Posted on 09/14/2008 3:22:09 AM PDT by a_chronic_whiner
Declaring that it’s becoming “easier to fall into poverty” in America, Barack Obama has laid out an anti-poverty agenda that includes raising the minimum wage, increasing tax credits for low-income wage earners, and enacting legislation to make it easier for workers to start unions.
John McCain would attack poverty by cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and boost opportunity throughout the workforce.
Although their agendas are starkly different, both men make the same fundamental mistake. They declare that labor-force solutions, like higher wages or creating better jobs, will significantly reduce poverty America. But that won’t happen because the vast majority of the impoverished in America don’t work and wouldn’t even if we raised wages or created more jobs. They are in poverty because of social or physical problems or choices in life they’ve made which make it difficult or impossible for them to work. Some have simply chosen not to work. It’s not that our economy doesn’t work for most of the poor, but that most of the poor don’t work.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
I agree. I am sending this to a liberal I know.
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Well, we all know who they will vote for, but probably the hardest decision they will have to make on election day...do I go to the polls before or after Oprah.
And I guess thay may depend on how many times they plan to vote that day.
Reminds me of a conversation with a high school counselor friend of mine. Who was having a meeting along with school administration about a troubled youth. His foster parents were attending in order to provide background information. They went into a long dissertation about their ability to care for and provide for the youth. The dissertation included the fact that they were quote, “living the American dream”.
Previous to the quote was the income background of SSI, disability income, food stamps, and a few other hands in the welfare pocket. Neither one of them worked and the American Dream quote nearly knocked all of them out of their chairs.
A friend of mine and his wife used to keep foster kids. I’ll never forget a quote from one little girl who asked him every morning where he was going? Where he went every day? He went to work. Totally a foreign concept for this child.
One of the worst and most persistent problems with public policy formulation in the United States is the fact that the assumptions underlying policy decisions are fundamentally wrong.
If those in poverty will not or cannot work, increasing wages, creating jobs and overall trends in the economy are irrelevant to their economic situation, except for the impact of those things on the amount of revenue that can be appropriated by the government and redistributed.
In some ways, it seems it is time to stop focusing on the poor, per se. Today the poor have many ways "up," but they can't be forced to want to stop being poor. Not only do we make wrong assumptions about how increased economic opportunity affects poverty rates, we blithely assume without real data, and no historical precedent, that those in poverty lack only economic opportunity, not desire to take advantage of such opportunity.
At some point, when society has removed all significant obstacles to the "flight of the willing and able" from poverty, it has done its job. After that, it is up to those who are willing and able to flee poverty to do so for themselves. And, in large part, they do; that's why the permanent underclass is becoming more and more concentrated, and why it is enlarging mostly by children being born directly into that permanent poverty.
Bottom line: poverty rates don't tell very much about the economy.
I lived in a poor neighborhood during college.
The kids of the welfare moms would hang around the house quite a bit out of curiousity. One little girl asked me why I was always reading those big books. I replied it was so I could get an education and then get good job.
She said, “Can’t you just get a check from the government?”
Mr. Malanga covers the true basics of the myths surrounding the palliatives proffered by politicians and demogagues.
Finding solutions to these problems is far more complicated and politically risky than offering palliatives about minimum wage hikes or tax cuts. To address the issue of the more than 80 percent of poor families where no one works full time requires figuring out how to dissuade poor girls without a high school education from having children by a man who won’t marry and support them. It also requires doing a much better job helping make ex-convicts--the 700,000 or so mostly men who leave prison each year--more employable. And it requires finding more successful ways of helping alcoholics and drug addicts—who make up a sizeable portion of those who say they can’t work because they are ill—get straight and stay clean.
Mr. Malanga has said a very unorthodox thing which has made me smile and because it's what I've been saying for way too many years:
figuring out how to dissuade poor girls without a high school education from having children by a man who won’t marry and support them.
The past 40 years has been the feminist demand for a man to "keep it in his pants". I, OTOH, have always asserted that it was females we needed to focus on in this regard. If she doesn't uncross her legs, his "it" has no where to go. Feminists don't like this response. But Mr. Malanga is right to focus upon the female in this equasion. For many reasons. And to add that "having children by a man who won’t marry and support them" in addendum to the focus.
Most of these males who won't marry and support their baby's mother, don't marry the mother and because... they can't afford to. IME, most can't afford to because they often have little more than what amounts to a 1st grade literacy level. And many are held hostage by "their culture" from advancing, breaking away from the pack, improving themselves, and living free.
Jesus was right when He said “the poor you will have with you always”.
but they can't be forced to want to stop being poor.
True, to a large extent. There are many with criminal records who make a decision they don't won't to go "there" again, and so begin to make tracks with getting their GED, which is a vast improvement.
Not even truancy laws can help a child want to learn, especially if the parent(s) is not encouraging education as a near religion in the home.
Activists like to proclaim there is a "gay" gene which affects behavior. You'd think they'd also support there's a reading gene. Parents who read to their children encourage a love of books; However, Children who see parents reading for the joy of reading, become lifelong readers themselves. It's the act of witnessing the behavior as a chosen behavior which does the greatest good in a child coupled with the parent sharing that joy with the child.
In my neck of the woods, the counselors around here would only have said, "Here is the problem with little Jamal, you don't have him on these programs". I.E. the parents had missed a couple.
“Most of these males who won’t marry and support their baby’s mother, don’t marry the mother and because... they can’t afford to.”
Many of these “men” already have several kids by several different moms by the time they graduate high school. A lady I know (nice hard-working individual) has 3 kids by 3 different men, starting when she was 14 years old. Never married. Each of her sons has multiple kids by multiple moms. Never married. Each of her 3 sons has been in prison at least once. None ever [legally] employed.
Monogamy, it seems, is not an option.
Earl Shorris and the various people who teach this might have a perspective worth noting: http://www.gw.edu/misc/radio/articles/Earl%20Shorris.pdf
“how to dissuade poor girls without a high school education from having children by a man who won’t marry and support them. It also requires doing a much better job helping make ex-convicts—the 700,000 or so mostly men who leave prison each year—more employable.
And it requires finding more successful ways of helping alcoholics and drug addicts—who make up a sizeable portion of those who say they can’t work because they are ill—get straight and stay clean.”
It’s not complexity requiring a solution here. As Reagan said, it’s a simple answer that requires a ‘hard moral choice.’
A neighbor workd for “Social Services”. She is a lib but even she is pissed at the money we throw away to better the lot of our “poor”. Here in NYS air conditioning is classified as a utility. Every housing project in my county is a garden apartment in a park-like setting with through the wall AC.
The EIC and other welfare programs foster this behavior. Tax day in many ‘impoverished’ neighborhoods is the day when several thousands of dollars in ‘tax refunds’ are doled out to people who never earned the income to produce the ‘refunds’ in the first place. Those several thousands of dollars come from you and me.
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