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from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.
Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:
We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.
This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).
The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:43AM
Too often people think that since they are *busy* they should be able to earn a living. If that were the case we should take track hoes and dump trucks away from construction crews and have them dig foundations and trenches with spoons - then they would be busy and we could employ thousands more with the same or even *fewer* projects.
It's not about being *busy* - it's about being *productive*. If you cannot earn a living then you need to find ways to be more *productive* rather than more busy.
It's not that many poor people aren't willing to work - they aren't willing to put the thinking and effort in to being more productive.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:52AM
It's a fact of existence that many people are not well suited for thinking jobs, and they would be more productive doing manual labor instead like construction and ditch digging and factory work. When automation eliminates manual labor, the manual laborers can't just "put the thinking in" because you say they should.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mr_mischief on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:52PM
Your parent post is assuming poor people are capable but lazy. You're assuming they are hard-working but stupid.
I think both assumptions are dangerous stereotypes to throw around and both are extremely arrogant and condescending to the poor.
How about if we're going to subsidize these people, we do it in the schools and infrastructure required to get them out of dead-end job tracks in the first place?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:21PM
Both stereotypes are often wrong, but occasionally right. No matter what you do there will be some people who are too stupid to do the jobs available and others who are too lazy. To assume that the intersection is null is incorrect. To assume that this covers all, or even most, economically disadvantaged it also incorrect. (I distinguish between "economically disadvantaged" and poor because given to people with the same income, they will choose different ways to spend and save that income. Poor is someone who makes the wrong choices for his level of income. Economically disadvantaged is someone who has less income. Given a mild disparity, an economically disadvantaged person may well do better than a poor person. But you can't cure a person of being poor, only decrease their level of economic disadvantage. [Also economically disadvantaged is easily measurable, where poor can't reliably be measured.])
There is a real problem here, and I don't know the answer. It ties in with the fact that automation is not static, but is increasing, and that increasingly jobs that were considered secure are being automated either out of existence, or being deskilled. This means that no fixed answer is likely to work. Predictions currently are that by 2025 about half of existing jobs will be automated away (and I'm not sure whether that means automated out of existence, deskilled, or automated such that only elite practitioners of the skill can secure employment). Getting from here to there is guaranteed to be a rough road no matter WHAT we do, and it's fairly clear that insisting that someone have a job to support themselves is not going to work. Not unless we want to turn to massive forcibly violent population reduction. There are many indications that the government is preparing for widespread violent insurrection, and that could reduce the population enough that there might be jobs for everyone...for another few years, until the next round of jobs were automated away. To me this does not appear to be a desirable approach.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:07PM
Thankfully one of the many advantages to automation is lower cost. Regardless of what some people think, businesses do compete on price and lower cost does result in some amount of lower prices. Lower prices mean lower cost of living, so less money goes further.
One example of a good paying job that tends to be quite manual is home construction. With technology threatening to automate away many of these well-paying jobs, housing can theoretically actually be much less expensive. Basically the automation pulls up the bottom some but drops more people toward the bottom at the same time. Meanwhile, the people producing the 3D printing systems (or whatever form of automation is used) and fielding them save money on labor per unit. They take somewhat less per unit but can build many more units. They get richer, their former workers get poorer, but housing becomes more affordable overall.
One way to prevent so many people falling through these cracks is to spread the ownership of the producers of goods. That doesn't necessarily mean socialism or even permanent welfare. It can mean getting substantial numbers of shares sold to the workers. It can mean working for a worker-owned cooperative type of company that replaces your job income with windfall profits from the automation. It can mean temporary government or charitable assistance during retraining. Unfortunately it's difficult to get substantial portions of ownership into the hands of people already struggling to make rent.
It would be nice to live in a post-scarcity economy. Getting there smoothly seems to be unlikely, though. Perhaps we can lessen the blows.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:23AM
It's a good job the US has a world-class education system, available for free, to any age, so that workers can easily learn new skills and improve their "productivity" in a rapidly-changing economy.
And it's a good job that so many US companies are willing to let their low-wage employees take paid time off (because such people generally can't afford to take unpaid time off and still eat), to improve their skills through education.
(Score: 2) by TK-421 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:07PM
You can't lay all of that blame at the feet of our education system. I am not sure if you are referring to university or primary. I am going to assume primary because university should not and is not for everybody. I see a lot of problems in our public education system. They have the primary goal (in my mind at least) of producing a young adult that can read the thoughts of others, assimilate them with their own thoughts, and express those thoughts back in a comprehensive way. This fails sometimes and for different reasons. The primary failure in my opinion is the lack of supportive partnership with the parents/guardians. I do not believe primary schooling should ever attempt to usurp parents/guardians but rather should partner with them.
The parents/guardians should be providing (to the best of their ability):
> a stable home with basic utilities
> structured meal times spent together as much as possible
> child care (when necessary) provided by healthy (mainly mental and chemically speaking) immediate family members
> the expectation that school is your equivalent to a job while growing up
> just like an employer checks up on your work, the parent/guardian will check up on your school work
Why is this absent for so many? It isn't a race issue, or a religious issue. It's a poverty issue. Poverty begets poverty. Once you are in it is very hard to get out. How would I get out? I would first fall back on family. If my parents were chemically and mentally healthy I would seek their assistance. If they were not an option I would move through my list of family until I found one. If I had no family I would reach out to friends. If framily were not an option I would seek out a good church that could partner with me. Say what you want but there ARE churches out there that spend the money they receive on helping those in need out of desperate situations. How do you find a good church? I can only answer for Christian churches, you find one that takes Matthew 25:31 seriously. If they look at you funny for mentioning it then keep walking. A good church can help you get out of bad situations on your way to a better place.
The educators should be providing (to the best of their ability)
> highly structured focus on math, science, literature, and verbal skills
> opportunity to make mistakes and learn in the process
> continued exposure to social interaction with the purpose of learning how to work within society
> opportunities to experience the arts
If either partner fails then the production of a prepared adult fails. Each partner must be prepared to push the other when necessary but this is largely one way. Educators have little to no power to get a failing parent to improve. If a kid shows up to school everyday having not eaten anything since the previous school lunch they surely won't be prepared to learn anything that day. So we get more social programs to provide free/reduced lunch which blossoms into breakfast and weekend meals. I hate the fact that schools have to spend money on such things but food/shelter/clothing always come before learning. Parenting failures, largely due to poverty, beget schooling failures.
I am running out of time for this post so I am going to make a bad segue here. If you know someone who is locked in that poverty cycle, try to partner with them (assuming you have a working relationship with them). Don't let yourself be abused, but do find ways to help that person or couple. Offer to let their kids come to your house, after school, if that couple has to work multiple jobs. Invite them to dinner a few nights a week so they can spend time with their kids (rather than spend time cooking a meal) so they can check homework and ask about school. Let that person or couple ask you questions about how you have handled tough situations. A hand up is always better than a hand out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:52PM
That's the compassionate conservatism [wikipedia.org] position: solve poverty through private charity. And it's what the US has at the moment, so I agree with donating and participating in charity efforts where possible, given the current political situation.
But it doesn't scale. The government does have some programs for helping the poor, but they could be better (see the basic income thread above). And employment regulations are broken as evidenced by the fact that they are encouraging this behavior, which is another direction that better government could help fix the problem of poverty.
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Thursday April 16 2015, @01:22AM
Part of the reason private charity doesn't seem to scale in the USA is because the governments within the USA have been unlawfully taking on the role as a dispenser of charity. If one of the local homeless shelters you chose to send funds to has turned into a crack house, you have the option to stop giving them your funds. This is NOT the general case with government charity, as the monies used have been obtained with taxation/theft, and if you try to stop funding the government anyway, conventional wisdom dictates that you are courting personal disaster.
Tally up the total you (presumably as a productive, relatively self-supporting individual) pay in taxes and government-imposed fees. The easily visible taxes should total 50% or more of your gross compensation. That alone should indicate that, absent such harsh demands on your productive capacity, private charity should indeed be a viable solution, as it was indeed for much of human history.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday April 17 2015, @04:57AM
Your idea was tried in early 19th century Britain and it didn't workout too well for the poor, read your Dickens. Your biggest error is thinking that without taxes you'd be 50% richer when in reality most wages would drop by close to 50% and the various fees that would be needed to be paid would sky rocket as they would be paid to private enterprises who are only interested in increasing profits.
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:27AM
Remind me: which Dickens titles involved a governmental system that treated humans like self-owning individuals rather than little better than chattel property?
Your criticism of the potentially inefficient or insufficient ways free individuals might choose to treat private charities is the functional equivalent of saying that American slaves were better off in forced bondage, 'cause they'd be unable to take care of themselves otherwise.
The potential downsides of freedom do not matter - neither you nor the US government has lawful authority to resort to any flavor of slavery.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:14PM
so that workers can easily learn new skills
I have seen precious few examples where people have learnt something new and then get more money from their employer as a result. Short of learning a new trade and completely changing careers, my best chance of making more money is by convincing an employer I'm worth more. Assuming I'm not incompetent, advancement owes far more to political ability and far less to do with what I know. (The exceptions here are specialised trades [plumbers and doctors, for example] where additional learning is considered to be additional specialisation and thus commands higher pay.)