All True, but I think there is "one item that rules the all" :)
Exploitation. Our economic system is based on exploiting other people. We "had" the worst kind, slavery along with colonialism. Then we slowly moved to a combination of "unlivable" Wages and Undocumented Workers.
This allows the well off to live the good life. With the issues we are having now, we may need to move to a different system, but witch one ? Unfortunately the only way that has happened in the past is civilization ending wars (or something close to that).
Eh... you have some valid points, but poverty has existed under every single policy regime so far. Ever. In history. So why should I accept that the root problem is bad policy instead of something else?
> If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry.
I'd be wary of these 'mega-unions' my SO has one here in Spain as she is a nurse and it hasn't been very good in practice.
They often side with the employer (in this case the Government) and then there is little recourse for the employees to find better conditions or pay as the agreements are for the whole sector.
That's not to say all unions are bad - it depends on the union, but having a few super unions seems to increase the probability you end up with bad ones.
The amount of single parent households has 5X'd since the 50s. The US now leads the world in this measure.
This seems like such an obvious factor to leave out of an article like this. I have trouble believing it's not one of, if not the most important changes the US has gone through.
There is a strong correlation between poverty and single parent households[1 2 3]. However it is not a popular thing to talk about because it can feel like “blaming the victim”. But if we ignore it we can’t have productive conversations about how to solve poverty.
In the 1950s you could also afford to raise a family of 4 on a single (male) income. If a single mother's income today was comparable to a husband's income back in the 50's relative to cost of living, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Or, you know, if we had any number of institutions in this country which are more common in the rest of the developed world, such as paid childcare and maternity leave, affordable healthcare and rent, real protections against discriminating on the basis of age&gender, etc.
And there is ample evidence to suggest that the incentive structures created by the very same Great Society anti-poverty measures are the most responsible for this tragic fact.
> The deregulation of the banking system in the 1980s heightened competition among banks. Many responded by raising fees and requiring customers to carry minimum balances. In 1977, over a third of banks offered accounts with no service charge. By the early 1990s, only 5 percent did.
I would think that increased competition would improve conditions for customers?
I'm not in finance, but I think the 'deregulation' in question is actually this law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Institutions_Deregu... . It 'deregulates' in the sense of making some mergers easier from a regulatory point of view, especially across state lines.
> I would think that increased competition would improve conditions for customers?
It did improve conditions for customers! As an example I currently bank with Ally, free checking account, no ATM fees (on any ATM, in/out network doesn't matter) and pretty sure they have good overdraft protection though I've never checked. Compare that to a place like BoA that has ATM fees, minimum account balances and fees, and while they probably have better overdraft protection than in 2008, it's probably not as good as what Ally offers.
The reason Ally can compete like this is simple, BoA and most other traditional banks have a ton of physical locations they have to pay to keep the lights on in, Ally on the other hand is entirely online. And while it may be nice to have a physical location for "peace of mind", in practice I found that it's usually better when the company (like Ally) puts the money into customer service so the phone gets answered when you call.
Honestly the biggest problem with Ally is that they are still a bit of a "savvy bank", that is if you ask any old joe on the street if they have heard of Ally, they would probably say no. Same goes for the litany of other new banks that have roughly the same business model as Ally. They would all be a great deal for those that are low-income but they aren't in your face like BoA or WF with their physical locations so people usually end up going to the "traditional banks" which are IMO not designed for them.
Left unmentioned is that interest rates in 1977 were high (like 8 percent) so there were lots of ways for the bank to turn around and make money off customer deposits, without needing to charge the customer fees.
Since that time, interest rates have steadily dropped and that business model no longer works very well
I'm getting a little off-track here, and had the same reaction as you, but I think in general the idea that "as competition increases to infinity, consumer choice increases to infinity as well" isn't quite right.
I think there's an implicit assumption that as options increase, variability in those choice options offered increases as well, which isn't always the case.
To the extent that the competitors all are constrained by some common variable (a business model oriented around loaned money, for example), they will not vary along some variables, which might result in the absence of some critical choice option.
I guess I'm feeling nitpicky about this but sometimes I think the US really needs some collective reflection on the meaning of competition, who is supplying it (private, public, government, etc.), how it is attained (choice expression through monetary-based purchases or non-monetary mechanisms such as votes) and so forth.
Often I think you can think of government services or regulation as another competitive mechanism; it's just attained indirectly through votes, and might encourage competition in different ways (e.g., either by acting as a competitor directly, as in the case of the USPS, or by changing the constraint landscape as in the case of regulation).
Eh, that's basically moot in the discussion of why people are poor. People have to earn money to put in those accounts. Real wages have fallen for the past 50 years. The barrier to entry for any job has increased (criminal record issues, college, certifications, responsibilities of multiple roles being lumped together), and some classes of jobs (primary and secondary sectors requiring lower education/skill) have diminished.
My understanding is that low-fee accounts with low balances have never been profitable for banks. Perhaps they were used as a way to bolster the bank's image and/or as a long-term loss leader to attract customers who might eventually become profitable. As long as a bank has few competitors and those competitors are also subsidizing unprofitable accounts then everyone can afford to do so.
But this is an unstable equilibrium.
If competitors focus on attracting more profitable customers then I'd imagine that this subsidy becomes unsustainable as unprofitable customers migrate to banks with lower fees and minimums and profitable customers migrate to banks with higher rates. (Which those banks can afford to pay because they are no longer subsidizing as many unprofitable customers.)
First thought is that bank’s make their money from loans. As such the primary way they attract their actual customers is to keep interest rates as low as possible. Second thought is that the reason they want people to store their money with them is so they have more money to loan out. This means that the class of people who store little money with them, especially the people who are constantly near zero, are essentially using the services without providing a benefit to the bank in return. As such, increasing fees on those people would allow the bank to turn more profit without negatively affecting their actual business, or maybe even let them have slightly lower interest rates than their competitors due to a secondary income stream.
Or TLDR: People who don’t store much money in their bank account aren’t customers the bank wants if we ignore fees.
"deregulation heightens competition" is corporate lobbyist speak for "take power from the government of the people, by the people, for the people (supposedly) and give it to existing large corporations to be used against employees and any small competitors that offer things people actually want".
We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Ala., sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, N.Y. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years. National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years, especially for multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people — and particularly poor Black families — don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.
A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities. ...
Reducing the U.S. military budget by 20% and spending it on poverty relief programs could eliminate poverty to a large degree in the U.S. (not entirely, but that's unrealistic).
It's not that the government doesn't have the money or that we're not paying enough in taxes. It's that we're spending it on the wrong things (if we want to have a generally prosperous and stable society).
As the article rightly points out, the US has spent more money over time on the poor, not less, with middling effect. Whether or not the military budget is bloated, there's no evidence to suggest that yet more money for the poor would result in better outcomes.
Articles like this never address some fundamental questions that would be much more enlightening:
* Why does poverty persist in any country? Is there any country where there are no poor?
* It states that the percentage of the poor in the US stayed relatively constant over time. But is it the same people (and their descendants) who are staying poor, or are the poor of one generation (or their descendants) able to lift themselves out of poverty into a stable middle-class life?
Instead it chooses to frame most economic choices made by the poor as being "exploitative", and at the same breath blames payday loan companies for being predatory and yet posits that the poor need greater access to credit.
"and spending it on poverty relief programs could eliminate poverty to a large degree in the U.S."
No, it won't, assuming you're talking about existing programs. The current programs aren't designed to fix the problems the recipients face. They're merely designed to keep people alive (food, medical care, etc). They have absolutely nothing to do with getting those people jobs with pay high enough to exit the support system. Many of the people on those relief programs work, but simply don't make enough. So in that regard your last sentence allpies to your own statement: "It's that we're spending it on the wrong things".
Giving people living in generational poverty a handout is the BEST way to keep them enslaved on government largesse. You need to take that money and invest in their neighborhoods and lift the entire neighborhood out of poverty by educating them. My God, how many eons is the saying "Give a man a fish..." been around? Yet the best idea we still have is to hand money out to absolve ourselves of collective guilt?
Look at San Francisco. Their homelessness budget is over $600 million a year, and yet, homelessness is the WORST its ever been. That's because homelessness "activists" keep the homeless as farm animals, living in homelessness without actually trying to help them elevate themselves. Look at the open drug markets and free access to drugs and needles they have. This is all to keep them enslaved in drugs and homeless without trying to help them.
Because if they solve the problem of homelessness, they won't have jobs anymore. They are like the pharmaceutical industry except at the grassroots level.
Putting cash into poor people's pockets is the best single way to spend the money, yes, but I think that article makes a great case that as long as banks, employers, landlords, etc. can take advantage of the poor, poverty will continue. So there has to be more of a policy component here.
Biden recently talked about limiting "junk fees" for example - we need more focus on stuff like that, and incidentally, these policies probably help all Americans.
There are many different definitions of poverty- but often, poverty is defined as a ratio or in relationship to others income. When using a definition like that, you will always have poverty in any state where you have any form of free monetary trade.
We can and we should do better. But we will never eliminate poverty so long as we want freedom of economic trade. (And use a definition that is relative).
I’m surprised the article presents an argument that welfare spending has increased from 1980 ($1,015) to 2016 ($3,419) as if that’s a big increase without even mentioning inflation.
$1,015 in 1980 is equivalent to $3,091 in 2016 dollars. So, it’s only a small relative increase, and as the article points out, it was mainly for Medicaid:
> Most of this increase was due to health care spending, and Medicaid in particular. But even if we exclude Medicaid from the calculation, we find that federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018, from $630 to $1,448 per person.
$630 in 1980 has the same buying power as $2,007 in 2018. So it’s actually a reduction in spending outside of healthcare.
This article gets very close, but ultimately fails to get to the root of things. It’s like a liberal facsimile of a radical analysis. This can be seen clearly with logic like
> Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism
Actually, it is. Market competition in the search for a steady profit pressures capitalists to reduce wages as much as possible, and eliminate any human aspects from work that are not strictly necessary for production. So, definitionally lousy, poorly paid work[^0].
Workers can fight back against this pressure, but it’s a Sisyphean task. As this article explains, it’s difficult and any gains will be eroded over time and a new generation of workers will have to fight again.
The real solution is to construct systems (technologies and institutions) that can perform the functions of capital (coordination of production and distribution, giving people something to do with their day), and then eliminate capital as a social process. Generating poverty (not to mention war, ecological destruction, etc.) is just an intrinsic consequence of the dynamics of capital and will be with us until we do away with it.
[^0]: I didn’t say underpaid because on average all jobs in capitalism are underpaid: profit comes from paying people less than they produce…
TL;DR: "The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?"
The answer is that not all men are created equal. However, that mundane fact doesn't transfer power to a centralised entity that will "protect" the poor, so you will hear the usual but wrong explanation instead.
The US government already spends more on healthcare and social security than on the military.
Most of that military spending is salaries for US workers. Guess where that $15 billion carrier is getting built? In the US from US parts. Its a jobs programs that conservative senators can support.
People in poverty aren't paying any taxes to fund any of that though. As the article somewhat noted, people in poverty get an average of $12,400 from the government annually. (Excluding Medicaid, which is much more spending, but even poor people do pay a small amount into that.)
57% of people pay no income tax.[1] The carriers and planes are essentially only being paid for by the top 40% of earners.
How much of this spending is really about creating defense jobs in the various representatives districts? Here is an article that argues defense spending is a form of indirect welfare.
Abstract:
this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non-military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left-right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect govermments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low-level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time-series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post-World War I period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfore and
It seems to be the usual things, education, understanding and knowledge of opportunities, risky behavior, and blind trust in the system waiting for it to live a person up rather than them having to lift themselves up.
It is much more straightforward to illustrate that an individual is failing a system than it is to illustrate the system itself failing the individual.
This is because a system sets the very problem domain for a person to "fail". By virtue of being a system, it is trivial to point to it and say "where" and "how" the person is failing inside it.
People are not so easy to describe. A person is not a simple system. Their needs are not so easy to point at and say "where" and "how" a given system has failed them. Each person is unique, and there are hundreds of millions of us all interacting with one system.
But that complexity is in everything you are asking of people here: What's does it mean to "lift yourself up"? What are the circumstances for "risky behavior", and are there really better options? Is the behavior a problem or result? These questions are all fraught with complexity, because people have complicated needs and complicated circumstances.
What we really need is to set a new problem domain: the needs of each person. But suddenly this becomes some vain moral debate: isn't it selfish?
It is. So is a system.
But what if a person's needs are to be taken care of without having to work hard themselves? Isn't that unfair?
It is. So is a system.
Our system demands we ignore such edge cases, and wave them off as moral failings: the person's fault: but what gives our system the right to say so? After all, this is just a system: it isn't God! We made the damn thing! It doesn't get to tell us what is right and what is wrong. Yet we let it do just that with every person every day.
Poverty persists because Americans have abandoned the notions of education and safety. Entire cities are destroyed by generational poverty but those are also the highest in crime. No one talks about the 20+ murders a weekend in South-side Chicago. No one. How do you expect children to get an education and lift themselves out of poverty when they are terrified of being gunned down every single day?
The worst parts of the US need a well-trained, well-monitored police state that will bring safety to those neighborhoods and so that the kids can get educated properly and level up into the middle class and higher. I'm all for freedom, but we can only achieve freedom once we have moved up in Maslow's hierarchy, and people in those neighborhoods don't have the foundation to thrive.
Second, we need to focus on education. Education, especially when run by people like those in charge of California's education system, is ruinous. Lowering standards only helps those white liberal educators feel better about themselves by seeing graduation percentages go up. But it leaves the children unable to compete and unprepared for the real world. It's like the story of Blind Side, where Michael Oher kept getting graduated to the next grade but he couldn't read. That's what is going on in California, when they start saying that mathematics propagates white supremacy, as if mathematics didn't originate outside of America. I believe the poorest areas of the US should get double or triple the number of teachers, so that class sizes are small and kids get the learning they need.
Safety and education. I believe those are what bring people out of poverty. My parents grew up in a war-torn country, and they grew up poor. My grandfather had a gambling addiction and never had enough money to pay tuition for my dad. Both my parents studied their asses off and immigrated to North America, and we became middle class. My siblings and I are all 1%ers or higher, and that's because we could thrive because of the education we received. We need to give kids in the worst areas a chance, but no one cares so places like Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Missouri, etc are all left to fend for themselves in squalor and they will NEVER get out of it by themselves without safety and education.
> No one talks about the 20+ murders a weekend in South-side Chicago. No one. How do you expect children to get an education and lift themselves out of poverty when they are terrified of being gunned down every single day?
Crime in Chicago isn't talked about? That's not been my experience. It's literally infamous for it.
>The worst parts of the US need a well-trained, well-monitored police state that will bring safety to those neighborhoods and so that the kids can get educated properly and level up into the middle class and higher.
The police are generally not all that different than the other street gangs, especially in cities. The LA County Sheriff has an actual literal street gang operating in it.
There is no such thing as a 'well-monitored' police state.
Safety and education can only be achieved through economic security, not incarceration and abuse by the state.
I am sorry but I believe that data suggest that income inequality and marginalization are what cause those issues. No child wakes up one day dreaming about shooting someone.
Also, if I am correct, I think teachers and underpaid and schools are working at max capacity. This also creates a big inequality with people that can afford the best schools.
And better if we do not talk about the crime that is healthcare in the US...
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 years ago|reply
1. Raising health care costs
2. Very little poverty spending actually goes to the recipients' pockets
3. Decline of union membership
4. Home ownership is out of reach and the rent is too damn high
5. Banking is expensive for poor people
Most of these issues can be traced back to corporate lobbying.
The moral of the story is that poverty is a policy choice.
[+] [-] jmclnx|3 years ago|reply
Exploitation. Our economic system is based on exploiting other people. We "had" the worst kind, slavery along with colonialism. Then we slowly moved to a combination of "unlivable" Wages and Undocumented Workers.
This allows the well off to live the good life. With the issues we are having now, we may need to move to a different system, but witch one ? Unfortunately the only way that has happened in the past is civilization ending wars (or something close to that).
[+] [-] humanrebar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schnitzelstoat|3 years ago|reply
I'd be wary of these 'mega-unions' my SO has one here in Spain as she is a nurse and it hasn't been very good in practice.
They often side with the employer (in this case the Government) and then there is little recourse for the employees to find better conditions or pay as the agreements are for the whole sector.
That's not to say all unions are bad - it depends on the union, but having a few super unions seems to increase the probability you end up with bad ones.
[+] [-] Spinnaker_|3 years ago|reply
This seems like such an obvious factor to leave out of an article like this. I have trouble believing it's not one of, if not the most important changes the US has gone through.
[+] [-] celeritascelery|3 years ago|reply
[1]https://post.ca.gov/portals/0/post_docs/publications/Buildin...
[2]https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-poverty-less-prison-more-col...
[3]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/04/half-of-all...
[+] [-] speculativename|3 years ago|reply
Or, you know, if we had any number of institutions in this country which are more common in the rest of the developed world, such as paid childcare and maternity leave, affordable healthcare and rent, real protections against discriminating on the basis of age&gender, etc.
[+] [-] prottog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schnitzelstoat|3 years ago|reply
I would think that increased competition would improve conditions for customers?
[+] [-] ElevenLathe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
It did improve conditions for customers! As an example I currently bank with Ally, free checking account, no ATM fees (on any ATM, in/out network doesn't matter) and pretty sure they have good overdraft protection though I've never checked. Compare that to a place like BoA that has ATM fees, minimum account balances and fees, and while they probably have better overdraft protection than in 2008, it's probably not as good as what Ally offers.
The reason Ally can compete like this is simple, BoA and most other traditional banks have a ton of physical locations they have to pay to keep the lights on in, Ally on the other hand is entirely online. And while it may be nice to have a physical location for "peace of mind", in practice I found that it's usually better when the company (like Ally) puts the money into customer service so the phone gets answered when you call.
Honestly the biggest problem with Ally is that they are still a bit of a "savvy bank", that is if you ask any old joe on the street if they have heard of Ally, they would probably say no. Same goes for the litany of other new banks that have roughly the same business model as Ally. They would all be a great deal for those that are low-income but they aren't in your face like BoA or WF with their physical locations so people usually end up going to the "traditional banks" which are IMO not designed for them.
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
https://www.aarp.org/money/investing/info-2022/restarting-po...
[+] [-] andrewmutz|3 years ago|reply
Since that time, interest rates have steadily dropped and that business model no longer works very well
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
I think there's an implicit assumption that as options increase, variability in those choice options offered increases as well, which isn't always the case.
To the extent that the competitors all are constrained by some common variable (a business model oriented around loaned money, for example), they will not vary along some variables, which might result in the absence of some critical choice option.
I guess I'm feeling nitpicky about this but sometimes I think the US really needs some collective reflection on the meaning of competition, who is supplying it (private, public, government, etc.), how it is attained (choice expression through monetary-based purchases or non-monetary mechanisms such as votes) and so forth.
Often I think you can think of government services or regulation as another competitive mechanism; it's just attained indirectly through votes, and might encourage competition in different ways (e.g., either by acting as a competitor directly, as in the case of the USPS, or by changing the constraint landscape as in the case of regulation).
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asoneth|3 years ago|reply
But this is an unstable equilibrium.
If competitors focus on attracting more profitable customers then I'd imagine that this subsidy becomes unsustainable as unprofitable customers migrate to banks with lower fees and minimums and profitable customers migrate to banks with higher rates. (Which those banks can afford to pay because they are no longer subsidizing as many unprofitable customers.)
[+] [-] NineStarPoint|3 years ago|reply
Or TLDR: People who don’t store much money in their bank account aren’t customers the bank wants if we ignore fees.
[+] [-] kgwxd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Ala., sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, N.Y. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years. National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years, especially for multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people — and particularly poor Black families — don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.
A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities. ...
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
It's not that the government doesn't have the money or that we're not paying enough in taxes. It's that we're spending it on the wrong things (if we want to have a generally prosperous and stable society).
[+] [-] prottog|3 years ago|reply
Articles like this never address some fundamental questions that would be much more enlightening:
* Why does poverty persist in any country? Is there any country where there are no poor?
* It states that the percentage of the poor in the US stayed relatively constant over time. But is it the same people (and their descendants) who are staying poor, or are the poor of one generation (or their descendants) able to lift themselves out of poverty into a stable middle-class life?
Instead it chooses to frame most economic choices made by the poor as being "exploitative", and at the same breath blames payday loan companies for being predatory and yet posits that the poor need greater access to credit.
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
No, it won't, assuming you're talking about existing programs. The current programs aren't designed to fix the problems the recipients face. They're merely designed to keep people alive (food, medical care, etc). They have absolutely nothing to do with getting those people jobs with pay high enough to exit the support system. Many of the people on those relief programs work, but simply don't make enough. So in that regard your last sentence allpies to your own statement: "It's that we're spending it on the wrong things".
[+] [-] blindriver|3 years ago|reply
Look at San Francisco. Their homelessness budget is over $600 million a year, and yet, homelessness is the WORST its ever been. That's because homelessness "activists" keep the homeless as farm animals, living in homelessness without actually trying to help them elevate themselves. Look at the open drug markets and free access to drugs and needles they have. This is all to keep them enslaved in drugs and homeless without trying to help them.
Because if they solve the problem of homelessness, they won't have jobs anymore. They are like the pharmaceutical industry except at the grassroots level.
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 years ago|reply
Biden recently talked about limiting "junk fees" for example - we need more focus on stuff like that, and incidentally, these policies probably help all Americans.
[+] [-] ensignavenger|3 years ago|reply
We can and we should do better. But we will never eliminate poverty so long as we want freedom of economic trade. (And use a definition that is relative).
[+] [-] what-do-I-know|3 years ago|reply
Using the BLS CPI calculator:
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1015&year1=198...
$1,015 in 1980 is equivalent to $3,091 in 2016 dollars. So, it’s only a small relative increase, and as the article points out, it was mainly for Medicaid:
> Most of this increase was due to health care spending, and Medicaid in particular. But even if we exclude Medicaid from the calculation, we find that federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018, from $630 to $1,448 per person.
$630 in 1980 has the same buying power as $2,007 in 2018. So it’s actually a reduction in spending outside of healthcare.
[+] [-] ihm|3 years ago|reply
> Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism
Actually, it is. Market competition in the search for a steady profit pressures capitalists to reduce wages as much as possible, and eliminate any human aspects from work that are not strictly necessary for production. So, definitionally lousy, poorly paid work[^0].
Workers can fight back against this pressure, but it’s a Sisyphean task. As this article explains, it’s difficult and any gains will be eroded over time and a new generation of workers will have to fight again.
The real solution is to construct systems (technologies and institutions) that can perform the functions of capital (coordination of production and distribution, giving people something to do with their day), and then eliminate capital as a social process. Generating poverty (not to mention war, ecological destruction, etc.) is just an intrinsic consequence of the dynamics of capital and will be with us until we do away with it.
[^0]: I didn’t say underpaid because on average all jobs in capitalism are underpaid: profit comes from paying people less than they produce…
[+] [-] nateb2022|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlgorithmicTime|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] newaccount2021|3 years ago|reply
Our military budget will soon pass $1 trillion annually
Our elected representatives now routinely provide the Pentagon with more money than it even requests
Every NYTimes article on Ukraine is riddled with comments suggesting we provide a blank check for weaponry
The Washington Post likes to tell me every day why it is essential the US build more $15 billion aircraft carriers to provoke China
This is just one reason why we have poverty and always will
[+] [-] tyoma|3 years ago|reply
The US government already spends more on healthcare and social security than on the military.
Most of that military spending is salaries for US workers. Guess where that $15 billion carrier is getting built? In the US from US parts. Its a jobs programs that conservative senators can support.
[+] [-] mminer237|3 years ago|reply
57% of people pay no income tax.[1] The carriers and planes are essentially only being paid for by the top 40% of earners.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/25/57percent-of-us-households-p...
[+] [-] meany|3 years ago|reply
Abstract: this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non-military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left-right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect govermments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low-level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time-series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post-World War I period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfore and
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25766258
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] myshpa|3 years ago|reply
Money is always the culprit.
[+] [-] localplume|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Proven|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
It seems to be the usual things, education, understanding and knowledge of opportunities, risky behavior, and blind trust in the system waiting for it to live a person up rather than them having to lift themselves up.
[+] [-] Clent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|3 years ago|reply
This is because a system sets the very problem domain for a person to "fail". By virtue of being a system, it is trivial to point to it and say "where" and "how" the person is failing inside it.
People are not so easy to describe. A person is not a simple system. Their needs are not so easy to point at and say "where" and "how" a given system has failed them. Each person is unique, and there are hundreds of millions of us all interacting with one system.
But that complexity is in everything you are asking of people here: What's does it mean to "lift yourself up"? What are the circumstances for "risky behavior", and are there really better options? Is the behavior a problem or result? These questions are all fraught with complexity, because people have complicated needs and complicated circumstances.
What we really need is to set a new problem domain: the needs of each person. But suddenly this becomes some vain moral debate: isn't it selfish?
It is. So is a system.
But what if a person's needs are to be taken care of without having to work hard themselves? Isn't that unfair?
It is. So is a system.
Our system demands we ignore such edge cases, and wave them off as moral failings: the person's fault: but what gives our system the right to say so? After all, this is just a system: it isn't God! We made the damn thing! It doesn't get to tell us what is right and what is wrong. Yet we let it do just that with every person every day.
[+] [-] blindriver|3 years ago|reply
The worst parts of the US need a well-trained, well-monitored police state that will bring safety to those neighborhoods and so that the kids can get educated properly and level up into the middle class and higher. I'm all for freedom, but we can only achieve freedom once we have moved up in Maslow's hierarchy, and people in those neighborhoods don't have the foundation to thrive.
Second, we need to focus on education. Education, especially when run by people like those in charge of California's education system, is ruinous. Lowering standards only helps those white liberal educators feel better about themselves by seeing graduation percentages go up. But it leaves the children unable to compete and unprepared for the real world. It's like the story of Blind Side, where Michael Oher kept getting graduated to the next grade but he couldn't read. That's what is going on in California, when they start saying that mathematics propagates white supremacy, as if mathematics didn't originate outside of America. I believe the poorest areas of the US should get double or triple the number of teachers, so that class sizes are small and kids get the learning they need.
Safety and education. I believe those are what bring people out of poverty. My parents grew up in a war-torn country, and they grew up poor. My grandfather had a gambling addiction and never had enough money to pay tuition for my dad. Both my parents studied their asses off and immigrated to North America, and we became middle class. My siblings and I are all 1%ers or higher, and that's because we could thrive because of the education we received. We need to give kids in the worst areas a chance, but no one cares so places like Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Missouri, etc are all left to fend for themselves in squalor and they will NEVER get out of it by themselves without safety and education.
[+] [-] cmh89|3 years ago|reply
Crime in Chicago isn't talked about? That's not been my experience. It's literally infamous for it.
>The worst parts of the US need a well-trained, well-monitored police state that will bring safety to those neighborhoods and so that the kids can get educated properly and level up into the middle class and higher.
The police are generally not all that different than the other street gangs, especially in cities. The LA County Sheriff has an actual literal street gang operating in it.
There is no such thing as a 'well-monitored' police state.
Safety and education can only be achieved through economic security, not incarceration and abuse by the state.
[+] [-] ainiriand|3 years ago|reply
Also, if I am correct, I think teachers and underpaid and schools are working at max capacity. This also creates a big inequality with people that can afford the best schools.
And better if we do not talk about the crime that is healthcare in the US...