velvetpage | Good article

Something that always strikes me as interesting is that "poor" in America is still "rich" to the rest of the world. The poor often have cable, a computer, and broadband internet. I'll have to go find the stats - I just read them the other day. I know several women in Booju say they are on food stams and receive welfare, yet they are on their laptops with cable internet. I'm not saying whether it is right or wrong - I just find it fascinating.

When our parents and grandparents were working, the necessities were food, shelter, clothes. If you were lucky you had a car, and a TV set. Now, food, shelter, and clothes are a gimme, and the "necessities" are cell phone, computer, and two cars. The standard of living has risen sharply, and the bills with it. But if you are willing to live without all the frou frous, you still can make it. I worked a minimum wage job in North Dakota for a year. My apartment was 285 a month, food was 150, utilities, including phone and cable came out to around 100 a montn (basic service on everything), health insurance was 72 a month, and I socked away about 250 a month. I had a used bronco that was completely paid off, no computer, no cell, no frills.

Couple articles.

http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleid.16414/article_detail.asp

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24104,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

This is not a new thing. This is from George Orwell's 1937 book, "The Road to Wigan Pier."

Replace "radios" with "Playstations" and "fish and chips" with "McDonald's", and you get America today.

"... in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has in-creased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase he can buy himself a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as dark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal....

Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish-and-chips.

Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life."

Yes, but one big difference between paying for services and paying for goods is that most services ARE a luxury. I don't know prices in other areas of the country, but my cable, internet, and cell add up to around $200 a month. That can buy groceries (GOOD groceries, not junk) for my family of five for a week and a half, or buy good quality shoes for my three kids plus a pair of pants apiece. And that $200 goes out every month. If I were pinching pennies to make ends meet, I'd rather give up my cable, internet, and call, and actually feed and clothe my family.

Yes, you CAN do that. But luxuries are tempting. I was pointing out that this has been true for about 80 years.

I think this is the basic problem in America right now. The price of gew-gaws and luxuries has dropped dramatically. However, the price of what I things that matter has risen sharply. If you live in North Dakota, you can readily get an affordable apartment, but if you live in an urban area, housing eats of a huge chunk of your pay check even if you have a large salary. Housing is largely unaffordable at low wages. Education is also damned expensive as is health coverage especially for families. You can get cheap insurance, but how much is it worth really? I had the kind of insurance you mentioned when I was working a couple of dollars above minimum wage. However, when I had a serious illness, I was still $20,000 in the hole when all was said and done.

But you don't HAVE to live in an urban area. If you are working a minumum wage job, you can get said minimum wage job anywhere. It's a choice. There are literally thousands of choices you can make about how you live your life that affects how much money you need to sustain said life. Education is free until college, and then there are grants, scholarships, and student loans. I agree about the health insurance problem, though. I was lucky enough to never need it while I was on the cheapie plan.

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I don't know about America, but one stat I saw recently that intrigued me: 12% of all the jobs in Canada are in Toronto, but only 6% of the population is there. If that holds true for American cities, and I suspect it does, then a huge number of working-poor and lower-middle-class folks are by necessity living near a major city, if not actually in it. You know the first thing that happens when someone in a small town falls on hard times - loses a job, leaves an abusive spouse, etc? They move to the nearest big city, because that's where services, both government and charity, are located. So in order to access what help is available and in order to have a decent shot at finding a job that will support them, they have to go to a place where basic expenses are higher.

And as for the frills issue: I work at a school that is considered "medium needs," because it includes areas of extensive subsidized housing but also some fairly affluent suburban housing. That means I have a mixture of well-off kids and kids whose parents are either working poor or on welfare. Some stats from the grade threes at my school:

Fewer than 50% have access to a computer. Fewer than 30% had access to the internet at home, as of two years ago when I heard these stats. About sixty percent owned at least one book of their own; about 40% had more than five books of their own; fewer than 30% had parents who read or who bought them books (that is to say, most of the books they had, they had acquired at school through cheap book sales or library cast-offs.) Less than 25% had a newspaper coming into their home. About 80% had a phone, but less than 20% had a cell phone in their family (again, two-year-old stats.) 60% of their parents were working; stay-at-home moms with dads who worked made up about 15%, leaving only 25% of families with no working income. Most of these were single parents for whom childcare would have cost more than their paycheque would bring in from a minimum wage job, so they were effectively forced out of the workforce until their children were at least in school.

There are certainly families that spend a lot on frills that they could be using to feed their families. There are large numbers of poor who don't know how to make do - they don't know how to cook, and rely on expensive processed foods because it's all they know. There are many more who do away with all frills and still have trouble getting by. One American stat that is quite telling is the bankruptcy one: 50% of bankruptcies in the States are the result of a major illness in the family, and 85% of those were people who had insurance and were working at the time they filed bankruptcy.

I am totally not denying that there are families in desperate straits. I AM saying that what is considered "poor" has changed, and that the poor in America are still a hell of a lot better off than the poor anywhere else.

As for the stats at your school, this is what puzzles me. When did having a computer at home become a necessity? I'm sure your school library has computers. The public library has computers. I didn't own a computer until well after I was married - I used the ones available to me in my school computer labs, and then the public library. Newspapers and books are available at the library. Yes, it is wonderful to be able to afford books and newspaper subscriptions, but just because you don't get them at home doesn't mean they don't exist. My parents didn't have the money to buy me new books either. We picked them up at used book stores, and my dad brought me to the library every week. I still can't bring myself to buy new books - the markup is so dang high. I get the boys' books at used book stores or the library as well.

I totally agree with your last paragraph. Life skills need to be taught in our schools, since the skills are no longer taught at home. Basics like shopping and cooking, as well as budgeting and saving. The message being sent out is "you can have it all", when really, you can't. I'd be curious as to how many of those families who declared bankruptcy for medical bills already had credit card debt, or no savings whatsoever.

"I AM saying that what is considered "poor" has changed, and that the poor in America are still a hell of a lot better off than the poor anywhere else."

True. Does that mean we can effectively ignore their problems? If their children are hungry, or alone, or lacking the attention they need to stay in school, or sick with no medical care, we still have a social obligation to them. It's unconscionable that CEOs are making hundreds of times more than their lowest-paid workers. Capitalism is supposed to bring us all up. It doesn't. It's failing, badly, and the people who are being failed by it are the ones at the bottom, with people telling them they have choices and don't have to live as they do. Somebody SHOW them their choices. Somebody TEACH them how to manage. Somebody give them the necessary safety net in terms of health care so that one bad illness won't wipe out everything they have. Choices require a baseline. They require that the person believe they can make a difference in their own life, and they require an investment to get started - possibly a small investment of time and resumé-printing, possibly a bigger investment in moving house, but an investment. Who is helping them? (Answer: not enough people, to judge by the stats themselves.)

The stats I gave point out differences in home education levels. The students without computers are much less likely to pass the standardized testing in grade three; the students with computers counted amongst themselves all of the top achievers and many of the middle achievers. The students with no books of their own were also much more likely to fail. It goes back to resources. You and I would be capable of raising literate kids without the frills, because we know how to access the resources of our community and we have the skills to make do. These parents are not like that. They don't have the mental, emotional, or physical resources to provide a nurturing and educational environment for their kids. As a result, they're raising the next generation of working-poor and welfare-dependent adults. But give a kid access to these things at home - newspapers, books, or a computer - and suddenly their chances of meeting success skyrocket.

As far as I can tell, we aren't ignoring their problems. There are oh my god number of government programs in place to help families. Head Start, free breakfasts and lunches at school, free clinics exist in every medium to large city to help with vaccinations and basic medical care. The resources are THERE. Now, whether people know they exist or know to use them, or even want to use them, is another question altogether.

And how much do drugs, alcohol, crime, etc factor into the inability to get going? Drugs are rampant among the poor. What about not using birth control? And having babies right and left? Having 6 babies by 6 different men is not helpful either. The existence of poverty and the continuation of poverty go well beyond the availability and effeciency of government programs. I would suspect a lot of it has to do with people not having the capability to see the consequences of the decisions they make.

" It's unconscionable that CEOs are making hundreds of times more than their lowest-paid workers" No, it's not. Those CEOs provide thousands of jobs, and make our economy go. Not only do they provide thousands of jobs in their own companies, but they provide thousands more jobs in other businesses that they use. Walmart, for example, keeps who knows how many advertisers, truckers, paper supply companies, construction workers, environmentalists, etc in business. Capitalism is not about leveling the playing field - that's socialism. Capitalism is about people helping themselves, and using good work ethic, ingenuity, responsibility, and determination to get ahead.

A comparison, if you will. You've given yourself permission not to worry about the ways you're not able to take care of yourself at the moment. I agree with the decision to let go of that guilt, and I hope the time will come soon when you can start picking those things up. It's a good decision. For you, it's almost certainly temporary.

What if it wasn't? What about the person who slipped through the cracks of school until she left at age fifteen with no literacy to speak of? What happens to her when she finds herself, at 22, with two kids, a minimum-wage job, an apartment she can't afford, and practically no possessions? Who's going to help her learn to read properly? Who's going to teach her how to dress or write a resumé? Who will show her how to help with her kids' homework? Who will look after her kids for a price she can afford? And how can she make the choices required to improve this situation, when she's faced every day with the prospect of being out on the street the next? Stress limits one's ability to deal with things. Chronic stress is stunting in its effect on initiative. Even if she had some of that to begin with, several years of chronic stress and no apparent end in sight would kill it.

Your comparison is interesting, and brings up what I said in my last response about not being able to forsee the consequences of actions. Bad choice: dropping out of school. Better choice: Finding a teacher or counselor to help her with her reading problem. Bad choice: having two babies - use birth control or get an abortion, or give the kiddo up for adoption. It's a terrible choice to have a child when you are in those straits. Those are two big crossroads where she could have made better choices for herself and not ended up with two kids in a minimum wage paying job and not being able to take care of herself or them.

You know, I don't have all the answers to poverty. Who does? It is an incredibly complex and multilayered problem. I agree that government assistance should be available, on a short term basis, to help people get going. But I also feel that people need to take responsibility for themselves and the choices they make in life.

It's interesting that you bring up birth control, because the people who are supporting unrestrained capitalism in the U.S. are the same people who are funding abstinence-only education, supporting pharmacists' right to limit access to birth control options, and fighting for extreme abortion bans. But I digress.

I want people to take responsibility for their choices. I also want to help them make better ones in the future, and help their kids make better ones. To me, that's where good social programs come in. They should support adults who need to go back and get a better education to make them employable. They should help with childcare for those folks who made the choice, possibly when times were better, and are now stuck with it. Since getting ill is not a choice, medical care should not be one of the things that people are left to take individual financial responsibility for.

I really dislike the rhetoric of choice, actually. It's often a way for people to absolve themselves of social responsibility for needed changes. I don't believe in making people and their children suffer endlessly for past bad choices or downturns in their fortunes. And I'd rather pay for a few leeches than NOT help someone who really needed it and could have improved their lives with it.

I am really of two minds about the birth control thing. On the one hand, I think abstinence only education is a GOOD thing. Frankly, if more people kept their zippers zipped and their legs closed, we wouldn't have nearly the problem with poverty we have today. Since it has become acceptable to have babies hither and yon out of wedlock, with as many baby-daddies as you please, we now have huge problems of exactly the example you described. A huge factor of poverty would be eliminated if people would stop having babies out of wedlock. There were good reasons for Christianity to have so many strictures against pre-marital sex and affairs - it destroys the family unit. But, on the other hand, abstinence only ed doesn't work, because every other message they receive is sex is wonderful, go for it, it is your right, etc etc etc. So yes, birth control should be taught about and provided.

The social programs you describe are great, but they only help those who WANT to help themselves, and end the cycle. Too many people don't have the basic intelligence, or are addicted, or have some other outside factor going on. I think eliminating addiction, and eliminating out-of-wedlock babies would be two HUGE steps in breaking the cycle of poverty. Unfortunately, those two things can only be influenced by society at large, not by the government.

I don't believe in making anyone suffer for past choices either. But if you absolve everyone of all responsibility for their situation, all you do is create a class of victims who feel entitled, which is where we are right now.

The entitlement is a problem, I agree. I also believe that if more people kept their legs shut and zippers up, things would be much better. Abstinence education kind of boils down to "Sex leads to pregnancy and STDs. The only way to completely prevent these is not to have sex, and when you do have sex, have it with someone that you're in a permanent committed relationship with and that you can provide for children with." Repeat that enough, starting early enough, and it might filter through hormones and whatnot. It works for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, those are people that have a strong hope of a life that includes luxuries and other trappings of the modern definition of success.

One of the classic characteristics of poverty is a high birth rate. There are proven sociological and biological factors for this, i.e. more births means more chances of at least one child surviving, more children means more hands to do the work necessary for survival, etc. The unfortunate part is that with modern (usually urban) poverty is that more children actually means more work without more hands to do the work, because of child labor laws. (Note: I'm not saying that those laws are wrong.) In the cycle of work/eat/sleep, one of the few forms of entertainment and/or pleasure (and just about the only one that doesn't usually cost money) is sex. When you are feeding a family of even as few as 3 on minimum wage, especially in an urban environment, milk takes precedence over birth control (assuming you have the time and ability to get to even a free clinic at the usually absurdly few hours such clinics can afford to be open to get the prescription).

Yes, there are programs available. Most of them require reams of paperwork or going to inconvenient places during work hours or both. The system was irretrevably broken from the get-go, mainly because it's not a single system to begin with, it's a disparate network of systems with layers of territorial bureaucracies and poor inter-system communication. There are more cracks to fall into than actual surface area of honest-to-god help.

Good article

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