Originally Posted by Elemenope
rbstern wrote:Lemme guess: Wealthy suburbs. Poor inner cities. Small pockets of wealth inside cities.
Poor rural areas. Why would this blow anyones mind?
That's not it.
This thing will show you what the actual average income level is for given census tracks. What blows your mind is you can't imagine anyone being able to live on that little, and that's the average...
But I get it. We know you don't give two shits about poor people because they've all fucked up in a prior life and thus, Karma dictates they deserve to be poor.
rbstern wrote:
madryan wrote:
rbstern wrote:Lemme guess: Wealthy suburbs. Poor inner cities. Small pockets of wealth inside cities.
Poor rural areas. Why would this blow anyones mind?
That's not it.
This thing will show you what the actual average income level is for given census tracks. What blows your mind is you can't imagine anyone being able to live on that little, and that's the average...
But I get it. We know you don't give two shits about poor people because they've all fucked up in a prior life and thus, Karma dictates they deserve to be poor.
I've been poor. I didn't dwell on it because I was working pretty much every waking hour of my life to make myself not poor. It worked out well. Such experiences tend to inform our opinions.
I'd bet if we had a dick measuring contest and compared sob stories nobody on this forum could compare to the shit that was my life.
I still came out fine.
That doesn't mean that poor folks can all pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
A common conservative thinking error is that they look at everything in the "Micro" lens. They see the local drunk down at the mini-mart using his food stamps to buy junk food and his cash to buy smokes and beer. They assume that since he's obviously useless, and on every sort of public assistence, that everyone who's on public assistence is just like him.
I, and most folks who are a bit more educated in things like social demographics and whatnot, tend to look a bit more "Macro" and understand that in any economic system there's always going to be a subset of the population that's "poor" no matter what you do. If your economy is healthy this subset is going to be very fluid and people are going to move in and out alot. If, like our economic system it's not very healthy, and you've stratified your wealth, then people are going to get locked into being poor and getting out is going to be harder.
Like it or not, no matter what the individual does, there's always going to be poor folks, which is why your way of looking at the world is fundamentally fucked. (no offense) Once you accept that poor people happen systemically, you then make a societal choice to keep them from starving and to ensure that they don't stay poor individually. You spend the money as a society to ensure that Education and drug treatment and all that is always accessible.
Unfortunately, here in America, the Conservatives have privatized the Prison industry so tossing the poor, drug addicted folks in jail is actually the smart business move, and using the money we would normally be spending on education to build bombs and planes we don't need (The F35) is keeping the Defense contractors happy.
Crazy world we live in.
Mr.NiceGuy wrote:
madryan wrote:What blows your mind is you can't imagine anyone being able to live on that little, and that's the average...But ...they don't live on that little, do they? Housing assistance, SNAP, medicaid, EITC,etc. make it so they actually have more disposable income than people earning much more.
I'm not complaining about it. The left wring their hands that we need to do more and the right bitches that these programs have not reduced poverty but have actually increased it. Not gonna argue with you all about it. It just is what it is.
Yes and no...
What the left bitch about isn't giving the poor more money. It's about mobility. It's about getting out of being poor, which in America is relatively hard because of how our assistance programs are setup. Other countries do a much better job of this.
The right have this idea that we just want to give people cradle to grave welfare. That's not true at all. The idea is to structure the system so that people have choice. They have mobility. They can move upward in the social and economic strata.
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