. Should the penalty for choosing to have unprotected sex when you can’t afford to raise a kid, be life long poverty? Should the penalty for allowing yourself to become addicted to drugs be that you should live on the street or be incarcerated? Should one finding oneself in a position where they have to rely on others for food be allowed to maintain their dignity?

Conservative in general tend to favor punishment as a means to deal with the ills of society. Liberals tend to take a more forgiving viewing negative consequences to anyone, even that of one who transgressed, as being a regretable.

127

There are some other issues with “better funding,” namely that kids in poverty tend to have higher diagnoses of conditions under IDEA and therefore require additional services. A kid multiply-identified as an exceptional child can cost many thousands a year more to educate than a middle-of-the-road kid.

128

And I wonder how much of that instability is an effect of poverty rather than a cause. I have always worked in jobs where I both encounter a lot of poor people and have reason to know their family circumstances. I rarely encounter “serial cohabiters” among the middle class. They exist, but in about the same proportions as divorced people who later remarry or cohabit with a new partner. They almost invariably refer to their children’s other parent as “my ex___”. Among the poor, it is far more common to encounter a person who as lived with three or four (or even more ) and to refer to the children’s other parent as “my son’s ___” as if the speaker had no independent relationship with the other parent. I can’t help but wonder if the instability has something to do different reasons for cohabiting - perhaps the poor cohabit for financial reasons and the middle-class do so for relationship reasons.

129

I see your point, but -

Should the penalty for drunk driving be death? No, but sometimes it works out that way, because drunks get into lots of accidents, and sometimes they die from it. Should the penalty for addiction be prison or homelessness? Given that we have no reliable way to “cure” addiction, it works out that way as well, sometimes. We can send drunks and addicts thru treatment, and most of the time they relapse.

The idea that conservatives want to punish and liberals want to help is a grotesque oversimplification, IMO. As mentioned earlier, most people do not stay poor all their lives. For whatever reason, they take advantage of what our society offers and progress up the ladder, to varying degrees. Some don’t. They were offered the same help, the same opportunities, and for a variety of reasons, they do not take the same advantage. There comes a point at which people are responsible for their own lives. No doubt liberals and conservatives would disagree on where that point occurs, but it occurs. Sooner or later, it becomes clear that we are simply throwing good money after bad, and since resources are not infinite, we would be better served spending our tax money on practically anything else, or simply leaving in the pockets of those who earned it, than trying to coax some nineteen year old with three children to put forth the effort to hold down a simple job and take care of her own family even if she’s tired out from her shift at Wal-Mart.

It depends. Depending on charity is inherently an undignified position. Adults care for themselves; it’s part of what the word means.

If you cannot feed yourself, that’s one thing. If you can, but would rather not, that’s another.

I was awake in the 90s when welfare reform was being proposed, and I remember the apocalyptic noises about how people were going to starve in the streets and so forth. But the reforms went thru, and guess what - most people adjusted. They didn’t starve. They didn’t like it, they complained, but they managed somehow. Some proportion were moved by force of circumstance to do what everybody else was doing, which was to go out and get a job and start your life, instead of collecting welfare for years.

Most of the time, we are helping. Sometimes, we are just enabling.

Unfortunately, much of the time, stopping enabling does not improve the situation. If I don’t give a wino a dollar, that isn’t going to stop him from drinking. So what do we do with him? Send him thru a treatment program that he has already been thru a dozen times? Send him to a shelter that won’t accept him because he’s drunk and pukes on the floors? Set him up with his own apartment so he can drink himself to death? If there were a simple solution, we would have done it by now. Spend more money? We have been spending more money every decade since the 60s, and that simple solution doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.

LBJ declared war on poverty fifty years ago. Poverty won.

Regards,
Shodan

130

Probably both. Being poor is a stressor that causes relationships to break up, which causes people to be poor.

I don’t know - maybe. Or maybe the detriment of unstable relationships has a greater effect on poor people than on the middle and upper classes. “When the middle class sneezes, the poor get pneumonia”. And more on women - after a divorce, the financial status of men goes up and women goes down. Maybe it works the same for breaking up with the father of your child as well.

Regards,
Shodan

131

This is a good post, IMO, and I think it helps demonstrate two of the big assumptions that liberals and conservatives disagree on here: the point at which we’re “throwing good money after bad”, and the proportion of those in poverty who are their basically just because of laziness (liberals think it’s pretty small, and conservatives [I think] believe it’s pretty large).

But other countries seem to have a better handle on poverty than us, while still having pretty strong and vibrant economies. I think we can do far better, and not by cutting programs.

132

That chart is laughably misleading. For example, in Iowa, 3% of students take the SAT whereas 84% of those in DC do. Look at the ACT scores, which is more popular in many of the those high performing SAT states. Iowa goes from being way ahead to 16th. Iowa is 13th when ranked by percentage of HS grads going to college- well below NJ and NY. For reference, Iowa and NJ graduate about the same percentage of their students. In the HS rankings, Iowa is 37th, and NJ and NY are 11th and 5th respectively.

That alone doesn’t speak directly to the spending argument, but it’s worth noting that schools in DC and other urban areas are often asked/required to take on tasks that raise their spending considerably. The takeaway being that the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

133

Keeping in mind that often we are not talking about the same group of people. I would not agree that conservatives think that most poor people are lazy. Non-disabled adults who are chronically poor? That may in many instances be true. And of course there is the gray area of those who fucked themselves into long-term poverty while still minors - by getting pregnant at age sixteen, or majoring in Gangsta Studies in high school, etc. Now they’re adults, and poor. Is it their fault? As mentioned earlier, it may not be a worthwhile question.

Done for now. Have a great weekend.

Regards,
Shodan

134

Funding has increased over the years. Have educational outcomes? Why would we expect them to get better with more funding when previous funding hikes have gotten such poor results?

135

When the system punishes someone for a bad decision, it’s fair to debate whether the system is just. When reality punishes you for a bad decision, the right approach is to educate people to make better decisions. Should be die because they chose to smoke? No, but they do. Should people die for pulling the tails of sharks? Shodan with the drunk driving example already explained this well. Reality is harsh. Although society can mitigate some of the effects of reality in small ways, the fact remains that a LOT of people die every year because they are morons.

136

SATs aren’t the only metric where well funded states often lag behind less well funded states. Graduation rates tell a similar story and there is no cherry picking of students on that measurement:

Again, Iowa beats the living snot out of DC and more funding has done nothing to help DC catch up.

You could then make the demographic argument, but the worse funded schools win there too:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_03_appendix_table_1.htm

African-Americans and Latinos graduate at higher rates in the South than in the Northeast.

If you don’t like the Manhattan Institute as a source, here’s a different set of numbers from the Education Department:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/interactive-state-high-school-graduation-rates-by-race-ethnicity-20121130

Note that Texas, which supposedly underfunds EVERYTHING, has one of the highest rates of graduation for African-American students.

137

The graph doesn’t show how well correlated that number is with per pupil spending or the composition of students, cost of living, services offered, etc. It’s basically useless as far as proving your point.

My point was not the DC has better schools. It’s that saying more money doesn’t help is kinda disingenuous when you are not comparing the same things.

That does not tell you the raw numbers, or the cost to educate those kids in a particular environment. It’s nice to see that those states do well, but it doesn’t speak much to the claim that more money doesn’t help. Especially given that common sense tells you money must be a factor at some point.

138

The claim that more money doesn’t help can be backed up simply by looking at how much spending has increased per pupil, yet not helped. Why would the next big increase in spending help when the previous ones did not?

There’s a reason why pretty much everyone in public service not beholden to teachers’ unions is looking at charter schools and other innovative ideas. It’s precisely because infusion after infusion of new money has accomplished very little.

139

You tell me–what apples-to-apples comparison will you use that controls for effects outside of the school environment? Funding has increased over the years in significant part due to IDEA. Do you think that educational outcomes for kids with disabilities are the same now as they were three decades ago?

In virtually every other field of human endeavor, applying more resources to an endeavor improves the outcome of the endeavor. Something magical apparently happens with teachers in which the unmarried schoolmarm teaching a roomful of kids age 5-20 achieves a better outcome than having trained professionals teach research-based curricula in an age-appropriate fashion; can you explain this magic?

140

Because every graph is not a linear line or a smooth curve. If I need to buy a car, and the lowest priced one is $5k, it doesn’t matter whether I have $0 or $4999 since neither amount will get me my goal. You can’t conclude money doesn’t matter just because I experienced no change in results from $0-$4999.

Obviously spending no money on public schools would be a disaster, right? It’s also obvious that spending $100k/student, even if it meant sending them to the best boarding school in the world, would be better and/or effective. So at both at both extremes, money matters. The issue is not whether it does, but HOW much it does at a given point when it’s spent in a given way.

Yes, spending $1000 more per student may not help in DC if it just used to buy ipads or is spent hiring specialists for a few dozen students with disabilities (not that either shouldn’t be done), but it may if it’s used to do something else. The argument is too simplistic, and makes little sense given that more money almost always equal better products and services if it is spent right. Nobody would ever say more money doesn’t buy you a better car, or a better vacation. In almost all cases, you can get a better car for $50k than you can for $25k or $15k. Yes, it may not always be worth the extra costs, especially given we are dealing with public resources, but the idea that it is not a qualitative factor in 99% of things is foolish in my opinion.

I love your qualification here. Anyone who is not looking at charter schools is beholden to unions, right? Charter schools and per pupil spending are not directly related anyway.