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Years ago if you were poor, you were poor and lived that life. Now there are an incredible number of programs to raise the standard of living of poor people who make low wages into the middle class lifestyle.
Food stamps, free school lunch programs, discounted rent, public housing, earned income tax credit, reduced cost for health insurance, free health clinics, etc. etc.
When did all these things happen? Do you remember the days when if you were poor and did not make much money, you were just poor?
Well, a little before my time, but my grandparents lived in a four room house (that's four rooms total, not 4BR) with, at various times, their kids, their grandkids, their daughter-in-law, my g-grandma, two of my grandpa's siblings and one of his brother-in-laws. Nine people total at the most crowded point. No indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, wood fired cookstove, drawbucket well. They grew or hunted almost everything they ate. They made their own clothes. If you got sick or were injured you either got better or you died. The only medicine was home-brewed concoctions made from wild plants.
It's survivable. And a pretty good way to instill multigenerational contempt for the mainstream economy.
Welfare rolls are high where I'm from. (Appalachia) If it was cut off tomorrow you'd end up with more people living in substandard housing eating fried squirrel for breakfast and teaching their kids to be isolationist at best, my grandparents were really closer to Appalachian separatists. But hey, if ya think that kind of thing is good for the country...
Bull. Veggies are cheaper than carbs, and better for you.
Processed food is a heck of a lot cheaper than fresh food. Plus, many poor neighborhoods are what are known as food deserts, where there is a lack of grocery stores, farmers' markets, and healthy food providers. That leaves convenience type of stores, which offer little, if any, fresh foods.
Are you serious? My grandparents got food in the 50s from the forerunner of the food stamps program, the surplus food program. The school lunch program with free and reduced price lunches started in 1947. I'm not sure how you know that poor people didn't avail themselves of these programs in the 50s. If you were alive then (I was) you were a kid or at most a teen and not privy to everyone else's finances.
In my NJ white blue collar town in the 50's no one got a free lunch or food stamps..must be in the larger cities or ethic neighborhoods.... no one got a hand out... even the poor brought in a can good to feed someone else.
I was poor and had pride. I started to work in a factory at age 16 during the summer. I also started working at 14 doing old jobs for spending money.
Many people went to rummage sales to look for clothes and women would go to the five and dime store to buy material to make clothes on an old singer treadle machine . Women would exchange what they canned in a canning jar to stock the cupboards for winter. Men would plant a garden of various vegetable..Some raised chickens to eat. Coal stoves and old coal furnaces were the source of heat.
People had just the basics , not the materialistic garbage that line the store shelves today. People did have a simple life and did enjoy the basics.. even if it was a glass of home made lemonade sitting in the shade of a tree on a warm day. One thing; people visited one another and had many meals together.. that was their entertainment. They enjoyed hard work and saw the fruit of their labor when planting a garden or canning the food from it. They would do whatever they could to keep the wolf from the door.. in other words ..keep away extreme poverty and need.
My grandfather would take the train to the A&P to shop and bring a suitcase.. he would pack the food in the suitcase and bring it home so as to look like he was on a trip.
Two points. The first is that your view of "welfare" is what existed decades ago -- an open-ended system where people can permanently stay in a system of survival without having to ever work. That system does not exist and hasn't existed since the mid-1990s.
Point two: Anti-poverty programs have worked. SNAP provides people, mostly children, with nutrition. It is highly effective at responding to recessions, when people lose their jobs. Most people do not stay on the program long-term.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years.
Processed food is a heck of a lot cheaper than fresh food. Plus, many poor neighborhoods are what are known as food deserts, where there is a lack of grocery stores, farmers' markets, and healthy food providers. That leaves convenience type of stores, which offer little, if any, fresh foods.
There is a lack of healthy food providers in poor, often minority neighborhoods because of incidents like Ferguson. It isn't good business to put a store where residents burn and loot their own neighborhoods.
People lived in squalor. They were malnourished. Children started working when they were quite young if they weren't adopted or apprenticed out to another family; young girls especially would live with families who had no children to help out around the house. Babies died from a lack of prenatal care and poor nutrition. Kids wore ill-fitting hand-me-downs until something that actually fit them came along.
That's how they "survived".
Quote:
Originally Posted by charolastra00
When I look at the history of my own family, a few things are apparent:
So many good points. My grandmother raised 12 children (2 died in infancy) on a miner's salary. They were lucky -- my grandfather had work, most of the time. They had meat when my uncles caught fish or were lucky on their hunting trips in the countryside. Can't do that today -- how would an urban family get far enough out into the woods to shoot game, and that's only when hunting is legal? Some of my grandmother's neighbors had chickens in the backyard pen, something else that's been legislated away or made impossible by density. My mother, the youngest, slept in a crib until one of her sisters got married and freed up a space in one of the beds in the tiny girls' bedroom. My mom and her siblings ran along the railroad tracks, picking up pieces of coal that had dropped from the moving train cars to heat the house. The only reason the house had a phone was because my aunt worked for the telephone company. My grandfather turned the entire yard into a garden, and my grandmother canned what they didn't eat right away.
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Originally Posted by WaldoKitty
Posts like yours make me want to vomit. Your intellectual dishonesty and fundamental disingenuous is downright disgusting.
Your inability to comprehend that post you quoted is even more puke-worthy.
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Originally Posted by jasper1372
That has always made me wonder too. Yes I understand the reasons behind this, but none the less, it's a bit amusing and should give you pause.
There's nothing amusing about poor nutrition and food insecurity. Shame on you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ringwise
Bull. Veggies are cheaper than carbs, and better for you.
Incorrect. Go to the grocery store, and estimate how many people you can feed with $1 worth of vegetables, vs. $1 worth of macaroni.
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