Fighting Poverty One Idea at a Time

Never has a non-German wanted to punch an Englishman so bad.

EDIT: Let us also put effort into improving our nation's infrastructure! Our school-to-prison pipeline was built decades ago and isn't up to serving the country's needs in the future!

Paleocon wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtVcxPvCIAAdueH.jpg)

Mainly because they are too busy doing hipster things like working minimum wage jobs and being crushed by student loan debt.

That's... par for the course

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtVcxPvCIAAdueH.jpg)

Mainly because they are too busy doing hipster things like working minimum wage jobs and being crushed by student loan debt.

That's... par for the course

Booooooooo! Get off the stage!

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtVcxPvCIAAdueH.jpg)

Mainly because they are too busy doing hipster things like working minimum wage jobs and being crushed by student loan debt.

That's... par for the course

Booooooooo! Get off the stage!

Yeah, I've totally heard him make that joke be-fore!

I used the phrase "par for the course" with a 22 year old co-worker yesterday. He didn't get the reference.

Huh. That sounds like a story a journalist can really... Um... drive down the green for a home run?

I'm thinking these guys should have seen this coming. From 21 years ago:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

nel e nel wrote:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

I still hold out a whole lot of hope for capitalism, but think that the role of the state is to define rules around the economic engine that benefit the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, it appears that the last 30 years have been defined as one of a government role being hijacked by moneyed interests.

Paleocon wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

I still hold out a whole lot of hope for capitalism, but think that the role of the state is to define rules around the economic engine that benefit the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, it appears that the last 30 years have been defined as one of a government role being hijacked by moneyed interests.

When the moneyed interests are the only ones able to get elected, the outcome is fairly set.

Nomad wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

I still hold out a whole lot of hope for capitalism, but think that the role of the state is to define rules around the economic engine that benefit the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, it appears that the last 30 years have been defined as one of a government role being hijacked by moneyed interests.

When the moneyed interests are the only ones able to get elected, the outcome is fairly set.

Sadly true given present circumstances. That and recent supreme court decisions seem to have accelerated the velocity of that political direction as well.

Paleocon wrote:
Nomad wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

I still hold out a whole lot of hope for capitalism, but think that the role of the state is to define rules around the economic engine that benefit the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, it appears that the last 30 years have been defined as one of a government role being hijacked by moneyed interests.

When the moneyed interests are the only ones able to get elected, the outcome is fairly set.

Sadly true given present circumstances. That and recent supreme court decisions seem to have accelerated the velocity of that political direction as well.

Which - in my opinion - are more arguments in favor of wiping the slate clean and starting over.

Paleocon wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

In great timing, Bill Maher interviewed Richard Wolff last night about this very topic. Clips aren't up yet, but his basic premise was that capitalism isn't working anymore as it was originally intended (to create/support a large middle class - i.e. consumers that keep the economy going) so it's time to look at a new economic model altogether.

I still hold out a whole lot of hope for capitalism, but think that the role of the state is to define rules around the economic engine that benefit the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, it appears that the last 30 years have been defined as one of a government role being hijacked by moneyed interests.

I googled Wolff, and the first thing I saw is that his emphasis as an economics professor is Marxism. And while I will gladly adopt a socialist model, getting his opinions on capitalism right now is a little opportunistic. He is always going to find a problem with capitalism. That's not bad, but he is far from a neutral econ professor that has suddenly adopted a new view on capitalism.

The fact is, the use of an economic model as an enemy of our country, which supported the military industrial complex well, has done more damage to our country than anything else. We literally avoid particular solutions to problems because we turned anything with a hint of a socialist foundation into the boogeyman. We don't need to adopt a new model, we just have to open ourselves up to more solutions to problems we have.

The same guy that did the banned TED video also has a really good editorial on Politico. In it, he speaks to the wealthy, pointing out that the plundering of America's wealth has taken a toll, and we are closer and closer to an ugly turn. Things like Occupy Wall Street are just the beginning. The wealthy will no longer be safe. And when you mix in the police state rhetoric, it really does have the foundations of a violent uprising. That will suck for everyone, form the poor to the 1%.

Basically, we need an aggressive minimum wage, a return to the tax policies that created the booms we've had, and to use that revenue to support a strong social net and provide universal healthcare.

Fundamental to a functioning capitalist society is the idea that at least a sizable percentage of the best and brightest will succeed by virtue of the strength of their ideas and the product of their efforts. This is at the core of a Conservative moral philosophy.

But if the deck is so stacked because of measures taken to protect the interests of corporate and dynastic wealth, the mechanism for the mobility of these ideas and individuals is necessarily {ableist slur} (or even prevented entirely). If the best you can say about the financial opportunities for the smartest African American man in the ghetto is that he can become world class organized criminal, your capitalism is hosed so badly it no longer resembles capitalism.

It is not "socialism" to devise and implement a system for equality of educational opportunity. The idea that an accident of birth dictates your financial and social fate is (or at least used to be) deeply offensive to real conservatives.

When conservatives return to that revulsion and stop protecting the mechanisms that stifle the velocity of capital, we will, honestly, start to see progress regarding poverty.

SocialChameleon wrote:

If I were Queen of America, I'd start by going full-on Federation and provide a guaranteed basic income for every citizen over 18, regardless of wealth, and re-target supplemental assistance programs for those with particular needs beyond what a basic income provides.

All hail, the Queen of America! I support this idea, and would add something else, a maximum wage. In my wildest dreams it'd be something like a 30,000/3 Million minimum/maximum adjusted for cost of living. I really don't see how any one person needs more than 3 million dollars a year to live a comfortable life, or that any one person's worth and/or work are 100 times more than any other.

Rich people and poor people may once have had a common ancestor.

“Side by side, poor people and rich people look almost nothing alike, of course. It took months of chromosomal comparison to discover that links exist between, say, a top-level consultant at Bain Capital living in a gated community and a mother of three relying on multiple low-wage jobs to survive. And upon close inspection, it is possible to detect subtle, but striking, physical resemblances between these vastly different peoples.”

Related - Most Americans have enough retirement saved to live on the streets.

IMAGE(http://www.tickld.com/cdn_image_article/a_455_20140506161846.jpg)

I know I am a left leaning but I don't think anyone can seriously look at the direction of US culture/society is going and not see it as falling apart. It isn't necessarily bad, thinks are born, grown, and die. I expect we will have a place in the world like Britian does now in a few decades.

Time for Asia to rise up.

farley3k wrote:

I know I am a left leaning but I don't think anyone can seriously look at the direction of US culture/society is going and not see it as falling apart. It isn't necessarily bad, thinks are born, grown, and die. I expect we will have a place in the world like Britian does now in a few decades.

Time for Asia to rise up.

I tend to take a very dim view on America, American values, etc. We're not as awesome, just, righteous, excellent, etc. as we're constantly led to believe.

However, I disagree with the notion that our culture/society is falling apart. I think it's consistently been how things are today. Some areas are worse. Others are better.

I believe that we need to do a lot of soul searching and hard work to be more like the country our propaganda leads us to believe we are.

As an aside, as I re-read your post, I think you're confusing our society/culture with our empire. Britain's culture and society hasn't declined or really changed all that much -- that I'm aware of -- however their empire has surely diminished; their global reach and influence has declined; but their culture and society are still going strong.

kaostheory wrote:

As an aside, as I re-read your post, I think you're confusing our society/culture with our empire. Britain's culture and society hasn't declined or really changed all that much -- that I'm aware of -- however their empire has surely diminished; their global reach and influence has declined; but their culture and society are still going strong.

Yes perhaps empire is a better word. I don't know, I often see empire as dealing more with economic/military control of other countries, etc. I guess one could argue that we current do control other countries but I was thinking more of how our society/culture is considered the norm. I think that will end.

So Britain's culture and society haven't declined for British people but what they do is not considered the normal thing to do.

farley3k wrote:

So Britain's culture and society haven't declined for British people but what they do is not considered the normal thing to do.

I don't know what you're talking about.

*bites into offal pie*

plavonica wrote:

It’s also true, in this case, that a lot of conservative economists have already decided that inequality – as opposed to mobility or the even broader “economic opportunity” – isn’t a problem.

Oh good God I tried to read that linked article. If I ever need a go to example of smug idiots deciding that they can define anything any way they wish in order to make an argument, I'll dredge that piece of crap back up again. uugggh.

kaostheory wrote:

I think it's consistently been how things are today.

And that would be a mistake. The situation since the early 80's stands in marked contrast to the decades that preceded it. The effects of the choices we, as a people, have made, have affected our culture and society for the worse in the last 35 years. It's not moral failing, however - it's the callous decisions that have increased inequality and reduced opportunity for an entire generation.

The current generation is set to be the first one that is not better off than it's parents. For the majority of middle and lower class citizens, earning power has not really increased since the late 1960's. Secondary education was highly affordable into the mid-80's, but since government was pulled out of the business of helping young people prepare for a productive life with grants and loans, college costs have skyrockted, and those who can't afford a traditional education are now preyed upon by incompetent for-profit degree mills and predatory lenders. The parts of Congress which were dedicated to investigating issues and technology and issued reports and gave advice regarding rational policy choices were chopped to bits in the mid-90's and never rebuilt. Congress has literally ground to a halt in a way unprecedented in modern history, with policy now being implemented largely by executive degree. Deregulation has been applied widely and uniformly unsuccessfully (as implemented) across a large number of businesses, with dire and damaging results in the financial sector since the mid-80's. Tax cuts have continuously reduced government funding, and policy cuts have been aimed disproportionately at the social safety net, the transportation infrastructure and basic research. Oversight of government has become dangerously weak at the same time that the intel sector has multiplied without restraint, leading to the worst privacy and security abuses we've seen in decades. The US, once an important power globally, is now regarded as an exemplar of dysfunctional government and interventionist over-reach.

This is simply not the same country I came of age in. This period will be remembered kind of like the period of social reforms in the early 20th century, but in reverse; a time when Americans decided they really wanted to *experience* the things that kept the US a third-rate power in the mid-19th century and a callously expansionist one decades later, in the futile belief that "those were better times". They weren't. But that's where you have to look if you want to see what we are moving into right now.

Could be posted here or in the news story thread.

The middle class is 20 percent poorer than it was in 1984

Nostalgia is just about the only thing the middle class can still afford. That's because median wealth is about 20 percent lower today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was in 1984.

Yes, that's three lost decades.

Now, as you might expect, the middle class has been hit particularly hard by the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery. It's all about stocks and houses. The middle class doesn't have much of the former, but it does have a lot of the latter. And that's bad news, because, even though the crash decimated both, real estate hasn't come back nearly as much as equities have. So the top 1 percent, who hold more of their wealth in stocks, have made up more of the ground they lost. But, as the Russell Sage Foundation points out, the slow housing recovery means that, in 2013, median households were still 36 percent poorer than they were a decade earlier.

In fact, the housing bust was big enough to erase all the gains the middle class had made the past 30 years—and then some. As you can see below, median households didn't add much wealth between 1984 and 2007. That's what happens when real wages don't increase, and the cost of a middle class lifestyle—housing, healthcare, and higher education—does. So, as Dean Baker points out, when the crisis did come, it devoured these meager gains and left the middle class with 20 percent less wealth than they had when it was "Morning in America."

You guys are... meaners!!!. It's all the same game every time. Just when someone makes an encouraging post about an up-and-coming conservative presidential candidate hopeful coming up with a bold plan, you guys shoot that plan full of holes and go on to beat the drum about how awfully bad things are in ol' US of A! Shame on you!

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

You guys are... meaners!!!. It's all the same game every time. Just when someone makes an encouraging post about an up-and-coming conservative presidential candidate hopeful coming up with a bold plan, you guys shoot that plan full of holes and go on to beat the drum about how awfully bad things are in ol' US of A! Shame on you!

;)

Technically, most posts in this thread aren't even talking about the actual plan, as much as they are about general wealth inequality and straw-manning conservatives.

That is pretty mean.

Nomad wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

You guys are... meaners!!!. It's all the same game every time. Just when someone makes an encouraging post about an up-and-coming conservative presidential candidate hopeful coming up with a bold plan, you guys shoot that plan full of holes and go on to beat the drum about how awfully bad things are in ol' US of A! Shame on you!

;)

Technically, most posts in this thread aren't even talking about the actual plan, as much as they are about general wealth inequality and straw-manning conservatives.

That is pretty mean. ;)

To be fair, I haven't seen you talk about the plan, either. I thought you wanted our ideas.

Nomad wrote:

Technically, most posts in this thread aren't even talking about the actual plan, as much as they are about general wealth inequality and straw-manning conservatives.

Several of us did propose ideas, but you brushed them all off as attempts just to levy more taxes. Heck, I even asked you about what you considered the "leaks in the boat" in the current welfare system and you didn't respond.

Any discussion about poverty is going to involve the transfer of wealth. Any anti-poverty plan whose basic premise is that we have to transfer less wealth than we currently do isn't really an anti-poverty plan. It would be a plan to reduce government spending. And, if that's the ultimate goal, then let's just agree to start with a less vulnerable portion of the population.

OG_slinger wrote:
Nomad wrote:

Technically, most posts in this thread aren't even talking about the actual plan, as much as they are about general wealth inequality and straw-manning conservatives.

Several of us did propose ideas, but you brushed them all off as attempts just to levy more taxes. Heck, I even asked you about what you considered the "leaks in the boat" in the current welfare system and you didn't respond.

Any discussion about poverty is going to involve the transfer of wealth. Any anti-poverty plan whose basic premise is that we have to transfer less wealth than we currently do isn't really an anti-poverty plan. It would be a plan to reduce government spending. And, if that's the ultimate goal, then let's just agree to start with a less vulnerable portion of the population.

A few posted ideas, but if you look back thru the thread it's not a stretch to say most posts weren't talking about potential issues with the original article or even specific ideas to improve our current anti-poverty plan.

I disagree with your premise about the solution to poverty is the transfer of wealth. If that were the case, why do so many lottery winners and professional athletes wind up broke? They clearly had massive wealth transferred to them.

I do however think that education, as listed earlier, is a part of the solution.

The problem with Ryan's proposal is that it is just repackaging the same ideas. We have a ton of poor people in this country that need help, and we use programs to make sure they get food, housing, and healthcare. He wants to see if there is a snazzy new way to do it without proposing any ideas. Instead, he wants to let state opt to muck around with the current way to provide service, but throw in requirements that are created to privatize welfare.

Plans would be approved on four conditions: The state would have to spend all funding on people in need. Second, the state would have to hold people accountable through work requirements and time limits for every able-bodied recipient just as there are for cash welfare today.

Third, the state would have to offer at least two service providers. The state welfare agency couldn't be the only game in town. And fourth, the state would have to measure progress through a neutral third party to keep track of key metrics.

All this does is figure out how to deal with the poor that we have, while trying to privatize welfare, meaning that there would be a financial incentive to keep a large class in poverty for a new industry, or the eventual dismantling of the social nets we have.

You claimed you wanted a discussion about how to diminish poverty. But you haven't posted a single thing about that, other than agreeing that education is a good thing to invest in.

What Ryan wants to do is spend less and hope that helps. What most of the people in the thread are saying is that if you invest in real changes then we will spend less.