I think it depends a lot on the specifics. Of course, there are certainly lots of Americans who are both poorer than the author and work harder. But in the US, the very poorest people tend to be those who don't work at all, or only work part-time. People who live their whole life in a small town with one or two big employers, which move away when the economy crashes; people whose skills go out-of-date, and can't afford a retraining program; people who may be hard workers, but just really suck at interviewing, and always get rejected; people who want to work more, but their employer only gives them a few odd hours a day, and no one else wants to hire them when their schedule is unreliable; people who get job offers in other cities, but can't afford to move. This underclass doesn't work that many hours, and some would call them "lazy", but I think it's usually more like despair. It's terribly depressing to be broke, to not know if you can do anything other people see as valuable, and to have nothing better to do than watch TV or play video games.
I come from poverty. There is a big difference between poor and working poor. The poor get handouts, the working poor get fines because they can't afford Obamacare. Then people wonder why the poor don't struggle their way to working poor.
I also come from poverty and in my experience there can be a dangerous area making just enough money to be disqualified from receiving assistance where you're just a few mistakes or irresponsible decisions away from having serious money issues. But there are also a whole lot of people that qualify for all kinds of assistance and don't ever even bother to check because they are hard working people and take pride in that.
I think the solution is pretty simple: raise that income maximum well past where you would normally put it and make it trivial (like sign up on the internet trivial) for anyone who qualifies to receive assistance and make it just as simple to stop receiving it. Someone should be able to sign up and receive assistance on the next distribution cycle. This makes it easy for people in that dangerous spot to get assistance because you remove it and those with pride can get it quickly, easily and as temporarily as they want with no humiliation.
Here's why: Today you must commit a lot of time and effort as well suffer humiliation to get assistance. You have to stand in line, wait in a waiting area, fill out forms and finally talk to a worker about what a fuck up you are. If you have kids and can't get/afford a babysitter your kids are right there with you losing their minds. If you can't take time off work you don't get assistance because this government office is closed in the evening and on weekends. It may be hard to imagine something worse than the DMV but that's exactly what this is. And then you have to deal with doing it all over again because they are looking for the tiniest possible reason to turn off your assistance and force you to appeal.
Why is it so painful? Because welfare queens, drug dealers, drug users, lifers and frauds can't be allowed to get assistance even if the cost in terms of dollars and opportunity are much greater to prevent them from doing so. We've let it become about who we deem "deserves" it rather than a simple monetary calculation.
Whoever downvoted this comment doesn't understand it at all.
The working poor are a revenue source. By keeping people indebted, they remain predictable consumers and fixed-income assets, like a human bond.
The impoverished are effectively trapped by the welfare system itself, because it reduces benefits as incomes rise at a faster rate than can be made up by the equivalent amount of work. If the minimum wage was a living wage, like in Australia, then this wouldn't be a problem. But instead American welfare/min-wage clearly incentivizes staying just poor enough to keep getting benefits, or else you are actively making yourself poorer by working more.
This is why so many Walmart employees are on food stamps.
> the poor get handouts, the working poor get fines
> many Walmart employees are on food stamps.
Are you implying that Walmart employees are not 'working poor', or is the first sentence a dramatic over-generalization that doesn't contribute to the conversation?
Minimum wage Walmart employees are often working poor.
Poverty depends on perspective. Most Revolution-Era Americans were living in what we today would call extreme poverty. But you can have a tv and a smartphone today and still be quite poor, because of the difference in consumer cost between things we need and things we don't need.
Yes, I agree that Walmart employees are the working poor. I don't understand how you can recognise that and also argue for the validity of this statement
>There is a big difference between poor and working poor. The poor get handouts, the working poor get fines because they can't afford Obamacare. Then people wonder why the poor don't struggle their way to working poor.
I suspect you guys agree. I don't think he is saying there is a big difference in that they are both poor. The difference is that the poor are are being rewarded (transfer payments) while the working poor are being punished (they have to work, but still get fined, and pay taxes).
Poor, working poor, lower middle class, they're all crude definitions for people who are struggling. Arguing over who is more or less struggling or deserving is to play the oldest rich person's game of fight-for-scraps.
The argument isn't about who is struggling more, or is more deserving, it is how you might use different policies to help working poor vs the poor who can't even get a job, and how policies that intended to help one might inadvertently hurt the other.
Walmart pitches social programs as part of your compensation package when you apply. They dont exist to help the poor, its there to subsidize wages for the benefit of corporations.
The impoverished are effectively trapped by the welfare system itself, because it reduces benefits as incomes rise at a faster rate than can be made up by the equivalent amount of work
This isn't true. The CBO extensivesly evaluates changes in benefits and taxes to calculate effectice marginal tax rates across the income distribution to make sure that you never make less money from working more. There are a couple of ranges where you will lose money from working more, but none of them are larger than 25c/hr.
The marginal tax rates include the combined effects
of federal and state individual income taxes, federal
payroll taxes, and benefits from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program and cost-sharing subsidies
for health insurance, generally on the basis of 2016 law.
Unfortunately, SNAP and ACA health insurance subsidies are not the only means-tested welfare bits, and the other ones are _not_ being included here. Most prominently missing are Medicaid, TANF, and Section 8 housing, but there are a _lot_ of means-tested programs (e.g. Pell Grants) that only apply to certain households.
Now I do think it's true that the income ranges where the effective marginal "tax" rate is over 100% are fairly narrow for most households. But the ranges where the rates are less than 100% but not much less are far wider. And that gives you an effective take-home hourly wage that is tiny. If you happen to have kids, it almost certainly doesn't cover daycare costs, for example...
The analysis does include Medicade and TANF. Does not include section 8 because only a very small percentage of the non-elderly non-disabled poor receive section 8 housing subsidies.
Granted is there some small(~1-3%) portion of the poor who have a marginal effective tax rate greater than 100%. Probably. Are they representative of the vast majority of the poor? I don't think so.
> people whose skills go out-of-date, and can't afford a retraining program
United States job training programs do not work - they are a 1980s Reagan-era privatization scam to funnel tax dollars to private scam "training" and "job" centers that do not provide effective training or result in any meaningful employment outcomes: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...
Job training needs to be stopped being mentioned as a realistic or viable option - it is a Republican distraction to free public universal vocational and university schooling in certified and accountable programs with qualified instructors: "why do we need free trade schools, we already have job training!"
Sorry, I think there's a semantic confusion here. By "retraining", I was also referring to vocational education and trade schools in general, not just a specific US government program. It sounds like you're not anti-retraining (as I was using the word), you just want it to be reformed and brought more under federal control.
Oh boy, I couldn't agree more... I, too, feel rage at this state of things. What makes it particularly awful is I just don't see any way out of it.
People are pathetically easy to manipulate for the most part. The poor are the demographic that most frequently votes against their interests. The fascinating part is, it would be easy to conclude that perhaps these people are simply not very clever.
Well, that's certainly true for some fraction of them, to some extent... but I really don't think that this is the main factor (or even in the top 3), no - rather, I just think that it's a combination of their being credulous, and not particularly predisposed toward a special type of socially-strategic thinking. Like, the sort of thinking that manipulating psychopaths use to bend people to their will. Like you said, the poor are often plenty clever and useful, they often just get manipulated and used.
What I don't know is whether this is just a matter of education (and so long-term improvement is viable) or whether it's more of a societal-cultural values thing... or even, I guess, a biological thing (there is probably at least _some_ component of this but probably very minor relative to the others).
I'd want education to include a kind of mental self-defence component, so people can protect themselves against mental infiltration by virulent memes (eg, religions and other ideas which abhor and resist attempts of inspection and eradication) and demagoguery... as well as a heavy focus on critical thinking in general. Learning _how_ to think - not_what_ to think.
"that most frequently votes against their interests"
This itself is a meme. Shouldn't we sometimes vote against what's technically in our own narrow interests in favor of what's in everyone's interests or that of future generations?
That view that it it's "terribly depressing to be broke" and all the despair the poor in America feel because they can create no value could only be thought up by us smug hacker news software creators. I know first hand that much of the poor are content to live off the government, never had any aspirations and ultimately don't need much to survive and be content enough. They don't know what they don't know and therefore they don't suffer from the despair of not being the next Steve jobs. That was never on their list. They are truly ignorant enough to be content with video games. I'm not talking everyone but this probably is the majority. Things work and all you need is to be able to hold a minimum wage job for a few years at a time and when you get fired you can take a few years off while another friend or family member is on deck, meanwhile you're contributing food stamps the whole time, 6 months of an unemployment check, money from a few scams here and there, electricity bill deductions and many other such benefits you can get if you are below the poverty line. These are all meaningful contributions you can contribute well past the 6 months of paid unemployment. You have to understand you also have old people in the household collecting social security at $1k per month. There are not only other people not working, but other non-workers coming up with money and resources. It becomes just as normal for a working-age male to not be working as grandma. After all we aren't talking 1 person or couple cramped into an over priced San Francisco apartment. In short, the family doesn't need as much money and everyone bands together, and can go for a very long time bringing in very little money. And though totally in the hands of the "public" health care system whose bills they will never pay if they get into an accident, they are more than content with tv and stolen movies/shows via apps like "ShowBox" until that happens, and even after. They have near zero ounce of fight in them for anything more, certainly not to be the prolific CEO or CTO of a tech company. That's far out of their field of vision. I am one that believes to not aspire to something is not healthy. So for now ignoring the other psychological issues surrounding the more privileged all feeling disproportionate pressure to be somebody, I'll just say the opposite extreme we are discussing now is worse and it's out of ignorance. An ignorance most here can't understand or have forgotten. A true "ignorance is bliss" syndrome. To us it may look like that as a result they are content to live in squalor. The truth is the squalor of those living standards have risen. It all just feels normal to them. What I call "poverty trap sweet spots" certainly do exist in America.
... I barely know how to respond to this. If you think the most poor people are content being poor it's hard for me to craft a rebuttal given how out of touch you are with reality. I grew up poor myself. Like lived on the streets for 2 years, spent time in the state grouphome system, had shoes held together by safety-pins level of poor and I now make six figures. On my way from there to here I spent a lot of time with other poor people and the vast majority of them were extremely unhappy in their situations. A lot of them were working hard to get out of that situation, others had given up because they realized they didn't really have the aptitude or mental temperament or the resources to bootstrap to anything better. I met only a very-very small handful of people I would have described as "content" or "eager to game the system forever". Your disdain for the poor is frankly disgusting and sounds like it comes from a place of having never had to scrap and scrape for your next meal or make hard choices about which bills to pay this month because you can't afford to pay all of them. I can promise you it never feels normal to be just a few dollars, or one mistake away from homelessness.
Hard work, a healthy serving of luck, and a decent amount of hustle. Luck in that while my living and financial circumstances sucked, I won the genetic lottery on the intelligence front, so learning has always been both fairly easy for me, and something I'm naturally inclined to pursue. On the hard work front I basically gave up my social life for the most part and instead focused on learning everything I could, and made myself available to move should any opportunity come up. At 35 years old I've moved over 20 times almost always in pursuit of opportunity. I also make a point to always be available for my clients or for my boss if I'm working for someone. This helped me build a decent sized network of people who say nice things about me which makes tracking down those new opportunities easier. Currently going on my 6th year in six figure territory and my 8th for doing better than 80K a year. Not bad for a previously homeless guy with a GED eh? :-)
It's good to hear about your experiences, but please don't make personal attacks on HN. Usually, commenters here are quasi-anonymous; even when they're wrong, it's bad to make assumptions about who they are as people, since in most cases you just don't know.
It's deserved, he painted a broad segment of working class folk as welfare queens. Why bother with that computer shit when there is a next to zero chance of it ever being useful? God help you if you want to progress into a field where the knowledge is locked away in the ivory tower or behind expensive texts/journal memberships.
Quite frankly it's disgusting and repulsive. Community rules be damned.
The reality is there are many "realities." That said, THERE IS A LARGE GROUP THAT LIVES LIKE I DESCRIBED. We can squabble over percentages all we want--it's large and that's all that matters.
Call them the "lucky poor" or whatever you want. Come to Las Vegas (not the strip) and see for yourself. Unfortunately, I'm living it first hand right now, coding away on my own self-funded project--yes, making decisions about which bills to pay etc.
I'm an anomaly. You are an anomaly. Perhaps you went from one anomaly (extremely poor) to extremely rich, and along the way missed the common scenario I'm bringing up. I'm simply stating the welfare state IS REAL (yes, even if they offer far more in Europe) to make my initial point that: the aforementioned group of people are NOT CONSCIOUSLY AWARE of the value they cannot create, and that it's "out of touch" to think they are. For the group I'm talking about, that's simply not their pain point.
We tech people are obsessed with creating value and assume for the majority its the same. We are projecting ourselves on to them, yet we are very different. They aren't seeing life through the same lens. If we really want to help people, we can't go from 0 to 60--we cant take people that aren't thinking about creating startups, tell em to their face "if only they created value they would be happy" and tell em to climb a mountain to do so. They won't make even the first step. We can't help bring others up unless we truly understand what they're dealing with, and what the initial baby-steps actually would be. So I apologize for my insensitive tone. It's a sensitive subject and I expressed some of my own frustrations with such people that I'm dealing with on a daily basis, which from my standpoint seems to be everyone but me. That all said, I think opportunities to create value is the answer--just, we must recognize we can't sell them a better future by telling them: "you aren't creating value, if only you were, you would be happy." That's as condescending as it gets.
Ultimately, it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Education and more opportunities for future generations is the best we can do. That's my current standpoint. My perspective is that it is very impractical and unlikely to teach a 50 year old cashier anything else. If we could magically produce statistics it wouldn't be looking good. This is reality. There's legions of people with minimum wage jobs that will have minimum wage jobs their whole life. One group may be in utter despair because of it, and another (the lucky poor) might be able to make it work well enough. The best we can do is show future generations the satisfaction, pride, etc that comes from the mastery of skills and creating things. The problem is in these communities there isn't the role models for success like in NYC or LA/SF. I grew up in NYC. I'm living in Las Vegas now. I see the difference in mindset daily. In NYC everyone is a hustler and about something. In Las Vegas once you get away from the strip and people who service it, virtually nobody is. Young people are absorbed with being wannabe gang-bangers and are not thinking about creating some enterprise or becoming an artist or whatever. I AM IN THIS DAILY and see this first hand. Have nephews and family members living like this.
NOW FOR MY RESPONSE TO YOUR PERSONAL ATTACKS: It sounds ultimately like you have lived your life siloed in an elevator from the bottom to the top and barely took a second to look around. It seems you care more about telling us all about how far you've come and how much money you now make. That's your ego at play. For you, it was very stressful being poor. So stressful you did something about it. What I'm saying is that for many it's nowhere near as stressful for them to do as much as you did about it. Put that in your pipe in smoke it, what do you say about that. There's no much you can say. It doesn't sound like you did very well at being poor. It sounds like you got one taste and as soon as you were of age, you headed for the hills. It's a common story. No shame in that. And I'm happy for you. However, I'm doubtful that in your later more inevitably conscious years you were around much to watch it first hand. Whatever it is, your words don't help. I'm apprehensive as to how much you actually do want to help. Typically the words you have shared--about how far you've come and how much money you now make--serve no purpose but to make you feel good about how far you've come. So for those that actually do want to help, THERE IS A PROBLEM: people are under-educated, are not surrounded by models of success, and perhaps if they were actually conscious of how little value they are creating and how accessible it is to create value, they might. But to pretend like they are all aware of this lack is completely unproductive. If they were they would be taking the first step to clawing their way out of that dead-end scenario.
NOW FOR A SOLUTION: well for one, there never is a silver bullet. This is a large country overseen by a bloated stagnating government that each year wastes a larger percentage of taxpayer money than the last. That likely isn't changing any time soon unfortunately. We can't rely on them to overhaul our schools. Technology has become cheap--and as poor as everyone is--they all manage to have modern phones and TV setups. Education technology is simply the key. Not necessarily in the traditional sense, but that too. As technologists it is our mandate to bring as many opportunities as possible to small screens in people's hands. I think we also--going along with the theme of this discussion--need to put pressure on people to be somebody. Simply put, many people are not growing up with any urgency to do something great, be somebody, call it whatever you wanna call it. If you don't grow up with the urgency to hustle, you likely won't. As a controversial of a point as it is, it's just the reality. The people in this forum--us--got the "do something big" bug. I think it can be taken to negative extremes, but overall I think it's a positive thing. So I'll just sign off by saying abstractly that through our apps we need to convey this vision, this mandate, so future generations between LA and NYC are inspired.
I don't think it's likely that I'll convince you otherwise, but my experience -- having grown up in a very poor community -- could not be further from yours.
Despair is exactly the word I would use to describe the feeling of not being able to make your bills and not being sure if you'll ever be able to save enough to afford moving to a more prosperous place. I'd say the majority of my friends and acquaintances at the time felt that way, too. The only reason I was ever able to escape was luck; my grandparents had to rescue me from a variety of financial disasters that would be extremely minor for somebody not on the edge of being able to make rent. It's amazing how much damage getting a $25 parking ticket because you had to work late can cause when you're working a minimum-wage -- (at the time: $5.15/hr) -- job. Lack of aspiration is definitely not the problem; lack of hope definitely is, though.
I don't mean to engage you in a debate about this, though; it seems like you have already made up your mind. I just don't want your comment to go un-challenged.
> That view that it it's "terribly depressing to be broke" and all the despair the poor in America feel because they can create no value could only be thought up by us smug hacker news software creators.
I think that's the view that's easy to come up with for smug HN software creators.
I've lived in poverty while working a minimum wage job, and while it was only for a couple years, it utterly destroyed my morale. There was no reliability; nothing I could count on. If something happened; if I got sick or if something broke down, then I would have had to go to a loan shark. Not because I was stupid or because I didn't understand that I'd never be able to pay the loan back, but because there would simply be no other option.
Long story short, I escaped that situation largely through luck, but I try to keep reminding myself of what it was like in the days where I had to double-check my bank balance before agreeing to go out for Chik-Fil-A.
> They are truly ignorant enough to be content with video games.
While I understand the sentiment and may have even expressed similar feelings when younger, the reality is a bit more nuanced.
It's more like they hit walls and repeated failure when trying to move up the ladder and eventually just gave up. You may not have been around for that, but it did happen.
And yes, there are plenty who are so persistent that they never stop trying and eventually do experience some level of success ... but that doesn't excuse a society which is openly hostile to those who want to do better and instead shoves a government check in their mouth.
Have that happen to you often enough and you'll choose to play video games instead too. At least with video games, success is just around the corner. They were designed with you winning in mind.
Imagine you are born into a glass room. Others are already in the room. Initially your focus is within the room. You don't really notice anyone outside the room. But eventually your mind starts to imagine other possibilities. Looking around, ,none of the others are trying to break through the walls, even though they can see others outside those walls. You ask about this, but are told there's no point - the walls are impervious. You start focusing outside those walls. At some point, you decide to have a crack. Yet no matter how you try, the walls are indeed impervious. You stop trying. You accept your lot. Are you happy? No. Would you rather it were different? Yes. Are you doing anything to try and bring about a difference? No. It's futile.
I could also add, that very few on the outside are truly looking into the glass room. Some will be aware of it and its inhabitants, but of those most are uncomfortable or even offended. For some those feelings arise when considering the inhabitants; for others considering the glass room itself. "I did not create the glass room", they think. "I did not put those people there". While they may feel some sadness at this state of affairs, they do not at all see themselves as causally connected to the glass room or its inhabitants.
Some of the inhabitants of the glass room may try and communicate their presence and their dissatisfaction to those outside the room. But largely, those communications are either misunderstood, or ignored. Many of those that tried to communicate conclude that the minds of the "outsiders" are as impervious as the glass walls of the room itself.
To those on the outside, it does indeed seem as the glass-room dwellers have lost any fight. "How can we help those that won't even help themselves?". "Knowing nothing other than the glass room, perhaps that is where they are most suited to stay. They seem content enough."
Perhaps the walls contain an unknown but fatal flaw? The walls seem able to absorb vast quantities of anger without exhibiting any faults. Yet upon reaching a (very high) threshold, that pent up anger may cause the walls to suddenly shatter. I wonder, how much fight will the glass room dwellers will show then?
However, I think your version could be subject to misinterpretation. When you are referring to change, are you implying "themselves", "their circumstances", or both?
In the story above the glass room dwellers did change themselves - from aspirational to resigned.
So perhaps, the compression was "lossy" after all ;-)
>I know first hand that much of the poor are content to live off the government, never had any aspirations and ultimately don't need much to survive and be content enough.
Well, I know the opposite first hand. The idea that poor are content being poor is totally out of this world, especially in the US where the welfare and "handouts" for poor people are a joke (compared to Western Europe, nordic countries, etc).
>Things work and all you need is to be able to hold a minimum wage job for a few years at a time and when you get fired you can take a few years off while another friend or family member is on deck, meanwhile you're contributing food stamps the whole time, 6 months of an unemployment check, money from a few scams here and there, electricity bill deductions and many other such benefits you can get if you are below the poverty line.
This is crazy talk compared to all the people I've known and listened in such conditions. This is much closer to how poor people working such "minimum wage jobs" actually live:
Yup - it's hard to imagine a more out of touch viewpoint. Straight out of "talking heads present one type of franchise blockbuster reality fiction that manipulates you into betraying your fellow humans and yourself" land.
The life you're describing doesn't sound nearly as bad to me as it does to you. The people in this picture have family, community, people watching their back and taking care of each other. They may not have money, but they're wealthy. I don't think that describes anything like the majority of poor people though.
Despite what you intend to mean, I think you describe the "lucky poor", those who have a functional family and community. I think there is some truth to what you say; nobody on HN considers early retirement/FI as something to be depressed about. There shouldn't be anything wrong with banding together as a community to pool resources, work together, and enjoy leisure.
Yet you are actually addressing a different point than the commenters in this thread. The rest of the commenters are talking about the unlucky poor, those who are trapped and aren't able to live comfortably with the support of family and friends.
As to what proportion of poor are the unlucky vs the lucky, this is less easily discovered. I imagine the "unlucky" poor are at least half. I don't have any data for that.
