How much does air conditioning cost the poor person? Honestly, how much money do you believe they could put away if they didn't use their air conditioning (that they might have) as compared to what the average poor person spends due to their air conditioning right now?
well, i have a pretty small house (it's Japanese), and we only cool the rooms we are in rather than the whole house - really, mostly just two bedrooms (ours and the boys). we use natural light during the day, and electricity at night. this month, we are out of the house (she's in the US and I'm TAD); and our electricity bill is about $215 (ish) lower. Mind you, we're in Oki, so it's hot and humid. In the US, when we were living in an Apartment, we probably could have saved more like $125 ish. And, the months when we were down, that's generally what we did - we cut the luxuries and bought food and gas.
And the vast majority of air conditioning was barely available in the 1950s.
yes. that's the
point. we have something now that we didn't have then, and surprise, it costs us more to have something than to have nothing. give the choice, we would generally
rather have it than not, and thus claiming that we are
worse off because we have made this trade and we should all long for the grand ole days of the 1950s is poppycock.
But then again, only about a decade ago did cell phones really start to become popular, and now, every servicemember (or at least sailor) is required to have a cell phone so that they can be reached no matter where they might be.
required? not in the USMC - if you have a billet where it's required you are issued one. I'm carrying a temp right now for while i'm on TAD and when I get done I'll turn it back in.
We are not living in the '50s. Things that were considered conveniences then, are now requirements.
this is incorrect - these things remain improvements in our standard of living. i have half siblings on medicaid, and I am forever seeing them posting pictures on facebook.... that they take with their smart phones.
Hell, only about 62% of the households in the 1950's had phones. Now, it would be pretty much impossible to get/keep a job without a phone of some kind that you could be reached by fairly quickly.
and cable television? who will fire you if you aren't watching MTV?
And most of those in the middle class are living lives that would be considered rich. And those at the top are living lives almost undreamed of in the 1950s.
that is all correct
thank you for taking several pages to agree with us that life is now better than it was in the 1950's
.
You brought up them having those items. Most of those items were not even available in the '50s.
precisely. the poor today have access to (and are accessing) things today that weren't available to even the wealthy in the 1950's.
So, maybe if you compared the activities and what was owned by the varying classes in the '50s to what those classes now have/enjoy, you may have a point. But, by just listing what the poor have, it simply appears that you are just complaining about them owning stuff that you consider "above their means" without any information to go along with why they have that stuff.
i'm not complaining about them owning stuff - you seem not to have read the backstory on this. I am pointing out that aren't we
glad that they own stuff, aren't their lives probably
better for things like air conditioning, safer cars, etc.
I want to help everyone. There is no reason that everyone shouldn't be able to live lives that are at least a little closer between the top and the bottom. That means that the top is going to have to do some sacrificing too.
if that means cutting them off the government teat all well and good - i'm a fan of means testing government giveaways. but if you mean trying to tax them extra then that is a problem. you can't build up one class by taking from another, not really. attempts to jack up taxes on the wealthy invariably backfire and hurt the poor and middle class.
1. I am all for making divorce harder, when there are children involved. I would also say that we should raise the age of marriage to at least 18, if not 21, to discourage teens from getting married too young.
i'm down with both of those. no fault easy quick divorce for $99.99 is destroying our country.
2. I am all for making child development classes, including comprehensive sex education, child costs analysis, and field trips/videos of childbirth, mandatory for all high school freshmen.
sexual education is something far too easy for the state to abuse it's mandate on - it belongs in the homes, not the schools.
3. I am all for decriminalizing most hard drugs, so that costs saved from incarcerations and fines paid for violations can go toward rehabilitation programs
and we would see a rise in their use, which means a rise in child abuse, child abandonment, poverty, divorce, crime (ironically - much "drug related crime" involves people engaging in illegal behavior to get money
for drugs) and so on and so forth. you could have an argument with regards to "soft" drugs like marijuana which works generally like alcohol, but not methamphetamine.
I also would like to see drug testing for anyone who gets government assistance or any government paycheck
why? you just legalized it.
Also, legalizing and highly regulating/taxing marijuana would also help to boost tax revenue and decrease the number of people in jail for such a petty drug.
truth.
4. This one is going to take a bigger push than the rest. It is going to take a while to implement because you cannot force people to learn. You can force them to stay in school for only so long. Mandatory financial planning classes might help this a little, especially if done prior to legal drop-out age. Encouraging parents to take an active part in their child's school life. Mandating certain tutoring programs and/or level of class participation as a part of receiving assistance for children might help, but it would certainly be iffy on how legal it is. Mandated parenting classes relative to the age of the child every year or two for those receiving assistance might help as well.
as a public choice theory sympathizer, my first question is, what are the incentives involved. have we
incentivized sticking it through graduating and then working full time? or have we
disincentivized those behaviors.
my younger half sister in law is 16 years old with a baby, the daughter of a single mother herself. she hasn't graduated high school, and her intention is to 'finish school at some point, because that would, like, help with getting a job'. instead she's living with single-mom parent in your classic description of a generational cycle of poverty. we have worked hard, lived lean, and are now doing okay, so we offered to take her in. it would be easier on my wife's biological mother, easier on her sister (we could take care of little one with our boys while she focused on finishing education) and - most important to us - better for the baby, who would be raised at least part of her critical early years in a two-parent fully functioning household. at first she was excited, and so we got the paperwork ,flew the wife back to the states to do the legal work, and were prepared all told to spend about 8-10K ish out of our "we want to buy a house one day" fund in order to help her live a better life. then she found out that there would be no parties at our house - we mean it about the education and the work. and no boyfriends coming over to screw her while the baby sleeps in the crib by the bed. and baby daddy is 'just about' to start making child-payments, and baby daddy momma wouldn't like it...
she
decided to remain poor, and she
decided to raise her daughter in conditions that will probably guide her to become a single, young, poor mother herself.
no banker robbed her. no top 1% guy saw her walking down the street and forced her to drop out of high school and start sleeping with older guys. she is poor because at the end of the day it's
easier.
And these are not the only reasons that people are living in poverty.
overwhelmingly those are the main ones. if we were to wake up tomorrow and have all mothers of impoverished children marry the fathers of their kids, child poverty would be reduced by over 75%.
And even within those categories, there are people for which those were not choices that they made, but rather things that were not an option for them. How do you stop a person from divorcing you if they decide to leave?
you marry well at the beginning, and that person will (odds are) likely not do so well themselves. in the meantime, we should probably stop
deliberately disincentivizing marriage. the illegitimacy rate for blacks in America was lower than the rates for whites prior to us putting them on welfare and paying them not to get married.
How do you force someone to marry you if they decide they want nothing to do with you or your baby? [/quote
don't have sex outside of marriage unless you are willing to marry that person and they are willing to marry you. hell, maybe (this might be crazy) don't have sex outside of marriage.
What do you do if the school rules prevent you from graduating high school because you failed one grade in elementary school?
we institute school choice so they can go to a smarter school, but realistically, graduation should be based on a national, standardized test that comes with
incentives. You pass the citizens test to become an adult citizen, you you don't.
Not everyone can afford the classes for their adult high school diploma or to move to another state on their own at 18 or 19, just to finish a semester of school.
which is one of the several reasons I am in favor of vouchers. Indiana has just instituted school choice for its' lower-income children. I won't pretend it will change the situation for all or even most (most having been raised by a failed subculture to be a failed subculture), but for some it will provide that much needed escape.
I have never said "just give them money". But education and a leg up, along with systems in place to limit the impact of such things can go a long way.
and a leg up? in what way? limit the impact of "such things"? how? at some point unless you structure
very carefully you are giving them money or buying them things to make up for their failure to provide for themself; meaning that you are only increasing their relative incentive to continue to do so.
And it is going to take more than letting them fail on their own, because that is really not an option that is likely to happen. It will lead to more problems.
more problems are coming. the fiscal survival of the Western states at this point necessitates sharp reductions in social spending upon which we have trained these populaces to be dependent. the riots we saw in Greece and Britain, the flash mobs and OWS'ers we see here in the States? they are all part of the same phenomena, and they are only the beginning. These aren't educated enlightened youngsters who have reached a new transcendental understanding and are speaking out against injustice, they are nomads - trained to live off of the efforts of the proceeds of workers in the civilized farming community below. we've taught them that they are justified to take from others in order to sustain themselves, and trained them to think of that as a morally just order of the world, reinforced by the relative ease of doing so. we have created a generation of feral human beings within our own society. what do
you think their reaction is going to be - these people who have been trained to think that it is their right to sustain themselves indefinitely off of others - when they are informed that the state can no longer be the vehicle for that transaction? they will turn - as all nomads do - to burning and pillaging. you can only pay the
danegeld so long before you run out of other people's money.
the longer we wait, the worse the social explosion becomes. we can either allow the natural results of their failure to force these people to start becoming productive members of civilized society now, or we can gun them down in the streets (not hyperbole) sometime in the next 20 years. you tell me which is "kinder".
