:shrug: You are free to define “poverty” however you like. As I noted above, most people’s understand of “poverty” would lead to a conclusion that China has more people living in poverty than the United States.
:shrug again: You are free to define “gun control” any way you like. When I referred to it above, I was using a more common understanding of the term. Alas, liberals who push for new gun control laws tend not to advertise in advance that they are merely grandstanding and don’t expect the laws to have much effect.
In the US at least the problem is not so much a lack of people who want to BE nurses, but a lack of training opportunities. Nursing programs have to turn away a lot of capable students. I’m told that at the university where I work, and many others, the root of this problem is that demand for nurses has become so high that qualified nursing instructors can make more money working as nurses than they can teaching. My university would be happy to accept more nursing students, but there’d be no one to handle teaching the extra classes.
What does China or Mexico or Jamaica have to do with this discussion, though? Really Not provided statistics that compared the incidence of poverty in the US with the incidence of poverty in other First World nations like Germany, France, the UK, and Canada.
Sure, Chinese or Mexican standards of poverty are very different from ours, which is why their numbers on the incidence of poverty, based on their poverty standards, look artificially low by our standards.
But French or British or German or Canadian standards of poverty are not very different from ours, which is why it’s legitimate to compare our poverty rates with theirs.
And that comparison clearly indicates that America does not have a significantly larger percentage of poor people than Canada, or the UK, or Germany.
Well, clearly that’s not true, if by “underclass” you mean “people living below the poverty line”. But you say that that’s not how you’re defining “underclass”.
So okay then, how are you defining underclass? Enquiring minds want to know.
You’re not likely to get an answer. Brazil is a stupid coward. His method of debate involves picking a semantic issue and riding it to death. Look at any of the global warming threads from the last couple years in GD.
Ah, something I’m familiar with. You know what was offensive to the rest of Missouri about the Kansas City desegregation plan? 1) That enormous amounts of state money were given to urban school districts while poor rural school districts coped with what they could manage on local property taxes. 2) And that it was on the say-so on some judge who didn’t answer to legislative correction.
Of course, the legislature could have raised state funding of all schools to match it, but then again, it was felt that the amount of money going into KC magnet schools was excessive, not something to be copied everywhere. (And it was surely more attractive to certain interests to keep the inequality as a source of resentment & campaign on that.)
You’d better believe I’m for funding schools from a state level–but all of them, with an eye toward equality of opportunity, not just a few districts.
I think there’s an interesting parallel here. We spend federal money on health care for only certain people, & this creates resentment–just as spending state money on KC schools & only KC schools created resentment. This is why I think there’d be less popular objection & resentment for a unified UHC plan than for Medicaid as it is now.
So what do you object to?
Are you saying you’d like to just see Medicaid eligibility expanded, but no universal entitlement? That may be easier for some to support in the near term, but I think it’d be more fragile long-term than building a system for everybody.
This. Canada & the UK have actual welfare bums/dole dossers. It’s much harder to do in the US, which does not have a general dole. Yet Americans think that the US is somehow more stricken by this attitude of mooching along than other Western countries, which is actually backwards. The US culture just objects to it more.
(I think the US culture is kind of nutty about the work ethic, to be honest. To be fair, a high-tech country doesn’t desperately need everyone to work full-time, so free market dynamics mean that the price of labor goes down. If you can’t get the fully employed to work shorter hours & share both the work & the pay–& you generally can’t–then you will end up with some proportion with no regular paying work at all. And yet somehow the non-workers are blamed for this. Yet, try to set up your own business with no start-up capital for a shop or money for a license–like the guys who sell oranges on the freeway or wash windows on the street–& you’re a nuisance no one wants to see. The more of you try to get jobs in an established industry, the more you’re driving their wages down & scaring working people. Try to open up a new sector, & people say, why should I pay for that if I never have before? Give up & you’re a bum. Seems like we want the dynamism of the free market when it’s working for us personally, but anyone struggling from the bottom is expected to crawl into a hole & disappear somehow.)
Where do you get this idea that the middle class is paying for the government’s expenditures, or that the left want the middle class to do so? It’s the upper income levels that control most of the liquid assets!
To address the subject line’s question, I remember a worldwide poll of most of the major First and Second World countries done by Reader’s Digest not long before the election on various topics. In every other country they polled besides the United States, Obama outpolled McCain by something like an average of a 2 to 1 margin.
That alone tells me that there’s a big gulf that I really can’t explain (though foolsguinea’s theory seems attractive, at least).
The fact that we don’t have UHC now is affecting you too. Most of the things that you buy (products and services) are made available by a company that charges you more because it pays all or part of its employees’ health care insurance. That’s true of everything from food to cars. With UHC those extra charges would be unnecessary.
I don’t know. Is there any estimate of how much you are already paying in extra charges on products and services because of other people’s health insurance costs?
I was in a situation where I had to take advantage of the health care system in France – including the free ambulance. I’ve also been able to see how proud the Danes are of their health care system. Imagine never having to worry about whether you can afford a certain treatment or a stay in the hospital or care for you child or aging parent.
Here I’ve seen my mother go without medicine she needs. (And she is reasonably well off.) The medicine is too expensive – $700 a month. (Before medicare began to pay.) My sister was getting a shot once a month that was $10,000 a pop.
Today I received a letter from Blue Cross with a long list of generic medicines that I had to use instead of the medicine the doctor wanted me to take. So that has begun even in contract negotiated insurance for teachers.
The upper income levels control most of the liquid assets, so that means that they don’t have to pay the same percentage of taxes as the middle class, eh? We are getting taxed into extinction but the rich get richer - how does that work?
Gosh, how selfish of the fully employed, to want to stay that way so they can pay their bills.
These things don’t connect the way you seem to think they do. Prime examples are the Mexicans that come here to S Cal and work their way up, usually knowing very little English.
The biggest reason there are so many unemployed? Overpopulation - more people needing work than there are jobs to give them.
I think it is overpopulation as well. Which is why I’m for family planning, & government funding of same.
That said, something weird is going on with medicine in this country. Hospitals are struggling to survive in the market economy, & jobs in health care are being lost, even as health care seems to have gotten so expensive. Maybe they priced themselves so high they collapsed their demand.
I live in the UK and given my somewhat limited experience of the US underclass (ie. watching ‘The Wire’) this immediately struck me as odd.
From the same site, percentage of population below median income:
UK - 12.5 Cite
US - 17 Cite
So why the descrepancy of the figures? As stated by a previous poster, not all poverty measurements were created equal. I’ll use Wikipedia as cites here, since I can’t find official documents that aren’t in PDF files:
UK - Uses a relative poverty measurement of below 60% of the median income. Cite
US - Uses something more akin to an absolute measurement based on what the DoA decides is a living food allowance. Cite
Using data from 2007 you can convert the US poverty measurement into the UK’s relative measurement for a more useful picture:
US Median income 2007: $50,233 Cite
Poverty threshhold (5 person family, mainland U.S.): $24,800
Equivalent relative measure: 49.37% of median income
So there is clearly a significant disrepancy, and I would suspect that by the UK’s measurement the US would have at least the UK’s 14% poverty, probably more.
I would personally be careful about using the word ‘underclass’ to describe people of low-income as IMO it is a bit of a loaded term. Someone can be poor but still raise their family well and not be a burden on society, or they can be a welfare-sponging, shell-suit wearing pikey with 5 kids and no desire to work. To me only the second type is the ‘underclass’, but then I’m English and I’ve been told we’re overly sensitive on matters of class :).
And just get UHC already. It’ll almost certainly be cheaper for everyone despite having to support the ‘underclass’, although with the attitude I’ve seen from some people the objection is based more on the principle of helping someone else rather than any well founded practical concern.
Poverty is relative, genius. If the average worker makes 5 dollars a day, the guy who makes 1$ is living in poverty in that country. People making minimum wage in the US would be considered positively wealthy in Mexico or Jamaica.
And you think this gives you an insight into Canadian poverty and relative levels of poverty between the two countries?
Living on the border gives you no insight at all; you have anecdotal observations of one place in Canada. Most Canadian poverty is tucked away from the border, and the REALLY bad stuff is on Indian reservations. We have an entire class of people, many of them hopelessly poor, who actually have a different legal designation from other Canadians that helps to keep them poor.
Believe me, we have lots of poor people, and the fact that you have not personally seen then means jack shit. We have lots of welfare bums.
That’s hilariously dumb. If the reason for unemployment was overpopulation, then the current U.S. unemployment rate should be the highest it has ever been, which it is not. In 1932 the United States had 125 million people and an unemployment rate of 25%. Today the population is 300 million people and the unemployment rate is about 7.5%. Tell me, if overpopulation causes unemployment, how did the unemployment rate NOT go up while the population was increasing so much?
First, it’s people who have a strong tendency to engage in various irresponsible/improvident/self-destructive behavior. For example, people in the underclass frequently get into trouble with the law; frequently become parents (out of wedlock) as teenagers; frequently get into drugs; tend to have trouble holding down a job; often drop out of school; etc.
Second, people in the underclass typically have family members who are similar.
Ah, something I’m familiar with. You know what was offensive to the rest of Missouri about the Kansas City desegregation plan? 1) That enormous amounts of state money were given to urban school districts while poor rural school districts coped with what they could manage on local property taxes. 2) And that it was on the say-so on some judge who didn’t answer to legislative correction.