No, it doesn’t. First, because they can generally just toss any inconveniently expensive employee and find one desperate enough to work for less, under worse conditions. And second, because employers are generally going to work together to keep wages down; your “bidding war” theory is based on the fallacy that employers are too stupid to recognize that they have a commonality of interest against their employees.
How do you know these people can work? What system would you establish to verify their ability to work? How is it better than the existing system?
Ah, but he doesn’t want them to work, he wants them to “work”.
As if people in the military don’t work!
Here’s where I think the OP may be onto something—and I may not know what I’m talking about, so please subject me to a reality check if you know better:
Many of those who are homeless and/or impoverished are so because they aren’t very good at taking care of themselves. They might do okay in a very structured environment, like the military. But if they’re responsible for all the details of their own life—where to live, where to work, how to manage their time—they’re in over their heads. Probably many of these people aren’t “army material,” but could there be some civilian alternative to the military (or prison or religious orders or group homes for the disabled) that they could voluntarily join in order to be supervised, structured, and guided to earn their own livelihood?
Yeah, that might be a good thing, if they were totally voluntary - kind of like dorms for adults. But places like that would probably require the residents to be completely sober and drug free, thus chasing away those who need them most.
…
The price should be high - perhaps a forfeiture of certain Constitutional rights in exchange for rehabilitation, which then have to be earned back, perhaps through some form of work for the state. A special benefit of that idea would be to cut down on the efficacy of legal action and protest on behalf of individuals that the state simply refuses to recognize as having the rights of full citizens.
The vast majority of welfare recipients are single parent families. What are the children going to do when their only parent is shipped off to fight the Taliban? Foster care? Yeah, that’s a good idea.
You have funny notions about the causes of poverty. But here’s a tip! It’s not usually because they’re waiting for their dream job of Lido Deck Director to open up.
Also, why do people persist in believing that teh Army takes all comers? You have to do more than just show up, you know.
Seattle is trying the experiment of providing housing for hard-core street people, without requiring that they become sober and drug-free first. So they can sit in their crappy studio apartment and drink all they want instead of doing it on the streets.
Hard-core street people can sometimes rack up phenomenal expenses–they get medical treatment, psychiatric treatment, go to jail, then are released back to the streets to start the cycle over again. I remember reading an article where the author estimated that one trouble-prone street person cost the locality over a million dollars before he finally died from hard living.
Giving a street person a roof can be much cheaper. They don’t fight with other people, because they’re inside imbibing. They don’t scare normal people, because they’re out of sight in their subsidized housing. They don’t have to go to the emergency room every other week with hypothermia.
And if they sit inside and drink themselves to death on the taxpayer dime, well, it was still cheaper than letting them sit on the streets to drink themselves to death. Because the cops can’t just let a guy freeze to death because he’s mentally ill. They can’t ignore an unconscious person lying on the sidewalk because they think he’s a street person. They’re gonna bring him in to the emergency room, and we’re going to pay for it. Letting strange people die in the streets isn’t an option, what if your grandmother wandered away from her nursing home, would you want the cops to pass her by? Or help her?
And it turns out that having reliable shelter often helps street people with their substance abuse. Shelter first, then get them off drugs. Requiring that they remain sober won’t work, they’ll stay on the streets and cost us millions.
Yeah, they’re leaching off society. But you really think a “get tough” attitude would help? We’ve already got a get tough approach and it manifestly doesn’t work.
One of the problems with this proposal is that in many countries such as the United States, the government is looking for competent professionals to staff their military with, not random cannon fodder. In WW2, I could see this happening in the US, as back then, you could pretty much give a guy a gun, a few weeks of training, and tell him to go shoot Japs, but now, even “grunts” have a quite complex job.
In the US, the standards to enlist are actually pretty high (commissioned officer candidates even higher), and I would guess that many, if not most, homeless people would fail one or more qualifications - many homeless are seriously mentally ill, have non-minor criminal records, and/or are in poor overall health - three major disqualifiers.
I think the point is that the military doesn’t “work” in the sense that they don’t produce a tangible product or service for a peaceful society*. One could make the same argument about a person who simply lives off an inheritance- they’re not producing anything of benefit to society either.
*I realize that the military provides a service in guaranteeing the safe continued existence of the USA. But it’s really much bigger than it needs to be to do so, or at least we’re on the steep end of a curve of diminishing returns.
You quoted my entire post yet failed to see the alternative to the Army?
Also, it isn’t just you but the majority of replies I’ve gotten to this is …Army this Army that…
In my OP, I provide for non military alternatives. Yes, you will have drug addicts, yes you will have the disabled, yes you will have those who cannot work due to some weird turn of life. THIS ISN’T FOR THEM.
I never state anything like your claim of people waiting for their dream job so I don’t really know where that came from?
Fear Itself " The vast majority of welfare recipients are single parent families. What are the children going to do when their only parent is shipped off to fight the Taliban? Foster care? Yeah, that’s a good idea. "
Maybe they work for the government in a different capacity like I said in my OP?
No they can’t. They need those people. It takes a while to hire and train a new person, if that person exists at all. You don’t think that studios pay actors a huge sum of money out of the kindness of their heart, do you? They have to pay that or the stars won’t consider them.
And I don’t know where you get the idea that “bidding wars” are fallacious. Just this week, Wal-mart had a bidding war with Amazon over some popular books. Now they’re $2 or $3 cheaper than they were last week.
And I personally just switched companies solely because the other company was offering more. I’ve seen it a million times where someone says they’re going to quit and the employer gives them a raise. My cubicle-mate just had his ex-boss show up at his front door begging him to come back and offering an extra 20%. Why? Because employers need the employees. If you’re a wage slave, it’s because no one wants you anyhow. But for the rest of us, the employer-employee relationship is a two-way street.
Your argument is based on the fallacy that employers are too stupid to recognize that they have an interest in keeping their employees happy.
Your information about “welfare” is woefully out of date. The current program for aid to the indigent is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which already has work requirements for recipients:
So a large percentage of your target demographic are already working, and the rest do not meet the requirement of being “job ready” which would also make them poor candidates for government work or the military.
That’s all well and good, but I was talking about lower skilled workers, and this thread is about the impoverished and homeless. They have very little bargaining power with their employers. And even among the skilled set of workers, if you are too fickle and hop jobs “too much” employers are going to be reluctant to hire you in the first place. You can also likely afford to build up enough savings to cushion you for at least a few months if your work conditions become too intolerable, giving you plenty of time to find a suitable employer.
Then I suppose it’s fitting that my principal objection was to your notion that the many welfare recipients are as you described “those who are clearly able to work, but choose not to.” Let’s review some factors that people have identified as causes of poverty:
[ol]
[li]Low human capital development (low levels of educational attainment or vocational training)[/li][li]Inability to obtain affordable childcare[/li][li]Chronic illness[/li][li]Social prejudices (including racial and sex discrimination, disfavoring applicant with prior criminal histories, requiring college degrees inappropriately (class discrimination))[/li][li]Low levels of demand for unskilled labor[/li][li]Laziness[/li][/ol]
The way you phrase your suggestion smacks of the influence of Reagan’s fables (a nicer way of saying “lies”) about welfare cheats—the mythical welfare queen. Moreover, the sentiment was the animating force behind Bill Clinton’s ending welfare as we knew it. So-called “workfare” has been the name of the game since the early nineties—more than fifteen years now.
Workfare looked like it was working during the boom of the late Clinton years as a result of that hoary chestnut, the rising tide that lifts all boats. As I recall, workfare has fared less well as the economy softened. This only makes sense, since whatever satisfaction people get out of making a welfare recipient pick up dogshit at the park (and there are people who do get satisfaction out of making welfare recipients do this; it takes all kinds I guess, but I don’t see the attraction myself), ***it doesn’t really seem to do much for the root causes of poverty. *** Picking up dogshit, it may surprise you to learn, is not exactly the world’s most marketable skill. It does nothing to help secure affordable childcare or treat chronic illness or acquire reliable transportation or the other dilemmas that disrupt the ability of the poor to secure regular employment. It does nothing to increase the demand for low-skill labor or make these jobs more likely to be the full-time, benefits-eligible positions that are essential to lifting people out of poverty. It doesn’t dispel the prejudice that lock people out of the workforce altogether.
In fact, it’s hard to see what it does do for the poor. But then workfare isn’t about helping the poor at all. Middle-class folks like to believe that being poor is a moral failing, about industriousness and self-discipline. That’s why they complain about how great the poor have it. When you ask them, “Well, if being poor is so terrific, why not quit your job and allow yourself to live the charmed life of the destitute?”, they reply with the claim that they have “too much self-respect to do that.” This view of poverty is, briefly, deeply deluded.
But! Poor people aren’t very influential and so it’s become our national poverty policy! So, instead of just cutting poor people a check (or even better, doing expensive things like improving inner-city schools or providing subsidized child care or expanding Medicaid rolls), we make them pick up dogshit in the park. Everybody (who matters) wins!
I wonder how much of what is ascribed to “laziness” is in fact a symptom of an underlying mental disorder like depression or anxiety. I suspect quite a lot of it is. In which case, many of the poor should be getting psychological help instead of being heaped with scorn.
Oh, bollocks. I worked with the homeless for years, and Shodan is entirely correct – your long-term, chronically homeless are nearly all mentally ill and/or substance abusers.
People from deprived, shitty childhoods may usually end up poor, and may be periodically homeless, but they generally find a way off the streets in a few weeks or months … unless they become mentally ill or addicts.
So, Kimmy, negatively stereotyping the poor is bad, but negatively stereotyping the middle class is okay?