No one chooses to live at or below the poverty level right? Well, I didn’t think so, but the Census data may prove otherwise.
As of 2000, there are 106 million households in the US. I am first going to break the country into quintiles from lowest income to highest income (which means that the bottom 20% or 21 million households earn the least, and so on).
Here are some stats (remember each quintile has 21 million people in it):
Number of people in the lowest quintile who work (part time or full time): 8 million
Number of people in the highest quintile who work (part time or full time): 19.5 million
Number of people in the lowest quintile who held full time jobs year-round: 5 million
Number of people in the highest quintile who held full time jobs year-round: 17.5 million
Number of people in the lowest quintile who did not work at all: 13.5 million
Number of people in the highest quintile who did not work at all: 2 million
Percent of people in the lowest quintile who have a job: 37%
Percent of people in the highest quintile who have a job: 91%
This says that for every 1 rich person who doesn’t work, there are 7 poor people not working. Also, for every poor person working full time, there are more than 3 rich people working full time.
What all this data really says is that the people who make money are employed.
So are the people living at or below poverty doing so by choice? I don’t know. But they are choosing to be unemployed.
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How many of those unemployed are not working by choice? How can we figure that out? What if it’s a bad system stacked against them?
In this country, I find it hard to believe that a large number of the poor are absolutely unable to find employment. If I may offer an anecdote: I was looking for temporary summer employment and applied to four different places (Family Video, Subway, Walmart, and Kmart). I received a phone call from each store requesting that I come in for an interview and am now working for Kmart. And I am not from a particularly booming town either.
I do believe that some people choose to be unemployed so that they are able to collect welfare and other government handouts. But some people do get a bum deal in life, and I think that private charity would be able to take care of their needs in place of government bureaucracy, which there would be a lot more of if government did not attempt to fix things.
Poor people are the masters of freebies. Not only don’t they have to work for the freebies often they must not work to get the freebies.
Welfare is free, if one meets qualifications, like not working (accruing enough money to be above the poverty line). Some welfare loafers work under the table only, because they can’t bear just to stay home doing nothing. But, the game has rule, my friends.
Free things are addictive.
Poor people are poor because of welfare. That’s the institutional explanation.
It’s pretty clear by your analysis only that unemployment = poverty. That is called a sequitur. What keeps people there is institutional opportunism based on unemployment as qualification.
Institutional opportunism has serious long-term consequences. “Earning” income for not working means you’re foregoing the human capital appreciation process. Those who hold jobs build experience, references, and income over time. Incomes do not remain stagnant over long periods of time, because workers get promoted, and learn to take on new responsibilities. Those who are paid off not to work (those on welfare) are deprived of the opportunity to enhance the value of their employment worth. This is the greatest disservice of Socialism.
When I was a teenager I was poor (dirt poor, eating out of a dumpster poor) and on the street for a time. Most of my friends from that time were in the same situation as me. A few of us got an education, started to earn a living, became moderately successful. We did so with the help of the social safety net in this country, not despite it. The friends of mine who didn’t make it tended to be the ones who didn’t take advantage of the social safety net.
Some of them were forced into the social care system due to mental disorders and are back on the street due to budget cuts. My buddy Matt who hears voices and only recognizes me one time out of five (and this was very close friend) now had no place to stay… he is not someone who can take care of himself.
As to the observation that more people who have money have jobs… really? You needed a study to tell you this?
It’s great to hear success stories, so congrats on overcoming those challenges. I’d argue that your success was mainly your own doing. Having help at the bottom, particularly for basic needs, provides critical support to then focus your efforts on what you need to do to move forward. But it’s your ambition and will power that ultimately makes the difference, hence those other friends you mention failing to achieve the same success.
The biggest concern with welfare programs is to ensure they remain safety nets instead of spider webs. We want people to bounce back from them, rather than remain stuck in a depressed state of serfdom.
My observation in the last comment was not that people with money have jobs. I was referring to the accumulation of human capital you can only get from employment.
The thing is, welfare is often such a small percentage of government spending as to be barely noticeable, but often welfare programs put strange restrictions on applicants. I remember one friend wanting to attend law school while on welfare (single mom) and being told that she would be cut off if she went to law school but she could take hairdressing for the same length of time…
As to my friends who didn’t make it… perhaps you missed the part about most of them being institutionalized due to severe mental conditions. Matt didn’t fail because he lacked ambition, he failed because he couldn’t sort out which voices were inside his head and which ones were outside. He is on the street at this point in his life (if he is even still alive, I haven’t seen him since mid last winter) with no hope of ever getting off the street. Some others have done a little better (Johnny gets welfare, which makes his panic attacks bearable as he is able to maintain a roof over his head and food, the alternative for him is a mental hospital or, more likely, the same route as Matt). Most of the girls in that mental state ended up hooking. One of them (and I won’t use her name here) actually pulled herself out of that place, but again, she couldn’t have done it without help and her years as a junkie meant that there was no family help for her. She went from street hooker to escort, to stripper, to waitress at a strip club, to getting her degree and working for a major international company (that is where she is now). Along the way she got funding for a high school diploma, methadone, funding for university, welfare during the times she couldn’t work due to withdrawal and the like.
People just need help sometimes, and other people won’t give it to some of the population, that doesn’t make those people worthless.
Alleviating poverty is an admirable objective, but relegating this function to government has had dismal results. In the U.S., since Johnson’s “War on Poverty” jump started modern welfare, over $5 trillion had been spent up to 1993. I haven’t tallied this number since, but it’s obviously much higher.
Results for over $5 trillion expenditures? Less than 1% reduction in poverty rates and an increased dependent population. These programs lack accountability and capability to actually work.
There are of course examples of good stories, but I question the balance. There is quite a bit of bad that comes along with the good; really bad systemic issues that have bad long-term consequences.
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the micro-lending movement, has lifted over a million people from severe poverty over the last thirty years. He has done this by never giving anyone anything. Rather, he enables people to lift themselves out of poverty through micro-credit facilities. Yunus is an outspoken critic of government-run welfare programs, stating that his programs, with proven success rates, cannot compete against institutional welfare programs. He has had a miserable experience introducing micro-credit to Europe and the U.S., as a result.
http://www.thefreedomfactory.us/book-review-banker-to-the-poor/
So rather than having a proven program that actually makes a profit, we have a system that provides disincentives from working, has cost over $5 trillion, and has no measurably positive results over the course of forty years.
Fighting poverty is a noble goal, but government is clearly not the proper solution.
Welfare doesn’t eliminate poverty, but it does help people that micro-lending doesn’t. Read the above examples and tell me how micro-lending would help Matt, Johnny and the girl. None of the three of them is a candidate at all. Also, micro-lending works in societies with a low barrier to entry for owning a business ($20 goes a long way in rural India… it buys dinner for one in Canada, provided you don’t want anything high end).
Both have different purposes behind them.
At what cost are welfare programs appropriate? Is there any measure of performance you’d hold them to, or is just write a blank check no matter what?
My issues are with the consequences of welfare systems and their inadequacy compared to proven alternatives. The basic economics of micro-credit in Bangladesh or the United States are the same, just adjust the loan amount upward.
Matt, Johnny, an the girl are great candidates for charity. There will always be fringe cases and to create a Goliath-of-a-system with enormous waste and counter-productivity (with other peoples’ money) that perpetuates poverty for a large class of people is not the right solution. Far more people are harmed by welfare than helped.
Micro credit is a great idea, I give you that. I am a huge fan in fact… but it doesn’t do what welfare does. What micro credit does is allow people to set up small business, something not everyone is suited to. As to charity cases… when people talk about the increase in charitable spending as government support goes down, they forget the reality of that situation. Victorian england is a classic example of that. What tends to get ignored is that poverty was at a much, much higher level then, and charitable giving was actually a lower percentage of the problem (even if it was a higher percentage of spending).
People like my friends are not actually edge cases, I know they seem like it if you are looking down on the situation from a middle class life… but in the city I live in there are hundreds of them in the few drastically under funded shelters every night, hundreds more squatting in abandoned building or camped in wooded areas within the city. I live in a fairly small city, the problem grows exponentially as the city does. Every time there are cuts to social programs, the number of these people grows.
Our biggest difference however is our concept of freedom. You believe that money = freedom. I believe that is wrong and kind of twisted. Humans are not lone hunters, we are pack animals. We survive based on a social contract. In a jungle village that social contract means you share food with those who need it, you abide by a set of rules of conduct towards other people, and you can do whatever you want if you obey those rules. The equivalent to that in modern society is that we sacrifice a very small part of our money for social welfare (take a look at percentage spending sometime. Welfare for poor people is a drop in the bucket compared to corporate welfare), and then we get to do whatever we want. Except that we don’t get to do what we want, mostly as a result of right wing moralists. See, the left wants you to give up a little bit of your money to help out your fellow human beings, the right wants to tell you who can sleep with, what you can put in your body, and who you should worship, but they don’t want any of your money to be used to help people (just to shoot them).
Now take a look at welfare rates and homeless rates. Every time you drop welfare rates, homelessness goes up. Ironically, your ability to move upwards in class goes down with welfare rates (seriously, they did a study a couple of years ago that showed it is easier to change class upwards in Canada than in the states, and they were able to show causative effect from social programs). Turns out, that a well administered welfare program does lead to a reduction in poverty, but that there are offsetting effects (for instance, globalization and free international trade tend to lead to severely economically depressed pockets and seem to lead to an overall reduction in wealth when corrected for resource depletion, but the verdict is still out on that) that have lead to the US seeing an increase in poverty. Also, programs like workfare lead to overall economic depression because they fail to take into account the reality of human relationships.
Welfare simply isn’t the disincentive to work that you think it is. Living on welfare kind of sucks… but there are some people for whom that is an acceptable life. Most of those people would have been day labourers on farms when that was possible, but agribusiness made that impossible as a lifestyle.
Look up the history of Africville in Nova Scotia, Canada for an example of where institutionalization of welfare comes from. Might change your mind about a few things (but then again, might not)
Homelessness is roughly 0.04% of the population in America. For us it is certainly a fringe issue. However, it looks like homeless rates in Canada are 0.45% of the population (1015% increase over U.S.), and in the EU is 0.60% (~1400% increase over U.S.). A cursory glance at this data suggests something fundamentally worse about the Socialist welfare models. This warrants further research.
At a minimum, we should question costs and benefits of welfare systems, setting measurable objectives and actively tracking data. Combined local, state, and federal welfare costs amount to over $1 trillion in the U.S. We cannot circumvent the reality of living in a world of finite resources, so welfare at all costs is unacceptable.
When it comes to costs we need to look beyond the annual budgetary impacts of these programs, and towards the total long-term economic and social costs. We create dependent populations with decreased incentives to produce on their own. Crime tends to increase with dependency, not poverty. We create serf-like castes of people, treating them like animals rather than humans. Every bit of time spent outside of the labor market decreases the value of human capital and individual long-term prospects to succeed on their own.
I have personally heard many stories of individuals tracking income and welfare program income limits, intentionally remaining below income thresholds to sustain welfare benefits. This is not a healthy situation and far more common an issue than realized.
Money is merely a store of value to exchange. Having money does equal freedom. You can do whatever you want with your life with money. You can buy what you want, go where you want, and do what you want. That is the ultimate freedom. Most people spend their lives doing things they otherwise would not do if they had more money. Demands on other peoples’ money will always be accompanied by warped philosophical arguments for why people should happily relinquish their possessions. Human relations need not be accompanied by force. It is possible to live freely amongst each other. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are far better “social contracts” than Rousseau’s version.
Have to check your facts there:
“As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year (1% of the entire U.S. population or 10% of its poor), and about 842,000 people in any given week. Most were homeless temporarily”
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: Who is homeless?
40% of those who are homeless are families with children. This is the fastest growing segment.
That sounds like a bit more than 0.04% to me. Perhaps you are talking about permanent homelessness. That number is quite a bit lower… as it is in Canada and the EU. Now, it should be noted that the methodology for gathering homelessness stats is at its most strict in the US (many who would be considered homeless in the EU, Australia, and Canada are not considered homeless in the US… this includes people living in hotels that are rented by the week or paid use shelters, everyone agrees that people in free shelters are homeless). I am in the process of reading the 300+ pages of the EU’s latest report on homelessness so I can’t give you the total numbers yet (it’s a bit of a dense read). It should also be noted that EU stats include not just western social democracies, but a number of failed states, the unified Germany where numbers are distorted by the worker pool from former East Germany, etc.
As to money, you said that doing what you want is freedom. If you can do whatever you want with your money, but are restricted to a specific church of worship, have strong legal restrictions on recreational activities, have to follow strict rules for who you can have a relationship with, are you free? If you have no money, but you are free to do absolutely anything you want, then are you free? Currency is a measure of freedom only in the context of the society we live in and even then, it is not the only one that matters. Money is a measure of power, not of freedom. By and large it is a measure of power over others, not control over your own life. I am going to give you another example (and yes, I know it is anecdotal): This woman has never earned more than 25,000 a year after taxes (and that was an extraordinarily good year for her), she travels around the world on her own dime, works the hours she feels like working (sometimes the months she feels like working), eats at nice restaurants when she wants to and generally live a life that many would envy… until they realize she does this without the trappings of wealth we take for granted. She lives in a commune with several friends, so her accommodations cost her less than public housing often does here (yes, you still pay rent in the pubs… just a lot less of it), she doesn’t have cable tv, she shares Internet with the whole group, she shares some food costs with the group (and pays some for herself). Is she free? She chooses socialism after all, everyone working for the good of all. She thinks she is, and I tend to believe her.
One more point on the homelessness situation in the US:
“In 1980 federal dollars accounted for 22% of big city budgets, but by 1989 the same such aid composed only 6% of urban revenue (part of larger 60% decrease in federal spending to support local governments)”
Welfare comes predominantly from municipal governments. As municipal funding has been slashed, so have social programs. The increase in poverty levels you are talking about have happened as the result of killing social programs. The whole “Welfare stops people from working” thing is a myth, always has been. There is a small percentage of welfare cases who are chronic for a variety of reasons. Then there are the many welfare cases who are in economically depressed areas who work when able to. Also, if a job really is paying so little that it doesn’t compete with welfare, so a welfare case turns it down… is that really the fault of the person on welfare, or maybe the job just isn’t being adequately compensated. Of course, here we have a law that says if you turn down a job you have to show adequate reason for turning down the job or you lose your welfare, and you have to show 4 job applications per day, every day.
Try it… figure out what welfare pays in your area and try living on it for a month. Hell, take housing out of the equation. Assume a typical welfare rent in your area (in Halifax where I live welfare will pay up to $300 per month for an apartment plus an additional $204.00 per month – a typical rooming house is $350.00 per month leaving most welfare recipients far, far out of the city centre in some pretty nasty slums. That means if you lived here you could take care of your housing costs and then try to do everything else for $204.00). People who have not been on welfare just have no clue what it is really like. To put it in perspective… I have a couple of hundred bucks to last me until Monday and it’s going to be tight.
Traverse,
It sounds like your personal experiences were tough and give you strong opinions on what ought to be done to help people. I can respect that. We are both working towards the same goals. Helping people in need is admirable.
My statistics were good. Figures were pulled from federal and non-profit sources dedicated to homelessness:
http://www.hud.gov/news/release.cfm?content=pr08-113.cfm
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/facts/Whois.pdf
Homelessness is a problem, but truly a fringe issue. There is no widespread poverty in the U.S. no matter how you splice the stats.
Welfare decreases incentives to produce…that is not a question. It’s such a fundamental axiom I find it difficult to delve any further into rationale for why it is the case. People work for a reason-to obtain resources to survive-if those resources are provided from means other than employment or production there is less reason to work.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6698
This gets back to defining and evaluating measures of performance for social programs. The U.S. thus far has spent over $10 trillion on welfare programs, with no measurable impact on poverty. No matter what supporting examples we contrive to support welfare, these figures and their dismal historical performance speak definitively.
On top of decades of failure I find it imperative to question the philosophical implications of forcefully taking property from people to fund social experimentation. This is even more true when we speak of social experiments that lack accountability, objectives, and performance requirements.
As I said last time, money is nothing more than a measure of value. There are certainly values that reside outside the marketplace, but even for many of these money helps. Reality dictates we must produce at least enough to survive. In a market economy we can trade with others to decrease total input requirements to obtain minimal subsistence, but there is no escaping the fact that we must produce to survive. Money is nothing more than a measure of that production.
Sorry to belabor the point, but if you want to spend time doing anything you value you must have sufficient resources to defer spending time producing. Having money means you can forgo work and spend your time/life doing whatever you’d like. Even your friend who lives on less than $25K/yr must devote a portion of her life to producing enough to satisfy her values.
There is nothing wrong with voluntary socialism. Free collaboration is awesome, but the key is that it must be free. Introducing government to the equation changes that. By definition, political implementations of Socialism require the use of force to force people to live within guidelines established by others.
I definitely agree with you on the trappings of moral regulations and other social restrictions. I think you know by now I am equally opposed to authorities telling me how to live my life as I am of them taking my property.
@Traverse Davies – I took a class on this stuff and the message is clear. The more we spend on poverty the less absolute poverty there is, but relative poverty will always be with us. Also, the more that is provided the harder it is to get off of that assistance.
Government budgets should not be used as some kind of fiscal cookie jar by Democrats and pro-welfare Republicans! Government is a necessary evil, meant to provide a few big services like public schooling for those who absolutely cannot afford private education, provide free roads for the public to drive on, defense, etc. But we should never have spent this much. I mean, once you start entitlement spending, where do you stop? You cannot say that every little service is a right. Something is not a “right” just because one cannot afford it. You should work to afford it, or get more skilsl and education to get higher-paying jobs. THAT is how we can solve all these problems. The solution has never been “increase entitlement spending” and keep folks dependent on government. All welfare does is treat the symptoms. It’s certainly not a cure.
I find it funny how the Left decries the right to smoke in public and the right to bear arms, two moral rights, but then they talk all day long of material “rights.” A government big enough to give you everything is also big enough to take it away. Besides, shouldn’t we be more weary of government power? Why do the left-wingers treat government as though it’s their rich father or mother?
The whole concept of material rights makes no sense. Plus, it plays right into the hands of materialist consumerism that they decry so much.
I am just happy that i am employed. i have very less chance of being part of the below poverty line. woohoo!
What really irritates those who contribute to the workforce is the ‘Generational Welfare Junkies’ those who were raised on the ‘system titty’ and raise their children to know the how to de-fraud the system..this is done in the form of lazy food stamping, HUD living, Check Chasing, Trashy Americans and Illegal Mexicans abusing our Human Services organizations. These twits are hell for enabling reckless pregnancies to secure benefits, and generational enabling on the part of the parent(s) who are recipients of Welfare that raise these junior leaches and encourage sponging off America’s Workforce.For a woman to qualify for assistance, she only have a Vagina and seed it as soon as she is able. It is like working Americans are paying FICA into the system for the benefit of whores. It makes me sick. I am a healthy woman, who has worked since I was 14. i never saw ‘getting knocked up’ and getting on the system as an option. However, I have cut many people out of my life, because they have chosen to cripple themselves by suckling the system rather than make their own way.