OK, what I was trying to comment on that chat post like a dunce.
Have to add that I was in college relying hard on Pell grants and work study, when the Clinton administration expanded eligibility for all need-based federal aid to include higher income brackets.
Doesn’t sound like a bad thing, right? Yeah, if you also increase the funding to cover at least double the number of students suddenly eligible for what little non-loan aid exists. Including the number of work study jobs/hours available.
Fast forward 20+ years of further slashed educational funding and skyrocketing costs, and I can only imagine what it must be like by now.
The situation was rough enough then, and that was one of the reasons I ended up crashing out. Trying to make up the sudden gap by working my ass off even more. At a state university within commuting distance. (Where I ended up largely because it was almost doable with the aid I could get starting out.)
A long ugly slide from Reagan to here in so many ways, yeah.
federal government: alright we’re going to grant you this much money for student aid
federal government: but part of this student aid requires you getting a job
federal government: and we’re going to act like there absolutely is a job available for you
federal government: because there are enough student jobs for everyone right?
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.
The U.N. investigation aims to study the effects of systemic poverty in a prosperous nation like the United States.
90% of the poorest areas in America are in Republican Red zones.
B-b-b-b-b-b-but poverty in the Red States isn’t all that bad, right?
Right?
Errrrr
Jesus christ, and to think how many billionaires we have in the US while this is happening
How is anyone surprised by this though?
Do people not look around?
Or is this really not prevalent anywhere but the South? It’s damn near everywhere you look in the South. I had friends in the high school with houses that when you flushed the toilet it went from a pipe in the trailer out to a ravine out back. I remember burning our trash. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean I’m in my thirties and it’s not uncommon for me to meet people in my generation who are the first in their family to have indoor plumbing.
The republicans aren’t blind. They aren’t naive. They’re just greedy. You can’t amass that kind of wealth by giving it away to the less fortunate. And don’t be tricked into thinking the wealthy Democrats are any better. Politicians will say whatever it takes to get voted into a position, and then they’ll vote however they need to in order to keep the money rolling in.
They really don’t look around. Myself included. (I knew things were bad in the Deep South but I didn’t think they’d been quite this bad since the ‘30s.)
Like… have you seen how many people complain whenever you talk about poor white people? Most middle-class folks don’t want to believe that things could be this bad for anyone. A lot of lefty middle-class white people want to believe that poor white people are poor because they’re stupid and racist and probably fat, and poor black people are poor because they’re ~discriminated against~ without thinking about what that means for 30 seconds. (And often with a side dose of subconscious racism– of course black people are poor, they can’t rise above their station.)
Talking about what that kind of ‘poor’ actually looks like? Bursts people’s bubble. It means they have to think about how people could be suckered to do something that’s not in their best interests, whether it’s white coal-mining families voting for Trump or black people being anti-abortion because they’ve bought the ‘abortion is racist eugenics’ lie. It means they have to realize that politics isn’t a Tribe Game where it’s good when Your Team wins and Their Team loses, it’s a matter of life and death for a lot of people. It means they have to realise people on Their Team aren’t just stupidracistcrazy, a lot of them are desperate and afraid and have been suckered by greedy people.
And we can’t have that, can we? However will we have the Horse Race if we have to acknowledge that real humans’ lives are at stake? However will we get to feel superior over other people if we don’t think of social class as a morality-based hierarchy? </sarc>
[insert obligatory disclaimer that a lot of Trump’s base had a college education and a lot of people who are in the worst circumstances here are black; it’s just that White Is The Default and so people get mad when you talk about poverty happening to Default People.]
(also side note: growing up in the semi-rural Midwest, we had a septic tank, and it busted really badly a couple times. the smell was undescribable and Mum, longsuffering as she was, had to keep us from playing in literal shit more than once. …I can’t imagine living like that full-time, but of course people do.)
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.
The U.N. investigation aims to study the effects of systemic poverty in a prosperous nation like the United States.
90% of the poorest areas in America are in Republican Red zones.
B-b-b-b-b-b-but poverty in the Red States isn’t all that bad, right?
Right?
Errrrr
Jesus christ, and to think how many billionaires we have in the US while this is happening
How is anyone surprised by this though?
Do people not look around?
Or is this really not prevalent anywhere but the South? It’s damn near everywhere you look in the South. I had friends in the high school with houses that when you flushed the toilet it went from a pipe in the trailer out to a ravine out back. I remember burning our trash. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean I’m in my thirties and it’s not uncommon for me to meet people in my generation who are the first in their family to have indoor plumbing.
The republicans aren’t blind. They aren’t naive. They’re just greedy. You can’t amass that kind of wealth by giving it away to the less fortunate. And don’t be tricked into thinking the wealthy Democrats are any better. Politicians will say whatever it takes to get voted into a position, and then they’ll vote however they need to in order to keep the money rolling in.
Let me make this clear here. It’s actually impossible to hoard millions in personal fortune and also live an ethical life.
Some people are taking this as a personal attack against their families, who make something in the six figure range. This post is not about you. In full scale, families like that are not what I’d consider to be “wealthy”.
I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.
But if your uncle is the head of a multinational corporation that utilizes cheap overseas labour and exploits third world countries, fuck that guy actually.
(NB: US-centric economic discussion. Long post. Press J to skip.)
Americans think that the country’s wealth looks like this:
Above is is a rather famous graph that shows where Americans think the money is. Americans think that the distribution of income in America looks like these pretty colors. The very richest people, the top 20% (all the fancy millionaires and Bill Gates and, like…. the richest rich Hollywood celebrities???) are the yellow bar, and Americans assigned them a little more than half the money in the country. Next comes the orange, the Really Rich Folks. Americans think that the Rich Folks (whom we picture as the brilliant cardiac surgeons and brilliant bankers and eccentric uncles with mansions – the Rich Folks you can realistically dream of being), have a good chunk of the wealth in the country; maybe 20%. And they believe the upper middle class (red) has almost as much wealth as the Rich Folks (Those in the red are the ‘rich’ people that we know personally, after all, so that sounds sensible.) The working class and poor folks (dark blue – the bottom 20%) even holds some of the country’s wealth as well. You can see the rationale. There are lots of working class and poor people in the USA, so all of their money put together must add up to something.
What if you ask Americans to sketch out the ideal income distribution?
If you ask the Americans where they think the money should be, they say it should be distributed the way it is in the graph above. Look at that nice, fair-looking distribution. This isn’t particularly revolutionary. It wasn’t a poll of leftist Tumblr children. This is a fairly good, balanced study presented by Harvard. The polled Americans say that in an ideal world, there should be more money in the class with the upper-middle-class folks (red) than they think there currently is; there should be more wealth resting with the hardworking folks, the happily-white-collar people, the normal-rich ones. America thinks it’s only fair that we have more wealth resting with those folks, and a little bit less wealth with Mark Zuckerberg (yellow). America believes firmly that the orange (brilliant cardiac surgeons, famous musicians) are okay where they are – that they have a fair amount of the wealth and their portion can stay the same. In their ideal world, Americans also expanded the ordinary middle class (light blue). These normal Americans generally think that this class, which almost all Americans believe that they belong to, should have more wealth. And the working class (people who can’t afford vacations or new cars, and everyone poorer than that) should have more general wealth than they do. That’s only fair, Americans say, as they arrange this ideal distribution of wealth. This would be a satisfactory balance of money.
Here’s the actual distribution of wealth in the United States:
Yeah… yeah.
Here’s all the graphs together:
Yeah. The wealth of the nation disproportionately belongs to the top 20% of rich people. The rest of the middle and lower classes are crushed into less than 20% of the rest of the wealth, savaging each other for crumbs.
So, no, nobody cares about your Rich Uncle Joe. Nobody is particularly thirsting to put Rich Uncle Joe ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’ if that’s what people are afraid of.
Rich Uncle Joe the surgeon probably makes about $300,000 per year if he’s a decent general surgeon at an ordinary American hospital. Rich Uncle Joe’s decent, hardworking, saves-lives-every-day income is the orange-ish line in the graph below. (These are deeply shitty colors, by the way.) Rich Uncle Joe is definitely richer than a poor person, but his six-figure income isn’t influencing the nation.
Because the runaway red line in this graph is the 1%.
This graph is also showing you time. In 1979, when incomes were more equal, Rich Uncle Joe would have been Handsomely Rich, a man who commanded respect and moderate wealth, a man able to hold up his head in the company of the truly wealthy people in the nation. He might even perceive himself as being in the same social class as the Rich. He might build himself a fine mansion, golf with political influencers, hire a personal secretary, and invite the rich folks over for dinner (fondue, natch, in a wood-panelled den with a Persian rug) and count himself as an equal.
By 2007, the super-rich had separated themselves utterly from Rich Uncle Joe. Their money makes more money than Rich Uncle Joe makes. Rich Uncle Joe might impress a starry-eyed tumblr teen who really needs the $50 that his wife slips into their birthday card (“I have rich people in my family and ACTUALLY they’re lovely!”) but he has been left behind. Like OP says: Uncle Joe is not located on the same scale. His wealth is a fraction, which the oligarchs don’t stoop to notice. Also note: 2007, where this graph leaves off, was ten years ago. When The Economist published a graph of American wealth inequality in 2017, they had to break it into pieces to look good in the magazine, because they couldn’t show the 1% on the same graph as everyone else and have it look meaningful. Even with Rich Uncle Joe working his little butt off during all the hours God sends him, he can’t raise the average wage of the 99% until you can see it on a nicely formatted graph. He’s in the top 20-40% of wealthy people in the USA but he is closer to us than to them.
And, given that general surgeons work themselves to death and have mounting levels of educational debt, Rich Uncle Joe’s best hope for his earthly reward is to have all of his debts (including his mortgage) paid off and his retirement savings secured before he loses his hands, meaning that he will have to work 60+ hour weeks at antisocial times in order to be able to stop working when he’s 65, with enough money to cover the remaining 20 years of his life, including the expensive eldercare that he and his wife will require. Since one or the other is statistically increasingly likely to come down with a debilitating illness as they age – cancer or dementia or a stroke, and so on – and the costs of healthcare and eldercare are skyrocketing, Uncle Joe will always feel like he has to hustle to ensure comfort and survival in his winter years. Rich Uncle Joe is ‘rich,’ so he’ll want a private room if he has to go into a nursing home for the end of his life; the average cost of an ordinary private room in the USA in 2016 was $253 per day, so if he wants him and his wife to die in comfort, he will think of this increasingly as he gets older; a fact he is never able to forget or set aside, because he works in healthcare and knows what happens…
And those are the people that Americans assume are comfortable and happy and positively rolling in their well-earned wealth…
Because here’s the thing: Americans, we all think we’re middle class! We think we’re doing okay, and if we work really hard, we’ll probably get rich. Maybe if we win the lottery or publish that fantasy novel, we’ll be super-rich. So we, Americans, we don’t ask too much of the rich. We make things nice for the rich, because we imagine that one day, we will be one of them. AMERICANS DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE RICH ARE. Americans picture ourselves being “rich” and we picture ourselves shopping at the expensive store, going out to eat, living in The Nicest House On the Main Street of Lobster Neck, Massachusetts and going on one (1) vacation to Italy. We say, “Oh, let’s not make things TOO hard for the rich, because that’s what I’m going to be someday.”
STOP THIS. THAT FANTASY LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT IS THE TINIEST SLICE OF THE HUMBLEST PIE. THE RICH HAVE THE WHOLE BIG PIE, LEAVING THE REST OF US A SCATTERING OF CRUMBS TO FIGHT OVER, AND THAT FANTASY LIFE IS SIMPLY A SLIGHTLY LARGER CRUMB. You are picturing yourself rich, but you are picturing simply an ant on the table, holding up that large crumb, going “ooh, this piece of crust has a tiny dot of cherry filling stuck to it! I’m rich!” and somewhere someone in the distance has an ACTUAL CHERRY and everyone’s like “WOW YEAH one day I’ll win the lottery and get the BIG CHERRY TOO!” but, you know, we aren’t exactly dividing up the pie. The Republican guy who votes to make things nicer for rich people, and votes to make things worse for poor people, genuinely thinks that he’s a middle-class guy with an enviously high standard of living, who is absolutely going to be rich someday. He’s good and moral, he thinks, and he is going to get the big crumb like Uncle Joe.
His whole world is crumbs, in which looms that beautiful mental picture of the slightly bigger crumb.
He can’t conceive of the pie. He cannot picture what pie looks like. He thinks pie is what happens when you get, like, three whole cherries together. So he votes, thinking he is supporting the possibility of cherries for Normal Guys Like Him.
Stop picturing Uncle Joe when you picture “the rich.” The rich we’re talking about wouldn’t even give Uncle Joe a seat at a dinner party.
Anyway, I myself don’t really believe in revolution. and cutesy leftist slogans make me a Tired. But I hate it when people shovel shit and call it sugar. And then get mad when people point out that it’s shit. Like, if you’re doing this, the people you’re stanning for hold you in contempt, if they think of you at all! Have a little gotdamn dignity.
capitalist: capitalism is fundamental to class mobility!! without capitalism we cannot have class mobility. it is the only way a poor person can become rich!
So, I think there are absolutely libertarians who just think that poor people starving is less morally important than not taking money from people who earned it.
But there’s another libertarian belief which I want to articulate even though I think it’s profoundly mistaken, because I think its adherents are generally just as horrified as me by poverty, and as angry about poor people suffering, and that this is important to know if you want to convince them to stop being libertarians.
This belief goes, roughly, “for almost all of history, almost everyone was starving. Redistributing the wealth in 1200 Europe would achieve almost nothing for general prosperity, because there just wasn’t any wealth to distribute. Institutions matter a lot, and injustice matters a lot, but the main thing they matter for is making it possible in the first place to produce enough stuff that everyone doesn’t starve. Until you have that down, nothing you do about inequality will matter; and once you get that down, even if you do nothing about inequality, global poverty will go away.
And recently, we got really good at making stuff:
and this is finally, finally, driving down poverty:
Okay. Global poverty is falling, and there is reason to think it’s mostly falling because the amount of stuff we have went way, way up, not because we’ve gotten more equal about distributing stuff we have. But it would fall even faster if we also got better about distributing the stuff we have, right?
(this is where I disagree, actually; I think that it would, in fact, fall faster if we got better about redistributing stuff, and so we ought to do that.) They mostly think that the fastest way to end poverty is to keep that line pointed straight at the ceiling. And that anything we do which slows down that line, slows down the delightful, amazing, amazingly important collapse of global poverty that we’re witnessing right now. And often they feel like economies are fragile – that things we do which we think won’t affect the line much will actually affect the line a lot, and will take a while to be noticed.
So you get people who hate poverty, and want every poor person to have a phone and computer and food and shelter and safety and happiness, but who sincerely think that if we mess up our redistribution effort, we will fuck up the explosion of ability-to-produce-stuff which is currently taking giant bites out of global poverty.
If you want to argue with these people, I think it’s useful to be able to understand this view of the world. If you say to them “have you considered that a poor person having a sandwich is more important than a banker having a yacht” you won’t get anywhere, because they agree with you, they just think the giant poverty-destroying machine that is the global economy is more important than either, because it is delivering so many sandwiches to so many people and it is the only tool we have invented that does that. Instead, you want to argue either “the growth of the global economy is not actually reducing poverty, here’s why” or “we can reduce poverty in this way which I care about without reducing the growth of the global economy” or “this policy increases the growth of the global economy” or “I have another tool that is as good at sandwiches as the growth of the global economy”.
poor people on SNAP or other benefits do not need “healthy eating” rules imposed on them. restricting their food choices doesn’t make them healthier. when we limit what they can buy we limit their access to sufficient calories. “junk food” is dense with calories and provides efficient energy for the body. fruits and vegetables contribute little to meeting total energy needs and their nutritional content isn’t very beneficial when overall calorie intake is too low.
poor people don’t need food rules imposed from on high, they need ENOUGH food and they need regular access to it. i’m so done with these tepid takes (cc: pbs, npr and other liberal media) on getting poor people to eat “healthier” as though that were some kind of anti-oppressive stance… it’s not! are we willing to do what it takes to make all people food-secure, with regular access to enough food that they want and enjoy? that’s the only thing worth talking about
An important piece of how well-off you are, which measuring income isn’t really going to catch, is how much shock absorption your community has built in.
Some people don’t have an in-person community, of course, and so the shock-absorption available to them is just whatever is in their own savings account and how much credit they have access to and maybe the knowledge that in the worst case they could move across the country and sleep on a friends’ couch for a few weeks but not longer because the friends’ landlord is strict about subtenants.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, upper-class communities have tons of shock absorption – if your home burns down, you probably have a friend who has a vacation home or an in-laws suite or a guest room where you can stay, if you lose your job it was the kind of job for which you get unemployment and you know someone who can get you an interview for another one, if you have a medical crisis you have lots of friends who can bring food and help out, and they all work jobs that let them take off on short notice in the middle of the day.
I’ve been helping a friend recover from surgery this week, and I’ve been thinking about this a ton. I could work from home for three days to be with her; her girlfriend had a spare bed where she could sleep for two because she was supposed to be near the surgery center and her house was an hour away; her girlfriend’s boyfriend could come over to help when girlfriend had to go to work; when her doctor’s appointment was changed to a time when I couldn’t drive her, another friend could take three hours off to do it. That’s a community with shock absorption.
It’s a class thing, but it’s not just a class thing. Doing this sort of thing is one of the things religions do. When I describe what I value about my community, my religious friends tend to go “oh, so, like what my church does”. A poor community where a dozen people from church will bring meals and support after surgery or after a loss or during cancer treatment has vastly more shock absorption than a same-income community where people have no way to coordinate that (and I think the decline of religion has been particularly costly in poor communities for exactly this reason).
And lots of money can’t fully substitute for a community, because lots of disasters (like medical emergencies) are of the kind that make it hard to advocate for yourself and independently arrange all the things you’re going to need.
I don’t know how you increase shock absorption. Lowering the cost of housing does part of it; a spare bedroom is a particularly critical kind of shock absorption that protects lots of people from homelessness. More leisure time increases shock absorption, and cutting the expected work week has been at least partially successful some places. My impression is that Social Security dramatically increased shock absorption, by giving elderly people (who often end up needing community support to remain independent or survive) more financial resources; it’s much easier for poor families to take someone in if they will get regular money towards housing and expenses. UBI would do it too, of course.
It’s not just personal savings accounts for people without in-person communities. If something terrible happened to me, my friends could send me money through PayPal or checks in the mail and vice versa.
when i was recovering from surgery, seebs was able to take a big chunk of time off to be with me, because their employer thought ‘spouse recovering from surgery’ was a good reason to take time off, and they’re on salary.
people who’ve only worked one or the other don’t seem to understand the vast difference between wage and salary.
i kept thinking back to all my hourly jobs where i would’ve gotten fired for taking the time off, but even if my kindly employer had held my job for me – nearly impossible in service jobs – i would’ve been making no money while i wasn’t working. and that can be a blow your finances never recover from.
So if you want a desperate exploitable workforce pool, it’s to your advantage to disrupt, overburden, or outright destroy all forms of social shock absorption. This explains so much.
I wonder if one of the causes of animosity towards “entitled millennials” is that many millennials are poor people who look rich. There’s this growing class of people who wear nice clothes, have fancy new electronic gadgets, go out to eat nice food… and will never own a home or have a retirement fund or put a child through college.
It’s so easy to say “if you cut down on the avocado toast maybe you could save up”, and so hard to accept that a house these days is fifty thousand avocado toasts, and that’s why so many of us have just given up. We don’t treat ourselves because we think the world will take care of us when we get older; we treat ourselves because we know it won’t. Might as well feel and look good on the way down.
This is something I think about a lot.
American poverty is not like other kinds of poverty. We can have small luxuries and “frivolous” things but we can’t have the big, major things that we need the most. We can have fifty flavors of creamer for our coffee but not be able to pay our rent. I suspect in a lot of ways that’s uniquely Western, too?
But we’re all stuck on this outdated, almost Victorian idea of poor people, so people get all outraged when poor people have cell phones and fridges.
I actually like things like the Food Stamps challenge because, as important as numbers are in research, they’re still abstract to most people. Most people really do not understand the difference between two hundred and seven hundred dollars, or two hundred and two thousand, until they see for themselves. It’s important to give people concrete examples.
I wonder if there’s an info graph out there that demonstrates this thing?
“This amount of money can buy [presumably ‘luxury’ item]
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