You just described my wife. 
They aren’t.
Look, if someone asks me their opinion of the jobless, drunken asshole she (or even he) is living with I’ll tell them that person is a jobless drunken asshole. The difference is that I don’t expect that person to have a sudden epiphany and drop the loser. That’s not how people work in the real world. It usually takes a LOT of people telling the person to drop the drunken asshole before it actually happens, if it ever does.
As for people who didn’t finish high school I usually say “Well, if you didn’t finish high school you should get your GED”. The difference between you and me is, again, I don’t expect a sudden epiphany. If the person does ask for help finding a program or wants some tutoring I’ll give it but you can’t force an adult to reform and correct their personal problems unless that adult actually wants to change. I’ll keep holding out alternatives but until the person moves towards one there’s only so much I can do.
There are a lot of people who go through an episode of poverty and are happy to accept any and all help, but we’re not talking about those folks because they don’t stay poor. In a few years they’ll be climbing back up the socio-economic ladder. What we’re really talking about are the messed up poor, who have multiple problems. Sometimes we can help them, sometimes we can do damage control, and sometimes things aren’t going to be fixed. I think it’s still worth trying to find solutions to chronic problems, but solutions are what works, not what makes somebody feel good or fits into an ideology based on lack of actual facts.
It’s not a strawman because I’m neither making an argument or accusing you of making an argument. You asked if there were any valid reasons for choosing a luxury over a non-luxury, and I gave you a bunch of reasons–leaving it up to you to decide which of those were valid.
Most people do not know they are heading for a financial disaster until that financial disaster hits them squarely in the face. They lose their job and don’t stop the Netflix or the cable subscriptions. They don’t pull their kids out of piano lessons or forgo Pizza Night. Because hope is a crazy thing, and it’s hard to say “no” to relatively inexpensive requests.
One-time and “continual” are relative, though. You better believe the “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!!” chorus begrudges a person for spending their money on any extravagance, no matter how rare. A reasonable person thinks paying $8/month for a Netflix subscription isn’t that big of a deal. But the “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!!” crowd would say this money would be better spent accruing pennies in a savings account. You buy a steak for someone’s birthday dinner? It better not be paid for with an EBT card! The “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!!” crowd would even demand that a poor person sell all of their luxury items in order to qualify for assistance. You show up at a food pantry driving a nice car? NO FOOD FOR YOU. It doesn’t matter that the car was purchased during better days and it has been paid for in full. NO FOOD FOR YOU!!.
First off, you need to detach a little. I’m not talking about you or your family. Maybe your family dynamics are dysfunctional. But not every close-knit family is like yours.
It’s no more insulting than going BWWWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! I mean, how is it insulting to say that a person never learned how to budget (a problem a lot of middle class people suffer from). Is it less insulting to call them stupid? Or evil? Or irresponsible? Why do so many people advocate teaching personal finance in high school, if this is a skill everyone already knows?
People learn from what they see. They don’t learn what they don’t see. Do you agree? Or are you going to go BWWWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!! like you’re still in the 9th grade?
I think it is not only “monstrous” to say “fuck em”, it is also dangerous. These people don’t disappear just because you ignore them. I don’t know what the solution is, but saying “fuck em” is a pathetic cop-out.
Who is spending that much in movie expenses? If poor people are spending all their money on movie tickets, then I agree–let’s fuck 'em till kingdom come. But no movie theater that I know takes EBT cards. Most people receive cash benefits from the government that are so hard to acquire and so paltry that they’d have to be literally insane to spend that much at the movies. Produce cites that there’s a massive problem with poor people wasting money like this and maybe then I’ll be convinced that your argument–whatever is–isn’t clouded by extreme prejudice.
A living wage will cover the cost of housing, food, utilities, and necessary purchases (toilet paper, sanitary items, occasionally new underwear, etc.) Giving you a defined dollar amount is not a proper answer because it varies from place to place.
In my current area, for a single person, $8-10/hour would allow an adult a spare but self-sufficient existence, probably requiring a roommate of some sort or, in our case, a deal with a landlord to perform some maintenance around the place in exchange for a lower than market rate rent. That would not allow such a person to save any money, it would be a paycheck-to-paycheck existence which is why a lot of functional people in such a position seek a second job or some other means to bring in a little extra money. If two people were earning minimum wage (a married couple, for example) with full time jobs they would actually be above that.
If you live in Chicago, though $15/hour is closer to the minimum required for true essentials. In New York $15/hour might not be enough.
A lot of it depends on housing costs, which vary more than almost any other cost in that equation. If you live in Boondocks, Iowa $7.25/hour (the Federal minimum wage) might even allow a pretty good lifestyle, I don’t know.
So, from my viewpoint, a “living wage” isn’t a dollar amount, it’s earning enough to provide food, clothing/true necessities, and shelter.
Specifically, that’s a poor man’s excuse - a significant number of men don’t like condoms.
And while most poor folks may be able to get birth control that doesn’t mean ALL can, and just a few percent of such a group means thousands of actual people.
There’s also the issue that condoms are not the most reliable form of birth control. They’re far from perfect, and even if the poor can get and use condoms a certain number of failures will inevitably occur, and then there is the question of what to do then.
I mean, hell, a certain number of rich people get unwanted pregnancies, why do you expect the poor to have a better track record when it’s harder for them to get the most reliable forms of birth control and harder to deal with the consequences if it fails?
Oh right, the excuses again. Sorry I forgot.
I don’t like condoms either. You know what I like even less? Paying for a child for 18 years or getting a disease. I guess you have to be middle to upper class to make those decisions.
Thanks for your views on the subject. No sarcasm.
One question though, who decides how much shelter or necessities is enough for someone?
Interesting question, that.
Why don’t you answer it first?
We decide it through the political process.
True but several posters are also trying to point out actual real-life barriers and circumstances that they create themselves. We also tend to exclude people who are poor for external conditions (like stuck paying an ex-husband’s tax debt).
The children situation is interesting. If anybody waited until they could afford kids we would have very few children. That’s why I use the “buy a dog” example. The problem is when people imply that it is impossible for poor people to get birth control or when someone who can’t afford to feed themselves continues to have kids.
I look at this from a purely pragmatic standpoint. What’s the best way to reduce unwanted pregnancies: Lectures about “personal responsibility” or providing poor people free birth control? The former strategy might make you feel smugly superior, but at the end of the day does it actually get results in the real world?
monstro, I think the problem is we are talking about two completely different group of people. You seem to be talking about functional poor people that can make ends meet but only have $10 in the bank OR people that have no resources whatsoever due to a lost job. I’m not talking about people that make the decision to spend money rather than save. I’m talking about people whose priorities are such that survival necessities are not their top priority. We owe it to help people out when they lose their job because unemployment doesn’t pay enough to live on. But what I object to is when people feel we owe them assistance because they’re poor and they’ll starve or be evicted but yet they waste money on buying a dog/cat or pay $200 on movies and dinner out.
Let me give you this hypothetical: Your neighbor works in a low-paying job. You know that she goes out every payday (twice a month) for girls night out and spends $100-$150 each time on dinner and drinks. Last month she bought a doberman “because he was socute”.Every month a couple of days before the end of the month she begs $100-$200 off you “to keep the lights on” or “buy groceries”. Do you give her the money?
I agree. The only time I took a side in the discussion was when “They can’t afford birth control” morphed into “They don’t want to use them”. Apparently even if they were free it wouldn’t make much of a difference according to broomstick.
It’s not impossible to get birth control, but it is more difficult for some people than others.
Depends on the people and the birth control.
Saying “condoms are cheap” or “condoms are free” doesn’t work too well because there really is a subset of men who don’t and won’t use them. I still think they should be readily available because there are people who will use them but it’s never going to be THE solution.
Hormonal birth control (the Pill) is better in many ways because it is more reliable and women, who have the most to lose by an ill-time pregnancy, are in control and don’t have to get buy-in from their partner(s). However, it can have side effects.
I wish IUD’s were a more readily available option, in the sense of public funds being willing to pay for them (only about half the states do, last I checked) because that doesn’t require a person to take a daily pill, angry partners can’t flush them down the toilet or otherwise sabotage them, antibiotics don’t interfere with them, etc. Of course, they aren’t for every woman, either.
Basically, I think the more options the better.
No, I would not. And if she has kids, I’d probably be doing whatever I could to have her reported to CPS because she likely has questionable parenting skills.
But what I would do, as an individual, does not translate into what I would have my society or my government do. The reason I wouldn’t give her money are personal: I don’t want her coming back to me begging for even more money, nor do I want to be enmeshed in her drama just because she has mistaken me for a friend. But I have no problem with the government providing a housing subsidy for this person so that she and her dependents aren’t sleeping on the street. Food is cheap enough so she and her dependents don’t have to starve.
We could waste an entire day coming up with hypotheticals that describe a small minority of individuals. Sure, there are poor people who are irresponsible for absolutely no reason. But the vast majority do have reasons. I’d rather risk helping out a few bad apples than letting all the apples rot. I don’t like living amongst garbage.
Then what would you have society or the government do?
It’s a matter of priorities- if you’re having to go to the food bank and you’re driving a late-model Mercedes, that’s proof positive of bad choices. Not in buying the Mercedes in better days, but in keeping something that does have significant value above and beyond its utility in getting you from point A to point B.
Look at it this way- if a 7 year old Ford Focus will suffice, and cost $5000, and you can sell your late-model Mercedes for $15000, then why the hell wouldn’t you? That’s $10,000 that’s otherwise merely depreciating and being used to drive you around, when a lesser car would do, and you could actually you know, use that money for something much more immediately pressing, like all of these tragic poverty issues that are being bandied about in this thread.
And as to the using EBT cards for anything but the necessities, you DO know why people get torqued out of shape about that, right? Just in case you don’t, it’s because the money on that EBT card represents OTHER people’s money, and in some small part, money that I was taxed and that isn’t in MY pocket.
To simplify a bit, that public benefit money being used for luxuries is in some part someone else’s money that they could have spent on THEIR families, and if they’re having issues affording luxuries due to their tax burden, I can totally see how they might resent people on public assistance using that money for luxuries, and feel like they ought to pay for their own luxuries, and at least use the public assistance money for the most pressing necessities, or not use it at all.
As for the not buying luxuries and saving… I personally don’t care- it’s your business, but if you’re going to buy luxuries instead of saving, and then are caught flat-footed when a catastrophe strikes, then don’t expect me to care then either. That’s the consequence of your earlier choice. If you want me to care in the second situation, I’m going to care in the first. Most people would be MUCH more sympathetic and willing to help someone who say… had $300 in savings through thrift and foregoing luxuries to get there, and then needs another $200 to get plumbing work done or something, than someone who had $0, because they spent their surplus on Netflix and are whining because the plumbing work costs $500 they don’t have.
That’s what I was getting at with the genesis of the thread; choosing luxuries over a catastrophe fund is a choice people make. Suffering a catastrophe unbuffered by that same non-existent catastrophe fund is the consequence of choosing luxuries over saving money.
Yet there seems to be a large contingent of people who seem to think that the poor are entitled to make bad choices AND be saved from those consequences by other people. That’s what I was saying by not holding the poor responsible.
Those of you who are parents, how would you treat your child in this situation: Your child’s class is going on a field trip to a museum/observatory/planetarium. The gift shop is widely known for having really cool stuff that your child will love. So you tell your kid that they can buy what they want out of their own money (your kid is say… 10) that you give them every month for doing their chores. The kid sees a souvenir in the gift shop that will cost a bit more than 1 month’s allowance (1.1 months’ worth), but the field trip is 3 months away, so your kid can save up for it.
Instead, your kid spends 2.2 month’s worth of allowance on candy and sodas (or an Xbox game, or iTunes songs, or whatever), leaving him with 0.8 months worth.
Do you subsidize the kid the extra 0.3 month’s worth of allowance, or do you let them suck it up and not get the souvenir? Of course you let them suck it up (unless you’re a shitty parent). That’s the consequence for those 3 extra Baby Ruths or Taylor Swift songs or whatever.
But when poor people are in the same situation, everyone around here is falling all over themselves to say that the government and society should gladly cough up that extra money because they’re poor, and apparently mentally handicapped and can’t understand that spending money incorrectly has consequences that are unpleasant.
Balron, you remind me of myself 20 plus years ago. You’re clearly hard working and intelligent. It seems I have more faith in you bettering yourself than you do. I got myself out of the rut by having goals and relentlessly pursuing them.
Conservatives tend to see why you CAN succeed. Liberal and progressives tend to only see why CAN’T succeed. If you succeed, you validate the Conservative view. If you fail, you validate Liberal and Progressive view. Who do you think is really on your side?
When you take their kids. If you aren’t responsible enough to buy groceries, you aren’t responsible enough to have kids. Sorry we as a society allow everyone to give birth to kids but we do not let everyone to keep their kids.
And bitter experience has shown that the kids raised by the government usually do WORSE than kids raised even by not-so-great parents. Look at the outcomes of the “stolen generations” in Australia or Canada, e.g., or the modern American foster care system, and then come back and tell us with a straight face that these program break any kind of cycle.
(Note that I am not necessarily referring to kids who are physically/sexually abused at home or otherwise in physical danger, although even there the stories of kids removed from an abusive home and placed in an abusive foster home don’t engender confidence in the system.)