But in Nickle & Dimed, the author describes many people who are going to work every day, working hard, behaving sensibly – and who are nevertheless stuck in poverty.
Housing costs were almost always the biggest problem faced by the people discussed in the book. To bring into existance housing that can be afforded by the working poor, what would be required? New laws, or the repeal of existing ones, or both? This is a demand that the market is not fulfilling – why not?
But they are hit hard by other taxes: social security taxes, sales taxes, “sin” taxes. The problem with the standard tax cut is that only the income tax is cut. The better off you are, the more benefit you get from such a cut, while the genuinely poor get no benefit at all, or very little.
By the way, a question for puddleglum – what is “comstat”? You mentioned it as a sucessful anti-crime measure.
This is a comment statement I hear from poor people. The problem is if you are working hard on the wrong things, you spend your entire life spinning your wheels. What poor people need to do is sit down and say “I want to make $40,000/$50,000$100,000/whatever a year. What kind of job pays that kind of money and what do I need to do to get that kind of job?” Hard work is admirable, but “smart” work is better.
You need to stop worrying about tax breaks or incremental pay raises or new legislation. These are things that are all beyond your control.
And what you wind up with in your scenario, msmith537 is MBAs and MSCEs serving up your fries at McDonald’s. In the real world, there’s no such thing as too many chiefs and not enough Indians: the market will always need more Indians than chiefs.
The Baby Boomer generation has also skewed the economy in that we now areas, such as my own, where BB retirees are the majority of the consumers. This means that most of the jobs are in new home construction, health care, or services (food service and retail). New home construction is unstable, feast-or-famine, work; health care pays fairly well (although not as well as it used to) and many people just aren’t suited for it; and services pay very poorly but account for the vast majority of jobs.
I did not present a scenario. I simply gave some advice on how to not be poor. It was not a statement designed to solve the the problem of poverty for the entire country. Hopefully a poor person reading this will take action to improve their lot in life instead of sitting by and hoping that the government or big business will assist them.
You are correct that if everyone had a Master’s degree, MBAs and MA (probably more one than the other) would be working in McDonalds. The diference is that they would be able to work in other careers as well. Many minimum wage workers (maybe even most) work those jobs because they lack the skills to do somthing that pays more.
Has nothing to do with Indians and Cheifs (or worker bees/queen bees if you find this analogy more “PC”). As a recent MBA grad, I am at the bottom of my firms hierarchy. Even though I make a decent living, I could be considered poor when compared to a partner with a $million dollar salary. But even as a worker bee I earn enough to live very comfortably because not just person off the street can do my job.
Would you please tell me the kind of plan that someone who does not have an extra quarter (as the women in Ehrenreich’s book did not) and is already working 12 hours/day can make. I can’t see it.
I’m not pubblegum, but maybe I can help. In layman’s terms (which are the only terms I know), it’s a database tracking reported crime, police presence and a slew of other variables. It greatly helped NYC deploy its police resources, and is thought to have helped to the drastic decrease in gang activity and street / subway crime.
As for the subject of the OP: The working poor appear to be asking for a better/greater redistribution of wealth. Not sure I agree; not sure I disagree. I believe there will always be working poor. I don’t know anyway around it. I do think it is wrong to point to other countries with more socialist policies and greater taxes and say let’s copy their policies on welfare (or in Canada’s case, health care). The tradeoff is higher taxes. Someone called for slicing the military budget; have you seen the effects of a lost contract or cut budgets on areas which rely on military work? Yep, more working poor. The military budget takes tax money and redistributes it into the economy while gaining a necessary (although maybe too large depending on one’s viewpoint) service. Do some people get more a slice of the military budget pie than they deserve or have a right too? Yep. Welcome to Human Race 101. Despite the corporate and government corruption problems we do have, I believe we are on the lower end of the global scale. Another case was made for the low-income housing market. This is an economic no-brainer. Without incentives to create low-income housing (subsidies), why create it when the developer and land owner can earn more from middle-income and higher housing? I’m not saying it’s the smartest move socially, just the smartest economically.
Out of curiosity msmith537, when you graduate from MBA school, is it mandatory that you start expressing sentiments like “work smarter, not harder”? This is such a cliché that I am almost thinking that I am being whooshed here.
You do realize that the folks that are just working hard for the most part support the very infrastructure that you rely on day-to-day, right?
While it is no doubt true (in a sentiment that you share) that many of the folk that are working in these minimum wage jobs lack the skill to do anything else, I think that the point is being lost that all of these jobs are ones that need doing. That said, I don’t think that it is unreasonable for society to choose to enable folks to survive for jobs that have been defined as necessary by that collective.
What I am intrigued by, in this thread and in general when the subject of poverty comes up, is that immediately people start crying “Big Government” and “redistribution of wealth”, as if this is the only way to solve the problem. From there, it is a rapid move to deciding that these two sentiments are unpalatable, and concluding that poverty must therefore be unsolvable.
What if we were actually more imaginative about things?
Yes. I am also supposed to tell people to be ‘proactive’ and to focus on their ‘core competencies’ while wondering how anyone can live off less than $100k a year. Seriously though. I just didn’t wake up in my late 20s with an MBA and a high paying job where I surf the web all day pretending to work like Ron Livingston in Office Space. It took a great deal of planning, hard work and luck. Like anything else, it’s a lot easier if you start early. A person who drops out of high school and then decides they want a better life when they are 30 will have a much harder time.
It’s relatively easy to give financial and career advice on the level of an individual person or family. Trying to plan an entire society that eliminates poverty is a much more complicated question that smarter people than me have been trying to solve for as long as there has been a society. A lot of it has to do with basic macroeconomics. If everyone can suddenly afford a lot more stuff, what happens to prices? They go up. If more people can buy stuff, we need to make more for them to buy. What does that do to the environment? Just stuff to consider. It’s usually not as simple as just give the poor more money.
Then it was not germane to this discussion, as this discussion explicitly addresses the working poor of the entire country. Even if it were germane–how is someone working two jobs and struggling to meet the basic necessities going to have the time and money to get a (potentially useless) degree?
Binarydrone’s right: the services provided by the working poor are always going to be needed. To assume that those who perform those services should remain poor even though they work just as hard (if not harder) than you is akin to the mindset that decried the 8-hour-day and the implementation of child labor laws back at the beginning of the 20th century.
A decent day’s pay for a day’s work–is that so difficult to conceive? How can you take pride in a country where (if Binarydrone’s figure is correct) over one person out of every ten lives in poverty?
As for the low-cost housing issue: as I stated in my post on that, many post-WWII developers got rich building small, affordable house. Now developers offer incentives (free pool, free appliances, rebates, community amenities, etc.) to move their absurd middle-class palaces. Why do fast-food places push their “value” menus? Because they sell more. Why are stores such as Wal-mart and Target so successful? Lower prices=more sales=greater profits.
My working-class father built three homes and bought two more in the 25-years of my parents’ marriage. I make more than my father ever did, yet I’m far worse off.
So, I have just re read this thread and cannot find an instance where someone is advocating “just giving more money to the poor”. It could be that I am just not getting it, because I was up very late last night at my second job.
Minor dig aside, this is (I think) what I suggesting.
[list=1]
[li]That in this forum, we admit that it is a problem that more that (if we believe the Census figures) 1 in 10 people are living below the poverty line, and that we as a society can do better.[/li][li]That we admit that the Federally established poverty line is probably grossly low, and that chances are that the scope of the problem is worse than the official numbers indicate.[/li][li]That we take a deep breath and realize that (in the context of this specific debate), no one is suggesting that we all go become Socialists or that we have a massive redistribution of wealth. In other words, so far, no one is trying to take anything away from anyone. This particular point is rather dear to my heart, as I a at a loss to understand why, when this has not come up, every time (in my experience) the topic of poverty rears its head, people assume that the discussion will eventually come around to some sort of rob the rich to feed the poor Robin Hood scenario.[/li][/list=1]
That is because the entire discussion has degenerated into whining about being poor. I don’t know what to tell you. You can tell all the sob stories you want. That isn’t going to make you one cent less poor until you do something yourself.
I don’t understand how you are relating this to poverty. Wal-Mart and Target offer low cost products. That’s good for the poor, right?
Here is a source on poverty stats:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/povdyn93.html
Here’s my stance on the issue:
Generally speaking I believe it’s fairly difficult for people to move up in their socio-economic class (i.e. the poor have a very difficult time becoming middle class, the middle class have a difficult time becoming wealthy). I believe a number of cultural factors are responsible for this phenomenon. IMHO people are typically socialized to behave and think in a manner consistent with the socio-economic class in which they are brought up. This tends to make poor people act in a manner that generally keeps them poor. The same with middle class people. This very issue has been studied by sociologists. People who come from a middle class background, even if temporarily “poor” (whether from going bankrupt, immigrating to a new country with no belongings, etc.), are much more likely to return to the middle class than the working poor are to enter the middle class for the first time.
So what’s the solution? How do we give the poor an opportunity (opportunity because IMHO systematic reward with very little or no effort produces some negative side effects) to improve their lot? Why do the majority of lottery winners seem to wind up back where they started within 10 years? I believe it’s because they simply don’t have the skills or knowledge to maintain that level of wealth. I don’t believe that higher taxes for the rich, lower taxes and more programs for the poor is the solution in it’s entirety. For a government program (or combination of government programs) for the poor to be effective it should markedly increase the rate at which the poor transition to the middle class.
Does an effective program as I’ve described it exist in the U.S.? This may be cynical of me but I don’t think so. Is it possible to create such a hypothetical effective program? Maybe, but unlikely. To successfully change the thought patterns and behaviors of a class of people such that they are more likely to succeed economically is a difficult proposition at best. For example what if we were to take a hypothetical poor adult and put them through two different potential future timelines. In each of these timelines the poor adult does not work for a period of 5 years and then is released into “the real world”.
Timeline 1: In this timeline the hypothetical adult is removed from his neighborhood at 21 and lives with, eats with, plays with, learns with, etc. a middle class family for 5 years (but isn’t employed during this time). This person is not eligible for government programs for the poor at the end of the 5 years.
Timeline 2: In this timeline the hypothetical adult continues (at the same age of 21) living in his lower class neighbourhood, and continues to socialize with people who he works and lives with (who more or less share the same views and have similar backgrounds). This person is eligible at the end of the 5 year period for a number of government programs which will help pay for medical expenses, housing and food as well as a fair portion of post highschool education should he choose to attend.
Which person has the better chance of becoming middle class? IMHO the adult in the first timeline’s chances of transitioning to the middle class are substantially better that the adult in the second timeline.
There will always be poor people. That’s a given. The question is how to make the number of poor as small as is reasonably possible while sidestepping potential negative socio-economic side effects along the way.
Grim
Too bad you never learned to read and comprehend what you read, then.
Why don’t you explain your point more clearly instead of giving me attitude? If you want to be insulting, you can spend the rest of your life eating out of a garbage can for all I care.
Your comment doesn’t make sense because lower prices don’t necessarily translate to greater profits. If it costs 20% more to build a McMansion than a low income house and I can sell the bigger house for %200 more, I’m better off developing the big milk-carton houses.
Yeah, I should be better than to meet insult with insult–but you know, I’m not. Your second paragraph clearly shows that you understood my point, so why did you pretend misunderstanding in your previous post? We’re here to discuss a serious problem; you’re the one coming in here with an attitude.
I just read this whole thread. (ok, I might have skipped here and there, but I read most of it) I have a genuine question re minimum wage (MW). Many people here are advocating raising the MW to the 1960s level. If this is done, will the increased cost of doing business (i.e. higher wages) not lead directly to increased prices for consumers? And will those increased prices not off-set any potential gain in Standard of Living that the raise in MW is supposed to generate? I just don’t see how we can get more real dollars into the pockets of the working poor in this way. Would someone please explain it to me, thanks.
Like Hootnholla, [several posts up] I am a late-comer as well. For he past 6 months I’ve read Straight Dope constantly, and for the past week I’ve been divulging myself with the boards. The greatest part of the boards is the level of maturity, quick wittedness, and intelligence. Much better than the crap at AOL.
Well, if money’s your problem, have you ever thought about Amway?
All ya gotta do is go out there an’ sell the dream! Just sell the dream!
Hehe. Just kidding, folks. OT: My parents were into Amway for a couple years, it was pretty funny looking back at now.
I was trying to get clarification. I was not sure if you were praising Wal-Mart for offering low prices or condemning them for paying low wages and driving small mom&pop stores out of business. I think it is a perfectly reasonable question.
Rhum
If [raising minimum wage] is done, will the increased cost of doing business (i.e. higher wages) not lead directly to increased prices for consumers?