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Posts like this actually pi$$ me off. Again, yes, some are drug addicts, some are alcoholics - I know, let's sXit all over them instead of helping them get off of drugs! That's a great solution!
Some are criminals, some are people who had kids they couldn't afford. Some do live beyond their means.
But none of those is "all" or even "most".
What is a "useful" education to someone with a lower than average IQ? What courses should they take? How will they afford those courses? I'm guessing they are going to be poor, need some help, and will take on those low paying jobs that some people like to mock. Have you taken it upon yourself to talk to some of them and offer them guidance? Why not?
Not everyone loses their job because they are "chronically tardy, doing the bare minimum, calling in sick" (or hungover), etc. I lost my job and I was one of the highest rated workers in our group. Guess why we all got laid off....they outsourced our fricken job to cheaper labor. But, I guess that was "my fault", wasn't it?
Not everyone needs a GD lecture from twits who have no damn clue what it is like for some people. Do you know why I'm not this way anymore? Because when my sister's husband was clinging to life, (literally), in the hospital, and wasn't working so no full paychecks were coming in, and she has MS - well, you can guess that finances were a major concern. She was too embarrassed to ask for help, so I did a lot of the legwork for her. I learned a lot. A. LOT.
I learned what programs are available, I learned how you become eligible for those programs, I have talked to people on those programs, I have seen people on those programs. None of them are living large, and every last one of them has a different story.
The ones who made mistakes ("bad choices"), are pretty upfront about it, and want to get their life back together - they just need some help doing that. But, no, here comes the dipwads who want to bash on poor people and say, "*********, you deserve to starve, you useless pile of garbage. That's what you get for making any mistake at all, ever, in your life...not like me, who is perfect and did everything perfectly, at all times, and 'pulled myself up by my boostraps' and had no help at all whatsoever from anyone, except all those little things that add up to big things over time, but we don't talk about those because it doesn't support my edge lord persona on the internet".
Of course there's people who leech, as I said earlier on here, of course there's people who game the system, as I said on here, but none of you who say, "most people are lazy and made bad choices" have provided any type of evidence that any of what you say is true. It's your opinion that you are stating as if it's a fact. You don't know the circumstances that got people into the situations that they are in, you assume, and then you paint everyone who is poor the same exact way.
I don't give a fairy's winged derriere if you know someone who gets assistance but has this, that, and the other, they do not represent everyone else.
One would think for those who beetch and moan so much about having to take care of the poor, that they would actually get up off their superior duffs and actually help out so that they aren't poor - throwing money at them with nothing else behind it isn't the answer. Throwing money at them only helps them maintain a very, very, very basic lifestyle. What they need is knowledge - how about you share some of it, since you have so much of it, without sneering at them for a change?
Last winter, out in front of the grocery store, there was a homeless man (I say man but he was pretty young), lying on the sidewalk in front of the store. It was night time. It had been raining all day. It was cold. He was wet from the rain, he was cold - very cold. He was shivering uncontrollably, and the reason he was lying on the sidewalk is because he was so cold, he was trying to curl up into the tightest ball that he could to get some kind of warmth.
Hundreds of people just walked right past him.
I have never been so fricken repulsed at the human race as I was that night. There's a discount store 2 doors down from the grocery store. I went in, got a warm, fleece "throw" (blanket) for $5...that was it...five fricken dollars...and gave it to him. He was able to warm up, and he was extremely thankful.
I hate telling people what I've done for others, (because believe me, I get questioned on this forum all the time, "what have you done"), because I don't do those things so people will think whatever they will about me, I do them because I give a damn, even if the person IS a druggie, who fricken cares! He was freezing!
I only shared this one because how I felt that night, looking at all of those people walking in and out of stores, seeing him but doing nothing, is exactly how I feel reading some of the replies on this thread.
The people who would look at someone like that and walk by thinking, "Screw him, he's probably a druggie and deserves it" are not people I want to know.
You have no idea where I came from, how much I give to charity, how hard I had to work, and the sacrifices I had to make in order to rise above the station in life to which I was born, so no I don't feel especially sorry for those who haven't worked as hard as I did or made the sacrifices I did. We all make choices in life and we need to accept the consequences of those choices.
I am very familiar with the poor and how they live and the choices they make. I know what it is like to eat soup every night for dinner because that's all my parents could afford. I know what it is like to have to go to work every day after school out of necessity starting in 9th grade. As a result I choose to get out of that world by making the choices necessary to do so.
There is no shame in being poor. My mother taught me that. Some of the finest people I know are poor and some of the sorriest people I know are rich. And the opposite is true too. I don't judge people based on economics, but at the same time I don't subscribe to the notion that the poor are somehow the victim of what other people have done to them. They are instead a victim of their own choices.
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.
So true. I'd still be mopping floors and washing dishes, while paid little more than minimum wage, if I thought always doing poverty level jobs was my only choice. So true is the saying, "Life is how you make it."
I started out doing that, as well. After school job in high school. It's not a terminal position, to which I can clearly attest.
I wouldn't call someone who works two jobs a deadbeat. A lot of people, including Trump supporters, don't even want to work their day job let alone two.
No wonder this country is so divisive and broken beyond repair. If the OP's friend was a Trump supporter, you'd say how great of a work ethic he has for working two jobs. You should applaud people for working and contributing something to our society, regardless of how important the job is or how well it pays.
OP thank you for showing that there are too many people on high horses.
25% of the people have IQs below 90. You are not going to make astronauts out of them. Many of the better jobs for them like trucker, are going away soon.
"Poverty" has multitudes of factors. 30K in suburban Columbus OH is far more comfortable than 30K in San Francisco.
Your anecdote is just that, an anecdote. I have tons of them also. "Managers" in retail and fast food are typically barely above poverty.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,329 posts, read 54,358,694 times
Reputation: 40731
Quote:
Originally Posted by wallbuilder
I've lived in the real world and know this. There are some truly needy people in society, but it's a very small number, maybe 5%. The rest are just lazy or stupid. You wouldn't believe the number of Americans who turn down opportunities for higher paying jobs because "I don't want to work longer hours" or "It's not located in a trendy city."
Let me give an example. I know someone who works 2 part-time minimum-wage jobs and is a Bernie Sanders supporter. His mom told me that 1 of his jobs recently offered him a promotion to be a salaried manager. He turned it down because he is afraid that he might have to work longer shifts if he has a full-time job. Now of course he'll vote Bernie Sanders and complain that we all need to redistribute wealth to him because there are no good jobs available.
By the way, did you know that having a car loan is a choice? Most poor people don't know that.
So, the factual support of your allegation is knowing "someone"
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.
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.
Public assistance IS a poverty trap. It sucks entire families into lifelong government dependency.
Right - look at those soybean farmers. And corn farmers and refiners....billions given every year and an extra 14 Billion just handed out by the POTUS.
Hard to be poor in those circumstances. Just like it is with retired military. Jobs await in the Defense industry - financed by Government Largess (debt and deficits).....
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.
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