Why revolutions get so bloody.
The stress of being poor can actually harm a child’s cognitive development.
Children from poor families are more likely to be depressed, which makes it harder to climb out of poverty.
I think there’s a pervasive attitude among many that being poor is a moral failure on the part of the impoverished. I strongly dispute that conclusion. Being poor grinds you down, making it harder to pull yourself up by your bootstraps (assuming you can even afford to buy boots).
Shodan and Sam, when did you guys live off of minimum wage?
You are incorrect here – and I speak from my own experience (in general friends and acquaintances, though for a period my wife and I). It is quite possible to hold a position, even a quasi-full-time one, which does not pay enough to support a family adequately or which provides little or no margin beyond the payment of esssentials (rent, utilities, food). It is also possible to be in a position where one cannot find employment adequate to support oneself, despite extensive effort.
And you are no doubt right that it is not, strictly, your problem. But of course, none of the social benefits that you take for granted are technically our problems, either. It’s a case of whose ox is gored. Personally, I stand with John Donne: “No man is an island…”
Have you been poor?
I’ve been poor. Most of my friends come from the same background. I have other friends who grew up middle class or rich.
The biggest factor in determining if a child is depressed or has poor cognitive development is not poverty, it’s the behavior of the parents.
Fifty years ago, just about everyone grew up in conditions that we would consider to be poverty today. The middle class dream was a 1000 square foot home with a white picket fence. Two bedrooms for a family with four children. One TV and one car. If you went slightly upscale you might find homes with a washer and dryer, and maybe an extra half-bath.
I don’t think the youth of that time were psychologically scarred. If poverty is causing problems today, it’s because today’s poverty brings with it a lot of problems of the social underclass - poor parenting in particular. Too many single mothers, too many unparented children causing problems for other children. The people who lived in Levittown in the 1950’s didn’t live any better than people who live in poverty today - save that they generally had two parents who cared about them and who made sure they were raised right.
Fixing this problem isn’t a matter of money. In fact, the ‘conservative’ argument is that the problem we have today is a sociological problem of people who never grow up and take responsibility for themselves, and therefore don’t take responsibility for their children either. When you cast the safety net too wide, and take away the consequences of poor decisions, you remove the essence of adulthood - the notion that once you leave home, you are responsible for your own decisions and the consequences thereof. Adulthood doesn’t come to many people living in poverty any more. People just change their guardianship from the parent to the government. Then they have their own children, and expect the government to raise them. A wide safety net infantilizes the population.
This does not apply to everyone in poverty of course, or even to the majority. Most people in poverty do not stay there. But the problem of the permanent underclass needs to be solved, and you can’t solve it by throwing money at them. If anything, it makes the problem worse.
You mean during what time period? For me, it was up to about 1990. From about 1985 on I made more than minimum wage, but averaged less than minimum wage because I only worked part time while I was in school.
I don’t see that things have changed much.
I don’t think that providing people with a bare subsistance is going to infantilize them or reduce their incentive to work. Do you honestly think that if the government offered everyone who wanted it a crappy 100 square foot apartment (enough room for a bedroom, toilet, and a hotplate) and really cheap food (rice, beans, potatoes) that they are all just going to sit on their duff all day in the 10 by 10 room, eating their rice gruel and being content? Most humans aren’t built that way.
As have I. I have a huge gash scare on my foot that didn’t heal right because my mom at the time didn’t think she could afford to take me to the hospital to have it stitched up. I also have memories of running out of food, having the electric shut off in the middle of winter (which disabled the heater), getting picked on for it, etc.
Did you grow up in Canada? Did your mother make use of any social programs? Was the minimum wage there? Was it higher (in inflation adjusted money) then it is here now?
As did I. I detasseled, raked leaves, got a job as grocery bagger, etc.
What year was this? I can tell you my mom tried support a family on that in the 90s. Michigan minimum wage used to be very low. It didn’t work so well. Did your friend contribute $8,000 as well? If so then your statement is incredibly misleading because your household income was $16,000.
So who sweeps the streets in your society of Rands? Do you think minimum wage jobs don’t need done? You seem to think their shouldn’t be people wanting to do them. That they should be punish for fulfilling roles necessary to society.
If the jobs need done, other then being selfish greedy asshole, or a sadist, why would you want people to be punished for doing them?
You think if people have the basic necessities, including health care, they’ll just stop caring? If you do then how come doesn’t everyone stop at lower middle class?
This kind of dark ages style judgmentalism is the biggest flaw in Conservatism. It’s about hurting everyone who doesn’t live up to the 1950s office worker family ideal just for being unfortunate or different.
If the marriage isn’t going to work then you want to punish the spouses for it? You’d rather someone stayed unhappily married over fear of bankruptcy?
Yea those evil parents, abusing the system by not leaving their kids home alone.
It’s hard to believe, considering you want to make parents, and by extension, their kids suffer just so they won’t use a baby sitter as much.
This I actually agree with. The only difference is I include healthcare in that safety net. Do you think it’s right people sometimes have to choose between vital medicine or rent? Between bankruptcy or death? That they’re stuck at a job they hate, but can’t move on lest their health problem become a pre-existing condition?
People need the basics, including basic food, shelter, water, safety, and healthcare. Anyone who settled for just the basics wouldn’t amount to much anyway.
Yet which country has the more better off population? It sure isn’t the US, if you go by happiness, infant mortality, or life expectancy.
Also using money as a measure like that ignores cost of living expenses (a dollar goes a lot farther in Mexico, then Manhatten).
How much does the average Brit have to spend on healthcare expenses verses the average American? I can guarantee you it’s quite a bit less for the Brits even if you include taxes collected.
For example the US to Sweden.
Yeah, just what has Sweden been doing lately?
Sweden is also notably corporation-friendly, a key to their…non-complete failure that leftist types do not often acknowledge.
from this link:
Then…
From this link:
So your cites support social safety nets then?
No, it says that they can be propped up if you are even more more economically liberal than the United States is.
My family was the only non-welfare family I knew of in the housing complex we lived in. My mother grew up with the notion that you don’t accept charity unless you have absolutely no choice, so our standard of living was actually lower than most of the other families.
However, we were one of the few families to actually make it out of that situation. Because my mother actually developed job skills, she worked her way up in the small grocery store she worked in, eventually becoming manager. And we eventually managed to buy half of a small duplex and move out of there, and with my mother’s home equity she eventually bought a little store of her own. That was after I left home.
This would never have happened had she taken the welfare that was available to her, because she would never have developed those job skills.
I have no idea how much money he had. He paid his half of the rent and utilities, and sometimes we shared food and sometimes we didn’t. And I said nothing about household income - I simply pointed out that one option poor people have is to share expenses with others.
I think if society needs street sweepers, it will have to pay whatever the workers who are willing to do it demand to be paid. If they don’t, they won’t get the streets swept.
For example, around here we once used to have full-service gas stations. We no longer do, because no one is willing to work as a pump jockey for the kind of wages that can reasonably be paid for that job. If society valued that job more, we would be willing to pay more for our gas, and those people would make enough money.
However, a lot of those low paying jobs are not held by primary wage earners, but by secondary wage earners, college students, children, etc. One of the effects of high minimum wage laws is to eliminate the ability of such people to find work. And that’s a damned shame. Luckily we exempt jobs like paper carrier from minimum wage laws, because if we didn’t, a lot of kids would no longer get valuable work experience. But I suppose you want those jobs to pay $7.25 per hour as well?
What a twisted world you live in, where a person who accepts a job offer is beinig ‘punished’ because he’s not making as much as YOU think he should earn.
I think that any time you make it easier to live a lifestyle, some people on the margin will choose to remain in that lifestyle. This is not exactly a controversial opinion.
Here in Alberta, we reformed welfare, and we heard all kinds of howling about how we were punishing the poor, and dire predictions of kids starving and a rapid growth in homelessness, yada yada. Guess what happened? Most of the people who had their benefits cut went to work. Today, our underclass population is much smaller, and our economy healthier.
Or it’s about setting up conditions such that the children of those people might actually find better lives for themselves.
No, I’d rather that everyone was healthy. But the fact of the matter is that when you make divorce easier, you get more divorce, and with it more social problems. This is called a moral hazard, and it’s an unfortunate fact. We all want to help people, but we also don’t want to set up a situation whereby more people put themselves in situations that require the help. It’s not good for them or anyone else.
And here I thought poor people were already covered under Medicaid, and children under S-CHIP.
I don’t think anyone should starve in a wealthy country like the U.S. Nor do I think their children should go uneducated, or that they should die because they don’t have access to health care.
Life expectancy in the U.S. is greatly affected by high rates of obesity (the highest in the world) and homicide. Infant mortality differences have a lot to do with the fact that the U.S. goes to extreme lengths to keep premature babies alive, which means that when they die they are counted as infant deaths while in other countries they are not.
And if you’re a Brit and you develop cancer, you have a 45% chance of surviving. In the U.S., you have a 67% chance of surviving. Public health giveth, and public health taketh away.
A) A person who is physically disabled doesn’t match my description. If a person can’t be demonstrated to be a loser, I don’t see any reason to treat him as such. If he can show that he has a good reason why he can’t do any sort of physical nor mental labor, then I have no issue with providing a stable disability check.
B) You will likely rise back out of your ditch digger job because you aren’t the ditch digger type. It’s unfortunate that you have fallen into temporarily, but unlike your husband there’s no way to demonstrate that you aren’t a loser beyond climbing the ladder again. I suppose that we could try some system whereby your income is capped at whatever the highest annual income you made was, but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon.
Sorry to do this to you again, but check The Times:
LAKE STATION 1 Bedroom $450mo. heat included credit check required
HAMMOND 1-2 Bedroom apartments starting at $475 a month. Appliances included.
EAST CHICAGO- 2 bedroom/ 1 bath $450/mo + dep. utilities paid by tenant. No pets.
LOWELL: STUDIO $390/mo. 1 Bedroom $490/mo. 2 Bedroom $575/mo. Appliances Included
VALPARAISO: 1 Bedroom Duplex Apartment on West Side $450mo. No Pets.
I only bring this up because you seem so angry about your terrible situation, and I don’t blame you. But is it possible that the constant hopelessness you feel actually prevents you from getting up and out of poverty?
I don’t mean to single you out, since you seem like a great person who hit a really bad string of luck. But this kind of behavior seems to keep poor people behind.
That calculator is an absolute crock. The implication is that the “living wage” is dependent on how many kids you have, and that it’s a single working parent household.
That’s just not the way things work; jobs don’t (and shouldn’t) pay more because you have more children.
It’s hardly some sort of moral failure on our society’s part when a guy who makes about 30k a year and has no kids and a stay-at-home wife has a kid, and BANG! he’s not making a “living wage”. His stupid ass should have kept his cock in his pants, or should have his wife get off her ass and get a job if money’s a concern.
The other thing I question is how many people really make minimum wage? Most people don’t stay at minimum wage very long- it doesn’t take much to get a raise of a dollar or so at a retail place. Wait staff and waitresses, etc… tend to make FAR more than minimum, at least on a per-hour basis.
IMHO, you have to be some sort of inept wretch to make minimum wage and stay at that salary. Most teenagers don’t even make minimum for summer jobs.
Blalron: Let’s say you want to buy a new pair of jeans. You go to your favorite store that sells such items. They have a pair of jeans you like for $50. You wouldn’t mind paying that much for those pair of jeans, so you decide to buy them.
Do you pay the store (a) $50 or (b) an amount in excess of $50?
Similarly, when one person (“Employer”) wants to purchase services from another person (“Employee”), why would (or should) Employer pay any more than what Employee is willing to work for?
I suspect that poor Mexicans might find a roommate to live with so that the cost is split. Living 5 or 6 people to a room just isn’t going to kill anyone–lots of societies live that way as a matter of course.
Always welcomed by your average landlord in the US.
Common decency. People are not blue jeans, to be worn and discarded. Or to rip fashionable holes in.