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No - not sick and tired of hearing about the poor - but am sick and tired of the myth that not one "poor person" has had a major to complete role in themselves being poor.
See, I actually grew up poor (real poverty - not "I've only been to Disney twice as a kid") and worked and lived amongst the poor - so I know the real facts that many ideologues desparately want to ignore - too many "poor" created their own "circumstances"
"The Poor" are a politically valuable asset. Until that changes, you'll hear about the poor.
We'll spend billions helping the poor and could easily make them all millionaires but that wouldn't do much to build the perpetual assistance machines that suck money from the working in this country.
The tipping point has been reached, there are enough "poor" voting that the long slide to disaster is assured. It will take time but then there is plenty of that.
Without picking apart each sentence of the OP I'll say this:
You are mostly alone. We have a moral obligation to help the poor. It serves our own interest in many ways:
1) A country is only as great as its poor. America lags behind other 1st world country in things like child poverty, health care, and education.. due to this indifferent attitude towards the poor. Our top 10% is doing phenomenal compared to the world.
2) Welfare is an economic stabilizer. For the sake of my post, welfare is unemployment, social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc. All of it. Without welfare, our economy would be shocked at every downturn in business cycles.
3) Welfare keeps people off the streets (to an extent).
4) Welfare work requirements do not get people off welfare. We can require everyone to work a slave wage to get welfare and they will still need it! The GOP was obsessed with pushing Welfare reform because "dependency" is the cause of poverty.. right?
wrong! Welfare reform did virtually nothing to eliminate poverty or welfare spending. Welfare spending actually goes to the working poor and those who are long-term unemployed. Poverty is cured by skills, education, and creating an economy that works for the 99%.
5) No, I do not agree with your greed. Whether you like it or not, your tax dollars will go toward public services. Would you rather we create an economic situation in which people have an opportunity to survive, or just let the poor people suffer? Without changing our labor and tax laws, more economic inequality just creates more people on welfare. Guess who picks up their tab?
Last edited by Oldhag1; 07-07-2014 at 01:58 PM..
Reason: Removed color font - no rude icons
I love that the OP cites his grandmother's illegal activity during Prohibition as a way to make ends meet. I guess the poor should take up marijuana dealing? Oh, wait...
My father was born during the Depression. His extended family was full of hunters, trappers and fishermen who helped feed the family that way, since their factory jobs didn't pay enough. Oh yeah, and one of his uncles started an illegal gambling operation. His father left 5th grade to be a gardener and eventually somehow joined the police force with no degree of any kind.
Try living off the land now in any major urban area. Try running an illegal gambling operation out of your house. Try getting any kind of career beyond fry cook without a diploma or certification.
A different world that really doesn't compare at all to current conditions. Even getting a college degree was exponentially cheaper than it is today - my father and mother's generations got their degrees with no significant debt at all.
Complain about "the poor" if you need someone to demonize, but don't cite previous eras whose environment, conditions and standards were completely different from our own as your reason.
Well, we are supposed to help the truly poor. What I am tired of are people crying "poor mouth" while they're acquiring flat-screen TVs, SUVs, idevices, 300-buck sneakers, and a bunch of other things that indicate to me that they're not really poor.
Well, we are supposed to help the truly poor. What I am tired of are people crying "poor mouth" while they're acquiring flat-screen TVs, SUVs, idevices, 300-buck sneakers, and a bunch of other things that indicate to me that they're not really poor.
Those folks are not receiving public assistance.
Moderator cut: Off topic Most people angry about "welfare queens" have no idea how uncommon it actually is and how many people welfare actually benefits.
I knew a gentleman who wanted to quit his job to collect welfare because he heard they were getting free iphones, free rent, and free food. How misinformed can people get? (this guy was a homeowner with trouble making his mortgage payments)
Last edited by Oldhag1; 07-07-2014 at 02:00 PM..
Reason: Unless a thread is specifically about politic discussing political identifiers is off limit.
No - not sick and tired of hearing about the poor - but am sick and tired of the myth that not one "poor person" has had a major to complete role in themselves being poor.
See, I actually grew up poor (real poverty - not "I've only been to Disney twice as a kid") and worked and lived amongst the poor - so I know the real facts that many ideologues desparately want to ignore - too many "poor" created their own "circumstances"
I know - too adult for the C-D board!
Of course there are some poor people who did things that increased the odds of their continued poverty. HOWEVER, if one looks at a bell curve of distributions (based on childhood income and parental education), a second reality becomes clear. Namely, that if a middle class or upper class person did the same dumb things, they'd be FAR less likely to end up in a long-term cycle of poverty.
It's not a dichotomy, but probabilistic. If you do everything right after coming from a background of poverty, you are still far less likely to "make it". If you do everything wrong after coming from a background in the middle of the middle class or above, you are still far less likely to end up destitute and unemployable or in prison.
The other reason that the narrative exists the way it does is because the flipside of the equation is very effective. Point to one "welfare queen" in your neighborhood, one person abusing benefits, and suddenly that person serves as an accepted representative of the entire system. It doesn't matter that all the research on food stamp fraud and welfare fraud and disability fraud indicates that a VERY small percentage goes to fraud and waste, because humans prefer anecdotes over data. So, to guard against that, its almost a necessity that people on the left (myself very much included) never admit to blaming poor person X or Y, because once that happens, it serves as a tacit (but false) admission that most or all poor people are mostly or all responsible for their poverty.
It doesn't matter that those programs create high economic multipliers or nutrition for lots of kids, because Joey from Sector A buys heroin and is on assistance! We prefer individual examples to demonize or exalt instead of looking at the probabilities and the whole picture. It's a well-documented cognitive bias among a subset of related biases - availability bias, just world fallacy, etc... - and it destroys so much of our society's ability to discuss the realities of poverty.
It doesn't matter that all the research on food stamp fraud and welfare fraud and disability fraud indicates that a VERY small percentage goes to fraud and waste, because humans prefer anecdotes over data.
Who does that research and why do so many of us see evidence to the contrary all around us? I don't buy those figures at all. I worked for the government and have hundreds of stories. With my clientele it was nearly a given that they were cheating on their assistance.
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