Even though military will reject people with physical or mental defects, many people can't afford to move to a new location or pay for online classes, and may have had a substandard high school education from our school. I think I see the problem here. You think that someone who works hard, makes smart decisions, takes advantage of the opportunities he or she has and STILL ends up in poverty is impossible. If that's your assumed truth, that would explain the rest of your reasoning. I've known far too many working poor with multiple jobs to be able to agree with your outlook, but I at least I understand your mentality now. I think if you were working poor trying to escape poverty and got hit with a medical emergency without some sort of support network, you mind find your attitude shift a little bit, but that's probably not something you'll understand unless you experience it. Anyway, hardworking poor people who make good decisions cannot remain in poverty, it's impossible. Got it.
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University President Took A $90K Pay Cut To Pay Employees More
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TwistedAegis
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You keep throwing out this BS, ignoring actual numbers and data; "human nature" didn't just magically change overnight in the mid-70s. Meanwhile, there are other very wealthy countries out there where with much greater income equality than the US; our Gini coefficient is in such stellar company as South Sudan and Venezuela. Clearly, human nature has nothing to do with it, but keep spouting it.
Arcticfox04
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He's an interim president. The next official president will get played more and revert any paycuts. Thing is they won't report that.
I have to take his opinion and agree with it. Everyone i know who has stayed poor makes terrible decisions. I blame public education for it to be honest. They dont teach you any life skills anymore like budgeting and the like. I think someone who works hards makes hard decisions and ends up in poverty is impossible. You talk about people working multiple jobs etc. But thats a bullshit reply. What kind of multiple jobs? multiple minimium wage part time jobs? Maybie. But your missing the point. They aren't performing capital investment.
I'm from Georgia, in Georgia if you make a B in highschool college is free as long as you maintain a b in college. There are still plenty of poor people here. and yes its their own goddamn fault, its not hard. The only difference between myself and my friends who have made it out of poverty and people who have not has been decisions. The military is an excellent choice to lift yourself out of poverty. Thats the route i went. Your mixing "working hard" with 'hard work' those arn't the same things. Working hard includes improving yourself through education continually and i dont mean school education i mean with knowledge: If you work at mcdonalds figuring out what it takes to become a manager etc. you get the point. If you work 3 jobs flipping burgers (mcdonalds doesn't even flip burgers naymore) your probably not going to ever live well. And yes that is lazyness to me. Your thinking well he's working his ass off, 3 jobs etc. but he's not. He's performing the same thing everyday, he's not doing the hard part which is learning new skills and improving yoruself. I heard to relearn how to speak english properly so i didn't sound like i'm from the sticks for example. . "many people can't afford to move to a new location or pay for online classes" many FAST FOOD JOINTS will give you money towards school, not to mention tons of job training programs conducted by state/feds. You shouldn't be moving to a new location if your working a min wage job. if your working a office job and can't afford to move your not even trying. Your confusing wants with needs. You might have to live what by US standards is shit for a couple months but thats it.
Your thinking like a minimum wage employee. All you see is barriers. There is TONS of opportunity out there if your willing to take it. Every single person who has ever bitched to me about nto finding a job after garduating school i've found jobs for them. Usually the answere is it doesn't pay enough (they think they should be getting experienced pay as entry level) or i dont want to be that far from my family. Seems a lot of people aren't. I actually spend some of my off time training poor people who I think can be saved to see the path to success. Success being defined as middle income. I've only done 2 people so far one from oakland one from alabama, but one is now making 90k the other is now making 130k a year. The first one i had to break her out of a victim mentality and thinking like a californian which is its own problem. The latter one i had to teach had to basically teach public speaking to. He just went to shit when talking with people he didn't know. Smart guy, just had a problem with communicating.
The only valid part you gave for not escaping poverty was unexpected medical bills. Thats an extremely small portion of the population just like having a mental or physical handycap is as your excuse to can't get into the military. It doesn't negate that the majority of people can get themselves out. Thats the funny thing i find about modern culture of the poor. You literally COULD NOT design a system to do a better job at "keeping people dont" then modern culture. I FULLY believe its deliberate.
heatlesssun
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I don't think that this population is as small as you think. If you get sick or injured without some kind of insurance, a few days in the hospital or non-trivial surgery will run into the 10s of thousands of dollars.
The problem with using median income numbers, or any income numbers, on a national scale is that those numbers could not possibly be any more meaningless. Also, not sure where you got the 27k
For example, 140k may seem like a lot to many people, but if you live and work in Silicon Valley it's the equivalent of 27k in bum-fuck-nowhere-Wyoming or some place like that. One of our recent hires came from a job in Laramie WY where he was making 44k which was considered a lot there, here he was hired at 72k which is considered to be an OK salary for the job.
But let's talk about 27k, that's 54k for a household. In my very first job I got 34k, and my wife didn't work so we were a single income household. Guess what? We managed just fine. We didn't buy shit that we couldn't afford on credit and we didn't live in a house that we couldn't afford.
Poor people are poor by choice.
Yes, the odds are against them, but that's just nature for you, survival of the fittest. Those who can will move up and those who can't don't, just as nature intended.
Let's say your correct. This actually happend to my sister. She just never paid the bill.Ontop of that she never paid back the student loans she got prior to getting prego. She is struggling, but thats because she had kids a 20 and hasn't worked since relying on her husband (least she got married to the guy) 's income. He works his ASS OFF, he goes to work a 630 gets off at 6, hour drive each way and basically raises the kids because my sister is literally a lazy piece of shit. He stil finds time to goto school part time to improve his situation. They live in a house and while money is always tight for them, its because of their poor choices and DESPITE those poor choices they are living okay and he is improving himself thats goign to imrpove their position.
Just to be clear: she never paid back either bill and the net result has been nothing.
heatlesssun
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Unfortunately survival of the fittest is too often a euphemism for exploitation of the weak.
heatlesssun
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Until she needs access to credit on reasonable terms.
Sure, but even that fits with the natural order of things, there's always predator and prey. For there to be rich there have to be poor. There are some countries that tried a classless society for a while (if only on paper) and we have ample real world evidence that if you try to artificially equalize economic standing then bad things happen.
People, myself included, often point to Denmark as one of the modern day 'most equitable' capitalist societies success stories, but that has to be put in context; the country is the size of a postage stamp (not counting Greenland) and has fewer residents than most mid-sized US suburbs. The Danish model doesn't scale, which is why it's not used anywhere else in the world.
Frankly, 100% of those why decry the exploitation of the weak willingly benefit from it every single day. The clothes you are wearing right now are made by people who are brutally beaten if they don't work 18 hour shifts in some sweltering shack in Bangladesh.
She never will, husband joined the military for four years and qualifies for the VA loan program.
QwertyJuan
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How is that possible?? By that reasoning (survival of the fittest) in 50 years we have should have "less" poor folk and more rich.
You really think that is gonna happen?? Seriously?? Using survival of the fittest to argue your stance is ridiculous.
I just read one of your previous posts about bailout. Your right that was bullshit. Thats kind of the point i'm getting at though in my earlier post.You have the right, which thinks government is evil and you have the left which thinks capitalism is evil. I think they are the same thing and that corporations are less evil because everything they can do can be broken down into money where government is money and power. Right now i think they are the same people. they are both exploiting the weak. Congressmen are literally allowed by law to perform insider trading.
The reason i almost always argue against the government harder then a corporation is a fundamental difference that the current people in government anyway never actually punish the rich. They punish the people trying to GET rich. In the corporate structure there is more opportunity for you to become rich. The US still has the g
I ABSOLUTLY believe in free markets. I think they work when they happen, But i DONT think they currently happen due to government involvement both in creating restrictive regulation and taxation IE cronny capitalism.
People like to define enemies on why they can't do something or something thats holding them back but ill finish with the same though tas my first post. This is a republic, its our fault. Until we accept our responsibility as voters we deserve to be screwed.
Not if its a zero sum game you wouldn't.
heatlesssun
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Credit affects everything from getting a cell phone to getting a job. Bad credit and poverty are joined at the hip and regardless of past mistakes, you don't get out of poverty with bad credit.
Till her husband dumps her for a younger woman who's better at life (i.e. better at finances, better educated, etc.).
1st by its very definition in the current credit system you do, once its 7 years old it doesn't matter. second despite her terrible credit she still has a cell phone and got a car etc. etc. Its no where NEAR as dire as you think.
Honestly i would if it wasn't for my nieces and nephews.
heatlesssun
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I never said it was dire, I said that you don't get out of poverty with bad credit. Put another way, you won't stay rich using credit poorly.
Ill agree with the second statement. I think you can get out of poverty i just don't think you can get to middle class with shit credit.
QwertyJuan
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It will never work.... let's say the "poor" people are phased out... who will make the burgers that you want to buy at your favourite fast food joint?? Hence - the "poor" people will NEVER be phased out.... if anything there will be MORE poor and less rich. The poor people working to make the money for the rich. I firmly stand behind the stance that "survival of the fittest" will NEVER work in the rich/poor scenario. To think we could possibly "phase out" out poor people is absurd.
You just described survival of the fittest in economics..... There will always be rich and always be poor and there is jackall you can do about it.
QwertyJuan
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I agree 100%... I "assumed" dude I quoted was talking about "breeding away stupid", and that my friend will NEVER happen.
It may work with animals... but with people? Barring euthanasia, it's an impossibility.
QwertyJuan
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P.S. OTOH if stupid kids keep doing this - http://video.foxnews.com/v/37140820...ary-new-trend/?intcmp=obnetwork#sp=show-clips it just may happen! LOL!
I agree 100%... I "assumed" dude I quoted was talking about "breeding away stupid", and that my friend will NEVER happen.
It may work with animals... but with people? Barring euthanasia, it's an impossibility.
lol nods
Minimum wage or entry level jobs is precisely what I'm thinking of, unskilled labor essentially. As for bad decision making, my experience with people in poverty is it's been more like a third for chronic bad decision makers, a third for people who have outright psychological problems, but our system won't support them and a third people honestly trying their best to get out.Romale23 said:
I'm sorry, but I feel like I'm talking to an alien when you say that someone who is working 3 jobs (because many places don't want to hire full time so they don't have to give benefits) isn't hard work. If someone works 12 - 15 hours a day at a job or two, especially doing something like flipping burgers, saying that's not hard work sounds extremely detached and asinine. I literally do not understand you reality if you think that's not hard. It's productive, it keeps the economy running. Now I will say it's certainly not the sort of work you expect to get wealthy from, but why is something like this a standard for getting by? Why isn't our society structured so that someone can work part time, live poorly, but not have to worry about meeting base needs? Again, our productivity is booming, the work is getting done.
I'm actually not, I realize there's a lot of opportunity, however larger trends are shifting against the middle class and below overall. I mean jesus, there's a ton of opportunity the more resources you have, especially for stocks knowledge. I am choosing to focus on the barriers part in particualar however, because I feel like letting people fall through the cracks is kind of a tragedy. I find it kind of impossible to praise a system where at the top you have people breaking the law or rewriting it to benefit them with net worth rivaling that of some countries, but at the bottom it's considered okay to marginalize people and let people go homeless or hungry, whether they're productive or not. To me, that's a gross misallocation of resources and the wrong priority as a society. I absolutely think that people who work more and whose function is more integral to society should earn more, but I think there's a balance between that v. any system that allows people to starve or not get medical treatment short of the emergency room. Basically I find any system that allows people to die in the street and has the resources to prevent as barbaric and it should be our goal to try and correct that. I realize this is likely seen as a radical view to people however.
Well, it's the #1 cause of bankruptcy:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148
It was just an example, many jobs depend on cars that people can't afford to have major repairs to, others can be dropped suddenly and can't handle a gap in pay while they search for new jobs, someone may have day care costs go up, there's all sorts of variables that are easily weathered as middle class that can be devastating at the poverty line.
Here, wikipedia also has it at 26k, but it's with older data:Thuleman said:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...s-optimism-reaches-10-year-low_n_1022118.html
Cool! Think you could do the same thing at minimum wage at 15k?
Yeah fuck this civilization shit, huh?
Yeah, it's almost like some of us would like to change this system...
Your not getting what i'm saying. let me try to rephrase this, its working easy? its not that its not hard due to the amount of work but its stupid. every single min wage job is entry level. You are not supposed to do a min wage job for life. PERIOD. Your not supposed to be able to raise a family working for fast food unless your a manager. Speaking of which the mcdonalds here is hiring 3 levels of managers right now. whether its full time part time doesn't matter. You are failing. If you have a kid before you're making more then 30k, you made incorrect decisions in your life. Lets get even more frank, if your a single parent and not a member of the military the chances of you making it out of poverty are as close to ZERO as you can get. Soo dont do it.
Part time one job labor is deliberately designed NOT to pay you enough to survive, it was designed for school children. Your looking at is as why can't i work part time and meet basic needs and i can't get full time labor. You can't get full time labor doing a job that was never meant to live on because so many people are trying to live on it instead of progress in their life . You want to be a cook you can be a cook you want to be a mechanic, be a mechanic, and make a living. Not flipping burgers. Your supposed to progress, not stagnate. Does this make sense? Your literally living in a country where a homeless guy made an app and got rich. People have to TAKE the opportunity and they aren't.
While i agree with your premiss you should drop the dieing in the streets bullshit you can goto a hospital and get treatment. Its illegal for them not to provide the care if you goto the emergency room. I dont like how expensive our healthcare is and think its fucking nuts. My problem is with everyone who goes OMG GOVERNMENT IS THE ONLY ANSWER. why doesn't anyone actually try to identify the costs and how to make it cheaper? I've been on government healthcare both in the military and now in the VA and the healthcare is significantly worse. So i'm very reluctant to see a government owned solution. I would rather government regulation be used to figure out how to curb costs. To me thats what a government is for to protect the citizenry not control it. Think about the current government, whether your a liberal or a conservative it doesn't matter take it in its entirety, are those the people you want deciding what is covered and what is not? i sure as shit dont.
Okay so the first part, You can afford it if you learn how to do preventative maintenance yourself. I'm 32, i've owned 2 cars my entire life. I paid them off and kept them and ran the first one to 200k miles and the second is at 93 and i bought them both used. I did preventative maintenance and outside of oil changes i did it myself. IE i need new spark plugs, dealer quoted me 435 dollars, i did it for 83. I youtubed how to do it. alot of people are suckers though and would of paid the 435.
Day care costs do go up, don't have kids if you can't afford it. Hell being poor and having kids is irresponsible. kids who are going to grow up on a community that teaches them the wrong values and yes they are WRONG.They teach you to be POOR. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it to. You have to be responsible for every single thing you do. I will admit that no one teaches any of this stuff anymore. Instead everyone learns that their opinion matters on reality and they are snowflakes. Why aren't kids taught to budget and what debt is and compounding interest? I had to have a drill sergeant teach me that stuff. Think about that. He literally made me fill out a TSP(non matching 401k) account request and submit 9% of my measly 900$ a month paycheck. Which was technically illegal but i thank him every day. Sure today its only worth 30 grand but its something and it taught me a lesson and he tought me not to be a fuckup.
Phoenix333
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Indeed. It's a step in the right direction. Now if only others would follow his example.
Just skimming some of the comments in here reminds me just how many of us have a first world looking glass. Then again to be [H] you often have that kinda perspective. Some guys in here spending more on their rigs than a third world family makes in a year. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong. I just put several hundred bucks worth of upgrades into my own rig. Though I do thinks its dangerous making blanket statements about what people should or should not do.
QwertyJuan
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A trip to a 3rd world country would change a lot of people's outlook on life. It did mine.
Unregulated capitalism isn't the problem. If we had true unregulated capitalism we wouldn't have these types of discrepancies. The problem arises when you have regulation that prevents competition from entering the markets by creating cost of entry that is so steep that only established players can afford it. Thus you get the CEOs and upper management that can demand huge salaries to run increasingly large and complex companies. If we had true free for all capitalism companies could and would fail to be replaced by more flexible and nimble companies. But we have a system that makes it impossible for this to happen. To much protectionism from a political system that is greedier than the private sector.
heatlesssun
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Of course we would. Remember Standard Oil?
Well, the theory of capitalism requires that for-profit entities act in the best long term interest of the entity. So, in theory, true capitalists are actually pro-environment because long term profits depend on sustainability.
Just like the idea of socialism/communism was perverted by those in charge we are seeing the same in capitalism. Instead of long term profit maximization people engage in short term profit maximization.
In some way you can't really fault them for that because what does it matter to someone who's alive today what happens in 200 years, or even in 50 years if you are ~40 already.
As to your question of what I would have done if I had gotten a minimum wage job and made 15k ..., I would have sent my wife to work for another 15k, we would make 30k together rather than the 34k I made by myself, and we would have lived within our means. The reason I got a 34k job with full benefits at the time with nothing more than a the equivalent of a High School degree is that I am simply better at life than those who cannot escape their minimum wage jobs (and I am white, if you want to argue that).
I recognized very early in life that in order for someone else to give me money I have to give them something that is worth more to them than the money they give me.
Learn how to be useful, offer people solutions, be personable and persuasive, and it's trivial to leave the minimum wage world behind. Many people simply don't have the capacity to be any of those things and thus they are, rightfully, stuck at the bottom of society.
heatlesssun
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What is true capitalism? The history of regulation in the US is shows a very clear pattern of reaction to large scale scandals and failures in the private sector, virtually never before. If true capitalism were self regulating then situations should never reach catastrophic proportions in the private sector creating political pressure for government intervention.
No, now you're cheating, you were saying you didn't want your wife to work. Or hell, assume you're single and making 15k and the only apartment you can afford is in a high crime district, so your odds of getting mugged or robbed go up substantially. I'm not refuting that there are lots of opportunities, but I reject the notion that someone can't be poor and remain poor under the system. The amount of opportunities go up exponentially the more income you have and what sort of background you were born into. Saying you were supporting someone at 34k implies that because you were able to do it, everyone can do it, even though they may not have the same background and abilities as you.
In practice, it's largely run by sociopaths where the people making decisions (board of directors + large stockholders) that cause environmental damage on a grand scale. Environmentalism is profitable in the short term. Even in the long term, the costs saved aren't easily translated into dollars. I would bet the average capitalist is not thinking ahead of negative impacts 20 years from now or generations ahead (except maybe people with nuclear material). I mean look at any top hardware company, then look at any article on e-waste. Capitalism doesn't provide a motive for the people making the decisions to look after the environment unless they're personally motivated to do so, which is a really small minority. At best, it sometimes leads to cleaning up the pollution in one area and essentially outsourcing it to another.
Did I just read that been in education (learning new skills) is harder than working at mcdonalds as one of three jobs?
Sorry I find that nonsense.
I have done numerous jobs in my lifetime, and my earlier jobs were physical repetitive jobs which were of course crap pay, I have no doubt whatsoever those early jobs are the hardest jobs I have done.
Some reasons why.
1 - doing boring repetitive work requires mental strength to go through with ti every day hours drag, its boring, its hard work to even be there.
2 - manual labour tends to be physically harder.
3 - often these lower paid unskilled jobs have higher health risks, e.g. working on a line in a factory not good for your back, often manual workers have severe health issues by the time they 40 or 50. of course they cant retire then, so they either carry on working with the health issues or live off low social security.
4 - often low paid work is bad working hours, can also often be long hours to get a liveable wage, e.g. 80 hours a week.
Jobs I have done since doing low paid unskilled work, has been after a promotion in one of the factories I was doing semi skilled work which had more responsibility and more pay, however the work I considered much easier, it was more enjoyable, I didnt feel like a zombie, as my mind was kept active the time flew by and of course it was way less physically demanding.
I have done management jobs again I considered easier than my early manual jobs, the challenge was different in the sense there was more stress, had to deal with employees, but for sure on a overall basis more enjoyable, easier, and better pay to boot.
I now run my own companies, and am my own boss, this is even better, working from home, work at my own hours, hourly rate probably 10x what I got at the factory, no employees either, I am a one man team.
Now to get to where I am yes I had to teach myself some skills, but if I didnt do this and was still in my first job, I wouldnt say it was due to lazyness but rather applying focus in the wrong place.
Not to mention different people get different opportunities in life, there is luck involved in what you are born into, one reason my early jobs were factory work is my parents didnt support me at all, and I got kicked out at an early age I had to get a job "any job" or I was on the streets. Whilst other people may walk into a nice job at daddy's company.
Sorry I find that nonsense.
I have done numerous jobs in my lifetime, and my earlier jobs were physical repetitive jobs which were of course crap pay, I have no doubt whatsoever those early jobs are the hardest jobs I have done.
Some reasons why.
1 - doing boring repetitive work requires mental strength to go through with ti every day hours drag, its boring, its hard work to even be there.
2 - manual labour tends to be physically harder.
3 - often these lower paid unskilled jobs have higher health risks, e.g. working on a line in a factory not good for your back, often manual workers have severe health issues by the time they 40 or 50. of course they cant retire then, so they either carry on working with the health issues or live off low social security.
4 - often low paid work is bad working hours, can also often be long hours to get a liveable wage, e.g. 80 hours a week.
Jobs I have done since doing low paid unskilled work, has been after a promotion in one of the factories I was doing semi skilled work which had more responsibility and more pay, however the work I considered much easier, it was more enjoyable, I didnt feel like a zombie, as my mind was kept active the time flew by and of course it was way less physically demanding.
I have done management jobs again I considered easier than my early manual jobs, the challenge was different in the sense there was more stress, had to deal with employees, but for sure on a overall basis more enjoyable, easier, and better pay to boot.
I now run my own companies, and am my own boss, this is even better, working from home, work at my own hours, hourly rate probably 10x what I got at the factory, no employees either, I am a one man team.
Now to get to where I am yes I had to teach myself some skills, but if I didnt do this and was still in my first job, I wouldnt say it was due to lazyness but rather applying focus in the wrong place.
Not to mention different people get different opportunities in life, there is luck involved in what you are born into, one reason my early jobs were factory work is my parents didnt support me at all, and I got kicked out at an early age I had to get a job "any job" or I was on the streets. Whilst other people may walk into a nice job at daddy's company.
I will put it this way, if tomorrow every job was made equal pay.
People would still try to get the more fashionable jobs, I doubt people would be queuing up to work in factories, mcdonalds, be cleaners etc. unless thats what they enjoy doing.
People would still try to get the more fashionable jobs, I doubt people would be queuing up to work in factories, mcdonalds, be cleaners etc. unless thats what they enjoy doing.
QwertyJuan
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Wow... you make between $75-$100/hour. Very impressive.