Since when did this concept become so alien? It used to be called the American dream, but it exists in all countries. The people who came to America before the 1960’s didn’t come for a handout - they came because they wanted opportunity and freedom.
This may be alien to you, but it’s worth trying to understand and not just sneer at and dismiss as delusion or stupidity: There are MANY poor people who truly believe in freedom, and who want the ability to rise to the level of their own ability. I was raised to believe that taking charity was about the lowest thing a person could do - it was a sign of failure - failure to provide, failure to save, failure to live up to one’s responsibility as a free person. It was the absolute last resort.
On the flip side, I was raised to not care so much about material things and to focus more on building character and mind. Those grandparents I mentioned that built their farm into a half-million dollar property? When they retired they still drove a 15 year old car and lived in a modest little house in a small town. When they were away from home on a trip, they would stay in a motel 6 or whatever cheap motel they could find. Until the day they died they continued to act as if they were poor. Because who you were mattered more than what you had.
I took student loans to go to college, and felt bad enough about the 0% interest rate when I was in school that I refused to sign the paperwork that would have wiped 40% of the debt off the books at graduation - a program the government came up with to encourage students to finish. To me, it was horrifying that people were being taxed in order to give a big gift to new college grads - the people who were expected to do much better than average anyway. So it took me over 10 years to pay off my student loan.
Later, when I started a small business, I wrote a fairly successful software package. I got a call from the government wanting to give me an R&D grant for building it, even though it was finished. I guess it was less risk to fund only ‘R&D’ that was already a success. It was a large five figure sum of money, and I turned it down flat to the astonishment of the government agent. I was just raised that way. That money came from someone else - it didn’t grow out of thin air. I had no right to it, and I didn’t need it. It would have been grossly against my values to take it.
This is not an uncommon attitude. Ever notice that some of the poorest states have a lot of right-wing types, while San Franscisco, full of liberals, is one of the most expensive places to live? And the most wealthy area of the country right now is the D.C. region - full of liberals. It’s not about wealth. It’s about being left alone to live your own life and to see how far your own skills can take you.
As for the right offering more freedom - it’s absolutely true. The best path to wealth a poor person has is entrepreneurship - the dream of starting a small business and growing it into something. Every regulation, zoning law and license requirement makes that harder. The legal requirements may seem ‘reasonable’ to an ivy-league grad, but to someone with nothing but a college diploma and no money to hire a lawyer, it’s daunting. it was the biggest hurdle for me to get past all that, and I live in the most economically free region in North America. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to open a small store in Berkeley or in Chicago.
Unemployment benefits are a one thing - you pay into that system in case you need it, so it’s more like insurance. I don’t have a problem with it, unless it is extended to the point where it enables marginal cases to stay out of the work force for so long they become unemployable.
I grew up in a city with a population of 50,000 when I wasn’t living on the farm. Not exactly rural. I moved to Edmonton in my early 20’s, and that’s where I went to college and started my business. At the time, Edmonton was about 600,000 people. Not exactly rural. I lived in a basement suite for 5 years with a roommate in order to survive, and I worked every summer, every spring break, and 16 hours per week while in University to make it through. It can be done.
I can’t speak to Chicago. But you know what? If your skills won’t allow you to survive, you can always move. That’s what I did. I moved away from home with all my belongings in the back of my old car, A couple of thousand dollars plus tuition that I earned working 3 years full-time after high school, and nothing else. My mom couldn’t spare any money. I found a cheap basement suite for $400/mo, found a roommate to share it with, and got a near-minimum wage job.
I’m not saying it’s easy, and I believe it’s harder today than it was then. But it can be done.
Aren’t you the defeatist. I started my business with almost zero money. And of course other people aren’t going to buy a farm. My mother didn’t - she worked minimum wage in a grocery store and worked her way up to manager. Then she bought half a duplex and lived there for 12 years and paid it off. Sold it to buy a small store of her own, then sold that at retirement and bought a double-wide trailer to live in. A nice one, in the city, but still a trailer. But it’s all she wanted, and it allowed her to put enough cash in the bank that she could buy things for her grand-kids and not have to worry about whether she could make her mortgage payment.
You don’t have to be. My mother worked a minimum wage job with two young boys. My father left when we were 2 and 5 years old. She went to night school to get a secretarial diploma, got a job as a receptionist in a hair salon, then found a better job at a grocery store where she had a chance to move up.
She actually made less money switching jobs, but it had the opportunity for advancement. Again - aspirations. Sacrificing now for future benefit.
I wonder if it helps them when the left constantly tells them that they are being oppressed, that their lives are miserable, and that it’s not their fault, and that someone else should ‘do something’ to solve their problems. I wonder if they were helped by the grand projects and subsidies that had the effect of congregating them into ghettos? We did the same to the native populations in Canada - paid them to stay on reservations where there was no hope and no opportunity.
When you’re a young woman with parents who are raising your kids for you and paying all their expenses, a welfare check can buy you a lot of drugs and alcohol - which seemed to be the plan she was on.
No, the Republican alternative is to make the safety net as small as it needs to be without being cruel, because the moral hazard created by an expansive safety net is a soul-deadening trap. The Republican plan is also to cut regulations and remove obstacles to upward mobility so that the poor can lift themselves up.
You don’t have to report your job search status when on unemployment? You don’t have to deal with social workers when you and your kids are living in a lousy place out of necessity?
Why did you have to bring race into it? In some areas race is definitely a large factor. In other areas it isn’t. Before we reformed our very generous welfare system we had a larger percentage of people on welfare than you did, and it was pretty much a demographic cross-section of the country. When we reformed welfare and added strict work requirements, the roles shrunk in HALF. Subsequent studies looking at where they all went concluded that the vast majority simply went back to work.
Bullshit. My employer ‘feels’ like paying me nothing. It HAS to pay me a good salary, or I won’t work there. The market works two ways, you know, and employers are as helpless before it as consumers are. If you don’t believe this, please explain why so many people make more than the legally mandated minimum wage? Perhaps you could tell me why here in Alberta our minimum wage in 2013 was $9.40, but 7-11 cashiers were getting $12.50 and up, plus $500 signing bonuses and another $1000 if they stayed a year? You don’t suppose that evil *market *had anything to do with it, do you?
To the extent that the ‘game is rigged’, government is a big part of it. Subsidies and grants going to cronies, featherbedding rules, closed-shop ordinances, regulations designed to protect established businesses from new start-ups, you name it.
If you think all regulations are put in place to protect the public from business, you’re kidding yourself. The Davis-Bacon act was a piece of racist legislation put in place to protect existing construction firms from competition from ‘upstart’ blacks willing to work for less than union wages. Beautician licensing is nothing more than protection from competition instigated by the very industry being licensed. Mattel lobbied for lead-in-toy testing because they already had lead testing in place while their competition from the second-hand market couldn’t do it.
So yes, the game is rigged. And it’s cronies and politicians on the left and right doing the rigging. That’s what I’m fighting against, while you want more of it so long as it’s the guys on your side doing the rigging for the ‘right’ reasons. I’m pro-market, not pro-business. There’s a big difference, and if you don’t understand what it is, I recommend remedial reading.
I don’t believe in ‘sin’ taxes. And I do believe that the rich should pay more than the poor. But I also know that what makes capitalism work is capital, and nothing else works as well for both the rich and poor. You guys on the left like to make fun of ‘trickle down’, but the fact remains that the poverty line in America is almost 3 times the world’s average income. How do you think that happened, exactly?
Whereas the money that was given to them came from the money fairy.
I’m against drug testing as a condition of government benefits, but the first question I’d ask is, what kind of mother would be spending her money on drugs when she has children and is living on welfare? Perhaps the focus of this story is a little misplaced? Is this the same mother who couldn’t possibly save money while making minimum wage?
We’re going to have to disagree on this, but a healthy economy is not created by convincing people to spend beyond their means. This takes Keynesianism and twists it into something it was never meant to be. As a reminder - if Keynes were alive now he would be telling the government to stop spending so much and start paying off the debt. Remember? To the extent that ‘fiscal stimulus’ works (and that’s debatable), even Keynes would say that’s only true when there is an output gap, and modern Keynesians would say it’s only true if there’s an output gap and the preferred solution of loosening the money supply doesn’t work because interest rates hit the zero bound.
No one serious other than today’s political partisans ever suggested that you could simply borrow and spend your way to higher growth regardless of the underlying conditions of the economy.
Sez you. Ask France how their 90% tax rate on the wealthy worked out. Ask Japan how that massive infrastructure stimulus is working for them.
On the other hand… Canada has lowered federal corporate taxes to 12.5%, lowered the top marginal tax rates, cut dividend and capital gains taxes, and we came out of the recession with very little debt, our federal budget is now in surplus, and our pension system is fully funded. How can that possibly be, if austerity and low taxes don’t work?
On the other hand, we used to have a government that consumed 53% of GDP, a debt equal to 70% of GDP, much higher taxes, more generous social programs, and our economy was in the dumps, our dollar was 30% lower than yours, and our unemployment rate was chronically 2-3 percentage points higher than the U.S.'s. Please explain that using your economic philosophy.
While you’re at it, you can explain how the Keynesians could be so wrong after WWII, when the U.S. cut its government budget by 60%, laid off 15,000 regulators and about a million soldiers. The Keynesians including Paul Samuelson said that this would plunge the U.S. into a deep recession, and advocated massive spending on public works programs. So that’s what Britain did, taking a sharp turn to the left. The result was exactly the opposite - the U.S. economy exploded, and Britain was plunged into a deep recession. So what went wrong?
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Do they want to fix the inner city schools? No, they want to siphon money away from them via vouchers.
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Actually vouchers are a last resort. The right tried to fix the public schools by instituting reforms such as merit pay and giving principles the right to fire teachers who were not doing a good job. That was opposed by the teacher’s unions. Republicans advocated allowing children to choose their own public school. That too was shot down. So finally, charter schools and vouchers were used to do an end-run around a system that is failing the kids and which refuses to carry out fundamental reforms necessary to correct the problem. Oh well. You can try to stop them, but if you do eventually you’re going to lose to some other alternative, because your left-wing unionized model of public education sucks.
One of the fundamental hypocrises of the left is that they always decry materialism, but when it comes right down to it that’s all they care about. You are obsessed with what the rich have, what you don’t have, and you demand that someone take power and ‘spread it around’. The right tends to believe that freedom is an end unto itself, and that family and community is more important than federal bureaucracies and ‘help’ from nameless bureaucrats. The right tends to believe that productive work is a key part of a person’s self-worth, and that charity, while sometimes necessary, is also a trap that leads to a life of misery.
The old phrase “Give me Liberty or give me death” comes to mind. It wasn’t “Give me liberty, but really I’ll trade it for a nicer TV.”
No, because your side lost the debate. It would be if you got your way.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think Silicon Valley was built on? How about Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Amazon, Federal Express? Do you know why the Allen Large Telescope Array has that name? Hint: it might have something to do with the capital you want to tax away.