It always comes down to education. An educated poor person can pull herself out of poverty within one generation. My parents were dirt poor because their country was devastated by war, but they were able to concentrate on education and were middle class, and now me and my siblings are 1%ers.
The problem is the poor areas in the US are exceedingly violent and basically succumb to victimization to explain why they can’t get out of poverty. If they can’t have safety and the culture is to just blame others and not try to better themselves, this is a perfect way to create generational poverty.
I think we need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the most economically devastated areas of the US and first create safe neighborhoods with jobs. Once kids can go to public schools and not worry about violence, that neighborhood will thrive. In order for that to happen we need to INVEST in those communities with more police and more jobs with middle class wages.
Instead of $100B to Ukraine we need to invest that money on Americans in South Side Chicago, where there are 50 shootings a weekend, and Baltimore that has live birth rates lower than 3rd world countries, and Missouri and Oakland, etc. Create Amazon warehouses there or whatever can create an impact immediately and then hire a ton of police officers from the community and train them (1 day of training a week). Within a generation it will change the entire city and you will have a thriving middle class where wss once generational poverty.
people won't get out of poverty working at amazon warehouses. America has always had enough money to do whatever it wants. We could spend money in Ukraine and Chicago if we cared to, but we just don't. This country will never solve the poverty problem, as there is no real interest in doing so to any significant level by those who could solve them.
Universal free health care, like the rest of the modern world.
Free Education, like much of the modern world.
An effective and cheap transportation system like most the modern world
Those things would make a pretty big impact. America doesn't believe in such things. It won't happen. America believes in the lottery system (not just thru tickets). You have a chance to be rich beyond your wildest imagination. But almost certainly won't be. and if you aren't, hit the road.
> This country will never solve the poverty problem
When poverty is defined as the lower quintile of income, it cannot be solved. America's poor are the richest poor people in history. It's one reason why millions flood over the border to get in.
Which is why the general sentiment in this thread is not to solve the poverty problem, but to solve the unaffordability problem, ie. living paycheck-to-paycheck with no liquid assets, and still having less than $50 at any point, maybe going through periods of high credit card usage and paying minimum payments to get through things like vehicle repairs.
Considering how many middle-class and upper-middle-class folks live paycheck-to-paycheck too, I don't think it an "unaffordability problem" -- it's a "missing social safety net" problem.
Many will always live paycheck to paycheck regardless of their income. The solution is to make financial disasters less devastating. "Unaffordability" is a separate, also extremely serious problem.
I think this is more a result of how easy it is to spend to your capacity; if you make $500 a month after rent, you're heavily incentivized to avoid any unnecessary spending to avoid either taking on unnecessary debt or hitting 0 in your checking account. but if you change jobs and now have $1000 a month after rent, you'll find ways to 'splurge' on your (short term) QOL by buying more things instead of putting that towards a savings account. The best way around this is to set hard limits for yourself, eg. splitting direct deposits via payroll or setting up rules in your bank to automatically transfer a portion of your paycheck to savings (This is not to say that the government should make it harder to spend money via some black magic or technological measures)
But you're right in that society could do better to set up safety nets so that losing your job doesn't mean impending doom in the form of crippling medical debt and being kicked out on the street. The government, even the republicans, know that this is vital to preventing a complete collapse of the middle and lower classes, given they ran the PPP loan and forgiveness programs, but it's applied selectively because the two party system allows our political leaders to turn a blind eye as long as the other side also doesn't advocate for improving the situation.
Sure, your formula is not wrong. But its a bit like saying "it's easy to lose weight, eat less, eat better, exercise more." It might be simple, but it's not easy.
Going into the nuance of each step in your formula would result in a too-long post, but let's consider the first;
>> stay in school, pay attention, get good grades.
For various reasons this is easier to do for the rich, and harder for the poor.
Better nutrition.
Better home support if your parents were educated and have surplus time.
Better access to ancillaries (books, stationery etc.)
Less need for you to get a job to supplement family income.
No need for you to act as day care to younger siblings.
More reliable transport to and from school.
Better sleep patterns in warm, secure, environment.
Better infant nutrition resulting in well-developed current mental facilities.
Better access to heath care, meaning fewer lost school days.
And so on.
Your formula is not wrong. But it is not easy. And every part of it is greased with money. The best indicator of success is the environment you are born into.
It's worth stating clearly: the best predictor of poor health and other "failure" is being born into poverty. A predatory economic system will defend predatory economic mechanisms.
Such a system will even go to war to defend the "proper order of things".
> When you see or interact with someone who is down on their luck, remember that it probably wasn’t just one thing that put them in that situation.
I agree you have choices. It's just that those choices are easier, and simpler, the more money you have.
Incidentally the drug choice is less aligned with poverty. Middle class and rich people take plenty of drugs, including expensive ones like opiods and cocaine. Drugs more likely to be used by the less affluent (weed) is more actively enforced, including well understood disparities on racial and socio-economic lines.
But we digress, this is not about drugs. It's about the ability of people to succeed. And the playing field there is far from level.
So don't smoke weed, and disparate enforcement won't matter.
I voted for the legalization of marijuana. That doesn't mean smoking weed is a good idea. It's expensive, too. Can't really claim one can't make ends meet when spending money on weed.
1. Yes, but schools can be incredibly bad. They are largely funded by local taxes and tend to be playgrounds for lunatic educational theories of both right and left. You need a big dose of luck to ride this train.
2. Assuming you can get the grades, without a library, internet, or a stable home life, sure. And that you can navigate the fafsa and the rest of the college bureaucracy, potentially without parental help (and god help you if you have an uncooperative parent and cant get the data).
3. Sure, assuming your home life is stable enough to keep you out of this. Harder if mom or dad is already neck deep in weed, meth, or opioids.
4. Sure, if we are talking about shoplifting or larceny. But a teen can be pulled over for riding in a car on the flimsiest of reasons, and if the cop doesnt like you, you can easily get sucked into the maw of the justice system. I think we've all seen enough video of police acting badly to know that things can easily go badly wrong in a heartbeat.
5. Yes, except that not every plan covers it, and sometimes it fails, and it is becoming increasingly hard to get a plan B, like literal plan B or abortion. Plus we may have higher rates of sexual crime.
All the things you say are correct, but the reality of being poor in America is much, much uglier than straightforward theory suggests.
The schools are run by the teachers' union. If the schools are bad, it starts and ends with the union.
Yes, sometimes birth control fails, and there are sexual crimes. That doesn't explain teen pregnancy rates, though.
> without a library, internet, or a stable home life
The library, internet, or home life is simply not necessary to get good grades. The schools move along very, very slowly. 6 hours a day in class is enough time to learn it all several times over. If one pays attention.
> enough video
That implies that all the crime in poor neighborhoods is actually over-enforcement by the cops. That doesn't explain the bars on the windows.
> And that you can navigate the fafsa and the rest of the college bureaucracy, potentially without parental help
What do you need parental help for there? The colleges provide everything necessary. When I was in that situation, I sent a letter to each college asking for their admissions package. They mailed it to me. I followed the directions in it. Fulfilled the requirements. Wrote the essays. Filled in the forms. Sent it in. My parents did exactly none of it.
If one stayed in school K-12 and paid attention in class, one should be quite capable to handle applying to college.
Warehouses and employers with benefits (like healthcare, 2-4x minimum wage, retirement savings, and scholarships regularly offered) are definitely a way out of poverty.
There's a book written about how healthcare at Starbucks kept a man from poverty and changed his life from cancer.
What's been missed is that Chick-fil-A, in and out,McDonald's, Targets, Walmart, Publix jobs have some of the most opportunity for college aimed people. But sometimes the small local (without scholarship, or pays under the table) is a quick win (scholarship applications take additional effort and require 6+ months in the job).
But yet, universal healthcare, even Medicaid/Social security expanded to not have such a steep cliff would make stark difference.
You can quibble over who the employer. I don’t care if it’s Amazon or the federal government. Putting middle class jobs in these areas is important. Middle class jobs inherently means some form of health care.
Universal health care by itself won’t solve poverty.
Do you not completely lose faith in the country by saying only middle class and above can have healthcare? Or that healthcare is tied to full time employment in order to keep the masses grinding for the capitalist machine? Is that not fundamentally evil when there are better solutions out there?
No doubt education, hard work and grit are also at work here, but the facility of two incomes, two people to split housework and childcare duties are an enormous boon. Statistically, two parent married families who have children after high school are almost never below the poverty line.
I offer that as descriptive and not proscriptive - I don’t know the solution. But I know two parents in a stable household make it much easier.
It’s as basic as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter and Safety are foundational. Everything else comes with they. The poorest neighborhoods in the US are like war zones. Once they have safety and middle class jobs, things like 2 parent households will flourish.
> The problem is the poor areas in the US are exceedingly violent and basically succumb to victimization to explain why they can’t get out of poverty. If they can’t have safety and the culture is to just blame others and not try to better themselves, this is a perfect way to create generational poverty.
I think its more that if you want a straight-forward means to earn proper money without a degree then organised crime has positions for you. That's not a case of a "bad culture", its a case of opportunity.
> Instead of $100B to Ukraine we need to...
everyone knows that one of the two political parties attacks _every_ piece of public spending, not because they wish to re-invest it elsewhere but because they would like to justify tax cuts a few years down the line. So it surprises me every time this line gets trotted out when they're in opposition. Are we not learning?
Furthermore; Funding Ukraine is a very cheap means of gaining geo-political outcomes that fit the aims of NATO. Every citizen of a democratic nation should be celebrating the success of the Ukraine armed forces as opposed to trying to defund them.
> My parents were dirt poor because their country was devastated by war, but they were able to concentrate on education and were middle class, and now me and my siblings are 1%ers.
You just described me and millions like me in India. Education continues to be the most reliable path for the poor to escape the poverty trap.
I have to disagree here. Education is often more a result of increase in wealth then the cause.
How do you invest in JOBS? That's not a thing that exists.
Also, cities are not save because of police. That's a misunderstandings of how city work and a misunderstanding how safety works.
Simply reducing violence is hard, or impossible, more police isn't the answer. What are the underlying reasons for the these issues in the first place.
> Within a generation it will change the entire city
Schools and policy are not changing a city. What changes a city for the better is public transport, good infrastructure for utilities, good tax and land use policies, effective minimum public services.
Schools and policing are part of that, but only a part.
The police in Oakland are not always a force for good. They are under federal supervision essentially for being too corrupt. it's not clear that hiring more of them will help.
Because we spend too much on the military industrial complex and not on our own communities. We are rotting from the inside because we create generational poverty in these communities and just leave them to themselves. Occasionally when a cop kills someone there, we will remember them for a few days and then forget them in a couple of weeks.
Over 3000 people were shot in Chicago this year so far. And that’s down 20%. Did you even hear anything about that? We let these poverty-stricken neighborhoods live in violence and don’t do a goddamn thing about it. Meanwhile we feed the military industrial complex to fight wars on the other side of the world. That’s bullshit.
But chicago and Baltimore’s poor violent neighborhoods are not a federal problem. That’s a chicago and Baltimore problem. I don’t want any of my tax dollars that go to DoD going to either of those cities. I’m sure you can find ways to donate to various social programs and outreach for those places if you looked. I want to support Ukraine with our defense budget not waste it on Baltimore
I'm pretty sure the people of Oakland would welcome you to keep these ideas confined to whatever place you currently inhabit. Why don't you take your weird crusade to a city that could actually use it, like Memphis, Tennessee?
Want to make South Side Chicago prosperous? Make it an attractive place for productive people to set up shop. Cutting taxes and regulation is how that works.
This is a surprisingly tone-deaf comment as someone from the same background, and its not even internally consistent.
On one hand you seem to understand that education helped our parents:
> but they were able to concentrate on education and were middle class
On the other you seem to think that menial labor will somehow fix these places, you think we just haven't tried more police (for every sound bite you hear about defunding the police, go look at the YoY expenditure that city actually has)
You also flip-flop on being able to understand that safety is a pretty big part of being able to focus on education for some reason.
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I mean can tell you right now, our parents are not representative of their surroundings.
Yes there are a lot of stories like theirs, but your home country is anything like mine, the stories are almost bi-modal: either a given person from "home" is the hardest working person you've ever met and pulled themselves up by the thread of their bootstraps (tends to be our direct family or family friends so we hear about this more)... or they're borderline dysfunctional, often struggle with addiction as a form of escapism, and probably not trying to better themselves just like the people you're thumbing your nose at (tends to be something you see a lot more if you go home yourself).
Maybe instead of taking the good fortune that we've had with what our parents sacrifices and struggles started us off with and stomping on it with self-aggrandizing diatribes where you proclaim the simple fixes that would right everything for these "poor self-pitying victims"... maybe just take away the lesson that things can improve for them.
Focus on the more positive aspects of that exposure, rather than confusing exposure with experience. Because if you're anything like me, we sure as hell don't have any experience near what these people struggle with, both in the US and in our home countries.
The problem is the poor areas in the US are exceedingly violent and basically succumb to victimization to explain why they can’t get out of poverty. If they can’t have safety and the culture is to just blame others and not try to better themselves, this is a perfect way to create generational poverty.
I think we need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the most economically devastated areas of the US and first create safe neighborhoods with jobs. Once kids can go to public schools and not worry about violence, that neighborhood will thrive. In order for that to happen we need to INVEST in those communities with more police and more jobs with middle class wages.
Instead of $100B to Ukraine we need to invest that money on Americans in South Side Chicago, where there are 50 shootings a weekend, and Baltimore that has live birth rates lower than 3rd world countries, and Missouri and Oakland, etc. Create Amazon warehouses there or whatever can create an impact immediately and then hire a ton of police officers from the community and train them (1 day of training a week). Within a generation it will change the entire city and you will have a thriving middle class where wss once generational poverty.