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Since no one acts on the responsibility of raising these children, we are seeing multiple generations of uncontrolled children and adults. Who cannot break the cycle they were raised in. And whom will need financial assistance all of their lives.
Well, rich parents ALWAYS do a good job of controlling their kids. When they get in trouble over drugs and alcohol, no big deal...or when they wreck their cars...or are just generally spoiled brats.
Well, rich parents ALWAYS do a good job of controlling their kids. When they get in trouble over drugs and alcohol, no big deal...or when they wreck their cars...or are just generally spoiled brats.
Bad parenting exists at all income levels. However the bad rich boy is his parents economic burden to bear while the poor bad boy is ours as a society.
Good parenting vs. bad parenting occurs at all levels of society. I do not see any correspondence between wealth and how raising independent children.
We adopted a child who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome [FAS]. His biological mother is an alcoholic and she drank through the pregnancy, as a result his frontal lobe is not fully developed. The public school system insisted that he was mental-handicapped and would never learn to read/write. They wanted to segregate him and only have him finger-painting his way from K to 12. After a long fight with the school, we decided to homeschool him.
The system would have had this boy to grow up a vegetable totally dependent on the system.
We worked with him, and he learned the skills to overcome his biological handicap, today he is in the US Army working as a helicopter avionics technician.
If the system is allowed to raise a child, they will raise that child to become dependent on the system.
I do not doubt that 'economic inequality' exists. People like the support systems that our government provides. I think it is those supports that cause the inequality to be as big as it is.
One of our sons, was in highschool when a neighbor girl was dating him. We had her over for dinner a few times. Her parents were on welfare, and they had convinced her that her only future lies in having babies. She wanted our son to be her first baby-daddy. To get her government checks flowing. We had a long series of talks with both of them. Our son was strongly tempted by her. What made no sense to me, was that this girl was a straight A student, coming from a low-income family she could have had a full scholarship to college, but her parents had trained her that she was welfare class and she would never be more than welfare class. Fortunately, our son did not become her baby-daddy. She found someone else that she was able to hobble with lifelong child-support debt.
I think this is an interesting question. The problem is that the part of the education that really matters is from birth to maybe age 6. By the time the public schools get them, it's largely too late. How do you give a child born to a poor single parent household the upper middle class values, ethics, and culture that program them to be economically successful? I had college educated professional parents. I had it drilled into me from birth. I wasn't parked in front of a TV set and left to fend for myself. Because of my parents, I pretty much couldn't miss. I don't care how much money you hurl at public schools, you're not going to recover from 6 years of bad parenting. I don't see how this is a "the rich not wanting to spend" problem. It's lousy parenting, particularly lousy single parent parenting. Do we require training and licensing/permitting to be a parent with mandatory abortions if you get knocked up without a license?
And it's also after they're out of school, depending on who they are around.
Where I volunteer, some of the folks are low income or disabled. Very nice people. But even the ones who are working make the worst decisions, driving them deeper and deeper into a hole. Don't pay the power bill, get turned off, don't pay the rent until they're so far behind they're evicted. Co-sign with another disabled relative for a brand new truck, then after a few months, quit making payments and turn it back in because the engine blew up. Get so many driving violations you need insurance that is ridiculously high for 3 years. Buy a piece of unnecessary furniture instead of paying bills. Didn't pay student loans so it's coming out of the disability payments. Lose the license and/or the car, then have to borrow other people's cars until you burn those bridges. Work a low wage job 40 miles away and refuse to apply at the ones close by.
And it goes on and on. One horrible decision after another. It's heartbreaking.
you mean in the middle of a world war and cold war?
Quote:
Originally Posted by rruff
In spite of it.
Not hardly. US prosperity in this hallowed, golden, Great age was specifically due to WWII. It's hard to say where we would have ended up if the Depression had continued without outside economic disruption, but the war cured most of those problems and created an era of almost wholly artificial prosperity and economic dominance.
For nearly twenty years, from perhaps the mid-1940s to around 1970 (choose your own bracket in there if you like), the US was the dominant economic superpower in the world. Japan was smashed. Much of SE Asia was smashed. China was learning to be a modern nation. Europe was almost wholly smashed. Even the UK, which managed to avoid the worst of war's costs, lost millions of men and took almost two decades to rebuild their economy.
So naturally the US, with its resource and (both war-developed and prewar) manufacturing might, was the world's supplier of everything. Of course we had an exploding economy and high-wage employment for everyone who wanted it and generally a free hand in defining markets and trade. It was 1955, man!
...and that's the thing too many armchair pundits, too many economists and nearly everyone who wears a silly red hat forgets: the postwar era was not normality or representative of American economic history, it was a huge anomalous bubble that deflated when other nations rebuilt their economies, their industrial infrastructure and their international trade. America didn't "lose its greatness"... it just had to go back to sharing the global economy, and with partners who now had completely modernized social and political structures, along with new, efficient and modern industrial infrastructures instead of our creaking mills and factories and plants that sometimes dated to the Civil War, or were hastily built for war production.
1955 is gone. It's not coming back. And the faction among us screaming and yelling and breaking things to try to make it come back are dangerously out of touch with reality. We either learn to be a global player, as we were doing in the last dozen years, or we become irrelevant on the world stage and an isolated social outcast with tremendous economic stratification.
Not hardly. US prosperity in this hallowed, golden, Great age was specifically due to WWII. It's hard to say where we would have ended up if the Depression had continued without outside economic disruption, but the war cured most of those problems and created an era of almost wholly artificial prosperity and economic dominance.
Nope. The prosperous period began in the early 30s, well before the war. Deficit spending for the war certainly stimulated the economy, but after the war the debt was paid down.
We did not profit from the aftermath of the war either. The US had very little international trade and we did not have a large trade surplus. We were pretty well self contained. If anything the higher demand for raw materials after the war would have been detrimental. If you have some evidence that the devastation in much of the world boosted the US economy, I'd love to see it.
Real median incomes during this 45 year period nearly tripled. Compare that to the subsequent ~0% increase.
I streamlined the events but will stand by my statements. Simple indexes like GDP per capita don't tell anything like a complete story - a typical failing of many economics discussions, where waving one or two highly cooked indexes or metrics is substituted for a complete look at the (global) situation.
I streamlined the events but will stand by my statements.
Unless you produce evidence and a cogent argument to support your beliefs, then I'll have to assume that you are like most people here. Let's say, not interested in the truth at any rate.
Regarding your statement about GDP, that was not the thing that changed so much in the early 30s-late 70s period, but rather the distribution of income and wealth. The most obvious reason why this occurred was because the oligarchs wished it. We needed a strong economy and a prosperous (tax base), patriotic, satisfied middle class to support WW2 and the cold war threat of communism. When the threat was over, tactics were changed abruptly.
Unless you produce evidence and a cogent argument to support your beliefs, then I'll have to assume that you are like most people here. Let's say, not interested in the truth at any rate.
Are you disputing that 1946-1960, more or less, was a unique time in US and global economics, with extraordinary individual prosperity and extraordinary global economic dominance by the US? If you do, I guess we'll just to move on, and if you don't, then you should understand why narrow metrics about GDP per capita are one page in a long book.
Of course the prosperity curve started earlier, even during the Depression; there are endless anomalies that belie the general "we were all broke and stayed poor" trope. It's really quite simple: the Communist and Socialist movements were very powerful and influential and led to widespread formation of unions and other improved working conditions. Which changes my contention about the postwar period not one bit.
It's like asking for a cite that the sky is blue. (And, actually, I have a NOAA page bookmarked for that purpose.)
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