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Excluding the disabled, the majority of the poor are poor because of the choices they make. Choose to be a drunk or a druggie? Life will be hard. Choose to be a criminal? Almost impossible to overcome that. Choose to have babies before you can afford them? It comes at a price. Choose to not acquire a useful education or skill? What did you expect the outcome to be? Choose to be lazy doing the minimum, be chronically tardy, call in sick when you're not truly sick, or be difficult to get along with, and you'll always be the first laid off in a downturn if you don't get fired first. At a minimum you'll never get promoted. Choose to live beyond your means? This never succeeds long term. Choose not to relocate to where the jobs are? The world doesn't care where you want to live, go to where the jobs are or live with the consequences.
Below average IQ types can succeed quite nicely if they apply themselves acquiring a useful skill and make good choices in life. At the same time high IQ types can live in poverty because of the bad choices they make. I've seen plenty of both.
Bingo! Life is not that complicated but for whatever reason some people like to make it more complicated than it needs to be. While not doing or doing the things mentioned on here is not a guarantee of avoiding poverty, it does significantly lower your chances of being impoverished in the long term.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chowhound
There's a whole lot of dumb f ers out there. 5 percent is too low.....
Yes, and some of them are even quite wealthy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by craigiri
Whenever anyone mentions "people are not poor, they have a phone...or TV", it makes me chuckle. Obviously these people haven't kept up with the basics of the modern world...for example...
Even the poorest peasants in most parts of the world have a TV.
The cost for a mobile phone is usually well less than what a landline used to cost - especially when inflation and CPI, etc are figured in.
It all depends on the type of phone of TV they have. Those don't make me as mad as seeing people on welfare who can afford tobacco, alcohol, and tattoos.
They will still find a way to screw it up. You can teach a ten year old how to do a job but they could not manage an adult working life. Some people really are stuck at the mentality of that age as to how they can manage their lives. They may have been able to hold jobs in a manufacturing economy where you could make a living doing the same thing day after day.
The modern economy is completely unsuitable for a good portion of people. It is also unnatural that we took decent livable jobs from our own and gave them to alien people.
Now with automation as well - Universal Basic Income, or I can see things getting worse, more drug abuse, more homeless, more thieves, more hopeless.
I agree with the fact that we could have a vastly better country with universal basic income instead of make-work and too much competition...which often ends in more problems.
Example...how many box stores do we need? Some would say we need whatever is built, but they don't mention that 100's of square miles of our land is paved over and vast building built...and often when one box "wins" other lose and leave those buildings empty.
Given Amazon and other online shopping, the need for vast numbers of retail jobs is fading. It used to be that you could make a career out of being a salesperson at Macys!
But as to the "unnatural" immigrants, I have to take exception for this reason. This has been going on almost since the beginning of time. Successful economies have already relied on outside populations to do much of their work in one way or another. Whether through enslavement, colonialism, imperialism or just the importation of labor, this has been the story of the last 500 years (and more....).
It's not unnatural at all. No more unnatural than factories leaving New England and moving to the South where labor was cheap and those pesky unions were not powerful. But what happened then? Yep, they moved from there to Mexico and Asia.
It's really "natural" in a sense. Most mill workers or meat-packing plant employees do not think "I hope my children and their children can work in a place like this". No, they think "If I work hard enough I can help my children NOT work in a place like this".
The sad thing is that there is plenty for all of us. In fact, we have too much...so much that we feel it's OK to throw away 5 TRILLION on wars of choice, a couple trillion for tax cuts, an extra Trillion a year for overpriced health care, etc.
That's a waste when the money could go toward good things!
Having 6 Copier Salespeople stop by my business as opposed to 4 or 5 does not create value, IMHO. If we look closely at a lot of jobs people do it's almost as if we created a Hell on Earth for no reason. We could pay them just as much NOT to do that job and we'd be just as well off or better.
Can we please stop using IQ scores in relation to poverty?
Because I know some wealthy educated people who do some really stupid crap when it comes to money and I ain't talkin' bout buying a pack of cigs, beer & lottery tickets either !
Bingo! Life is not that complicated but for whatever reason some people like to make it more complicated than it needs to be. While not doing or doing the things mentioned on here is not a guarantee of avoiding poverty, it does significantly lower your chances of being impoverished in the long term.
Yes, and some of them are even quite wealthy.
It all depends on the type of phone of TV they have. Those don't make me as mad as seeing people on welfare who can afford tobacco, alcohol, and tattoos.
Booze is cheap and probably required in many cases to deal with life.
As to Smokes - remember that the products themselves are/were not expensive. It's the taxes that make them so. I can't see why smoking a weed which is an anti-anxiety drug is something that need be withheld from poor people.
It's as if you want to grind your heels on the heads of people who are already on the ground hurting.
I don't see it that way. The human in me wants even the poorest of the poor to have simple pleasures in their lives.
Can we please stop using IQ scores in relation to poverty?
Because I know some wealthy educated people who do some really stupid crap when it comes to money and I ain't talkin' bout buying a pack of cigs, beer & lottery tickets either !
and yes I have "stories" too !
Well, I have plenty myself. Trump is not alone in terms of being able to turn what should be 10-100+ Billion into zero or close to that. The scale may differ but I know many smart people who lost 1/2 or more of their fortune in the dot-com booms and similar debacles.
The difference is that they usually still have a cushion or a family or Russians (in Trumps case) to go back to the well....to some degree.
The people who are nickled and dimed (great book, BTW - should be required reading) don't have that...and that is why even one accident or injury or illness can put them to below zero.....
The bolded: This is what I've been talking about for pages now. So many assume that everyone is perfectly capable of understanding the very basic things. They do NOT get it. People with lower than average IQ are not just a little bit lower, some of them are a LOT lower. Do we just toss them to the side and let them suffer because they aren't very bright? Are they not still human beings? I think for some people, who aren't disabled in some way, they can increase their IQ, but to do nothing more than throw money at them, or do nothing more than call them "stupid' and "lazy" doesn't help them. They need more - they need help with learning the very basic stuff. It may take months for them to finally understand one thing, but so what, they need to learn it so they can manage on their own...but no one wants to do it. They just want to give them some pathetic amount of money each month, or they want to treat them like garbage.
I agree with you 100%. TANF sends people off to the employment office so that they can sign up for jobs that they will never get and if they do get them they will get fired because they lack the requisite skills to perform the work because that's easier and cheaper than screening people and referring them to the appropriate resources where they might actually become better equipped to manage their lives.
What chance do kids of meth heads have? Unless we have mandatory sterilization, we're going to have people who are never going to be productive.
I'm not calling for sterilization, only pointing out that some people get so little start in life that they may never be able to rise very far based on their childhood, nutrition and schooling.
If we were more relentless about removing kids from bad homes, we'd be better off as a society but that won't happen. The left will scream racism or bias against poor people and the right will scream family first.
Some people are born on 3rd base and think they hit a home run when someone else pushes them across home plate. Others have to fight to just get into the ballpark. The kids of meth heads are certainly at a disadvantage compared to most other kids but they will choose to rise above their parents or they won't. Life isn't fair and some have to work much harder and make more sacrifices than others in order to get to the same place. Some choose to do that, others don't.
I agree with the fact that we could have a vastly better country with universal basic income instead of make-work and too much competition...which often ends in more problems.
Example...how many box stores do we need? Some would say we need whatever is built, but they don't mention that 100's of square miles of our land is paved over and vast building built...and often when one box "wins" other lose and leave those buildings empty.
Given Amazon and other online shopping, the need for vast numbers of retail jobs is fading. It used to be that you could make a career out of being a salesperson at Macys!
But as to the "unnatural" immigrants, I have to take exception for this reason. This has been going on almost since the beginning of time. Successful economies have already relied on outside populations to do much of their work in one way or another. Whether through enslavement, colonialism, imperialism or just the importation of labor, this has been the story of the last 500 years (and more....).
It's not unnatural at all. No more unnatural than factories leaving New England and moving to the South where labor was cheap and those pesky unions were not powerful. But what happened then? Yep, they moved from there to Mexico and Asia.
It's really "natural" in a sense. Most mill workers or meat-packing plant employees do not think "I hope my children and their children can work in a place like this". No, they think "If I work hard enough I can help my children NOT work in a place like this".
The sad thing is that there is plenty for all of us. In fact, we have too much...so much that we feel it's OK to throw away 5 TRILLION on wars of choice, a couple trillion for tax cuts, an extra Trillion a year for overpriced health care, etc.
That's a waste when the money could go toward good things!
Having 6 Copier Salespeople stop by my business as opposed to 4 or 5 does not create value, IMHO. If we look closely at a lot of jobs people do it's almost as if we created a Hell on Earth for no reason. We could pay them just as much NOT to do that job and we'd be just as well off or better.
Generations of families would work at good factory jobs, as some still do as police and firefighters, or running a family business. Manufacturing often paid excellent wages, depending on the job and company and it wasn't necessarily an unpleasant environment. So yes families did work at a plant and do quite well. Those good jobs lost are the ones that hurt the most.
Let me go one further with unnatural - yes with capitalism the point is to get the most productivity for the least money. But unfettered capitalism isn't a healthy system ultimately, and now with AI we have another level of intrusion to threaten our livelihoods.
I agree with you 100%. TANF sends people off to the employment office so that they can sign up for jobs that they will never get and if they do get them they will get fired because they lack the requisite skills to perform the work because that's easier and cheaper than screening people and referring them to the appropriate resources where they might actually become better equipped to manage their lives.
They send them to jobs like cashier. If they can't be trained to do that, then what resources are supposed to help.
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Being poor in America is a choice, 95% of the time
