The "Our poor is living better than the poor everywhere else" fallacy.

a reply to: Edumakated

Once again, why do we need to be as bad as other nations are currently to do something about the trend sending us into a decline heading towards the same kind of poverty?

Is ludicrous, sorry, I'm not going to wait til my entire country lives in a shack to do something about our economic decline.


Addendum: BTW I think this is a worldwide problem, not just the US, just one we're finally beginning to feel/notice for ourselves. This is NOT a bad thing, it's good, it means more of the world is WAKING up. It does not demean anyone that has it worse for us to notice that crap, things are getting bad for us too, perhaps we should have been paying attention.

Neo-feudalism. That's what I call what is happening.

No one will "own" anything, except the very wealthy and the government. Everyone will simply "rent" their entire existence upon the land, just as peasants did in the Dark Ages of Europe.

Yes, we will work the land and give tribute to our wealthy overlords who might as well be lords of the manor. History is repeating itself.

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Sad isn't it?

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: Edumakated

We're living in a world that has undergone a technological revolution, one where we have abundant resources and technologies to make life better. It is also a fallacy to compare now to the past if also discounting the advances of technology, ect.

Life should be getting better for everyone across the board, we have the ability, power, and technology to make it happen. No one NEEDS to be poor anywhere, US or otherwise, we as a species have advanced far beyond such being necessary, the numbers all agree. So why is it everyone feels the need to argue not only against things getting better, but for letting them get worse?

No one has argued against getting better. However, the issues we face in America have nothing to do with with material goods. The issues are mental. I donate a lot of my time and money trying to help others.

I have a 1% HH income. There is very little in my house that someone who lives in the worst ghetto in Chicago doesn't have materially. I take the subway, the poor kid takes the subway. I have a flat screen TV, the poor kid has a flat screen TV. I have a cell phone, the poor kid has a cellphone. I have air conditioning, the poor kid has air conditioning. I have a car, the poor kid's parents have a car. In fact, my house is not even materially larger than the houses in the closet poor area to me which is one of the worst in America.

The gulf between rich and poor when it comes to material items in America has never been closer. Remember when only drug dealers and doctors had pagers? Now EVERYONE has a cell phone. Remember when you were lucky to have ONE television and if you were rich, it might be a color TV? Now everyone not only has a TV, but a flat screen TV with an Xbox or playstation.

The only differences between rich and poor are cultural at this point. Poor have kids out of wedlock, the wealthier (or those who are striving to be better off) do not. Poor kids don't focus on school, while education is held in high regard in wealthier areas. The poor litter and don't take care of their neighborhoods, while the wealthier take pride in their neighborhoods.

I see this cultural dysfunction every single day. in America, poverty is a mental state.

originally posted by: Edumakated

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: Edumakated

We're living in a world that has undergone a technological revolution, one where we have abundant resources and technologies to make life better. It is also a fallacy to compare now to the past if also discounting the advances of technology, ect.

Life should be getting better for everyone across the board, we have the ability, power, and technology to make it happen. No one NEEDS to be poor anywhere, US or otherwise, we as a species have advanced far beyond such being necessary, the numbers all agree. So why is it everyone feels the need to argue not only against things getting better, but for letting them get worse?

No one has argued against getting better. However, the issues we face in America have nothing to do with with material goods. The issues are mental. I donate a lot of my time and money trying to help others.

I have a 1% HH income. There is very little in my house that someone who lives in the worst ghetto in Chicago doesn't have materially. I take the subway, the poor kid takes the subway. I have a flat screen TV, the poor kid has a flat screen TV. I have a cell phone, the poor kid has a cellphone. I have air conditioning, the poor kid has air conditioning. I have a car, the poor kid's parents have a car. In fact, my house is not even materially larger than the houses in the closet poor area to me which is one of the worst in America.

The gulf between rich and poor when it comes to material items in America has never been closer. Remember when only drug dealers and doctors had pagers? Now EVERYONE has a cell phone. Remember when you were lucky to have ONE television and if you were rich, it might be a color TV? Now everyone not only has a TV, but a flat screen TV with an Xbox or playstation.

The only differences between rich and poor are cultural at this point. Poor have kids out of wedlock, the wealthier (or those who are striving to be better off) do not. Poor kids don't focus on school, while education is held in high regard in wealthier areas. The poor litter and don't take care of their neighborhoods, while the wealthier take pride in their neighborhoods.

I see this cultural dysfunction every single day. in America, poverty is a mental state.

I used the CNN calculator and came in at the top 5%. CNN Income Calculator

I don't consider myself special, have an exotic career or own my own business. The only thing noteworthy is that my wife and I have always been willing to do what was necessary to better our standard of living for us and for our kids. Neither of our families have money, not helped us out financially throughout our lives. We made out own ways, paid our ways through college and did what needed to be done.

Playing devils advocate, what keeps people poor? There are numerous financial and educational resources available to people with low income that my wife and I would never qualify for. There are also numerous examples of people born into poverty or not the best home environment and having the drive and desire to overcome those obstacles. I'm sorry, but at some point people need to be personally accountable and stop blaming the government, the economy, race, religion, etc.

a reply to: Edumakated

-I have an 80" flat screen "smart TV" in every room
- poor kid has one 27" barley working flat screen he got from Walmart on Black Friday

-I ride the subway
-poor kid gets arrested/beaten by police on subway

-I have an iPhone 6 with unlimited data
-poor kid has cheap Chinese knock-off android phone with no data plan. It may get stolen by his classmates.

-I have a BMW SUV, with bluetooth, back up camera, the works
-Poor kid's parents drive a 15 year old Kia with 250,000 miles. Hopefully it'll last another 250k miles

-I have air conditioning "ahhhh"
-Poor kid sometimes has air conditioning, if it works. It's been broken for a while now until Dad can afford repairs.

You tried, I'll give you that -- but "things" aren't just "things" -- the quality and the circumstances behind these things matter. You've taken them out of the equation.

When you have much higher quality "things" and never have to worry about ongoing costs to fix/maintain them-- your life is so much better, easier, and low-stress.

I went from a very noisy, bumpy car to a smoother riding, quieter car. I feel much more relaxed and ready to work when I arrive in the morning. I don't feel so "frazzled" my life has improved because of the upgrade in my vehicle. The same is true with all of the other things you mentioned.

a reply to: peter_kandra

So when you run the numbers on the economy, and things like how the minimum wage compares to inflation, to how much a person, significantly above minimum wage, is still well below what minimum wage should be if it kept up with inflation, and you feel our economy is well and good?

You see those starving kids in africa, and think, they need to better themselves, it's there fault?

No we hgave a global economic crisis on our hands, and frankly it's only going to get worse if we keep insisting on ignoring it, and blaming the poor while the cash all funnels into the hands of the few.

Oh and the difference is, you can retire early if you want, you can live nice effort free if you want, we "poor" people if we have those things it's cause we're debt slaves in debt to our eyeballs, with very little real hope of ever retiring someday, work work work til we die broken and miserable from years of hard labor.

a reply to: MystikMushroom

I know what you mean, I now have a job close enough I can walk there, I'm no longer living in terror my car may break apart like with my last job I'll have no way I can afford to get there as there was no bus route. Also as was living week to week, I lost my job because my car DID break down, and by time I could get it fixed by begging family, I lost my job.

I don't have a couple spare cars, and a taxi for that distance was far beyond affordable. Now heaven forbid, my car breaks, I can walk 40 minutes to work. At least I won't lose my job.

Just being able to walk to work was a major stress reliever. For me, that fact is one of the things I'm happiest to tell others about my new job and home. People sometimes look at me weird for that, but they must never have lived that fear with a car that could die any time and no ability to fix it, with a job with no other means to get there, while living week to week.

a reply to: beezzer

I'd argue that a phone isn't a luxury item and that landlines are largely going the way of the dodo in many homes. The program erroneously called "Obama Phones" (which predates Obama) provides very basic service comparable in cost to a landline.

Also, not having a computer or Internet access is certainly a huge disadvantage for kids growing up these days as well as for out of work people. I was fortunate to have a father in IT so I grew up with a computer and access to BBSes, online services and later the Internet. I'm an autodidact and having these tools at my disposal put a world of knowledge at my finger tips, enabling me to teach myself the skills that pay my bills.

I don't believe very many people would make an argument for the rest of your list being necessities.

That said, are these sorts of discussions really all that useful? I guess the answer depends on whether you believe that people are poor primarily because they are unmotivated, lazy and dependent on welfare programs or because their is an increasing lack of opportunity. In other words, if labor supply is increasingly greater than labor demand, do we blame those stuck in the excess of labor supply?

It seems to me that we're headed for an economic cataclysm if we don't start addressing the changes brought about by our technology (globalization, automation, computerization, etc) and plan for the future.

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: peter_kandra

So when you run the numbers on the economy, and things like how the minimum wage compares to inflation, to how much a person, significantly above minimum wage, is still well below what minimum wage should be if it kept up with inflation, and you feel our economy is well and good?

You see those starving kids in africa, and think, they need to better themselves, it's there fault?

No we hgave a global economic crisis on our hands, and frankly it's only going to get worse if we keep insisting on ignoring it, and blaming the poor while the cash all funnels into the hands of the few.

Oh and the difference is, you can retire early if you want, you can live nice effort free if you want, we "poor" people if we have those things it's cause we're debt slaves in debt to our eyeballs, with very little real hope of ever retiring someday, work work work til we die broken and miserable from years of hard labor.

I never said that the economy was humming along on all cylinders. It is what it is. My point is that if I lost my job tomorrow, I'm confident that I would find a fairly comparable one within a reasonable amount of time. If it turns out that I was not able to, I wouldn't cry and complain about it. I would learn another skill, do manual labor or whatever I needed to do to for my family and I to survive.

I also never blamed the poor for their plight. I simply said that there are resources available for them to rise out of poverty.
I also never mentioned anyone outside the United States, but my bad...my post was specifically referring to those in the US.

Why does the minimum wage argument keep coming up? It's an artificial construct and inflation is so biased with the "basket of goods" they use to calculate it that's it's almost laughable. I don't live in a vacuum. I know the cost of some goods, especially food and energy have been rising rapidly. I don't claim to have all the solutions to all the problems. I just control what I can and try not to complain about the rest.

a reply to: Edumakated

I have a 1% HH income. There is very little in my house that someone who lives in the worst ghetto in Chicago doesn't have materially. I take the subway, the poor kid takes the subway. I have a flat screen TV, the poor kid has a flat screen TV. I have a cell phone, the poor kid has a cellphone. I have air conditioning, the poor kid has air conditioning. I have a car, the poor kid's parents have a car. In fact, my house is not even materially larger than the houses in the closet poor area to me which is one of the worst in America.

I have to question how much experience you have with poor folks. Up until a few years ago, we owned a few rental properties in low income neighborhoods. Not a lot of air conditioning unless you're counting box fans in the windows? The people I knew didn't have much in the way of luxury items. Flat screen TVs might have been a luxury item 7-10 years ago when I was putting them in every room of my house, now they're the only TVs on the market. Their furniture tended to be shabby (unlike mine which my wife insists on replacing when we redecorate every few years), their appliances were often ancient, inefficient low end models and many of the neighborhood women would walk to a local church once a week to pick up drastically reduced price bread/rolls/buns through some sort of program.

a reply to: peter_kandra

You control what you can, living in your own little bubble while everything crumbles around you, around the world, you recognize that cost of essentials are going up while wages to afford these essentials are not, and think just sitting there caring only about you and yours is the high road?

You straight up said you recognize things are getting worse, and your advice is essentially to "do nothing about the growing economic decline, look out for number one, and simply make the best of the way things are" in other words you recognize things are declining but think we should all just accept it, roll over and taken our beatings by our corporate masters while begging between beatings for scraps, and being glad they deigned to feed us some of their waste.

a reply to: Puppylove

Yes! That is a HUGE thing for poor people. Stress.

Stress that this or that will break. Stress that this or that will run out.

People living paycheck to paycheck don't have the luxury of security. They don't know how they'll get by if something breaks, because they don't have the cash to fix it. If something runs out, they can't afford to replace it.

Stress leads to all kinds of nasty health issues.

Ever notice that very rich people don't smoke cigarettes? Hmmm..

There's an oil company building nearby. You NEVER see any of their employees smoking in the smoking area. All the people there make over 80k a year. Go a block around the corner near the Social Security and DMV...you'll see half the employees out back smoking, most of which are paid less than half the entry level oil company jobs.

Now, granted the SS and DMV people aren't engineers ...but not everyone is at the oil company. You have a lot of admin people and low-level tech support people. The difference? They still are paid more in the private sector. It's really only the higher ups in public service (gov. jobs) that are making good money. The people you interact with at the DMV are getting squat. And you wonder why they're cranky. They have to tell people "NO" all day and get paid crap for it. People hate being told no...

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: peter_kandra

You control what you can, living in your own little bubble while everything crumbles around you, around the world, you recognize that cost of essentials are going up while wages to afford these essentials are not, and think just sitting there caring only about you and yours is the high road?

You straight up said you recognize things are getting worse, and your advice is essentially to "do nothing about the growing economic decline, look out for number one, and simply make the best of the way things are" in other words you recognize things are declining but think we should all just accept it, roll over and taken our beatings by our corporate masters while begging between beatings for scraps, and being glad they deigned to feed us some of their waste.

I don't live in a bubble. I grew up in a single parent household in a small apartment in an urban area. Saying that everything is crumbling around me is a little sensationalist, no? I also never said things were getting worse. I said that some costs were rising rapidly.

Since apparently I'm going about things all wrong, what's your master solution to the all the worlds problems? A one world government? A reset of the global economy? Don't use generalities, be specific and explain how you would restructure everything on a global scale without it taking decades. The UN has been trying to fix and/or better things for 70 years. How's that going?

originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: Edumakated

I have a 1% HH income. There is very little in my house that someone who lives in the worst ghetto in Chicago doesn't have materially. I take the subway, the poor kid takes the subway. I have a flat screen TV, the poor kid has a flat screen TV. I have a cell phone, the poor kid has a cellphone. I have air conditioning, the poor kid has air conditioning. I have a car, the poor kid's parents have a car. In fact, my house is not even materially larger than the houses in the closet poor area to me which is one of the worst in America.

I have to question how much experience you have with poor folks. Up until a few years ago, we owned a few rental properties in low income neighborhoods. Not a lot of air conditioning unless you're counting box fans in the windows? The people I knew didn't have much in the way of luxury items. Flat screen TVs might have been a luxury item 7-10 years ago when I was putting them in every room of my house, now they're the only TVs on the market. Their furniture tended to be shabby (unlike mine which my wife insists on replacing when we redecorate every few years), their appliances were often ancient, inefficient low end models and many of the neighborhood women would walk to a local church once a week to pick up drastically reduced price bread/rolls/buns through some sort of program.

I couldn't give a bucket of hamster piss what you question about my experiences. I've spent way more time "in the hood" than most people.

I never argued that every thing a poor person has is going to be as nice as a rich persons. The point is THEY HAVE IT. Is a 20 year old Saturn as nice as a late model BMW? No. But they both get you from A to B. Is a window unit as nice as central air? No, but they both cool you off. Hell, in my area, most of the rich people don't even have central air because a lot of the homes are older before central air became standard so we have window units too.

The point stands that the standard of living for even the poorest in America exceeds that of the middle class and rich of a generation ago and most certainly of the rest of the world today.

Poor people tend to stay poor because they do things that make them poor. Rich people become rich doing things that make them rich.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: Puppylove

Yes! That is a HUGE thing for poor people. Stress.

Stress that this or that will break. Stress that this or that will run out.

People living paycheck to paycheck don't have the luxury of security. They don't know how they'll get by if something breaks, because they don't have the cash to fix it. If something runs out, they can't afford to replace it.

Stress leads to all kinds of nasty health issues.

Ever notice that very rich people don't smoke cigarettes? Hmmm..

There's an oil company building nearby. You NEVER see any of their employees smoking in the smoking area. All the people there make over 80k a year. Go a block around the corner near the Social Security and DMV...you'll see half the employees out back smoking, most of which are paid less than half the entry level oil company jobs.

Now, granted the SS and DMV people aren't engineers ...but not everyone is at the oil company. You have a lot of admin people and low-level tech support people. The difference? They still are paid more in the private sector. It's really only the higher ups in public service (gov. jobs) that are making good money. The people you interact with at the DMV are getting squat. And you wonder why they're cranky. They have to tell people "NO" all day and get paid crap for it. People hate being told no...

Correlation does not equal causation. Smokers on average have lower IQs, so it is no surprise you see them working in those crappy jobs.

www.telegraph.co.uk...

From the article:

Prof Weiser said: "People on the lower end of the average IQ tend to display poorer overall decision-making skills when it comes to their health.

"People with lower IQs are not only prone to addictions such as smoking. These same people are more likely to have obesity, nutrition and narcotics issues.

a reply to: peter_kandra

I don't have all the answers but I damn well think it's time we all started talking about and figuring it out rather than sitting around with our thumbs up our collective asses as our economy fails to keep up with the technological changes brought about by industrialization and corporate greed.

As for the united nations, I trust them to do anything right about as much as I do our corporate overlords for whom they are probably bought and paid for. As usual when there's a major problem with society, the people with the power are the core of it. It's been that way every time throughout all of human history, to pretend otherwise is ignorance.

So pointing to the people in power, or who are puppets to the people in power and saying, they haven't fixed it, what can we do, is silly.

The people in power don't care, and they're not going to care until they have to care. They aren't going to take notice or do anything about things until they HAVE to take notice and do things for anyone but themselves. Same has been true of kings, emperors, and all others with power throughout the ages, and that's the problem.

The world is ruled by corporations right now, not presidents, not senates, not anything, just puppet leaders and economic power house elites.

They aren't fixing the problem, because they don't truly want to, nor does the united nations really even have the power to. I don't know how to fix things, but I do know it involves us collectively deciding to do SOMETHING about it, something big enough that those with power realize they can't keep grinding us down further and further with no recompense.

a reply to: Edumakated

Just because someone "has" something doesn't make it equal, not by any long stretch.

That 20 year old Saturn may be on its last legs. What happens when it breaks down and they can't drive it to work? What about that window AC unit that's on the fritz? It's also not very efficient and costs them more in electricity than the fancy central air system the rich folks have.

Just having a cheap, out dated, worn out copy of something isn't the same as having the quality "real deal". Having to deal with old, worn out, broken down, substandard items causes immense amounts of stress.

Those of us with nice things can tell ourselves "well, so what if he's poor -- he's got a cell phone. Sure it's old and the battery always dies, but at least he HAS one!"

It's not the same, it simply isn't.

a reply to: Edumakated

I know a few MD's that smoke...they certainly don't have low IQ.

Your argument could be twisted against you, as correlation does not imply causation.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: Edumakated

I know a few MD's that smoke...they certainly don't have low IQ.

Your argument could be twisted against you, as correlation does not imply causation.

I guess the phrase "on average" went over your head. While MDs may be smarter on average than many people, some lack basic common sense. I know surgeons who can barely tie their own shoes or would get hustled by a 9 year old on the subway.

Not all smokers are stupid. However, an inordinate amount of stupid people smoke.