Supersize Me

Yes, food poverty is a problem in Great Britain. It’s not so much to do with crime as it is to do with the economics of supermarket placement and the desire of suburban supermarkets to keep out the inner-city poor as far as possible lest they scare off more profitable suburban customers. Liz Dowler at Warwick works on this and has done surveys of exactly how much fresh produce is available within a plausible travelling time to someone without a car living in publicly provided housing in inner london & it’s pretty pathetic. I think she concludes that given the retail opportunities actually open to inner-city poor families in the UK healthy food is unaffordable (either too long to travel, or some limited choice available at a local store for an extravagant amount of money).

As far as Great Britain goes, Kuznicki’s claim above is exactly what Dowler shows to be false.

Andrew Sullivan is such a loser. Cherry picking comments from the DU and pretending like they are representative of the left. What a hack.

Oh wait never mind. Carry on.

Oh yeah, and I ate very well too.

Peter:

Perhaps it’s because I don’t have my social scientist glasses on (not being a social scientist I don’t actually own the appropriate glasses) but some of the points you enumerate (perhaps they’re described in more detail in the Economist?) seem to conflate correlation and causation.

To wit, even if a larger percentage of the poor tend to be unmarried (than of the general population) it doesn’t follow that their non-married state is in any way the cause of their poverty.

The correlation/causation connection seems more intuitive for #2 but some data demonstrating that people are poor BECAUSE they didn’t finish high school would still be great.

#3 seems to avoid this problem nicely. I mean if people are working for sure they’re less likely to be poor, aren’t they? I think, though, that this may be wrong on the facts. I seem to recall reading somewhere that a minimum wage job working something like 50 hours a week would still place a family of four below the poverty line (but perhaps I’m mistaken?).

Peter might also have trouble explaining why countries in which social democratic (in American terms, ‘socially liberal’) parties have held power for long periods of time have virtually elminiated poverty, while countries in which they haven’t (notably the US and the UK) haven’t. This fact also makes torubel for the people who want to blame the poor for their own condition.

Still, I treasure the Jane Galt thread — I’ll re-read it whenever I see leftists being accused of being smug, self-satisfied, and self-righteous.

Oh, and thanks for the quote mc; reminded me of how great Orwell could be.

And why should we regard someone as being innocent of their own poverty, if they decide to have a couple of children, and support a mate, on a minimum wage job? These are generally decisions, are they not?

Er–which decision? The decision to support a mate rather than let the mate starve to death? The decision to bear a child to term rather than to abort? The decision to have a minimum wage job rather than a better-paying job as a machinist? The decision, perhaps, to lose one’s job after one has started a family?

What are you suggesting, that somebody wakes up in the morning, and suddenly finds that they’ve got a wife and two kids to support, without having made any choices?

Now, somebody who is already working at a good job, and marries and has kids, might through misfortune find themselves unemployed, and have to take a job flipping burgers… until they can find something better. But let’s not pretend that that’s the normal face of poverty.

“your days play roughing it as a student don’t count”

“Play” roughing it? Oh, so I know nothing whatsoever about living cheaply, just because I did it so that I could afford tuition.

You know, maybe the answer is a manditory line of classes in school, on “how to live very cheaply, and not get yourself into debt”? Maybe we should HELP them throw off that conditioning? Instead of treating it as a reason to write somebody a check?

Harry,

Your overblown rhetoric needs puncturing.

Even when comparing relative levels, what % of the population is below x% below median income, of poverty social democracies such as France still run poverty rates of about 8%. About a 1/2 of the US rate. I am not sure 50% less and 8% qualifies as virtually eliminated.(1997 LIS)

And of course since the US median income is higher, even when adjusting for PPP, that means that families with the same PPP adjusted level of income in both the US and France would NOT be considered poor in France.

I don’t have anything against social democracies, they do a wonderful job providing for their citizens. As does the US. Perhaps we could do even better if we learned some lessons from the social democracies. And perhaps the reverse might also be true.

People don’t get to choose their parents. They don’t get to choose not to be victimised by criminals. They don’t choose to lose one parent. They don’t choose the society whose values they have to assume to fit. Oh, and nobody choose to be stupid. Now to be a criminal yes that is your choice.

DSW

Brett:

Personally, I don’t doubt that some of the problems of poverty are a result of choices made by the poor. What I object to is pretending that pointing that out, and then tacking on a “F*ck’em, they deserve it,” is tantamount to addressing the matter.

At the moment, you guys have a lock on the government; it really is your world, and we really are just trying to survive it. So if your poverty policy is “f*ck’em,” why write it? We already know that’s your policy (it’s not exactly a novel position in the Republican Party), and we’re not in much of a position to do much about it. Given that context, pointing to problems of the poor, and then saying, “they deserve it,” seems roughly analogous to offering a homeless drunk a can of beer just to get his face within range of your feet. Which bothers me. Because I’m “soft” like that.

The sentiments helpfully summarized by SomeCallMeTim and quoted by Belle above are the usual repugnant right-wing combination of callousness and self-aggrandisement – where the author’s own good fortune is ascribed to a combination of a dynamic will, incredible wit, intelligence and moral fortitude, and everyone else bad fortune is ascribed to slovenliness, weak moral character, stupidty and sloth – that we can expect from the right and those who espouse such sentiments deserve nothing but scorn.

I actually think there is likely some truth in this – certainly people are liable to attribute their good choices and actions to themselves and their bad choices and actions to uncharacteristic moods, moments of madness etc.

But does it not occur to you that a lot of people reading this thread might equally – and with far more empirical justification – conclude that on your side what we see are selfish ivory tower liberals so influenced by what are often little more than gonadal preferences for moral non-judgementalism, for casual sex, and for the abolition of family norms, into opposing social structures and social attitudes that have always acted to protect the poorest and most vulnerable? That if people like yourselves were less enamoured of sensual pleasure, the chaos and poverty far too many people suffer from would be less? The predictable calls for more state intervention by people like yourselves to solve these problems suggests the same self-serving, self-aggrandising attitudes.

Peter wrote:

“on your side what we see are selfish ivory tower liberals so influenced by what are often little more than gonadal preferences…”

Peter, I grew up on a deprived Scottish council estate in the 1980s. My grandparents lived and died in a bleak tower block in one of the most deprived and heroin ravagaed areas of inner-city Glasgow. I’m about as far away from the ‘selfish ivory tower liberal’ that you are prattling on about as it is possible to get.

I suspect I know far more about the realities of living in poverty than smug judgemental pricks like you will ever know.

So, politely, fuck right off…

Well, Matt, I can see you’ve got a problem in that respect in the UK, because of some perhaps unintended side effects of social-demcrat type measures. It’s a lot easier for poor people to move in the US, of course.

Brett, I don’t know enough about the housing market in the US to be able to make any definitive argument here.

However, I assume that there is still a requirement to pay a deposit and rent in advance when moving into a new property?

Unless the deposits demanded in the US are substantially lower than they are here, where they usually amount to between 100% and 200% of a month’s rent, I’d imagine that finding that kind of money might still make it very difficult for those in genuine poverty i.e. with no spare money, to move.

Of course sometimes it’s possible to use the deposit from a previous property to pay the deposit on a new one, but generally the delay in the return of a deposit means that one needs to find the extra money (which as I said can be well over 1000 pounds) for at least a period of a month or two. Getting access to that kind of money isn’t easy for people without access to affordable credit and with no substantial savings.

I think there is a way to reconcile the view that welfare can act as a disincentive to responsible behaviour, with the view that people ought to be protected against the horrors of absolute poverty, and with the view that this protection ought to be provided by progressive taxation in the interests of economic justice:

Basic Income, aka Citizen’s Income.

This policy would mean that every penny (after tax) of your income – from work, from investments and from pensions – would be retained by you in addition to the Guaranteed Minimum Income set by the state – not as a replacement for it.

There would thus be no “welfare trap” where you couldn’t afford to leave welfare and take a job because the costs would be greater than the benefits. (This really affects some claimants – especially single parents, who need childcare to start work, and I believe the British government is starting to address this particular trap).

No need for a minimum wage, either, as (by assumption) the guaranteed minimum income would be sufficient to give workers a real free choice as to whether to work or not.

From the standpoint of a future Basic Income society, todays welfare and taxation arrangements might look like a gigantic and disproportionate tax on the poorest members of society.

Of course, most right-wingers are likely to regard this idea as “socialist nonsense”, at least on first viewing. But the idea is slowly gaining currency internationally. The Brazilian parliament recently passed a law which instructed the Brazilian government to institute a basic income in Brazil, taking into account Brazil’s economic situation.

I don’t know about moving in England. But it is actually complete bullshit to talk about how easy it is for poor people to move in the United States.

In the cities–they are safer than they used to be. But as neighborhoods improve, prices rise, and poor people often move out.

Outside the cities, housing is cheaper. But there is no functioning public transportation system. None. So you need to buy a car, or, perhaps if you live in the suburbs, you can subject yourself to some of the truly shittiest bus systems in existence. My family is from Nassau County, Long Island, one of the most densely populated suburbs in America. We briefly had a series of home health aides come in to take care of a family member. Not only did the agency give them significantly less than half the money we paid (there are all sorts of retrictive contract terms to prevent aides from being paid privately), they often had two hour commutes in each direction. And they often had to work for more than family at once.

Towns are also allowed to write zoning laws that effectively keep any poor people out.

That if people like yourselves were less enamoured of sensual pleasure, the chaos and poverty far too many people suffer from would be less?

Ah, yes. A return to the sexual values of the time of Dickens. No poverty there…

Yes, I think poverty certainly is a choice in many cases, probably in most cases. And it’s a rational choice – the minimum wage is too low.

It just doesn’t make sense to a rational person to do hard manual work for 5 bucks/hour.

And it’s real easy to fix: bump the minimum wage to $15-20/hour – like here in Geneva – and poof! Suddenly poverty is gone, petite crime’s gone, everybody’s happy.

Unmoderated capitalism produces grinding poverty, which is precisely why no nation opts for it. Even conservative America has Social Security, Medicare, Medicade and other redistributive mechanisms. Absent those, we’d have poverty galore.

Pointing out that poverty levels are not terribly high in the U.S. is like noticing that Lake Erie is pretty clean these days. In both cases, the relatively good result didn’t happen without government action.

Peter replies: When someone pretends to be stupid rather than deal with your points, it usually doesn’t speak well for their argument.

Oh come on, how else can I respond to

… As the Economist famously showed, a person’s chances of being poor are 0.5% if they:

i) marry and stay married
ii) complete high school
iii) take a job even at minimum wage.

except with mockery? The quote asserts that if you do i), ii), and iii), then you will almost certainly not be poor. Certainly there is a correlation, though not so strong as the one between not-in-povertyness and yacht ownership. But obviously, whatever causality might be revealed by that correlation goes more to than from i), ii) and iii).

I had minimum-wage jobs for a few years after I got out of hi-skool. If you lived on a minimum-wage job in the U.S.A. back then in 1973, you didn’t escape being poor, you were poor! That’s assuming that, even equipped with that valuable high school diploma, you could find a minimum-wage job in 1973. And adjusting for inflation, U.S. minimum-wage is today about 25% less than in 1973.

One thing I couldn’t afford on minimum-wage jobs in the mid-seventies economic slump was to go to college. (Which, contrary to The Economist, this fellow Graff says is “a virtual prerequisite for success and a decent life.”) Again, this has gotten even worse since 1973, for while the minimum-wage has fallen relative to the CPI rate of inflation, the cost of college has consistently risen faster than the CPI.

“it seems that leftists and liberals are really, really innumerate… anyone interested in the real world and good in math seems to be very libertarian or conservative”

Odd, the overwhelming majority of the many people I know who do research in computer science or mathematics are neither libertarian nor conservative; they are certainly Bush opponents.

W. Kieran raises a good point — you have a vanishingly tiny chance of being poor if you own a yacht — and surely yacht ownership is a choice.

Second, it strikes me that Orwell basically concedes the conservatives’ point: The rich are better able to make sacrifices for the long-term good. That he concedes the point while painting a sympathetic picture of the poor does very little to change my mind; the point remains intact. Sacrifice and hard work are still better than profligacy if you want to escape poverty.

Ever thought the rich are more able to sacrifice for the long-term because they’ve got the short-term paid for? Lot easier to focus on going to college when you don’t have to work 40 hour weeks in high school.

“The deep-fried Mars bar is alive and well in Scotland with more than a fifth of chip shops serving up the delicacy.

“A study by NHS Greater Glasgow found 22% of Scottish take-aways had the foodstuff on its menu and another 17% used to sell them.

“Researchers surveyed 500 chip shops and found children are the main buyers, with one shop selling up to 200 a week.”
– from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4103415.stm

“Thousands of Scottish lives lost to coronary heart disease (CHD) and diabetes could be saved through better medical treatment, a report has claimed. . .

“An estimated half a million people north of the border have CHD. More people in Scotland die from the disease than in any other part of the UK, with 261 deaths per 100,000 men and 98 per 100,000 women in 2001. . . ”
– from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3719507.stm

“[…]Anyway, life isn’t fair;[…]”

That is true, and only criminals find no problem with that. That is your choice, mr Bellmore.

DSW

Anyway, life isn’t fair; The virtues that are optional for the wealthy, are life and death for the poor… they can’t afford to make the bad choices those better off can recover from.

Which suggests that maybe the poor face obstacles in getting out of poverty that aren’t entirely due to their own personal failings. Which pretty much undercuts your whole argument, it seems to me.

And “life isn’t fair” isn’t much of an argument; it can justify just about any form of social organization all the way to feudalism. Some kinds of society are more fair than others…aren’t they?

Matt McG -“I grew up on a council estate in central Scotland in exactly the kind of circumstances which Dowler is talking about and then lived in a number of different parts of inner-city Glasgow and in none of these places was good fresh food out of reach.”

Would it have been in reach if you were a 75-year-old woman? Remember, that’s where the poverty in the UK is concentrated.

Funnily enough, London is better for food, because of all the immigrant shops selling fresh produce and the excellent and free bus services for old people. But if the road is wet,and it’s cold, sometimes a 5-minute walk to the bus is too much.

Brett-

Given that you want the courts to overturn democratically enacted social programs like Social Security it’s sort of ironic that you’re now decrying judical activism.

First, Brett Bellmore and friends should read Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Second, most arguments asserting that the poor have made poor choices leading to their poverty assume that those who make the “bad” choices had enough information to know the choices were bad and the alternatives. They also ignore the fact that a large percentage of those in poverty are children. In what sense are these children making choices?

It baffles me that the right is able to get away with saying the poor choose to be poor, so we don’t have to care about them. Societies can alter the costs of choices, and unless there is some argument that the costs of choices that the poor took are appropriate, it’s no kind of argument at all to say x chooses y. If we shot everyone who had extra-marital sex, would people be going round saying, they chose to have extra-marital sex, it’s fair enough? No, we be going ‘my f****** god, what in christ’s name is going on?’ But they would have chosen it, so, by the conservative argument, it would be fine.

“Second, most arguments asserting that the poor have made poor choices leading to their poverty assume that those who make the “bad” choices had enough information to know the choices were bad and the alternatives.”

Geeze, how many times do I have to say it: I’m suggesting that, if a lot of poor people are poor because they’re making destructive choices, and if they’re really making those destructive choices because they don’t know better, (Rather than because of poor impulse control, or sheer stupidity.) then education ought to help. You think I learned to eat cheaply out of a college text book? Nah, I took home economics in high school. Perhaps we ought to make a beefed up home economics class required learning, since a lot of poor people aren’t getting that knowlege passed on from their parents?

As Jim Harrison noted above, “Unmoderated capitalism produces grinding poverty…”
And certainly without capitalism at all, or money, or any other set of symbols that represent work and/or value, poverty would be something else entirely. A sickness maybe, a Darwinian failure, evolutionary loss. That’s the heart of the right’s stance, eh? Devil take the hindmost?
But it’s promoted from within an entirely artificial system of energy holding and transfer, a system that’s neither benign nor wise nor insightful, nor designed to improve anything but the lives and life-chances of the people it most benefits to begin with.
–
We gained our amazing immune systems from a race against pathogenic evolution in which the individual losers, those whose immunities were not strong enough, were de-selected. Now, at the same time they repudiate that method of selection and improvement, these bloodless fops want to return to Darwinian selection, from within a capitalist-biosphere they created and control, while at the same time thwarting organic Darwinian forces on every hand. And blame the losers for their losing.

Returning to the food theme, we should never underestimate the allure of nationally advertised brands. Why else would Americans consume such a vast volume of the world’s worst beer?

Unpackaged foodstuffs are unvalidated, undesirable, suspect. Just ask the nearest teenager.

I was thinking today of how much better off the residents of American inner cities would be if the Singapore model of hawker centres prevailed. Sure, there’s fattening char kway teow, but every hawker centre has a fruit juice and sliced fruit stand with cheap papaya, watermelon, and kiwi fruit, not to mention carrot juice.

And cake, too. Let them eat cake!

(Oh, sorry–I didn’t notice that this unbelievably ignorant, contemptuous comment about the insufficient diets of the poor was mean to be condescendingly sympathetic.)

I understand that crime is a deterrent, but why exactly is it that US inner-city markets have such awful, expensive, fly-blown produce, even the ones in Oakland CA? Is this true in poor neighborhoods in Great Britain?

I heartily recommend Theodore Dalrymple’s demolition of the supposed “food poverty” problem in Britain. I expect the situation in America is similar.

dan, the Hawker food market comment is no kind of ‘let them eat cake’ argument. fast food is much better in teh far east than it is here. I think Japan does it even better.

I also fail to see how the Dalrymple piece is a demolition of anything. Even among the poor burglars are an insignificant minority and most of this debate is about obesity.

Most basic microeconomics courses show price discrimination in which the vendor will aim to make cheap products unattractive to high value customers with the result that they sell cheap crap cheaply and charge over the odds for the rest. It is hard to see a clearer example of this in practice than on the aisles of a modern supermarket and hard to avoid the thought that this will have an effect. It’s surely most patronising to presume that the poor are not rational actors.

As far as breakdown of the family goes, why do liberals get all the blame? Surely an economic system that would fail without almost universal labour market participation must place some pressure on families.

“If you’re of a rightist tendency, it seems quite right for parents to be punished for the sin of having children, if only as an object lesson (and source of self-congratulation) for others. But what are the children being punished for?”

Notice the unstated premise there, that if somebody gets into trouble, through no fault of mine, and I don’t help them out of it, I’m somehow punishing them? Well, I reject that premise.

It might be nice of me to help them out of their jam, but I’m in no way obligated to do it.

Mark Kleiman has posted some thoughts over at his blog. One of the best essays I have ever seen on American eating habits in fact. Choice quote:

14. Eating habits are heavily custom-bound, and someone living in a social setting where the customary diet is unhealthy will, on average, consume a less healthy diet than the same person would in a society where the customary diet is healthy. Trying to explain individual dietary choices on a purely individualistic basis is simply a mistake, and gets the wrong answers.

Cranky

Why is it that some people are so unforgiving of other people making mistakes? On the whole people don’t actually want to fail, so mistakes are either occassional and accidental, or they are frequent and the result of ignorance, illness, lack of confidence etc. If we suspect some individuals of deliberatelly putting together a hand for bidding open misere, then what does it say about the their lack of other reasonable options?

Brett:

“It might be nice of me to help them out of their jam, but I’m in no way obligated to do it.”

Such comments usually seem to be premised on some strong claim about property rights (“The government shouldn’t take my property to (a) give to some idiot, or (b) use in a way that isn’t beneficial to me.”) In general, I’m relatively sympathetic to that argument. But (I assume) you just supported an Administration that claimed the right to throw US citizens in indefinite detention without a trial or access to a lawyer. And (I assume) you’d choose to give up all of your property rather than spend a substantial part of your life in jail. (I would, in any case). To me, it looks like property rights depend, in part, on some requirement that the government properly justify incarcerating you indefinitely before doing so. So I’m not so sure how much weight I’m supposed to give to your (my assumption) unspoken claim about the strength of property rights.

What am I missing here?

Um, this bit about getting marrried and choosing whether or not to have children?

That isn’t acceptable.

Not to a conservative *Christian* at least.

Contraceptives are out – they’re immoral, either becuase of being ‘abortifacients’ [sic] or being against nature [condoms].

So is sterilization – against nature.

So how exactly is this “self-control” going to be enforced – “Just Say No!” to sex? Has that *ever* worked in the history of humanity? The catholic church, chief pusher of the meme and all the anti-contraceptive memes, has a dismal track record from before the Borgias to the present hour.

So this secular conservative worldview is *not* going to float as far as the theocratic conservatives are concerned…

[imagine high-school after class chant: “Fight! Fight! FIGHT!” – this is what you’re heading for.]

Aside from that, you’re demanding impossibilities – that humans not be humans – the same problem that conservatives decry the old socialists for. And clearly brett & co do NOT personally know what it is to be poor, and get all their data on poverty from the minions of the Four Sisters and sundry other millionaires.

I have as much respect for them as I do for the celibate celibacy-peddlers – just because I personally have a) never been drunk or stoned, b) never been tempted to be drunk or drugs, c) have no problem saying no, it would be foolish for me to say then that alcoholism is not a real problem, that it’s merely a voluntary choice and alcoholics should not be given counseling and support…

–Actually I used to hold something like that when I was a naive high school student, lacking in empathy and life experience. But that was a long time ago.

Brett: “Like I said, maybe we need to make home economics a manditory class, and go at it seriously.”

Ah yes. Being the deluded liberal that I am, when I was a case manager at a shelter for homeless women with children, a group of ladies from the agricultural extension agency came in to teach the women how to budget and live thriftily, pointing out how easy a family of three could live on $1,000/month. When the Moms pointed out that their impressive generous ‘welfare trap’ income – including food stamps – was closer to $650/month, the ladies took their leave to study the issue and said they’d be back in two weeks with a tighter budget. Two weeks later they called and said they’d determined it was impossible to do. There went our home ec plan.

Yet the fact is, the poor don’t have the choice of saying “it can’t be done.” They have to make it work, and they do. By their wits. Even when the only options are bad ones, with a potential to compound their problems, like picking up some babysitting money and not reporting the money, putting them at risk of being jailed for welfare fraud. You might be amazed at the actual ingenuity in practice that the poor command, that hardly deserves having their ‘bad’ choices emphasived.

Peter: “That if people like yourselves were less enamoured of sensual pleasure, the chaos and poverty far too many people suffer from would be less?”

Your words are in conflict with themselves. You have gained the sensual pleasures of smug self-righteousness, and apparently have not fallen into poverty. Yes, chaos would likely be less if we all chose the Jesuit life, but poverty would remain; it would simply be embraced by the monkish. Your idea is so grand in theory that I just don’t understand why you and others have had little success selling such a perfect idea.

Peter: “and stay married”

I agree this is a place where a better choice would have worked. I had me first mate tied with half-hitch knots, instead of bowline knots. Thus she was able to slip her bonds and escape the root cellar. With me second mate, I chose to cut off ‘er hands entire and our marriage has survived 43 years…

Are you saying that if one poor person in a marital knot is smart enough to know the importance of staying married while the other is too lacking in common sense, that both deserve poverty for the choice of the one? Or that one partner (the smarter one) in a marriage should get to call the shots, while denying the free will of the other? Perhaps you make the case that they both are responsible because they should have made a better choice in marriage partners to begin with. But that implies two things: that deciding on a mate is not a crapshoot at any income level. And that poor people have the option of choosing a mate from the same pool the rich swim in: well-educated, good breeding lines, with a dowry or a relative willing to loan money at moments where a capital infusion might help.

I’m of the mind that life is a process of ‘trial-and-error.’ I’ve found that for every formula for success, there’s not a few, but many exceptions. I learned, for example, with my food stamp caseload, that nearly 80% of our caseload were there for six months or less – dealing with a short term crisis. Another 10% (approx) were there for exceptional reasons like severe disabilities, not likely to ever be free of the need for outside help. Which left about 10% who included the substance abusers, the lazy, and the dumber-than-a-fencepost crowd – the stereotypes applied to the 90% who either have the self-motivation to move ahead, or simply, can’t.

The reality in the US is that most welfare flows to the middle (such as FHA mortgages and other housing programs), while welfare to the top (tax incentives to business and pork provided by lobbyists) flows in greater amounts still. (and spare me the differentials between tax cuts and pure welfare).

The only real welfare trap for the poorest occurred when conservatives decided in most states that an able-bodied male in a household precluded all members from getting help with anything but food and maybe medical aid. The result of that was to force marriages & partnerships to end, or to force the poor to lie, to be certain at least the women and children could gain help with the rent.

Had they not imposed that barrier, they could have set a time limit of six months to avoid the risk of folks getting institutionalized as welfare-dependents, without imposing added family dysfunctions where none may have existed previously.

As for choosing to parent only when it becomes affordable, I guess you mean that even married people must stick to abstinence because contraception choices aren’t foolproof. Which also overlooks that a couple could choose to have children when both have a good income. Then a plant closing, a recession, hyper-inflation, a car accident, etc. screws up that best-laid plan.

And the minimum-wage-steadily argument doesn’t hold either. My life and that of some siblings serve as the reality models here. When a layoff occurred, I took whatever job I could find so my downtimes rarely exceeded 30 days. And on numerous occasions, I juggled two or three such underpaid jobs to meet basic expenses. As a result, I’m a jack of all the lousy-wage trades, and have mastered few. Employers with minimum wage jobs won’t hire me now – I’m overqualified and they fear I’ll move on as soon as a better option exists… and they’re correct. But now the downtimes are so long that it takes many months of new work to get back to breakeven.

Ultimately, there’s some truth to the natural selection argument. Stop all welfare and the misfits will die off. But then there’ll be a much smaller labor pool to pick your cheap produce, to iron your shirts and to wax your heinys. Furthermore, some of the more enterprising misfits will decide that, along the exit corridor to life, there’s nothing at risk to behead the well off to gain an extra day of breath. Another choice that will seem bad to a theoretician, but one that will occur, as history’s made clear.

It must be terribly annoying that we don’t just have the courtesy to die without imagining how fun it would be to use our 2nd amendment rights just once, to stick a rifle barrel up your bum long enough to gain your confession to making a few bad choices yourself. (And I say this with full recognition that maybe you haven’t, and that you’ve achieved perfection. Which still would make it an exceptional educational endeavor, as some of us poor folks would like to know what the correct choice is when faced with a rifle up the bum).

Btw, don’t misinterpret my words to mean I’m making a threat against you or any individual. My point is that any animal cornered – even cornered by natural selection – is likely to be dangerous and unpredictable for a bit. Survival instincts can be messy things, but must be considered as a natural side-effect of pure libertarianism after theory collides with reality.

Brett: It might be nice of me to help them out of their jam, but I’m in no way obligated to do it.

But you are obligated to pay taxes to governments that aid the poor, or to find your mythical better society that lacks such obligation. Since there is a right choice and wrong choice to every question in your world, to maintain consistency with your belief system, your only choice then is to live in a society that does nothing for the poor. Go then, and be merry, and enjoy your choice. Your obligation to this society is nil and has been received in the spirit you intended. You clearly contribute nothing of value to my country except monetary theory, which sells for a dime a dozen these days.

Kevin, there’s an obvious difference between moral obligation, and the brute fact that I’ll be shot if I don’t obey some people’s orders. And one of those differences is that I don’t have to pretend to accept as right and noble the motives that drive those orders.

In other words, you’ve got my obediance, albiet at gunpoint. No NOT expect to lie about liking it.

Kevin, lots of good points.

One good thing about the UK is that some of the measures enacted by the Labour government of the past 7 years have gone some way to offering people a way out of the poverty trap you describe.

I’m not the biggest fan of New Labour but moves like the Working Family Tax Credit really have made it substantially easier — by essentially ensuring a minimum level of income which means that almost everyone is certain to be better off working than they are claiming benefits — for people to escape from the poverty trap.

Things are far from perfect but I can think of a number of people I personally know — mostly single mothers — who have managed to return to work or retrain and who had found that impossible in the past because any option they took that involved going off benefits and into low-paid work inevitably left them worse off.

Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go and the lack of good quality affordable housing and childcare in many parts of the country still make life a lot more difficult for those on low-incomes than they really ought to be.

It might be nice of me to help them out of their jam, but I’m in no way obligated to do it.

Shorter Bellmore: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Don’t ever let me catch you calling yourself a “Christian”, Brett.

Re: Housing choice in the United States: Not only does living in a decent apartment in a decent area in the United States require a deposit, but it also requires a good credit record. Poor people don’t have a credit record. Thus they’re not allowed to live in a decent apartment in a decent area. Rather, they’re generally only allowed to live in apartments that let by the week, which typically are either old hotels that let rooms by the week, or in very depressed areas of town. Neither is a very wholesome place for a family with children to live. And they’re often just as expensive as the good apartments in the good parts of town. $500/month for a room in a slum motel in Phoenix can get you a decent 2 bedroom apartment in Phoenix (in an okay, though not great, neighborhood). *IF* you have a credit record, plus the deposit (typically 2 month’s rent for the lower-priced apartments).

Now, I was lucky in that I was offered a credit card in college, accepted it, and managed it wisely, thus had a credit record once I graduated college. I was also lucky in that I entered college before Reagan gutted student aid and replaced it with student loans where you can go to jail if you don’t make enough money to pay the loan back (no, that’s not a joke — look at the 1998 revisions to the student loan act). Thus as someone from a poor family I got a chance at college (albeit a state university, not a “name” university) and ended up with a managable student loan burden (student aid paid tuition, the loans paid for books, I worked sometimes three part-time jobs for my living expenses). That route, alas, is no longer possible for the poor in post-Reagan America… and blaming the poor for this is as ludicrous as blaming the Jews for the problems of Germany in 1932.

– Badtux the formerly poor Penguin

“Don’t ever let me catch you calling yourself a “Christian”, Brett.”

In as much as I’m an atheist, you need have no worries on that score. ;)

Firebug, YOU just don’t get it: A point of commonality between both liberals and conservatives, is that you both think it ought to be illegal to “sin”; (You just disagree about what constitutes “sinning”.) Theoretically, though not in practice, you both think that there’s some optimal behavior for each and every person, which, to the extent it can be identified, it’s proper to FORCE them to engage in.

Fundamentally, neither of you believes in freedom. You just disagree about what orders ought to be issued to the slaves.

I posted a comment on the Asymmetric Info site, so I might as well speak up here as well. The point is not that *poverty* is not a problem in the US, it is that *hunger* is not a problem. It is true that food *has* gotten incredibly cheap in recent decades, and that the poor *do* tend to have higher levels of obesity than the well off. That is not to say that the lives of the poor are easy–they are not–but *hunger* isn’t the problem any longer. Housing, transportation, and medical care are now of much greater concern than food (or clothing). Most of the poor have enough to eat, have warm clothing, and even have cell-phones, cable TV, DVD players, etc. but STILL have difficult lives.

It is intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating to try to use cooked statistics to portray hunger as a main area of concern for the poor simply because hunger is a more effective marketing tool for generating sympathy. The risk is that people increasingly know that the ‘hunger in America’ statistics that get trotted out routinely are bogus (just as John Edwards fictional little girl who was shivering because her family couldn’t afford a coat was bogus).

Advocates for the poor in America need to learn to focus on the other issues that are the real problems or they’re going to lose their credibility.

I’m from Singapore (living in Toronto now). Hawker centers are great!

Peter says: “Nearly all poverty is caused by social liberalism.”

Which explains the complete lack of poverty in the Middle Ages. Ah, the Golden Years before social liberalism arose to create the hardship of poverty.