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If the poor were forced to pay taxes, perhaps they wouldn't feel so excluded.
If they lost all welfare, subsidized housing, Obamaphones and food stamps,
maybe they'd even get jobs before we have to import another 10 million or so illegal aliens to do that work.
Then, and only then, they might gain some earned pride and self respect.
They don't know what they're really missing in life.
Back in your day, a person could learn a skill without going to school by way of apprenticeship and on the job training. Now everything requires a degree or certificate and most poor people find it hard to find a way to pay for such schooling.
We have a seriously screwed up system. Higher education that gives a person a skill costs too much, the primary education IS leaving children behind, jobs suited for the uneducated have all gone overseas....what is a poor person to do?
The millions of unskilled immigrants hired for pennies on the dollar to do the same jobs those who went through apprenticeships have wiped the theory of apprenticeship outta the ball park. This is especially true in the construction trades. When I got out of HS I wanted to do physical labor and became a mason's laborer. I then became an apprentice and was a mason for a few years. I had to attend classes at night once a week and was taught the fundamentals of the trade that would let me go anywhere with that marketable skill. I saw the illegals come into the trades and along with paying far less developers/contractors also got subpar tradesmen. The more experienced older journeymen aren't in the trades any longer to pass their knowledge along to apprentices and laborers don't last forever. What these people lack is a direction or goal. They merely go to their jobs and do what they can to get by - like government employees. They don't care to learn, don't know the terminology of what they do and could never travel across the country getting jobs requiring such skills.
The bad thing is the buildings they erect are nothing I would be proud of. I remember having to show some illegals how to do the same task over and over to the point I quit doing so. The job supervisor wanted to know why things came out wrong but refused to look past his experienced journeymen.
I can go to a house/building built by less than experienced people and point out the difference. Americans who have grown up and lived here all of their lives are carrying on with the same slacker mentality which makes it even sadder.
Their attitudes are poor and that spills over into all aspects of their lives.
Im so sick of hearing about the poor and how we are suppose to help them.
I didnt grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth, I didnt go to an Ivy League school, we didnt live in a McMansion.
My parents grew up dirt poor. My father left school in the third grade to work on farms to support the family. My mother was left fatherless when her drunk father left my grandmother with 9 kids to house and feed in the 1920s. My grandmother brewed bootleg booze during Prohibition to feed and house her kids.
All my parents siblings worked hard enough to get a middle class life. No one was rich but we had a nice home. They did it without asking the government for a dime.
Their children have all done well. Again without asking for a handout. We all got educated or learned a skill. We worked for what we have today.
So yes, Im tired of hearing about the poor.
Have they tried to help themselves? Have they taken advantage of free education in this country? Have they learned a skill?
Do they care about improving themselves or are they happy to live a life of booze or drugs? Is it easier to hang out on the corner with their amigos than go to school.? Is it easier to collect from all the government programs while they pump out kids to get even more assistance?
Am I the only one who doesnt want to pay for their cell phone? Am I the only one who doesnt want to see my tax dollars support one more " poor" person that doesnt have a bit of ambition?
I do feel sorry for those who through no fault of their own have bad financial luck. We do need to help people like that but we dont need to give them more than the minmum to live.
Time to stop feeling sorry for the poor....MOST have choosen that life because it was the easy road.
I'm tired of hearing about what an "easy life" the poor have. The vast majority of people living at or near the poverty line tend to be the disabled or elderly people who could only work at low wage jobs and now have only a small income from social security, and families headed by a single woman who lacks adequate job skills. You write:
My parents grew up dirt poor. My father left school in the third grade to work on farms to support the family. My mother was left fatherless when her drunk father left my grandmother with 9 kids to house and feed in the 1920s. My grandmother brewed bootleg booze during Prohibition to feed and house her kids.
Stop right there. You want to take credit for the fact that your parents and grandparents lived through hard times. Unless their family arrived here after WWII, every single American reading your post has parents, great-grandparents, whatever who made it through the depression years. Those were terrible times for Americans. We all suffered together and we all came through it together. I can set down a family hard times story of my own. The difference would be that my Grandmother was a God-fearing, law abiding woman who never would have dreamed of bootlegging to support her children when my Grandfather did not run away but instead went to fight for his country in WWI. Frankly, I'm surprised you would hold up your own Grandmother's illicit activities as an example for the poor of today. Maybe those single Mom's could emulate old granny and set up meth labs and get off TANF and SNAP. At any rate, you don't get to rest on your parent's (tarnished) laurels.
You're an individual who either went to school or learned a trade and grew up in what you describe as a "nice home" and had a middle class life style. My, my what obstacles you have overcome. Why do you think this gives you the right to stand in judgement over the woman whose life savings were wiped out due to a long, disabling illness and must now live on no more than the $745.00/month she gets from SSDI? What makes you think you're so much better than the man born with a developmental disability who never-the-less managed to work at McDonald's at minimum wage for 20 years until he was forced to retire on a social security check amounting to $660.00/month. Oh, he gets $100/month in SNAP benefits (food stamps), too - that greedy old man! And why do you think you're worth more as a human being than the young 17 year old mother who fled her abusive husband, still looks over her shoulder all the time, and is trying to get her GED so she can get a better job and support herself and her child? No cell phone for her! Why, she might use it to call 911 because her ex has come back and is threatening to kill their baby unless she comes back to him.
I could go on, but I'll end this by giving you the word on that cell phone program you're so mad about. First of all, those things are not smart phones - not by a long shot. They're like those Cricket phones that are always being advertized for old people too senile to learn how to use anything besides a land line. They come with 200 "free" minutes and after that you are charged by the minute - anywhere from 10 cents to 60 cents for every minute over. You know how long it would take most people to go through 200 minutes on their cell? A day? Two days? Those "free" phones are too expensive for the poor. They go down and get some cheap phone with cheap minutes from Walmart. So rest easy, pal. Your tax dollar is hardly helping the poor with their cell phone bills.
Your bootlegger grandmother seems to have handed down an attitude of bitterness and ill will towards those less fortunate and you take pride in broadcasting this to the world via the Internet. Why are you wasting your time? You could be down at the park tipping some old guy out of his wheel chair.
Eh, well, both of my parents grew up dirt poor & English is my mother's second language, but you'd never be able to tell where they came from or guessed what their childhoods were like.
They worked hard to earn every single thing they have and everything they've provided for me and my sisters. I can't and won't apologize for my lifestyle or the life I live or what I have.
But then again I don't necessarily feel sorry for them because of what I have seen first hand from extended relatives who are poor and some of my high school classmates.
It's as though they actively continue the cycle of poverty. And then they expect everyone else to support them in the process.
A lot of talk here about people's parents growing up poor and how they overcame it, as decent people should. My father actually didn't grow up poor. He grew up what would probably be considered working class. His father, my grandfather, had come to America just a few years before my father's birth, a refugee from World War II with literally nothing whatsoever to his name. My grandfather had been a butcher before the war, so when he came here, he was able to get a job at a local butcher shop, or maybe a processed-meat factory -- he worked at both at some point, but I don't know which came first. My grandmother, also a war refugee, generally did not work, though throughout my father's childhood, she was occasionally employed as a cook.
My father did well in school, and when he graduated, he was able to attend a prestigious public college that was selective in its admission and did not charge a dime in tuition to any of its students. Today, that college has an open-admission policy, meaning any high-school graduate can attend without regard for academic performance, and students are expected to pay for that privilege. While attending school, for spending money, he worked at an ice-cream shop and as a bank teller, but nothing crazy like working multiple jobs or anything. After he graduated, he was hired full time by the bank, which saw something in him and soon chose to send him to one of America's best business schools, completely free of charge.
I believe he was already done with business school when I was born. He quickly rose in the company, which afforded yours truly a solidly upper-middle-class childhood in a series of increasingly affluent suburbs. By the time I graduated high school, the family had probably crossed the line to genuinely wealthy and was living in a nice house in a gated community a two-minute walk from a private beach -- though, like almost all rich people, my parents would have continued to categorize themselves as middle class. Having done well in school like my father did, I was able to attend a top private university, where I got the education and internships that led to what's become a very good career (though, it must be said, not nearly so good as my father's, who was a vice president and probably making the inflation-adjusted equivalent of twice my salary when he was my age).
As for my grandparents, they were both retired by the time I formed my earliest childhood memories -- I don't know exactly when my grandfather stopped working, but he was 66 when I was born. Throughout my childhood, this butcher/factory worker and his homemaker wife always had money for me on birthdays and holidays, and sometimes just because. They had a little bungalow in the mountains where they spent the summers, and they eventually moved their winter home to a retirement community in Florida, where they played shuffleboard and sat by one of the complex's many pools. I used to visit and ride a complimentary paddle boat on one of the artificial lakes, until they found an alligator in one of the lakes and then you weren't allowed to do that anymore.
Assuming my grandfather retired the year I was born, the time elapsed between his retirement and my grandmother's death, my grandfather having predeceased her, was 34 years. In all that time on a fixed income, they never wanted for anything. My grandmother even did some international travel. When I got old enough, I started wondering how they did it -- and then I remembered that they had owned a two-family home for many years, renting out the other half and pocketing the income.
After more than 60 years in America, nobody in my immediately family is resentful of the poor. There are a lot of reasons for that. As hard as they worked, we all realize how fortunate we've been. I could write a lot more about that, but what I especially want to emphasize is this: What if you'd moved my family's story back a few decades? What would have been different? What opportunities did they have that they wouldn't today?
For starters, my grandfather likely could never have earned a good living. A hard-working man, he nonetheless would have been relegated to a series of minimum-wage jobs, as the people with skill levels and educations equivalent to his now are. Remember, this isn't a man who rose from the bottom to own his own chain of supermarkets -- or even his own butcher shop. This is someone who worked for other people doing jobs that a whole lot of other people could do, too. The economy of his time allowed him to raise a family on that. Today, it wouldn't. He certainly could never have bought a two-family home -- at least not without taking out a dangerous variable-rate mortgage that would have doomed him to foreclosure -- so there'd be no idyllic retirement, just some scary financial struggles as his health and mental faculties declined.
How about my grandmother? There's no way she would have been able to stay at home, raising my father and my uncle. She would have had to work, too, and given her skill set, that most likely would have meant very long hours six days a week in the kitchens of restaurants and catering halls. She wouldn't have been there to raise my father, to encourage him to succeed academically, to keep him off the streets, to push him that extra mile. The neighborhood my father grew up in is, today, one of the worst in the city. Where would he have been with both parents gone all day? I don't really see the guy resorting to a life of crime, but I don't know if I see him getting the best grades, either.
College? It's doubtful he could have gone, even as a good student. He couldn't have afforded it. Maybe he would have kept working at that ice-cream shop. My father is smart and savvy, but he is not entrepreneurial, so I'm not sure I see him stowing away money to open an ice-cream shop of his own. He'd probably continue to work menial jobs. He might still be there today, especially considering a degree is more important now than it was back then.
Even if he somehow had landed a job with the bank, they wouldn't have sent him to business school. Corporations don't do that anymore. And he couldn't have afforded to pay for it himself -- he's fond of showing off a form letter he still has from around that time where a credit-card company rejected him due to insufficient income. So I imagine he could have made a good career for himself, and I would have grown up with a nice middle-class life. But I couldn't have attended the elite college I did, and you'd better believe there would be no beach house.
If everything had happened 30 years later, could I see myself poor today? You'd better believe I could. I have no idea what I'd do in such a situation, because money has never really been an issue for me -- though I also count myself fortunate that my parents weren't yet wealthy enough during my childhood that I grew up spoiled -- but I'd have to deal with it. I could myself very fortunate not just for when my family came to America and when I was born, but that I've always had a family that recognizes that and isn't blinded by misplaced anger.
I do feel sorry for those who through no fault of their own have bad financial luck. We do need to help people like that but we dont need to give them more than the minmum to live.
Time to stop feeling sorry for the poor....MOST have choosen that life because it was the easy road.
I'm a child of immigrants whose parents came here with nothing (and no other family here), but who built a modestly comfortable life. My parents always worked hard, and their children have always worked hard. It looks as though their children's children will be hard workers, as well. So, I can understand your frustration. Kind of.
But then I get to your two last paragraphs. You say that we should help people who have bad financial luck, but "we don't need to give them more than the minimum to live." And then: "Most have chosen that life because it was the easy road."
Hmm. What immediately comes to my mind when I read this is the line from A Christmas Carol in a discussion of helping the (19th century) poor in Britain: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"
I'm curious: do you consider yourself to be a religious person?
I'd also like to remind you that many war veterans currently live in poverty; there have been recent stories in the media discussing that fact. It's disgraceful:
I'm tired of hearing about what an "easy life" the poor have. The vast majority of people living at or near the poverty line tend to be the disabled or elderly people who could only work at low wage jobs and now have only a small income from social security, and families headed by a single woman who lacks adequate job skills. You write:
My parents grew up dirt poor. My father left school in the third grade to work on farms to support the family. My mother was left fatherless when her drunk father left my grandmother with 9 kids to house and feed in the 1920s. My grandmother brewed bootleg booze during Prohibition to feed and house her kids.
Stop right there. You want to take credit for the fact that your parents and grandparents lived through hard times. Unless their family arrived here after WWII, every single American reading your post has parents, great-grandparents, whatever who made it through the depression years. Those were terrible times for Americans. We all suffered together and we all came through it together. I can set down a family hard times story of my own. The difference would be that my Grandmother was a God-fearing, law abiding woman who never would have dreamed of bootlegging to support her children when my Grandfather did not run away but instead went to fight for his country in WWI. Frankly, I'm surprised you would hold up your own Grandmother's illicit activities as an example for the poor of today. Maybe those single Mom's could emulate old granny and set up meth labs and get off TANF and SNAP. At any rate, you don't get to rest on your parent's (tarnished) laurels.
You're an individual who either went to school or learned a trade and grew up in what you describe as a "nice home" and had a middle class life style. My, my what obstacles you have overcome. Why do you think this gives you the right to stand in judgement over the woman whose life savings were wiped out due to a long, disabling illness and must now live on no more than the $745.00/month she gets from SSDI? What makes you think you're so much better than the man born with a developmental disability who never-the-less managed to work at McDonald's at minimum wage for 20 years until he was forced to retire on a social security check amounting to $660.00/month. Oh, he gets $100/month in SNAP benefits (food stamps), too - that greedy old man! And why do you think you're worth more as a human being than the young 17 year old mother who fled her abusive husband, still looks over her shoulder all the time, and is trying to get her GED so she can get a better job and support herself and her child? No cell phone for her! Why, she might use it to call 911 because her ex has come back and is threatening to kill their baby unless she comes back to him.
I could go on, but I'll end this by giving you the word on that cell phone program you're so mad about. First of all, those things are not smart phones - not by a long shot. They're like those Cricket phones that are always being advertized for old people too senile to learn how to use anything besides a land line. They come with 200 "free" minutes and after that you are charged by the minute - anywhere from 10 cents to 60 cents for every minute over. You know how long it would take most people to go through 200 minutes on their cell? A day? Two days? Those "free" phones are too expensive for the poor. They go down and get some cheap phone with cheap minutes from Walmart. So rest easy, pal. Your tax dollar is hardly helping the poor with their cell phone bills.
Your bootlegger grandmother seems to have handed down an attitude of bitterness and ill will towards those less fortunate and you take pride in broadcasting this to the world via the Internet. Why are you wasting your time? You could be down at the park tipping some old guy out of his wheel chair.
That cell phone program that you talk about is nothing more than a come-on by the politicians to show the poor that they care about them and are giving them something. All they are giving them is a bundle of troubles; those politicians could care less about anyone. There is no excuse for politicians giving them a phone with only 200 free minutes, then charging them an outrageous rate for additional minutes. What really happens is that the poor do not keep track of their minutes, so they run up a bill making them even poorer. And to think that the politicians are doing this with taxpayer's money. All of the major cell phone companies now have unlimited usage plans for reasonable charges. With the buying power of many cell phones, those politicians should be able to strike a deal with one or more of the cell companies for unlimited minutes at a low monthly fee. Those free cell phones to the poor are government fraud at its finest.
Being poor in today's world does not mean NOT having a McMansion or NOT going to an Ivy League school. It means living in a rusty old trailer with no heat and not being able to concentrate on schoolwork because you are hungry or have parents with untreated mental health issues screaming in the background.
I never get tired hearing about those people because they need help and they CAN be helped. Especially the children. I'm not a religious person but one part of Christianity I certainly do subscribe to is what Jesus said about the poor, the sick, and the needy. In many of the Gospels, Christians are admonished to help those who have less. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, "Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." —Matthew 25:34-36
Last edited by Oldhag1; 07-07-2014 at 06:24 AM..
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They don't care to learn, don't know the terminology of what they do and could never travel across the country getting jobs requiring such skills.
