I don’t understand. In all the other threads, poor people are working three jobs and taking care of many kids, and that’s why they can’t return library books, or get a photo ID, or take a bus to a supermarket.
Yes, and 99% of the time around here, people are talking about chronic poverty- deepest, poorest Detroit ghetto style multi-generational poverty.
And that’s where it gets strange; it IS a tough nut to crack, and that’s why I’m so baffled that people seem to not hold that crowd responsible in some part for their situation.
They may have reasons for making bad decisions, but those decisions are no less bad for it, and until those decision making patterns change, and their worldview changes, there’s not a whole lot of hope for that set of people, as any amount of money thrown their direction isn’t going to change the fact that they have a poverty mindset and aren’t thinking in the long-term.
So it seems that the bigger question, if you’re not going to hold people responsible and expect (and enable) improvement, is essentially what level of social hospice (for lack of a better term) you’re going to provide to these people.
What were your good decisions that got you out of poverty, bump?
So here’s a difference between me and you bump. I believe that if you were born in an inner city ghetto, or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, in all likelihood you would not make better decisions than your average ghetto dweller or Indian Reservation resident. I believe almost all of us our products of our environents. If you’re born in a fundamentalist christian family, you will probably be a fundamentalist christian. A poor family, you will probably grow up poor. And if you can rise above that, good for you! But you are the exception rather than the rule, and expecting everyone else to do the same is like running a 4 minute mile and yelling at anyone who does less than you, or climbing mount Mount Everest and yelling at everyone who is not also able to climb th same slope. We are products of our environents, and it is incredibly arrogant to yell at people who have different experiences that have made them more disadvantaged than you to rise above it.
I recommend you read the book “Free Will” by Sam Harris. I think it might humble you.
No, not really, not any more than Social Security or unemployment or pension checks are a “service.” SNAP is a benefit, but not something available only at particular locations or at particular times, or requiring particular people to act as intermediaries.
Job training is a service; it requires teachers and is offered at particular locations. Medical treatment is a service; again, it requires medically-trained staff, and most treatments are available only at equipped locations. Once you have your SNAP card in hand, though, you can use it at pretty much any grocery outlet, and it doesn’t require specifically-trained personnel (and the issuance of the SNAP card itself, in many states, no longer requires any direct interaction–you send in your application and supporting documents, by mail/fax/internet, and the card comes in the mail).
OK, we are using the word “service” differently, is all.
To me, SNAP is a service that facilitates getting groceries into one’s home at little or no cost to the recipient. Likewise, the processing of the applications, even if done indirectly, is a service, as is mailing out the benefits. Even the state’s financial system that allows the merchants to be reimbursed is a service.
IOW, they’re not “goods”, they are “services”.
I realize that, but it doesn’t make them any less responsible for bad and stupid decisions. I’m reminded of a guy I once knew (let’s call him “G”- the former boyfriend of one of my wife’s friends). “G” had some kind of construction job, but since he had like 3 or 4 illegitimate children, he was paid under the table to avoid paying child support. And every paycheck, he’d buy something stupid like rims for his truck, or gold jewelry. And he and his friends would get monstrously drunk on massive quantities of beer.
Over the next couple of weeks, “G’s” cash would run out, so he’d be mooching off of my wife’s friend to pay whatever bills had come due, and for gas for his truck, or other necessities, as he had like $15 to his name. Then, he’d get paid again, and the cycle would start over.
To hear my wife’s friend tell it, ALL his friends and their families did the exact same thing every 2 weeks.
Now how am I supposed to be sympathetic to that? You don’t go buy rims for your truck if you know you have bills coming due that you may not be able to cover, or that you may have to mooch off someone else to pay. You don’t go buy $50 in beer if you’re chronically broke just before each paycheck.
I know that’s probably all he’s ever known, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid, and I certainly don’t think that it gets him off the hook for being responsible for the consequences of his actions.
That’s the point I’m making- many of you seem to espouse the idea that because “G” is poor, stupid and raised in poverty, that “G” is somehow not responsible for being a total cretin or for the consequences of his actions. Which is BS, if you ask me.
And, not to change the subject, but I want to point out that what you said above applies equally to things like bigotry, religious intolerance and several other things that lots of people around here have NO trouble at all angrily holding people to account for, regardless of whether they were brought up in a conservative Christian KKK white supremacist compound or not.
I goofed. I didn’t mean to say that a negative income tax is one way to implement a negative income tax. i meant to say that a negative income tax is one way to implement a basic income. Basic income hits a sliding scale because of taxation. The poor keep their basic income and as you approach the middle class, taxes absorb that basic income. As you get wealthier, the increased taxes absorbs more than what you get in basic income and you end up subsidizing the folks at the lower end of the scale.
But in theory, a negative income tax is just another form of basic income with less smoothness and more difficult enforcement but more easily implemented (like the EITC).
Are you serious? He’s poor! He never learned to pay his electricity bill or whatever before buying new rims! And the worst part is, there is NO WAY he ever COULD learn! There are absolutely NO places in this country for a poor person to learn about personal financial management. And even if there were, how could he get to them? I’m sure they are 1000 miles away, and he can’t afford time off from his 3 jobs to get to them.
That comes of viewing all poor people as identical. They aren’t. I do, in fact, have impoverished co-workers working more than one job. Sometimes that’s what you have to do if you have little to no support system and you’re raising a kid on your own, even if you make all the “right” decisions. Some people don’t value literacy which sucks if they have a kid that actually wants/enjoys reading and trips to the library. Some people just need a job.
Like wealthy and middle-class people, poor people are individuals and not all alike, whether you’re talking about positive or negative traits.
I think a lot of this hinges on the difference between “explanation” and “excuse”.
It’s hard to solve a people problem like chronic poverty unless you know why the person is chronically poor. However, saying “this person grew up poor” is an explanation (at least in part), which does not “excuse” their poor decision making or harmful behaviors, it just tells you how they got there. I think too many people confuse the two.
Coming from a long line of people who have kids out of wedlock at 14 does not make it OK, it just explains why a 14 year old might think having out of wedlock kids at that age is somehow normal. If you grow up in a family where the men drink beer until they pass out on Friday and Saturday night is common behavior that doesn’t make it OK, it just explains why someone might have started doing that themselves. It’s also different than someone coming from a line of teetotalers who becomes a black-out drunk.
Back when I worked at a clinic across the street (literally) from the Cabrini-Green project in Chicago part of getting peoples’ lives straightened out what figuring out how they got into a mess in the first place, then trying to get them to understand how they were sabotaging/harming themselves and giving them alternatives. Notice that in amongst that we weren’t wagging our fingers at them saying “you bad person, you!”. For one thing, a lot of them already knew they were bad people at some level or other, they didn’t need anyone else to tell them that.
So, do you want to punish people for being a mess, or try to help them solve their problems so they are no longer a mess? That’s two different approaches.
Having worked in the field (before my current brush with poverty) I am also well aware that some people can’t be fixed. Yes, it sucks. Continuing to punish such people in an attempt to reform them really is pointless, though. You can’t REhabilitate people who have never been habilitated in the first place. There’s a difference between reminding people of how good normal life used to be vs. introducing them to a normal they’ve never known. If someone has been in the work world steadily for 20 or 30 years and is now unemployed you don’t have to convince them of the benefits of a middle-class lifestyle, they already know about them and for the most part a nudge and a little help and they’ll get themselves back to that. If someone has never held a real job then there’s a lot more learning they have to do. That’s why in my state there’s now separate “job services” tracks - those without a substantial work history go into one where they have to show up daily, on time, and have someone looking over their shoulder to instill work habits like punctuality, and folks who educate them about what “business casual” means, what a job interview is, and help them get needed documentation for applying for work. Folks like me, it’s a seminar to brush up on how resumes and job hunting are done now as opposed to 10 or 20 or more years ago when we last were job hunting.
^ This.
There are some people you can NOT fix. Back when I worked at a clinic across from a project we’d see folks like this. We had a gal who was illiterate, had poor English skills, had poor skills in her native Spanish, a 20 year drug addict, a criminal record full of petty theft, shoplifting, and prostitution, and to top it off had just been diagnosed with AIDs back in the days before AZT, which meant a sentence of 6 months or less to live. The state keep hammering us for a “rehabilitation plan”. What a sick joke - you can’t fix that. She was going to be dead in six months (actually, closer to five to my recollection), there was no way in hell to fix any of that, even if you could give her a motivation to do so. As one of the doctors said, yelling loud enough for pretty much anyone to hear, the kindest thing was really to put her in a nice, comfy room and let her get as high as she wanted as often as she wanted until the end. Which, of course, is heresy on a certain level but also god’s own truth.
At a certain point it becomes plain a person isn’t fixable. There are a lot of ways to wind up there, but continuing to punish such people is pointless. It wouldn’t work. It just causes them more pain and the person doing the “hitting” just gets tired. Give them a safe, warm, comfortable bed to flop in, a lock for the door, and just let them be dysfunctional while minimizing any harm they’re causing. (Yes, in some cases that does mean confinement, but most of them time they’re harmful only to themselves)
You may not require face-to-face interaction, but at least in my state that is still an option you can request, and even if the first 3 months are somewhat (because you still have to prove some sort of need) automatically granted you’ll at least have a phone interview and have to resubmit documentation periodically afterward. In my experience, every six months I had a phone interview follow-up and had to resubmit documentation. Now, although the basic form has, indeed, been simplified your supporting documentation required might not be. Frankly, it was very much like having to do my taxes every 6 months. It was annoying, even if quite doable. The paperwork/documentation/follow up requirements are onerous enough that quite a few people will simply stop bothering once their benefit falls to around $25-50 a month unless they’re on disability or retired and have ample time on their hands to deal with it. The folks working two jobs are the ones who least want that sort of timesucker.
If anyone is wondering - the phone interviews were in part to make sure I was still working (how is your job going? Is your transportation still reliable?), other bits of follow up (are you registered to vote and if not do you need assistance in registering? Do you have health insurance and if not do you need assistance in getting it? Etc.) and when the caseworker noted an increase in income/work hours a bit of praise to go with it. Which, by the way, when you’re struggling to make ends meet and do better a little bit of praise goes a long way. For damn sure you don’t get it when some much better off person sneers at you for buying your bread and milk with a SNAP card.
And, of course, comes the day (we all hope) when you’re doing so well you no longer qualify. Which can be a little scary because you’re losing a guaranteed food budget, but also great because you no longer have to deal with that part of the bureaucracy. As it happens, my wages increased to the point where I one day called up the state and told them take me off the program, I no longer qualify. I filled out a one page form stating my withdrawal was voluntary on my part and done. Yay me. Yay millions of other people who have been on that program for a short period of time until they could get back on their feet.
But in the threads about food deserts, and voter ID, and returning of library books, there is never the qualifier of “some” poor people. It is always “Poor people don’t have time to do that” because of 3 jobs, or kids, or whatever.
I think this is a great program!
As I said, you have a meme in society that all poor people are the same. They aren’t.
And your repition of caricatures doesn’t really help the situation. Perhaps you find all of this amusing. Some of us do not.
Certainly it’s more reasonable than some. My state’s unemployment rate is under 5% currently, tracking people into different programs based on actual needs and traits rather than stereotype might be a factor in that.
Of course we do still have poverty issues, particularly in Gary where I live. Indiana is far from a paradise.
I’m not the one saying all poor people are the same. Posters who claim poor people cannot return library books, or get a photo ID, or find a grocery store are the ones lumping all poor people together.
I do not find people being poor to be amusing. I do, however, find someone complaining about how poor they are while having a tv, a place to live, a car, and a smartphone, while there are children in the world who live in trash dumps to be not as worthy of sympathy as they may think they deserve.
This is pretty ironic - no one has stated that all poor people are the same. That’s your own caricature. It’s also true that societal issues cannot be addressed at an individual level so policy choices are often made to apply to large groups. That doesn’t mean that all poor people are the same.
Yes, there is a way - the fact that he has to repeat this unpleasant mooching cycle every 2 weeks.
Also, you don’t have to “go” somewhere to learn financial management. You can learn it where you are.
Given how cheaply TV’s and smartphones can be obtained in this world having them is not a mark of wealth - second hand both those devices are dirt cheap to give-away. In fact, kids living in trash dumps might well come across such things in said dumps.
In the US have a place to live and a car are much more problematic, with some poor people winding up living in their cars as a way of combining two expenses. Some poor people. Some poor people are dependent on public transportation. Some manage to have a place to live and a vehicle. Some poor people who used to not be poor retain certain assets (like a car or a cell phone) which doesn’t make worry about the rent/mortgage and how you’re going to come up with money to put gas in the car or pay the electric bill and less burdensome. Why aren’t they allowed to bitch about their expenses just because they own some arbitrary object? Maybe we should make a rule the middle-class aren’t allowed to bitch as long as they keep buying fancy coffee from Starbucks.
That doesn’t mean society should treat them all the same.
No, no one has explicitly said all poor people are the same, but when a poster starts out “poor people do X” or “why do poor people do X?” that usually is what they are implicitly saying.
I live in a conservative “red” state that nonetheless manages to maintain different “tracks”, services, and benefits for different varieties of poor people, because different groups have different needs. It’s not rocket science. It does require going beyond simplistic definitions and stereotypes.
So you have sympathy for the guy up thread who ran out of money every pay due to buying rims for his car, and/or beer? And yes, nobody should get a fancy coffee from Starbucks everyday and then bitch about lack of money.
I’ve see it the other way around. For instance, the library book thread. When someone asked why can’t the kids and/or families just take the books back? The answer is along the lines of ‘Poor people don’t have time to do that’
Wow, I’m sure kids in third-world countries who sleep in a trash dump would be THRILLED to have a car to sleep in. Or the ability to take public transportation and a reason to take it. Maybe they will get lucky and, like you said, “find a TV” in the trash dump so maybe they could eat that day.
Nope, I don’t have have sympathy for Mr. Several Illegitimate Kids and Poor Financial Choices. However, I don’t have a problem with him bitching about his problems, self-created or not. Bitching is like free speech - it’s allowed even when it’s offensive and/or I disagree with the premise.
If nothing else, guys like that bitching about those problems loud and publicly allowed me to avoid some first dates with real losers back when I was a single gal.
I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I can ask people “Do you want suggestions on how to solve your problems or do you just want to vent?” And I’m OK with either choice.
What I object to is saying one group has a right to bitch while the other does not. If you want a No Bitching rule for people buying overpriced drinks from Starbuck’s, too, then I applaud your consistency.
Honestly, I’m a bit conflicted on that one. I remember as a kid there being times when I couldn’t get myself to the library and I was dependent on others to help me get my books back there on time. Fortunately, I grew up in a family that put a high value on literacy and thus trips to the public library were frequent. My in-laws, on the other hand, put little value on literacy at all, and most have never possessed a library card (my spouse, despite having a master’s level education, never possessed a public library card until after he married me. He also grew up having people throw out his books as “dust collectors” and “time wasters” whether he was finished reading them or not). Two very different family environments. Environment does have an effect, whether people want to admit it or not.
I get pissed off when I go to the public library and a book I’m looking through has had things like pictures sliced out of it, or “edits” by some busybody. No, actually, I get furious. But then I have to remind myself that this is what happens to the public commons and if you want to support the good such an institution does then you have to resist the impulse to yank it away when someone misbehaves.
Frankly, I’ve always had my doubts about people LIVING IN a trash dump. Scavenging in one, that I entirely believe, and I don’t think less of people for doing such a thing to survive if that’s what’s necessary.
Unlike you, though, I don’t make certain assumptions about such people. Why does scavenging in a dump rule out having the means to take public transportation? Cars and various vehicles do wind up in dumps so for all I know such hypothetical people do, in fact, use junked vehicles as a form of shelter (we certainly have homeless people in the US living in cars, vans, and such).
Cellphones, however, are no longer a mark of wealth. They’re frickin’ everywhere now. As I said, second-hand and “obsolete” hardware of that sort is dirt-common these days and in no way marks anyone as having wealth. You might as well say that poor people in the US no right to bitch because even if their studio apartment leaks rain like a sieve and is crawling with rats and roaches they still have electric lights so they can’t be poor.
Good Plan!
And I actually do the same thing.
Then we are in agreement on that.
I find this sad 
I don’t make assumptions about such people either. Only when people say they can’t do something because they are “poor” You don’t have to be dirty just because you’re poor. You don’t slack off on community responsibilities just because you’re poor. You don’t sit around wasting money on rims for your truck and then complain that you are poor.