Is there a growing "American underclass," and who's in it?

Great Debates
21

dude

Round here, most of the working poor I know are mainly fed up with lack of opportunity or financial traps that are almost unavoidable.

They work hard, but because so much of the available apartments are now owned by the yuppie get rich quick crowd, rents are high. They could move into the few cheap places left, but then they’d face high crime, racism, and landlords who don’t like to fix anything.

The banks charge for everything, it seems, but walking into the places, as if they are on the verge of going bust.

Loan interest rates are high and unless you have around twice the desired amount in valuables the bank can grab if you default, you won’t get approved. Loan companies are a bit easier, but their interest rates are one step below the Mafia’s.

These rent-to-own companies suck people in by offering easy terms for cheap goods, but in the end, the buyers pay twice the amount for the product than if they had bought it at a store outright.

Land values are continually going up, so if they own a house, their yearly insurance and property taxes keep going up also.

Many work two jobs, but if they keep that up over a few years, they start getting exhausted and sickness usually follows. A friend of mine worked 3 in order to make the fantastic sum of $24,000 a year and it wore him out! He did not get more than 5 hours sleep a night and after two years, just had to give up all but one job.

There are opportunities for large paying jobs, but to ‘earn’ them, the providers expect you to work something like 60 hours a week for 40 hours pay until you are approved and accepted. Heck, managers for the fast food industry make around $22,000 a year but have to almost camp at their restaurants to get the work done and keep the minimum wage workers from stealing half of the inventory.

New cars are expensive as hell, plus the required insurance needed for them. Health insurance is exorbitantly expensive unless your place of business provides it, gas is too high, electric is going up and the price of food keeps rising. So, unless one can manage to make at least $30,000 a year, forget having a pleasant or reasonably pleasant life.

One thing that gets most working poor (yes, I’ve stolen the phrase because it is so appropriate) is health care. All over TV we get reports of fantastic life saving operations and treatments, new wonder medications and caring, better clinics. All geared to people with great insurance and incomes of over $100,000 a year.

Want white teeth? Fork over $1000 for the treatment. Need a heart transplant? Got $100,000 laying around plus another $5,000 per year for anti-rejection medication you’ll need for the rest of your life? Cancer? Better be able to pay $50 to $200,000 for treatment. Got AIDS? Can you afford $500 to $800 a month for medication, plus $1000 a day for any time you spend in the hospital? Glasses? Well, $45 for the examination, which is fine, but $300 for the glasses! Need bone surgery? Rob a bank buddy because we’re talking around $20,000 and up.

Know how many people spend at least $200 a month on medications to keep them alive? There are more who spend $400 and up. A dentist will charge $100 to pull a tooth. Psychiatric therapy, which you’ll need for the depression you’ll get not being able to afford medical bills, will cost from $110 to $300 an hour. Medication will cost from $60 to $100 a month.

If you have kids, then be prepared to spend at least $6000 a year for their basic care, each. If you want a kid, the baby doctor wants $5000, at least $2500 up front before delivery. Hope like hell that the kid arrives healthy because if not, then look at $50 to $200,000 in medical care.

Getting old? There’re all sorts of cosmetic surgeries to make you look young, but they start at $2000 and go up from there. Only the well off may look young.

I can’t say much about cell phones, because I’ve seen stupid people living dirt poor who have them when owning a regular phone would have cost them 1/4 as much. Cell phones are being pushed as a status symbol.

I saw this car on TV. It’s got built in hands off cell phone, computer dash, memory seats, this special service for locating where you are and where gas stations might be and even to unlock your doors if you lock the keys in. It also has a built in locator if it is stolen. It does everything but give you a drink and a hummer as you drive.

Now, like someone making $30,000 a year can ever actually buy one.

If you notice, the cheaper cars, which people making under $50,000 a year can afford are also the most dangerous ones on the road. You know, those little things which have so many ‘crush zones’ on them that if they get hit, they crumple like beer cans? If you make over $100,000 a year, you ride in a luxury tank that can drive through cement walls.

I mean, the difference between rich and poor is really dramatic these days with ultra luxury items showing up because we have this major group of rich who can’t spend money fast enough!

Like the $100,000 HumV. I spotted an extended, limo-like HumV the other day and almost fell over. I personally get irritated at watching these old car shows, where these guys spend $200,000 fixing up a 1940s whatever and they also have a 52 Chevy they casually dropped $100,000 into and they just bought for $70,000 a rusty whatever and expect to spend $150,000 restoring it and this is just a hobby they like to do in their spare time.

I’m not going into the new and expensive extreme sports that not only cost a bundle for the gear, but you have to be able to travel all over the globe to play. Aspen skiers have always been considered idle rich and snobs, but they pale in comparison to the new globe hoppers.

Now, think about arriving home after working 10 hours, making $30,000 a year and seeing all of this GREAT STUFF available for the rich and think about how you’d feel.

I nearly forgot. After all of the hurricane disasters because of cheaply built, over priced houses, they have hurricane proof ones being built. There are two types. One which will stand a bad hurricane with minimum damage and one which will tolerate something like a nuclear blast. Both types are far too expensive for anyone making below $100,000 a year.

So, only the well off have the opportunity to survive a hurricane in comfort.

There’s trouble a’brewin in the wind. Yes, Sir, m’boy. Better think about finding some high ground.

22

This cracks me up:

I’m sorry, I’ve always been told that money didn’t grow on trees. Guess I was wrong. dude, there nothing natural about money at all.

23

I live in the UK so health care is essentially free ( well, we pay for it in tax and sometimes you have to wait ages for a specialist ), it ain’t perfect but its better than your system !

I agree about high property prices BUT think about it rationally, some people CAN afford them so it must just be we earn less.

Your parents had you and raised you BUT not everyone in there generation did have kids or buy property etc. , not everyone in this generation will either.

The people who did well at school and got a degree in something which pays well ARE buying property, having kids etc. we are the ones who didn’t do so well or did the wrong thing.

If you ignore the adverts on TV and actually look around you, how many people really do drive luxury cars, live in a big house etc ?

TV distorts reality, check out the girls then check out the real girls !

More people drive cheap cars than live in a big house with a luxury car ( check the numbers sold in an auto mag ).

Most people are NOT rich.

24

If you only have a 1 bedroom apartment where do you put the baby ?

If you go live in social housing it don’t count as cheap rent BUT who wants to live there ?

In the wild, if you have too many children for your resources they starve, i am just quoting darwin here guys… natural selection and all that… get with it…

25

Good points…

Don’t have to worry about house prices going down ( can’t afford one ), people stealing your luxury car ( ain’t got one ), college fees for kids ( you can’t go ! ). etc. etc.

You die out BUT you can have more fun !!

Girls say 'get lost i want to try find someone richer ’ so you are forced into getting drunk, watching tons of porn and getting involved with tarty women down the bar ( lot better than staying in cleaning the baby ! ).
chill out !

26

Spyder:

As a landlord, I can verify that good tenants (i.e. those that pay their rent and don’t trash the place) can find better, more affordable housing. I will charge less rent and/or require a smaller security deposit if the tenant has a good record. Good tenants are in demand and can almost write the lease themselves! Generally, the people who are forced into substandard housing are much more likely to be s***heads. The only landlords they can find are the ones who don’t care how horrid the housing is that they provide, don’t care what sort of morons the tenants are, and who either can’t afford to or don’t care to maintain the place. (Why spend money to maintain it if you know that jerk is going to tear it apart in one month, then run out on the lease?)

The better your credit, the lower the interest rate. You don’t have to have a lot of money to have good credit. If you habitually default on loans and spend far outside your means, of course the interest rate will be high because you’re a bad credit risk.

How intelligent does a person have to be to realize they’re paying too much? Not very intelligent. If these companies make a profit or even just manage to stay in business, it’s because there is a large population of poor people who can’t wait a couple of months to save up for that big-screen TV; they want it right now and don’t have enough concept of the future to realize this may be a bad move. These people will also make the payment on their big-screen TV before they come up with the rent money.

If the value of your house and land goes up, so does your net worth. This is money, albeit money on paper only. This gives you increased access to credit plus the ability to cash out that equity if you need it. Elderly people who own their own homes can get reverse mortgages, enabling them to increase their standard of living by cashing in on their equity. Increased property value is a good thing.

You will not die if you don’t have white teeth. As for the rest, there is not enough money in the world to give every American citizen unlimited health care. You get what you pay for. You need to pay for what you get. If I required a heart transplant to survive, I’d pass. That’s why I have life insurance.

Kids are optional. Free or at least low-cost birth control is available. If you conceive anyway, put the kid up for adoption. The cost of a tubal ligation or a vasectomy is a good investment compared to the cost of raising a child.

And there are cell phone contracts that are much cheaper than the local, “regular” service. We have such a plan: free long distance. If the cell phone is more expensive than regular service and a person chooses the cell phone anyway, well, that’s a stupid move on that person’s part. Would you like to outlaw cell phone service to protect the stupid people from themselves?

It’s a fallacy that wealthy people routinely spend money irresponsibly, on a whim. No; many wealthy people are wealthy because they save their money and make good choices. The people who spend their money like water are usually people who can’t really afford a lavish lifestyle.

My husband and I are now fairly well-off, though we used to live in such poverty that we didn’t have enough food for all of us. We bought milk for the baby (couldn’t afford formula, and didn’t have transportation to the required WIC meetings). My husband lost about 35 pounds, though he worked as a restaurant manager: he couldn’t afford the food. His employees used to bring us sacks of canned goods. I lost weight, but not as much because I ate margarine and sugar (which we bought at a food salvage store).

We always payed the rent on time. We never paid our bills late. Even when we were poor, we still had decent credit. Though we were far below the poverty level, we did not accept public assistance.

If we hadn’t gone through that horrible period of our lives, we wouldn’t know how well we have it now, and we wouldn’t know how to make good financial decisions. Of course, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heartache if we’d learned these lessons earlier on, but if you have half a brain you learn these lessons eventually.

“Poor” people go to the movies, go out to eat, buy new electronics equipment, buy new clothes, go on vacation. My husband and I don’t do any of this. We could afford to do so better than the “poor” people could. I don’t have much sympathy for those “poor” people who throw their money in the toilet and then whine at me because I’m better off than they are.

27

Spyder writes (way earlier in the thread):

Without being insulting to your mother, I think we see part of the problem is perception.

A poor person does not need cable of any sort, to eat in a restaurant at any time, “the occasional pizza”, or anything else that they see on TV. The idea that they do need any of these things has been pushed on them by a consumer culture in which most people are not poor.

It is called “rising expectations”. The average poor person lives far better than the rich did a hundred years ago. In 1900, two thirds of the US population earned below the current poverty rate (in constant dollars), and they didn’t have advanced health care because there was no such thing.

Now people think they are entitled to things just because they happen to be breathing.

Yes, I have been poor. I found out last weekend when my wife did the taxes that we are now officially rich. But I hope you do not insult my wife and me by implying that this is something that happened to us, like catching the flu. I was poor while I was going to school to learn something worth a little in the job market (I am another lit. major who wasted four years and a lot of scholarship money). And I did not have a car, children, cable, cigarettes - or charity - during that period.

What should we do about the underclass? In most cases, nothing. Most people start off poor early in life. If they don’t have children they cannot support, this tends to resolve itself as they age, gain work experience, wise up, etc. Married couples earn more than two singles would, and their expenses are less, both as a result of motivation and due to economies of scale. Chronic, long term poverty is another matter. This is caused mostly by illegitimate births and other social factors.

The US is an almost unique society. For the first time in human history, poverty has become an exception. Most people are not poor in America, and most of the time poverty is not something that just happened to them.

28

wasting time on lit. major…

married couples are richer, true, my advice is get a good job, move in with someone who has a good job as well.

Rent is usually the biggest expense.

Find ways to economize, i have an exercise bike instead of gym membership for example.

We get videos out instead of going to the cinema.

The main thing is to increase money coming in, a better paid job usually does the trick !

29

Necros you actually have a valid point, but you’re stating it abrasively. Everything you say is accurate, but the opposite view still exists because the lower level working class is growing rapidly in the States, and not just that, but thanks to so many areas of free information, plus the greedy push to provide the ‘haves’ with more goodies, they are becoming aware of how screwed they are.

In my parents day, radio was the big communicator with newspapers and Hurst controlled most of the print, strict laws controlled radio, so news was pretty well narrow. Then around my time came inexpensive TVs, but again they were governed by laws. They were B & W only, and we only had 3 stations, and cable was not even a thought. The news was not a gabby, colorful sensationalistic affair but was delivered with accuracy in mind. David Huntly and Chet Brinkly were two of the best, presenting news in black suits, behind a desk, in a serious manner.

We had a world view, but mainly knew the goings on of our local area. We did not know what we were missing. We were not rich, but we were not poor. There were people around better off than we and people less well off.

Suddenly, the world exploded in on everyone. Cable TV, color TV, more channels, radio DJs pushing the legal limits, rock and roll opening doors, more TV programs, more advertisements, informational programs, documentaries, investigative reports, movies about real life, HBO showing actual stories about places we had only read about, the exposure of nefarious actions behind our trusted banks, our trusted leaders, our trusted military, our trusted insurance companies and our trusted automobile maker, who expressed how much they loved us and desired our patronage.

Within the space of a comparatively few years, not only did we get into space, but reality exploded on us by all of this enormous wad of information.

Suddenly, we got a real look at what we were missing out on. We could actually see the toys of the mega-rich, the opulent and fantastic houses, the magnificent boats, the cars, the banks, the special clubs, colleges, and so on. Information flooded in about the discrepancy in medical care between rich and poor. Doctors went from the old general practitioner who made house calls and lived no better than us, but was dedicated to his art and highly respected to specialists making millions, living in huge homes, stopping house calls, building great offices, becoming aloof and selective and expensive.

Hospitals, once caring, friendly places became big, expensive profit oriented businesses, with their stockholders demanding more profits. Banks started upping rates, getting stricter on loans, eating up other smaller, friendly banks and turning into impersonal corporations.

We learned of clay feet on our heroes, our financial leaders creating ways for the rich to get richer off of our sweat, labor violations, all about special interest groups in congress working for the rich to get more money out of us, legally. We learned of corrupt union leadership, economics, privatization, secret deals by local governments, tax collectors who quietly sold off great chunks of repossessed property to their rich buddies before anyone knew of the availability of the lands.

We found out about how Workman’s compensation companies wanted managers of businesses to take note of any preexisting conditions of an employee to use against them if they got hurt, even if the condition had nothing to do with the injury. We found out about 30 year lawsuits involving the poor and major companies, about hidden poisoning of towns, rivers, lands, water systems and the efforts of the rich to keep it all quiet.

We learned how the mega rich through history built railroads not in the heroic, majestic way our history books taught us, but by virtual slave labor, killing off people in the way, getting paid off congressional leaders to steal the land from owners not willing to sell, callously burying fallen workers in shallow, unmarked graves alongside the tracks, breaking treaties with the Indians and so on. Then how these great rich gentlemen declined to install better safety gear on rail roads because it would cost money, so trains had 1 deadly accident a day for years, killing thousands until the government stepped in and forced change.

We discovered not only how we had been screwed, but still are being screwed and every time someone rose up to help us out, the rich got the laws changed to protect them. When Unions grew too powerful, the rich closed down plants and moved them into other countries where people would do the work for $4.00 an hour instead of $10 and safety laws were much more lax along with pollution regulations.

Like DDT is forbidden in the US because of it’s long term toxicity and genetic dammage action, so it is still made here and sold over seas to nations who don’t care. The company owners know it kills wildlife as well as bugs, wipes out whole species and affects humans, but, hey! it’s business bub. They don’t care, I don’t care, … so long as they pay good bucks.

Protected by ranks of highly paid lawyers, banks stuffed with money, paid for political friends, associations of powerful people equally rich, the wealthy rarely got hurt when their actions killed or sickened thousands of people or screwed a few hundred thousand out of their savings.

The information still comes in, even faster from the Internet. I’d never heard of stores in New York City that have luxury goods unpriced, where people go and if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it. I saw houses built out of abandoned missile silos owned by the government that are basically impervious. The rich guy bought the silo for 2 million, then sunk 3 million into renovating, restoring and customizing it.

If Y2K had hit hard, these people would have buttoned up and laughed at tanks. I watched reports of hurricane disasters, stunned at how those expensive houses were so cheaply built, learned of contractors and land companies getting building codes relaxed, learned about substitutions in construction, cost saving restrictions on things like nails, anchor bolts and truss straps, savings on left over materials, artificially increased values and hidden defects.

Hurricane proof housing has been around for years, but only the very rich can have it built.

We learn about stock cheats, bank cheats, enormous tax deductions for the rich, defective military goods produced by the rich that get our soldiers killed and our taxes pay for the stuff, wealthy corporations who freely sell good and weapons to nations that hate our guts, oil grabs, price fixing, farming conglomerates pushing out independent farmers to increase costs, seed companies developing single use seed to keep farmers from saving a buck by saving seed from the harvest, drug companies developing fabulous drugs at low cost, then charging enormous amounts for them.

We learn of property scams, housing scams, the complex and devious luxury cruse line scams, business interests illegally negotiating with Cuba to make bucks, and the efforts to form monopolies and fix prices.

It seems that the rich never have enough money. Then we spot the marked division between the really haves and the have-nots. We’ve discovered that human life is cheap after all when it comes to money. The wonderful, caring Disney corporation, based on wholesome fun, clean living, and wonderful fantasy sues a small day care center because they painted copywritten Disney characters on their walls. The old Disney would never have cared.

NOW we are aware of how we are getting screwed and we don’t like it.

We know how the rich interfere with social programs, how congressmen steal and redirect funds from programs designed to help the average person and place them into programs designed to help the rich. We know of crops rotting in the fields while people starve in the streets. We know of companies cleverly stealing donated goods from charitable organizations and reselling the stuff overseas at a high price. We know that Gucci shirt was made in Taiwan for $3, along with the Kmart brand, but Gucci sells here for $75 while Kmart sells for $6.

We know of the ruthless tricks Walmart pulls to drive competition out of local business and the price increases after the competition is gone. The Great JC Penny was in actuality a penny pinching, ruthless miser who treated his staff like crap.

See, we know now how we’re being screwed, how opportunities have been hidden from us, how deals have been made behind our backs, how the mega rich manipulate schemes to increase their wealth at our expense and how we’ve been fed dangerous products without being warned because the rich owned companies did not want expensive recalls. A few human deaths due to the products are acceptable, though.

Now that we know, we want our piece of the pie. Now blockades are being raised to hold many of us in our places.

Street folks clutter the streets and increase crime but the funds for mental health institutions and group homes to help them are cut so the rich can get corporate welfare, pay less taxes, or have these funds shuttled into governmental programs that benefit them.

A huge, luxury community for the mega rich settled into my town and the property values tripled over night. So did the taxes and cost of living. The average wage did not. Sacred zoning laws, never before changed for anyone in an effort to preserve some sensitive ecology, fell almost overnight and our city leaders suddenly had around 20 million reasons as to why they were archaic. Areas designated low density to preserve the natural beauty suddenly filled up with luxury housing, entertainment providers and glorious hotels. The natural beauty was cemented over. The city leaders, most of them bankers, major property owners and businessmen, gave us around 20 more million reasons why the previously untouchable regulations had to be removed for ‘our own good.’

Funny, we never saw the benefits and pay the price in higher taxes and cost of living, but our city leaders all built brand new, expensive homes.

So, now we know. Now we know how the upper class see us as expendables, trash, lower class, disposable work forces, ditch diggers, service people, and not their kind.

We’ve also discovered how the rich companies use racism to get money, capitalize on human misery, human poverty, and happily play one race against the other for profits. Even religion has become a mega business.

We are not pleased. Many of us might never have gone to college, but we have lines of information open to us via the news, the Internet, the TV, and newspapers. Much more than ever before. A man with a 6th grade education can still have an IQ of 130 and grasp correlation’s and facts just as good as a Harvard grad, so he knows how he is being screwed.

Awe, crap! I just wrote a book here. Sorry.

30

[quote]
If you ignore the adverts on TV and actually look around you, how many people really do drive luxury cars, live in a big house etc ?

[quote]

I have, which is why I’m pissed.

Next door to me, the guy just bought a brand new luxury truck, last year he bought a brand new car, the year before that he bought another new car. The guy two houses down has two new cars, a $25,000 fast boat, not actually designed for fishing, a $6,000 4 wheeled ATV, and just loves flying his family to England for vacation.

In town, at almost every business, I find high end cars owned by the business owner or manager. Gated communities are popping up around here like popcorn. Driving by the high school gets me a view of a field of reasonably new cars. Very few clunkers, like most of us drove in my day as students.

My car is 10 years old. I just spent two days removing the cranky power window motors, cleaning and rebuilding them in my small workshop and reinstalling them. One is shot and one needs to be pounded on to work. I can’t afford to replace them.

The local butcher, with his excellent meat, just closed his shop of decades and reopened in the rich business district and upped his prices. Not that he was ever short of business before, but now he can make more money with less work.

31

Shodan, I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with your basic point that some people are poor because of their own shortcomings that we’ll never really be able to do anything about, but I think that in trying to extend that category to most poor people you make some statements that are not really defensible. To wit:

A poor person does not need cable of any sort, to eat in a restaurant at any time, “the occasional pizza”, or anything else that they see on TV. The idea that they do need any of these things has been pushed on them by a consumer culture in which most people are not poor.

True, and it is worth pointing out that the non-poor don’t need any of those things either. They are mere consumer luxuries, and I’m not going to cry my eyes out over anyone’s doing without them entirely (well, maybe occasional pizzas and restaurant meals are an exception). I am far more concerned about the things that don’t appear on your list that poor people do need: safe, comfortable, healthy (though certainly not luxurious) places to live and work, affordable shelter, decent jobs with fair treatment from employers, decent transportation, affordable health care, quality educational opportunities for themselves and their children, effective political representation, social services to help with the inevitable crises of life that can be disastrous to those with no financial safety net.

IMHO, the lack of these things among poor people is emphatically not something we should “do nothing about”. I do not think that society is doing its proper job if it just lets poor people fester in slums without these advantages and merely expresses encouragement for them to lift themselves out by their own efforts. The whole idea behind economic democracy was supposed to be that although most people would naturally never rise to be rich and wouldn’t be able to afford the lifestyle of the rich, nobody who worked hard should have to live in squalid misery. A decent existence free from wretchedness and oppression, along with reasonable opportunities to better one’s lot if one wanted to, was supposed to be the birthright of every American. We made significant strides toward that goal in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s, and I don’t think we’ve really improved our society since then by largely relapsing into indifference and fatalism about the fortunes of the poor.

It is called “rising expectations”. The average poor person lives far better than the rich did a hundred years ago.

Nonsense: see below.

In 1900, two thirds of the US population earned below the current poverty rate (in constant dollars), and they didn’t have advanced health care because there was no such thing.

While the vast majority of us may have much more disposable income nowadays and certainly have more consumer goods and better technology, your comparison of the poor of today with the rich of a hundred years ago is still full of holes. Rich people a hundred years ago may not have had color TVs or VCRs, but they had commodious houses in pleasant and safe environments. They had luxury transportation, even if it was a horse and carriage instead of an automobile. They had the best schooling money could buy at the time (which was considerably better than what many failing inner-city schools provide to poor children today). They had servants to take care of their menial tasks and their children. They had leisure, culture, power, and influence. In short, they were rich, and I bet that if you had a time machine and went back to find them, you wouldn’t be able to come up with one of them who’d be willing to trade his or her existence for the chance to watch “The Little Mermaid” on DVD in a crime-ridden inner city of today. “Lives far better”, my eye.

*The US is an almost unique society. For the first time in human history, poverty has become an exception. *

In practically every developed nation, poverty has become an exception. And in fact, in most other developed nations poverty is far rarer than it is in the US.

32

It’s also true that the U.S. is far larger geographically than most of these other countries, has a liberal immigration policy, and despite that has for the last two decades at least managed to maintain consistently lower unemployment rates than most Western European countries.

Arguing that we’re different than everyone else in some one area (and by implication should get with the program) is not a good method of argumentation, IMO. Like every other country in the world we have some unique cultural and economic conditions, and they need to be addressed within the context of our society.

33

Fair enough, pantom. I was mostly taking issue with Shodan’s absurd implication that the rarity of poverty was somehow an “almost uniquely” American development.

34

How much of this is ’ i feel deprived ’ and how much is ’ i want what my neighbour has ! '.

All this new toys stuff is really chest beating in a ‘ape’ status kinda way isn’t it ?

People poorer than you want what you have and you want what people richer than you want.

Problem is you can see there flash car, toys etc. you don’t see the work they put in to get that, all the work at exams, the breaks etc.

I would rather not have the luxury car and have more free time, its a choice.

You don’t go down into the poor district and say 'cor look at that bum, which i had what he has ’ do you ?

If you suddenly find yourself in a rich neighbourhood perhaps you have to move ?

You have no ‘right’ to live anywhere, a friend of mine lived in a huge house in a nice area and then his father died and due to school bills and other things now lives in a cheaper area in a small flat, oddly enough someone at work lived in that cheaper area and now is moving towards the richer area… life is tough.

There is a reason darwin called it the ‘struggle’ for existance you know…

35

Hey SpyderA48, don’t worry about all those toys, just get with it yourself… saying my neighbour has this and this is a little sad, like being a school and saying 'mum, mum I want that toy '.

Get a running machine and run 5 miles a day ( feel those endorphines ) and shack up with some sexy college girl and you will not give a f*** what your neighbour has ( believe me this works ! ).

Alternatively… let down his tyres… burn down the local republican party office and declare class war !

I am sure there is a guy somewhere who wishes he had what you do, greed for more is natural but would those toys really make you happy ?

I have met some really ‘sad cases’ who have the toys and money and have also met some ‘totally cool’ people without the toys and money who seem to be having a lot more fun !

36

Sure. Money CAN buy happiness. You just have to find the right store.

37

dude, I can’t help feeling that you’re consistently missing one of the major points of this debate. You’re right that envy and greed are not very socially useful, and that we all just have to accept the fact that we can’t have a reasonably free society without some non-zero level of inequality (although your “social-Darwinism” explanations of this are IMHO a quite clumsy and outdated way of looking at the issues).

But I think the most important thing we’re talking about here is whether we’re seeing more use these days of institutional and policy factors to make economic inequality in the US worse and more persistent. That’s what I think Spyder is getting at with his talk of rising prices not being accompanied by rising wages, or environmental regulations being relaxed for the convenience of developers. The important question is not “should the poor be given everything that the rich have?” but “are the poor being treated fairly in their efforts to have a decent life and improve their status, or are they being increasingly taken advantage of in an ever-more-unequal society?” That’s a serious and complex question, and your repeated responses along the lines of “well, either get rich yourself or get used to being poor, stop whinging about it” aren’t really doing anything to address it.

38

Your right, i think we are getting sidetracked.

I may start a new thread about the pursuit of money versus happiness, as quick thought provoker, spyder, check out http://www.access1.net/janssen/realwealth.htm ( found from a search ).

Ok, to state my opinion in a clear way.

I think its a natural state that the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and its only intervention by the state that can halt this.

Taxation is the only way I can really see to alter things, tax the rich more and pay out more in welfare / better education / cheap housing loans etc.

America voted for Bush ( see tax cuts ).

Either the poor are not voting OR they are voting for the wrong party OR more people care less.

I don’t see the rich handing over money to the poor, the government have to steal it from them and hand it over.

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ok,ok, i know i keep posting but it takes a while for my small brain to work things through.

Most countries have 2 main political parties, one left wing and one right. The democrats ( left ? ) were just in power ( or am i wrong, i just see clinton being a limey i don’t understand it all ).

Why didn’t the democrats try help the poor more ?

Over here in england we have new labour ( right wing economics but left wing social policy, mostly ) who have done SOME things blatantly for the benefit of the poor.

I think a deeper question here is why didn’t the democrats help the poor more and how has america ended up with 2 ( mainly ) right wing parties.

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Quote from dude: " I don’t see the rich handing over money to the poor, the government have to steal it from them and hand it over."
That is where it breaks down, IMO. The government may have all the money required to help all the lower classes, but it doesn’t hand it over. Instead, the gov’t votes larger pensions for itself, and continues its back-washing relationships with big money, big business, and the banks. Then, when the clueless gov’ts get a whiff that people are concerned about gov’t overspending, what do they cut? Not anything to do with big money or banks; they cut healthcare, welfare, education, etc. I have no problem with tightening my belt to get the economy on track, but I think we ALL should be tightening, not just taking more away from people that have so little to start with.

As for differentiating between parties, I personally cannot see any significant difference between how any of the major parties run things. I have yet to see a gov’t come to power and then make changes that will act to the detriment of that party. The GST in Canada is an excellent example of this. Instituted by the PC party, the Liberals (debatably) won the next election on a platform of discarding this univerally despised tax. When the Liberals took office, one of their first official acts was to conspicuously ignore everything they had said about getting rid of this tax. I don’t have first hand knowledge, but I suspect the US gov’t acts very much like this also.