Maybe John Edwards Isn't Really Such An Impressive Candidate After All

[RTFirefly]

@Mr. Moto

No. I shouldn’t have said fired. I don’t know whether that was the case or whether the resignation was purely voluntary, and there is no way of knowing.

We’re good, then.

[spazattak]

@Shodan

No, actually it is evidence that what was said by you and DtC - that poor people “work their asses off” - is false.
IOW, somewhere around three quarters of poor families have no full-time, year-round worker. And a substantial majority of people over 16 living under the poverty line do not work at all.

So what you said was wrong. See how it works? Most poor people don’t work their asses off.

Regards,
Shodan

You might want to pick better sources for information than the Heritage Foundation

[BobLibDem]

Here is a case made for Edwards. Family loses Medicaid, can’t get the boy dental care, he develops an infection and $250,000 in hospital bill later, he’s dead. This is the other America that he speaks of. We can fight a trillion dollar war but infants die of thirst waiting to get rescued from a hurricane. We can give Halliburton a blank check, but can’t find a way to get routine dental care to the poor. The nation has its priorities all mixed up- while some argue that giving yet another tax break to Paris Hilton is going to make everyone’s life better, we can’t find a way to help those that really need it.

[spazattak]

Here’s an unbiased look(warning - pdf) at the numbers. Half of those below the poverty line are under 18 or elderly (65+) and of the remainders 26% are employed. Of those employed 1 in 4 work involuntarily part time. Roughly 20% of those in the work force don’t work.

[Shodan]

@spazattak

You might want to pick better sources for information than the Heritage Foundation

Actually, the figures came from the Census Bureau. They were entirely accurate.

Half of those below the poverty line are under 18 or elderly (65+) and of the remainders 26% are employed.

Did you perhaps notice that you are saying much the same thing I am - that three quarters (more or less) of the poor are unemployed? I reiterate - your notion that the poor are working harder than average is quite wrong.

Regards,
Shodan

[RTFirefly]

@spazattak

Here’s an unbiased look(warning - pdf) at the numbers. Half of those below the poverty line are under 18 or elderly (65+) and of the remainders 26% are employed. Of those employed 1 in 4 work involuntarily part time. Roughly 20% of those in the work force don’t work.

Some adjustments and clarifications are necessary.

1. Of the 37.0 million in poverty in 2004, 20.5 million (55%) were between 18 and 64 years of age, with the rest under 18 or over 65.

2. 25.3 million of the 37.0 million in poverty were 16 years of age or older. Of that group, 15.9 million didn’t work, 6.5 million worked part time, and 2.9 million full time.

(Source: IPHI 2005, Table 4.)

3. That means that of the 20.5 million in poverty between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2004, at least 11.1 million didn’t work at all that year.

Looks like these Census Bureau numbers back Shodan up.

[DSeid]

@BobLibDem

Here is a case made for Edwards. Family loses Medicaid, can’t get the boy dental care, he develops an infection and $250,000 in hospital bill later, he’s dead. This is the other America that he speaks of. We can fight a trillion dollar war but infants die of thirst waiting to get rescued from a hurricane. We can give Halliburton a blank check, but can’t find a way to get routine dental care to the poor. The nation has its priorities all mixed up- while some argue that giving yet another tax break to Paris Hilton is going to make everyone’s life better, we can’t find a way to help those that really need it.

Yup. That would be Edward’s way of making the case: a sympathetic sad extreme unusual example that tugs the heart strings in an attempt to the lead the jury (in this case the public at large) to make unjustified broad conclusions.

Yes, it is harder for many of the poor to find work, to get to work, and to manage families and work. That process is harder. A few give up. Yes, it is desirable to facilitate the entry of “the have-nots” into the Middle Class. 100%, the huge numbers of those without health coverage in America is both a human tragedy and a costly tragedy. But somehow I get the sense that Edwards is taking this as yet another personal injury case: “How can I use this tragedy for my personal benefit?” In this case his fee is hoped to be a Democratic nomination and it isn’t even contigent on delivering a verdict for the plaintiff.

Edward’s proposals would do little to address the root causes of poverty or the paucity of good jobs for those reared in poverty. Neither do tax cuts allegedly stimulating the economy create many more jobs as much as they amplify the wealth accumulated by the already wealthy.

The bottom line for poverty is having jobs that you can get, that you can keep, that pay well enough to allow you to no longer be poor. Getting those jobs today requires a good education. Having those jobs available depends on having a well educated workforce that can compete internationally not with lower wages (we will always lose that competition) but with products and services that only a well educated workforce can produce. That’s how we sell more for more. Stimulating spending by Americans is not the issue; having an educated workforce is. Keeping those jobs for moms that are single (and that is and has been a whole 'nother thread) means affordable childcare and transportation.

[Shodan]

Thanks, RT, but it was a hijack, so I guess I better drop it.

@DSeid

And what are Edwards positions here?

Help facilitate the poor entering the Middle Class by -
Subsidizing home payments for the first 5 yrs ($1000/yr/family).
Giving low-income Americans another $500/yr matching for savings.
Housing vouchers too, so that the poor can more afford to live in better school districts.
No “trouble” in HS then get tuition free for one yr at a public university.
No mariage penalty and fathers get help finding jobs if and only if they take responsibility for their kids.
Raise the minimum wage.
Pay for it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest back to where they were before Bush’s cuts.

I can believe he will try to achieve this - at least the last one.*

DSeid points out a lot of the troubles with all this - it is essentially same old same old. Giving help to fathers if they take responsibility for their kids is fine, except if the father is only marginally employable anyway. Poor kids who don’t get into “trouble” in high school often get into college anyway, and, as I have pointed out elsewhere, graduating high school is one of the key correlations with not being in long-term poverty anyway.

Whether you believe tax cuts stimulate the economy and create jobs or not, the kinds of jobs that are going to be created(where ever they come from) are going to be available mostly to the educated, or won’t pay enough to push someone into the middle class - unless they do the other things that correlate to not being poor - work full time, graduate from high school, stay married, and don’t have kids until you can support them.

Regards,
Shodan

*I’m guessing he’s got a boat load of other stuff that he is also going to pay for by rescinding the tax cuts, plus balancing the budget, plus increased spending on Medicare, plus increased spending on health care, plus…

[foolsguinea]

@DSeid

And better to get good schools all over and stimulate jobs all over than to imagine that you can enable everyone to move into the same neighborhood that somehow has both the jobs and the good schools.

I agree, but the housing vouchers can help with income-class integration. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step forward.

[foolsguinea]

@DSeid

The bottom line for poverty is having jobs that you can get, that you can keep, that pay well enough to allow you to no longer be poor. Getting those jobs today requires a good education. Having those jobs available depends on having a well educated workforce that can compete internationally not with lower wages (we will always lose that competition) but with products and services that only a well educated workforce can produce. That’s how we sell more for more. Stimulating spending by Americans is not the issue; having an educated workforce is. Keeping those jobs for moms that are single (and that is and has been a whole 'nother thread) means affordable childcare and transportation.

:dubious: Do you realize this paradigm is entirely dependent on America retaining educated-class superiority in a globalized (& thus fragmented) economy? Is the rest of the world really going to sit still while we demand that they outsource the “high-class” jobs to us, so we can have an unbalanced economic base? (They haven’t been letting us do that so far.) What you’re proposing is so unstable that those highly educated workers you talk about may end up having to emigrate to actually use their education. Meantime, many of them will drive the wages down in the educated fields, & many will end up in low-wage McJobs; preventing the whole class of them from profiting from college overall. We need a whole economy, not just a piece.

Protectionism: it’s not just for tiny island nations anymore.

[DSeid]

I have no objection to hijacking this moribund thread if you don’t.

What I do realize is that the rest of the world is not sitting still, and that we better not either.

So far most of the competition comes from the fact that other countries can offer a large and cheap labor force. Our poor aint poor like their poor, and we don’t want them to be. We want good wage jobs. Education investment in India and China is weighted mainly in educating the few who get to college level very well. Still given that they have such large populations, even an inferior early grades system can produce sizable amounts of top level talent. Some “high class jobs” are being outsourced from us to India even now. China won’t be far behind. So how do we compete?

We must work harder to get the most out of all of our potential talent. We must leverage the benefits we get from being the world’s hodgepodge stew of cultures … which is our inventiveness. We must concentrate on not doing cheaper but doing smarter.

If we do not then we will not have a whole economy. We will not have a piece of one. We will have an empty shell of one.

Protectionism? The days are long past when that would work. The economy is globalized and there is no going back. The question now is what role we will play in this globalized ecomomy as it matures and adapts to changing realities. And how to play that for the benefit of our own workers of all class levels.