Why? Today’s poor might be better off than the poor of 50 years ago (thanks largely to Medicare and food stamps), but they do not have “twice the purchasing power” – they merely have a broader range of things they can’t buy.
No more than any other administration. The fault lies in the long standin propensity of people to do nothing in the absence of a crisis.
What are you doing Simmons? This post was intended for the thread on whether or not the present administration bears any fault for the New Orleans levee failures.
True so far as it goes, but – simply because of that? Don’t you think there might be a great many other factors in play that you’re ignoring?
Well and good – but if there just aren’t enough bottom-rung jobs, what then?
And what about the working poor? There are many Americans who have jobs but still can’t regularly make ends meet. What can be done for them?
Also, keep in mind the only government assistance available to childless able bodied adults is food stamps and reproductive care. No cash assistance. No medicaid. You can’t even get food stamps if you own a car worth more the 3k. The situation of the childless working poor and unemployed is not much different than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, the big difference is that the boarding houses these people used to be able to live in have fallen out of vogue, meaning they spend a larger portion of their paychecks on rent than ever before.
There still are poor in America. There are people who sometimes come up short on meals. There are people who do not have permanent homes. There are people who cannot afford basic and essential things like medical care, appropriate clothing for the weather, transportation (even a bus pass here is $75 a month) and money towards their retirement. These people are often working. Next time you walk in to a fast food chain or big box store, give them a smile. You are looking at America’s poor. If you had a moment to talk to them you’d hear a lot of the same story- homelessness, unpayable student loans, chronic medical problems. They may look shiny in their uniforms, but they’ve got the same problems the poor have faced everywhere. There is a depth that America’s poor don’t reach, for sure. We’ve got nothing on the slums of India. But it can still be pretty damn hard here.
I think we should raise minimum wage to at least the poverty level. If we aren’t going to socialize medicine, I think we should mandate benefits for workers (i.e. Wal*Mart), and I think we should subsidize child care.
Mostly though, I think we should stop punishing people for working. We have the most insane system of public assistance possible. We should be giving benefits for working while on welfare, but instead we drop them from the system. I suggest we pay the difference between wages and benefits plus a incentive of 10%. So if you make $400 on welfare, and get a job that pays $300; I suggest the government pay you $130. The government saves, you make more, get time to train, and gain experience while still taking home a paycheck. When your pay reaches the pay + incentive you get dropped.
Do you believe that most of those in poverty are there because the won’t work? What about those who are working two part time minimum wage jobs, because employers want to avoid having the expense of benefits for full time employees? Are they lazy and in need of punishment as well?
In 1950, in constant dollars, the median family income was $20,668. In 1999, it was 51,996 (cite.
In 1999, the average family income for the lowest quintile was $13,320, and for the second-lowest it was $30,996.
That means that in 1950, the average family only made slightly more than the average family in the lowest quintile today.
Sure there are. But if you eliminated all the other factors, you’d STILL find that some people become rich and some people stay poor. I know a lot of poor people, and with very few exceptions I know exactly why they remained poor. It’s not rocket science. They remained poor because they didn’t save, didn’t stay in school, made poor choices that got them in debt, divorced and had to pay child support, etc. You can always find cases where someone was dealt a lousy hand in life and had horrendous luck, or who has a disability that prevents them from working, or was clobbered by the fickle hand of fate. It would be nice to help those people. But the vast majority of people who are poor are poor because they make choices that led them to that state. Maybe they’re lazy, or risk-averse, or lack confidence, or made bad choices that led to criminal records, or simply because they have a set of values that are not conducive to success. For example, the illegitimacy rate in the inner city is almost 70%. That’s tragic, and it means that most young women in the inner city are going to have a hell of a time being successful. But any individual girl who grows up in the inner city can still be successful - she just has to not get pregnant, stay in school, work hard to get good grades, get a job and work hard at it, and save her money. Many, many people from the inner city do exactly that.
There are ALWAYS bottom rung jobs, as long as the rung isn’t set arbitrarily high through fiat.
A person is unemployable when they are unable or unwilling to do tasks that are worth more than the salary they would be paid. If they are in that situation, they have to either A) accept a lower salary, or B) work to make themselves more valuable. This simple fact was understood implicitly by our grandparents and the generations before them. You did what you had to do, because there wasn’t no one else who was going to give you a free ride.
Today, I know people who refuse jobs because they are ‘worth more than that’, despite the obvious fact that no one is willing to pay them what they believe they are ‘worth’. That fundamental disconnect with reality causes a lot of despair, and we facilitate it by supporting those people.
Note that the U.S. offers very little support to able-bodied people who are able to work. It’s no coincidence that the U.S. also has the most vibrant large economy on the planet, the most economic growth, and the lowest unemployment.
France, on the other hand, has very generous programs for the unemployed. Think it’s doing the people there any favors? With unemployment running over 10%, and unemployment in the poorest areas over 40%? With taxes and regulations required to support the welfare state choking off the engines of wealth creation and making everyone equally miserable? With the expectation of cradle-to-grave coddling resulting in a looming fiscal crisis that’s going to make the U.S.'s Social Security problems look trivial?
France is what you get when you deny economic reality and instead rely on ‘feel-good’ socialist economic policy.
Why are we required to ‘do something’ for them? Are they owed something by the rest of us? Why is it good social policy or moral to decide that some people below an arbitrary line of income have a right to take money at gunpoint from those who have more?
And aside from philosophical issues, I have pointed to many well-known unintended consequences of redistributing wealth. It’s bad economics, and leads to bad outcomes.
You’re starting from the default assumption that socialism or a strong welfare state is a given, and we’re only quibbling about how to manage it. I’m telling you that it’s better for everyone in the long run if we resist the temptation to ‘manage’ the economy and change outcomes we don’t like by law.
And why should you get food stamps if you have a $3000 car? $3000 pays for a lot of food. My mother never had a car. We couldn’t afford it. And we weren’t on welfare.
Rubbish. The working poor 100 years ago worked long hours on farms, in slaughterhouses, and other forms of hard manual labor, and lived in hovels without running water, heat, or electricity. As for owning a car, Henry Ford’s big vision with the Model T was to build a car and hire the people to build it at a wage high enough that they could dream of owning their own one day. And that was considered a visionary idea at the time, because the ‘working poor’ were lucky to have food on their table and a one-room schoolhouse for their children to go do.
For that matter, one of the reasons families were so large at the turn of the 20th century is because children were an asset. You were doing four hours of chores a day by the time you were 8, and by the time you were 12 you were working the fields 14 hours a day in the summer and doing other chores in the winter.
The average factory wage in 1910 was $2.50 per day. The Model T Ford cost $950, or 380 days of labor for a factory worker. Today, a car much, much better than a Model T can be had new for under $10,000, or about 170 days of minimum wage pay.
And factory workers then had the good jobs. Farm laborers at the time made on average about $500/yr.
When I hear people compare the lot of the ‘working poor’ in America to the poor and destitute in other parts of the world or to the poor of a century ago, I have to just shake my head. The ‘working poor’ in the U.S. make, on average, more than twice the world average income. They make more than 20 times the average income in the developing countries. And they still have TV’s, internet connections, snack food, warm apartments with microwave ovens and dishwashers, and have access to the infrastructure of the richest nation on the planet. They can go to beautiful parks, museums, libraries, have access to cheap public transit, yada yada yada.
I’m not trying to make light of how difficult it can be to be poor. I know. I’ve been there. I’m trying to throw some perspective back into the debate. Not everyone who’s ‘working poor’ is the sole breadwinner in a family with children, trying to make it in spite of huge obstacles in their path, and with no obvious way out. A lot of the ‘working poor’ are single people working at Mickey D’s and hanging with their friends after hours, or young people just getting started in life and happily working their way to a better standard of living, or second-income earners in a family where the primary income earner makes more.
And I’ll feel sorry for them and try to help them if they aren’t simultaneously buying $100 Reeboks, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, or blowing money on lottery tickets.
Define that. You mean they live in apartments? Or have no fixed address? How many truly homeless people do you suppose there are who aren’t A) mentally ill, or B) refusing aid because they are criminals, or c) substance abusers? Of course there are some. There are always extreme cases. Let’s help them. But let’s not use them as an example of what the ‘working poor’ really are. They’re outliers. You want social programs that target them? Fine. But when you support large-scale welfare for the ‘working poor’, and then trot out the tiny percentage of extreme cases for why you need the entire package, I’m not buying. Let’s debate honestly.
True enough. I support paying for emergency health care for those who cannot afford it, and for paying for treatments of chronic conditions that prevent them from working, and for preventive care for children from lower income families.
I don’t know about this one. I used to buy clothes at Goodwill, and $5 would get you a pretty decent coat if you didn’t care about a small rip or two and an ugly style or color. And if you couldn’t afford $5, there are lots of charities around that will provide free clothing.
Where I come from, the poor get discounts on bus passes, or even free bus passes. I support that. It’s a perfect example of the kind of aid that I think does a lot of good and has few negative side-effects. Targeted aid at specific problems.
I thought that’s what Social Security was for?
I always do. BTW, I wonder if you realize how condescending your comments are? You seem to be making an implicit assumption that anyone who doesn’t agree with a large welfare state is operating from an ignorance of what it is like to be poor, and if only we understood it we would change our minds and join the ranks of the enlightened.
Talk to them? I grew up with them. I AM them. Or was. I worked in a grocery store bagging groceries when I was 14 years old, and never earned a wage over $10/hr until I was 25 years old. My mother never made more than $35,000 a year in her entire life, and usually much less. Today she lives in a house trailer. So when I talk about what it’s like to be poor, I’m not some rich guy giving you a rich guy’s perspective. I know all about it.
No doubt. No one promised me life would be easy. The fact that it’s hard to be poor is what pushes the poor to do better. That’s important.
And by the way, Wal-Mart pays on average almost $10/hr. If a family has two income earners who both work at Wal-Mart, they have a family income of $41,600, which isn’t that shabby. And Wal-Mart has a health plan and other benefits as well, and has a policy of promoting from within on merit.
Oh, yes, I’m all about punishment for being poor. I also like flaying kittens and tripping old people.
There are myriad reasons for being poor. Some are unavoidable, but most aren’t. It may not be laziness. A big one is the inability to delay gratification. For example, I went to college after high school, but a friend of mine went to work in a bakery because he wanted to buy a car. So I got an education, and he found himself working as a manual laborer.
Another reason is the inability to hold a job either through irresponsibility, or temper, or lack of people skills. I knew a few people like that. Six months into a job they’d blow up at a boss and storm out in a huff, or quit because a new rule was ‘stupid’, or quit because the boss asked them to come in and help on the weekend and they’d be damned if they’d work so much as an hour for no pay.
Another reason is lack of self control. Loading up the credit cards to buy toys, alcohol, etc., then having to work just to pay interest on the loans.
A big one is the inability to save. I have a friend who has always had decent jobs as a semi-skilled tradesman, often making more than $20/hr. Today he’s broke, because he’s always lived paycheck to paycheck. As soon as he’d get a job he’d be down at the bank getting a loan for a new truck, or a motorcycle, or something. Or he’d put a new stereo for his truck on the VISA card. THen he’d lose his job, and his credit would go in the dumper, and the interest charges would rack up. So he’d spend years digging himself out of a hole of his own making, and then once out promptly throw himself right back in again. He has no retirement savings, and will probably be poor for the rest of his life.
Another reason (a big one) is having too many children, or children out of wedlock, and failed marriages. Divorce is incredibly expensive, especially if there are children involved.
There are many other reasons.
Every one of the reasons you cited is some kind of character flaw. Is there no circumstance for poverty you can imagine that is not due to a character flaw deserving of your scorn? Some people just aren’t very smart. Some are physically impaired, or mentally ill. And some just get caught in adverse circumstances, that even you in your wisdom, could not have anticipated. Is there no room in your heart for poor people who aren’t there because they lack character?
Indeed, I do pity the smalls pets and elderly folk who cross your path.
Fear Itself, there is a difference between people who can’t work and those who won’t work or have made poor choices.
I didn’t get from Sam’s posts that he was adverse to helping those who can’t work, nor did he seem against helping people with a leg up on the road to self sufficiency. But at some point those people who can work have to take it upon themselves to sort it out on their own without expecting government do it for them. Why would stating this be scornful of the poor?
My point was that there are millions of people who are working, sometimes more than one job, but cannot provide for themselves and their families. I saw no compassion for them, ony dishonest claims about how phat life is on a Wal-Mart paycheck.
Whether or not society has any collective ethical duty to its least fortunate members would a debate for another thread; so would the question of whether society has any legitimate right to tax its richest members. The premise of this thread, in case you have forgotten (please reread the OP), is that poverty is a problem to be solved, so far as that is possible, rather than something to be accepted as an immutable fact of the human socioeconomic condition. We’re here to debate which solutions would be most effective, not whether any would be appropriate. If you want to participate, please do so in those terms.
You confuse compassion with socialism. I have plenty of compassion for the ‘working poor’. My entire family and many of my friends are in that category. My beliefs are informed by my compassion for those people. But I flatly refuse to accept the standard liberal line that if you have compassion for the poor, you must necessarily support liberal social programs, because only liberals act out of compassion.
My point throughout this thread has been:
A) there is a small percentage of the ‘working poor’ who absolutely, positively, can not be more productive. Either due to mental problems, physical problems, or some other enormous hardship. These people should be helped.
B) A much larger percentage of the working poor are in that position either because of choices they made, or because of character flaws, or because they were never taught how to lift themselves out of that situation, or because they are unwilling to make hard sacrifices and defer gratification in order to employ a long-term plan for improvement.
If you lump A an B together as one group and throw money at them, you will not be doing the B) group any favors.
It’s important to recognize the unintended consequences of ‘compassionate’ social programs. For example:
[ul]
[li]Public housing projects tend to collect the poor together and create slums, and the slums attach a stigma to the residents that makes them less employable.[/li][li]Long-term welfare creates a multi-generational problem where children born into welfare families never learn the skills and values necessary for success.[/li][li]Subsidized low-income housing drives up the price of that housing. That forces governments to put rent controls and other regulations on subsidized properties, which over time leads to under-investment, poor maintenance, and a shortage of the very housing the poor need. In the meantime, those who don’t qualify for the subsidies find their living expenses going up.[/li][li]Student loan programs that allow anyone to borrow money regardless of ability to repay or what faculty they study has caused a lot of poor people to make the stupendously bad choice of borrowing money to study non-productive subjects like fine arts and history. Then they find themselves unemployable, in their mid-20’s, with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and a degree that can’t get them a job making more than minimum wage. [/li][li]Welfare programs that pay per child have the perverse effect of causing welfare recipients to have more children, thus ensuring that they are never capable of leaving welfare.[/li][li]When you make it easier for someone to ‘settle’ for their lot in life, more people will choose to stay where they are at, rather than work harder to get ahead on their own.[/li][/ul]
I could go on. I know from personal experience that welfare is soul-deadening, breeds a culture of dependency, and leads to resentment and class warfare. People on welfare tend to justify the fact that they are on welfare by constantly proclaiming how impossible it is to work, how stacked the deck is against them, etc. No one wants to admit that they just aren’t trying very damned hard. As a result, kids who grow up in that environment never learn the skills and attitudes required to become truly successful.
Frankly, liberal ‘compassion’ isn’t very compassionate. The best thing you can do for a poor person is help them find a job. The next best thing you can do is help them learn to be more productive. You need to do that without destroying the values of self-reliance, pride, and confidence. Therefore, it’s critically important to separate out those who are able to work from those who aren’t. It’s also critically important to separate out those who are poor because they are young and just getting started (i.e. everyone who doesn’t have an inheritance), from those who are poor and have no prospects for the future. If you’re making minimum wage and you’re 50 years old and you have a bad knee and a persistent cough, you’re in much more need of help than is the kid who’s 22, making minimum wage and living with a couple of buddies in an apartment. In fact, any aid you give the young kid is liable to screw him up by making the consequences of his decision-making less unpleasant.
I was talking about this with my wife last night, and she pointed out that one thing that has changed in society is that it used to be expected that you would not be well-to-do until you reached 50 or so. It was almost a cliche that young people would start with nothing, and work and save their asses off until they could make it into the ‘good life’. It was the American Story. Our parents all have stories about the hovels they lived in when just starting out, and the two jobs they held, and the money they saved, and how proud they were when they finally saved enough for a down payment on their first tiny house, etc.
Now we want it all. People today expect to come out of college, buy a house, start a family, have a nice car, go on vacations, etc. And if you can’t manage those things right out of the gate, you’re ‘poor’. You’re a failure, someone who needs a ‘leg up’ in order to succeed. And plenty of liberals will bend your ear and tell you how it’s not your fault, how the rich are keeping you down, how the big corporations steal all the money and impoverish the people, yada yada yada.
Conservatives are much more likely to say, “Your life is what you make of it. Work hard. Save some money. Don’t have children you can’t afford. Take marriage seriously, because divorce is incredibly destructive. The only one who is going to determine whether or not you are successful is you. If you fail, it’s your fault. Be self-reliant, don’t demand things of others, and regardless of where you wind up on the economic ladder, take pride in the fact that you got there by virtue of your own hard work and wits.”
I’ll leave it to you to decide which attitude tends to lead to more success and is more ‘compassionate’.
You make some good points and while I disagree with many of your conclusions I’ll leave that for another post. For now I just want to say…
Holy Crap! That’s what you consider middle class??
Thats just flat out not true. Most of the college graduates I know are wanting things like their own room in a shared rented apartment, enough money to keep their clunker running or to buy bus passes, and money to do rock bottom hostel’n’backpack trips. People are doing stuff like buying houses and starting families later and later in life. In fact, it’s the older generation that has an outrageous view of money. I saw one guy come on this very board and talk about how hard it is to raise a kid on 90k a year. It’s not young folks that are buying these $70.00 a month cable packages and $5,000 bus tours in countries were you can live well for a couple years for 5k.
Anyway, it is possible for social programs to work. Let’s take public housing- it causes ghettos, sure. But why? I know in Sacramento, it’s because they had the bright idea to build all the public housing for the entire county in one area- with no regards to things like job access, transportation, retail access and schools. Of course you are going to make a ghetto! My own hometown eventually incorporated precisely because the city of Sacramento did it’s best to make it a slum- now in the course of a few years it’s become a desirable place to live. On top of that, the projects are not designed for living. They are designed with no attempt to foster a community or to encourage people to put down roots. Other models- like programs that emphasize home ownership and mix public housing into more affluent communities work much better. California has seen a revolution in it’s cities and there is nowhere near the gang activity, drugs and violence as there was fifteen years ago. Something somewhere is working.
Unless the cars are BMWs or the equivalent, yes. Two-car families are the norm in the suburbs. And lots of houses around here (these are houses that are roughly $200K) have snowmobiles or motorcycles parked in the driveway, or RVs, or boats. The two cars might be something like a Saturn and a Taurus, but they are still there.
And so it should be. No one should expect to walk out of university and expect to live as well as someone who has been building assets for 20 years. My point wasn’t that kids out of university ARE rich, but that they EXPECT more. They’re unhappy if they don’t have the trappings of middle class life. Some compensate by living at home longer while working full time, so they have more disposable income for travel, partying, clothes, cars, etc. Some are just miserable about their lot. But my main point is that they are lumped into the category of ‘working poor’, when they really shouldn’t be. We need a definition of ‘working poor’ that does not include kids who have bright prospects but are starting on the bottom of the ladder simply because they haven’t had time yet to accumulate wealth. We should not be subsidizing the lifestyle of a future architect or senior engineer just because they haven’t yet built up the assets or experience to live the ‘good life’.
It happens even when you split them up. The ‘public housing’ I grew up in was a four-square block of stucco tenement apartments nestled right in the middle of a middle-class neighborhood. That didn’t stop the residents from developing a culture of despair and hostility. It may have even made it worse, because they were surrounded by people who had more than they did.
Is that what they were like or intended to be when they were first built, or was that an unintended consequence of the sort I’ve been talking about? Liberals always dismiss the failures of past liberal policies by claiming that the people who came up with them just weren’t smart enough, and they’d be much more clever about it. But it gets tried again and again, and the failures mount. That’s because there are very good reasons why these things turn out badly, and it has to do with the nature of government and the psychology of making people dependent on the state…
Absolutely. And the reason these programs work better is because they at least pay lip service to market forces. It might not be as ‘compassionate’ to demand that someone work for their housing, help build it, or bust their asses to contribute a down payment than it would be to just give them a handout. But people take better care of the things they own, so such communities tend to be more successful. This is actually an example of the kind of social programs I support - trying to use the forces of the market rather than the heavy hand of regulation and handouts.
I had a first-hand experience with the results of liberal social programs tonight. I volunteer as a director of a local non-profit day care, and we just got handed a new pile of regulations that are going to make everyone’s life miserable. All with the best of intentions of course. Some background:
These day cares were relatively unregulated. We could hire who we wanted, and pay them what we wanted. So lots of these day cares were staffed by women who did not have other work, who perhaps had their own child in the day care, and who enjoyed the work and tended to stick around for years. They got very good at what they were doing. Most of them were already mothers, and had learned a lot of skills for dealing with the 0-6 year old children in these centers.
Well, a couple of years ago a liberal activist group discovered that many of these women had very few credentials in education. So they started pressuring the government to institute higher educational standards for day care workers. It’s for the kids, you know. By god, these places are unregulated! People looking after our children who don’t even have diplomas - just 1 year certificates and the like! This must be stopped, for the good of the children. We need licensure, and mandatory wage floors to ensure that day cares only hire the best people for our children. Very compassionate of them. Well, guess what happened? The law of unintended consequences reared its ugly head.
The government eventually decided that any day care certified to allow subsidized parents to bring their kids there had to have a certain number of staff members who had the equivalent of 3 years of a 4 year education degree. Suddenly all these experienced ladies were out of work. And then, predictable as rain, there was a shortage of day care workers. And the workers we did get were ALL young women starting out in teaching. So guess what? They don’t stick around. They come to work for a few months, then get their teaching jobs and they are gone. So now we’ve replaced a long-term, dedicated workforce of experienced people with a transient population of inexperienced young women who hate the job and are just marking time until they can get a ‘real’ teaching job. And for what? So they have degrees in education. We don’t do lesson plans for toddlers. Nothing they learn in school helps them cope with babies and three year olds.
Anyway, at the subsidy level the government provided the day cares couldn’t afford wages to attract more staff. So shortages developed. So, the government decided to increase the subsidy, and mandate fee increases so we could afford better staff. After all, it’s for the children…
Well, the next unintended consequence was that this is a real burden on those who don’t quite qualify for the subsidy (which was only available if you had a family income below $36,000). So now the government has had to raise the subsidy cap to $78,000! That’s right - you can make $78,000, and get your childcare subsidized by the government.
But this doesn’t even solve the problem, because even at the newer, much higher fees, we can’t afford to pay day care workers what they can get teaching in the school system. And we’ll never be able to. So after all this ‘compassion’, we put a lot of dedicated workers out of work, raised fees for parents, moved a whole new sector of society into the ranks of the subsidized, and increased expenses. And we’re getting poorer teaching, unreliable workers who don’t care, and a whole new bureaucracy to manage it all.
And let’s talk about the unintended consequences of raising the subsidy level to $78,000. Now you can expect that a lot of parents who stayed home with the kids will now opt to go to work. So more kids are going to come into the day cares, which will make the staffing problem worse… And is it really in the best interests of society to encourage 80% of families to put their kids in institutions so they can go to work? Plus, these subsidies will cause inevitable tax increases, which will depress the economy and destroy jobs.
The shortages are now so severe that most day cares in our area cannot meet the minimum government standard for staff-child ratios. But they can’t shut us all down, because these kids have nowhere else to go. So we’re going to no doubt get waivers to allow us to keep running. So now this brilliant plan has also left our kids with less supervision.
Also, the worst knd of subsidy is one that goes to people who already pay high taxes. Now you’re taxing people, then turning around and giving the money back as a subsidy. This is horribly inefficient. Now you’ve got bigger government, a bueaucracy to pay for, and all kinds of information losses that prevent the money from being used in the most efficient way.
These were clever people that came up with this. They had the best of motives. They want to help the kids. The problem is that they can’t hope to have the same aggregate knowledge as all the day care operators who have had decades of experience to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And because economic changes by fiat cause unpredictable, chaotic ripple effects, there’s no way that top-down management like this can be as efficient as management driven from the bottom up and capable of changing with market conditions.
This is the story of government intervention in the market place. One new regulation requires ten more to correct the unintended consequences of the first one. Then more regulations to fix the problems the next ten caused. Costs go up, the system becomes bureaucratic and sclerotic, and winds up hurting the people it’s trying to help.