Ah, but to be in glorious France and be getting government cheese! That would be the life – ça roule, n’est-ce pas? A gift basket from Fauchon is more or less what I had in mind, with matching government wines from some of the better local terroir. Yeah, I’d be OK with that.
I don’t consider it “tone-deaf” at all, I consider it being forced to cater to the private-insurance reality. When you live in a society that treats access to health care as an arbitrary market commodity like a new TV instead of a basic human right, it’s not surprising that people stressed for funds are going to take their chances and prioritize their expenditures in ways that don’t seem rational in the soft light of comfortable surroundings where meeting all your basic needs is just taken for granted.
I built computers for a charity where we took donated computers, and rebuilt them, the gave them to non-profit agencies and low-income families. Basically, anyone who gave us a computer less than ten years old, we accepted (we took the ones more than ten years old ans stripped them down as well, but less was usable, and most ended up getting hauled to the recycling center on our dime, so we charged $5 to take computers more than 10 years old. We also took working printers, monitors, etc. It was during the switch to 3-in-ones, and flat screens, so we got lots of perfectly good printers and monitors, and keyboards and mouses.
Anyway, we’d strip them down, and combine parts, and get two working computers for every three, approximately, and usually managed to put a writable CD drive, and DVD-ROM player in each one. This was 2004, so that was pretty good for a free computer. we installed WINXPpro in the all, and equipped each with dial-up and ethernet capability. They all had 512MB RAM and 20-60 MB hard drive.
Our criteria for “low income” was anyone who qualified for anything else: EBT, SSD, SSI, WIC, AFDC, Housing Assistance, anything, including unemployment assistance, and we’d be happy to give you a computer. Non-profits could get up to two. We gave away about 20 a month. We had three computer stores that would also occasionally donate parts to us, but our overhead was pretty much out rent, phone, electricity, and dial-up internet.
We probably gave away twenty computers a month, and got a little money from recycling the part and cases we didn’t use.
Very infrequently, we got really good stuff donated, and we’d build something funky, and sell it on consignment through one of the computer shops in town with a note that the profits went to charity. Somebody would get a really nice computer, with the plexiglass sides, and the LED strings and such, for 100 bucks (they were really in on campuses around 2004).
Back then, you could get AOL for about $10/month, and if you wanted broadband and already had cable, it was about $25/month extra, but there were introductory plans where you’d get it free for three months.
We put lots of good programs on the computer. We put Office 2003 and some games on them, and a few other things. We downloaded Java and iTunes for the end user, because they usually were people without much computer experience.
Anyway, we were in S. Indiana, and I know there was another group like us in North Indianapolis, because we swapped parts sometimes.
TL;DR: there are charities that give computers to poor people.
Have you ever had someone from the government show up at your doorstep, tell you they don’t approve of your lifestyle and tell you they’re going to teach you how to take care of yourself? What would you say to such a person? Would you be willing to listen to them and follow their advice?
Without coercing people at gunpoint or brainwashing them, how do you suggest the government undo the damage that is done to people by circumstances that they do not have the power to change?
You’re moralizing the problem, saying the poor can’t get themselves out of their situations because no one is “teaching” them the right thing to do. As if a poor person has never heard that kind of advice before. As if telling someone “just stop being poor!” actually fixes anything. If poverty is a moral failing, it is the moral failing of a society that is the richest in everything that any society on Earth has ever been but allows conditions like this to exist because of an arbitrary idea that some people just don’t deserve it.
Why instead of? Ignoring the symptoms that persist while the problem is being addressed surely results in other costs, which undermines the claim of cheapest in the long run.
That strikes me as an assumption that if I don’t give a poor person $100, he is automatically going to break the law, which is kind of demeaning to poor people.
Sure, as long as we address the symptoms effectively. Since malnutrition in children in the US is very rarely because the government doesn’t give their mothers enough welfare, and homelessness is mostly due to substance abuse and schizophrenia, neither of which are cured with more money, it isn’t going to automatically address the symptoms to hand out more money.
There is no consistently effective treatment for substance abuse, and there is no consistently effective treatment for obesity, especially if it begins in childhood. So if you agree with Bryan Ekers that “fuck this moral hazard bullshit” and focus only on what costs less, then we shouldn’t be wasting money on treatments that don’t usually work.
Or maybe it is the usual moral outrage clusterfuck where government programs are judged by how much they cost rather than how much they achieve.
Great. How do we solve this problem? Perhaps with lifetime limits on welfare, and incentivizing that people get to work? That sounds like a reasonable idea.
Really though, snark aside, what would you propose? And once you answer that question, follow-up question: why hasn’t it been done yet? Is it just because nobody’s thought of it?
But I reiterate, why should we not address the symptoms when the symptoms are homelessness and malnutrition?
“Conservatives are more likely than liberals or progressives to believe in what is known as the “just world fallacy,” where people who suffer misfortune are viewed as somehow deserving their fates. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals or progressives not to use systems-level thinking as a means of understanding that individuals do not exist separate and apart from society. Conservatives are also more likely to defend social inequality as “fair and legitimate.””
To a certain degree that did happen to me as a child. A few social workers genuinely interested in helping Roma children rather than delivering them as product for the adoption industry did step in and teach me how to use the resources available for poor children who wanted a better life and help me reestablish contact with responsible family members. Education definitely is the key to reducing poverty not just hurling money at the problem in stop-gap measures. Bullet holes require more than Band-aids.
When I see the majority of Republiopaths making a concerted effort to lift themselves out of their intellectual indigence, I might start taking that argument seriously. But not while he’ll is still warm.
That one guy acquired a severe severe case of hypothermia, so we stand here discussing why the fuck did he go out there without a coat, and how can we make sure he stops going out there without a coat, while, in the meantime, he has lapsed into a coma because we have been standing here discussing the root cause of his problem and how to solve it, since causes are much more important than symptoms. But he is dead now, so he will not be going out without a coat. Problem solved.
I said nothing along those lines, so I am going to assume that you are attempting to create a strawman.
Have you ever been poor?
Why do you think they don’t have the power to change their circumstances?
All of that is an assumption of what I believe, and it’s wrong, so I don’t see any point in responding to it.
I suppose I say that because the money available is finite, so it would come to having to take at least some of the money that only addresses the symptoms to be used to address the problem.
I have no idea what anyone has thought. And I’ve listed ideas here before that were considered, at worst, to be inhumane. I don’t understand why it’s more humane to allow those children you are so concerned about to grow up in the projects than to remove them as newborns and either adopt them out or raise them as orphans. I don’t understand how people can look at generations of grinding poverty, drugs, homicide and all that and think that throwing money at those who bring babies into that will help anything.
The reason things like this haven’t been done is that people who have never been poor get outraged when what they consider to be rights are proposed to be limited. Like taking a drug test to get welfare. All this about of course there is nothing wrong with someone on welfare having a computer and internet access. Who thought it was OK for EBT to be used on junk food? It seems that far too many people are concerned about what the poor should be given than actually trying to get them out of poverty.
I begin to think that the majority of people here are unable to do anything but address the surface of a problem. Are you all really this stupid? Do you really think the issue is this black and white, or is it just an attempt to shout down anything you don’t want to have to think about?
Tu quoque. If you want a meaningful discussion, offer us something more than an empty platitude. Look, that there car is red, we should discuss the very redness of that car at length, with its faded, peeling bumpersticker that says “The problem is people who not only don’t do anything to get themselves out of poverty, they make choices that pretty much guarantee they stay there.”
This has been tried. In Canada, First Nations children were routinely removed from their homes and sent to residential schools to be assimilated into Canadian culture. While there, they were cut off from their families and physically and sexually abused. They didn’t grow up in families and never learned how to raise children which resulted in problems that persist for generations and result in more poverty.
In the wake of these schools courts have ordered compensation and governments and churches involved have officially apologized. A Truth and Reconciliation commission heard from victims and documented their stories.
You are mistaken in your belief that we haven’t tried to “remove them as newborns and either adopt them out or raise them as orphans” and failed.
