Again, that’s not the question. The question, rather, is: are the better than they would have been otherwise, given everything else that was also changing at the same time.
Additional schooling/vocational ed/college can certainly make a difference, but that’s not necessarily as much of a guarantee (so to speak) as it used to be. There are plenty of unemployed or underemployed people with multiple high degrees.
Half true. Heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns? I’m sure that spending $8000 per student is better than spending $1000 per student. But is $16,000 per student significantly better than $8000? The data says no.
What has changed that would make educational outcomes worse assuming funding had remained constant?
By contrast, I have a feeling wealth is correlated with demonstrating in a tangible way that you are about your child(ren)'s education. With involvement, because of the things on LHoD’s list.
Every adult in my household is looking for a job. “Go out and get a job” is simply not the panacea at least two people in this thread have suggested it is.
Indeed, that is, at least to me, the crux of the “poverty is not the fault of the poor” position: either the obvious ways out of poverty are obvious to poor people too, who would be happy to take them if they could, or they’re obvious only to people naïve enough about poverty to miss the reasons they won’t help*. Education and training come up, say, but even if you can afford it, that may well do no more than change the nature of the jobs you get rejected from, while making you overqualified for a lot of jobs that depend on your resume rather than drawing on the network you don’t have.
*Or, as Shodan said in a later post, they require a time machine.
The reasonably rich people who came to our GATE meetings made their money in tech. I don’t know if this is also true of football players and show biz people. (I don’t know it isn’t, just not sure.)
That seems odd given the dependence of Buddhist monks on alms.
Results of observational analysis are never considered highly conclusive due to the possibility of lurking variables.
Which is convenient, since you can never prove that spending more money won’t help. Of course, you can never prove that it will help either.
Saying that a handful of corporate bailouts equates to a need to subsidize the stupid-ass decisions of millions of people isn’t rational or reasonable.
I mean, how many poor people smoke? Why should I pay a freaking dime to help anyone who smokes live another day, when the health effects of smoking have been clearly articulated for 40 years?
Or some dumb-ass who either got knocked up or knocked some chick up when they were 15? I sure as hell knew that parenthood before I was out of college was NOT the way to be successful, so I kept that shit in my pants or kept it wrapped. I don’t feel a lot of sympathy, and nor do I feel like it’s my problem to pay for that either.
Or some family whose parents make minimum wage and already have 4 kids and are having a 5th? Why should I pay a freaking cent for people who make such dumb decisions? 1 kid would have been too much in that situation, but 5 is just boneheaded. I’d be willing to pay for birth control, but I fail to see why I should have to subsidize some poor person’s huge family.
These are decisions that have no positive intent- at best, they’re decisions of obliviousness, and at worst, it’s stupidity or just not giving a shit. At least the rich bankers were trying to make profits for their companies, even if it was in a sketchy and risky way. That’s the difference here- the bankers’ intent was positive, while the knuckleheads’ intent was just… stupid.
I agree – corporate bailouts (and corporate misconduct) is far, far worse.
You’re already doing this with insurance payments. And I’m not sure what your point is – do you think welfare, SS, and other social income systems should not apply to smokers?
Again, you’re already paying for it, regardless of social programs. And considering that the children bear no blame for their circumstances, I believe such assistance is just for their sake alone. In addition, IMO, bad decisions early in life shouldn’t doom someone to a bad life forever – the system should be such that those in need, which will include some people who made poor decisions, should be given assistance. Some people will probably get assistance when they don’t absolutely need it, but I prefer that to some people not getting assistance when they really need it.
Don’t worry – the tiny additional payments from more kids are not nearly enough to cover the additional expense. I support greater emphasis on education (especially for women) and family planning, which really has been proven throughout the world to reduce family sizes.
LOL that you think the bankers’ intent was positive. In many cases, they were fully aware they were screwing over their customers, and thought nothing of it. Hurting people in pursuit of money is always wrong, and for me, far less forgivable then having unprotected sex when you’re 15.
It should be noted that the bankers paid back the money. So we should really be talking about auto companies here in this comparison.
Did they also repair the damage they did to the economy?
Don’t worry, the government is still trying to reinflate the bubble. And why not? They won’t get blamed if there’s another crash.
They paid back the money they got from the government. Did they pay back the lost wages of people who got fired thanks to their screwups? Did they pay back the government for extra unemployment? Did they pay back state governments who had extra expenses with a lower tax base?
I can go on.
Someone above mentioned the Vimes’ boots theory. This is a theory by Terry Pratchett’s character Vimes that one of the reasons he was still poor was that a rich person could spend 100 dollars on a pair of boots and have them last ten years and still be functional, whereas he didn’t have that 100 dollars, but needed boots, so spent 20 dollars on a shitty pair of boots that needed replacing every year. So he spent double the amount that the rich person paid and still had leaky boots.
You shouldn’t underestimate how much difference that initial investment makes. We don’t worry so much about well-fitting boots these days, but it applies to cars, homes, education, everything.
It reminds me of when some well-meaning friends told a teenage me that anyone can get rich based on the example of one friend who’d built his successful business from “nothing.” Turned out that his parents had loaned him £10,000 to get started (in the eighties). He had also gone to Oxford, giving him significant networking advantages. That’s not nothing. When you look into people who’ve come from nothing, it’s generally not true.
Most of you are also saying “except for people with disabilities…” Why? Quite a lot of poor people have disabilities, or their kids or partners do. Do you actually know for certain that the poor people you’re judging don’t have disabilities? I mean, you’re all generalising here, not just focusing on specific people.
The poverty trap doesn’t exist because you give financial aid to poor people; it exists because you give that financial aid but make it detrimental to the person to get off it. The giving of the money is not the problem, it’s the way you give it.
In the UK, since you mention it, the poverty trap stopped existing for an awful lot of poor people when the last government introduced working tax credits and benefit run-ons (housing and council tax benefit for a month after you start work). Before that, if you left unemployment benefits to start a low-wage job, you could genuinely be worse off for the first few months and not be certain that you’d ever be better off. It took bravery to take that risk - and if you had dependants, it wasn’t just you that was at risk.
Working tax credits did mean that you would instantly be better off, while the run-on gave you a cushion to take that risk. For most people the poverty trap, at least in relation to government benefits vs earnings, ceased to exist. It was far from perfect because it excluded under-25s unless they had kids, but all that means is that the system should have been expanded.
The solution to the poverty trap is not to stop giving poor people money, but to give some help to the next step up too. You will actually end up spending less overall.
Jumping right in with two comments:
-
Marley23’s personal experience is hardly a scientific study that provides a fair picture of a cross-section of the poor or digs into all the possible causes.
-
One could argue (and some have) that the two factors he identifies - making short-sighted decisions and not seeking additional schooling - are themselves functions of poverty. When you are worried about what you’re going to eat today, you can’t worry as much about long-term concerns; and when you’re poor and don’t have money for tuition and perhaps work all day and care for kids all night, it’s awful hard to go get a college degree.
At some point though you start getting into the issue of whether people have any control over their fate at all, or are we just a product of our genes and environment?
But even if we did find that people could not directly control their circumstances through their own independent actions alone, it would still be important to create incentives to deter choices that lead to poverty. If environment is so important, create an environment that makes poverty even more undesirable.
One way would be to deny welfare benefits or food stamps to those with substance abuse problems, unless they first entered a facility and successfully completed treatment. Otherwise we’re just enabling.
That’s it.
I think it’s a mix.
And the whole American myth about “anyone can succeed if only they work hard” is utter bullshit. It’s more true than in most other countries, and its good that we reward work and innovation and risk, but it’s not like every single person’s fate is entirely in their own hands. That myth becomes an excuse for not doing anything, a way of blaming victims for their failures even if they weren’t at fault.
But someone abusing substances lacks the will to enter a facility. Their ability to resist drugs - to think clearly, for the long-term, etc. - is severely weakened by those very drugs. Many would rather starve than give them up. Withholding food stamps probably isn’t going to do the job. It would probably just kill them before they finally got what they need to go into rehab. So I’d say that’s one of the worst examples you could pick. I’m not saying drug addicts are totally helpless or don’t need incentives, but all you’re doing is starving them without giving them what they really need, which is aggressive intervention and support, and some food in the meantime.
I agree, but you can’t make policy based on the assumption that some people are just bad code.
It’s not a myth, unless we define success too high. The vast majority of people do well enough. Unless someone is disabled, or has mental issues, they control their own fate. Of course, since 1 in 3 Americans supposedly have a mental illness, that would account for almost all poverty. Maybe most of them just aren’t diagnosed.
I think that most people would get treatment if it was free and if they were going to die otherwise. We make them go to jail, what’s wrong with making them go into treatment?