Back to basics: economic justice (political)

[oggbashan]

Despite the UK's welfare state we too have an underclass of people in "poverty".

The definition of "poverty" varies according to the commentator. Some suggest that poverty starts with anyone earning less than the average income - that means that half the bell curve will always be in poverty no matter what anyone does.

We do not have real poverty in that people have nowhere to live and nothing to eat except perhaps for some illegal immigrants, or immigrants waiting for a decision on whether they can stay or not.

We do have an underclass of people who have no incentive to move off state dependency. For most it is not a matter of choice but because of the disincentives to earn slightly more than state provided benefits. Earning just a few pounds a week more than the minimum stops many other benefits on a pound for pound basis and sometimes leaves the person/family actually worse off than if they didn't work.

For example I know a couple of pensioners that have a minimal income from a deceased spouse's company pension. If they didn't have that income they would actually be better off because the pension stops their entitlement to other benefits.

The arguments about deserving and undeserving poor go back to Elizabeth/Shakespearean times when the Poor Laws were introduced. Reading some of the pleas for admission of children to the Foundling Hospital in the 19th century is salutary. The hospital's income was insufficient to support all the children who could need help and the commissioners had to decide between children they could and couldn't take. They chose children of mothers who had tried and failed over children whose mothers hadn't tried. The desperate pleas are heart-rending yet only about one in ten appeals could be met.

I know a very few people locally who could be classed as the underclass of "undeserving" who are working the system. I know of even fewer who have been convicted of defrauding the system and some who should be. I know many who try to get out of the system and become self-supporting but are failing because of the poverty trap that stops benefits once another income is obtained.

Most of the people I know who live on state benefits would prefer to earn their way but the system does not make it easy to move from dependency to self-sufficiency.

Those who have a history of mental illness or have physical or mental disabilities have the hardest struggle to earn their way off benefits without intervention from someone else. There are charities that will help but as in the 19th century they have more potential beneficiaries than they can support.

Our system isn't perfect. It is better than nothing but the cheats and non-triers are vastly outnumbered by those who would prefer not to be state-dependent.

Og

 

[Pure]

to jbj

Blacks such as Bill Cosby and Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell make the same assertions about black-inflicted poverty and community disintegration

yes, i know. but the moral judgment "self inflicted" and therefore *deserving of poverty* is still NOT objective. after all, some very intelling churchmen have said, for example, that homosexuals choose their orientation and are blameworthy, and thus *deservedly* going to hell.

my point is that this "who is deservedly poor" is utterly subjective and NON factual. lots of smart people do this judging, just as they do with alcoholics. "he chooses to drink, and so deserves cirrhosis if he voluntarily overdoes it." uttering it, doesn't make it so.

OTOH, probably MOST of us deserve to be shot for laziness and dishonesty.!!

 

[incubus666]

The link below concerns poverty in America. Lot of information and surprises. It is worth reading the entire article.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm

Mike S.

 

[Pure]

to give the flavor of incubus article:

Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.
---


The authors by their standards estimate that only at most about 5 %. and on some scales 2%, of Americans are genuinely pinched (affecting living conditions, food, medical care).

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

PURE

You put words in my mouth.

I said the poverty and disintegration are self-inflicted inside the black community. Behavior comes with consequences and outcomes.

 

[Pure]

hi jbj

my point was that in this case 'self inflicted' is more of the nature of a moral judgement (like 'sinful' or 'depraved') than a factual one.

there is no factual basis for distinguishing John whose poverty is self inflicted, from Joe whose poverty is not.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

What an odd statement! Why would you possibly say that?

Do you really think we should all live separately in our own caves?

No, hence the necessary part.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

There is a certain irony that the Republican VP candidate is from the most socialistic state in the nation: Alaska.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

PURE

I believe there is a factual basis to pin responsibility where it belongs. Specific deeds and events correlate well with specific outcomes.

Prejudice often exists where everyone follows the same path, but a few individuals fail to get outcome the group gets.

I read a book about West Point. One of the cadets had good grades, passed all of the fitness tests, and met all the other standards that graduates are required to meet, yet West Point tried to pressure him to resign or tried to fail him up until the day of graduation. The kid didnt 'look' like a he-man warrior. His crime was looking dorky.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Milton Friedman explains why I'm right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

The Hallmark of the Underclass
The poverty Katrina underscored is primarily moral, not material.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007348

BY CHARLES MURRAY

Sunday, October 2, 2005

Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible--Democrats who are rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven't rediscovered poverty, we have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the years that people were ignoring it, including the Clinton years; and the programs politicians tout as solutions are a mismatch for the people who constitute the problem.

• We have rediscovered the underclass. Newspapers and television understandably prefer to feature low-income people who are trying hard--the middle-aged man working two jobs, the mother worrying about how to get her children into school in a strange city. These people are rightly the objects of an outpouring of help from around the country, but their troubles are relatively easy to resolve. Tell the man where a job is, and he will take it. Tell the mother where a school is, and she will get her children into it. Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

• The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.

A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate. When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.



Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

These increases are not explained by changes in college enrollment or any other benign cause. Large numbers of healthy young men, at ages when labor force participation used to be close to universal, have dropped out. Remember that these numbers ignore young males already in prison. Include them in the calculation, and the evidence of the deteriorating socialization of young males, concentrated in low income groups, is overwhelming.

Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio--the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35%--of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in the early 1960s was 24%.

But illegitimacy is now common throughout the population, right? No, it is heavily concentrated in low-income groups. Perhaps illegitimacy isn't as bad as we used to think it was? No, during the past decade the evidence about the problems caused by illegitimacy has grown stronger. What about all the good news about falling teenage births? About plunging welfare rolls? Both trends are welcome, but neither has anything to do with the proportion of children being born and raised without fathers, and that proportion is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next generation.

• The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Perhaps the programs now being proposed by the administration will help ordinary poor people whose socialization is just fine and need nothing more than a chance. It is comforting to think so, but past experience with similar programs does not give reason for optimism--it is hard to exaggerate how ineffectually they have been administered. In any case, poor people who are not part of the underclass seldom need help to get out of poverty. Despite the exceptions that get the newspaper ink, the statistical reality is that people who get into the American job market and stay there seldom remain poor unless they do something self-destructive. And behaving self-destructively is the hallmark of the underclass.

Hurricane Katrina temporarily blew away the screens that we have erected to keep the underclass out of sight and out of mind. We are now to be treated to a flurry of government efforts from politicians who are shocked, shocked, by what they saw. What comes next is depressingly predictable. Five years from now, the official evaluations will report that there were no statistically significant differences between the subsequent lives of people who got the government help and the lives of people in a control group. Newspapers will not carry that story, because no one will be interested any longer. No one will be interested because we will have long since replaced the screens, and long since forgotten.

Mr. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "Human Accomplishment" (HarperCollins, 2003), available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You can lead a horse to water but you cant make them drink.

This is where the nation is with the underclass. They wont drink until theyre thirsty enough.

The solution to the problem is draconian. Stop the welfare, and substitute it with real training and education and jobs. At the same time make every other option lethal to them.

 

[Pure]

it's a sermon and a fable

murray quoted by rox• The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Perhaps the programs now being proposed by the administration will help ordinary poor people whose socialization is just fine and need nothing more than a chance. It is comforting to think so, but past experience with similar programs does not give reason for optimism--it is hard to exaggerate how ineffectually they have been administered.

In any case, poor people who are not part of the underclass seldom need help to get out of poverty. Despite the exceptions that get the newspaper ink, the statistical reality is that people who get into the American job market and stay there seldom remain poor unless they do something self-destructive. And behaving self-destructively is the hallmark of the underclass.
----
let's get this straight: of the poor, there are the NON self destructive: they "seldom need help". they will not remain poor, for by working hard, they raise themselves.

there are the self destructive: they have an
inability to get up every morning and go to work. they have no concept of thrift and blow their money on entertainment, booze and drugs.

we might ask: HOW does murray know this? i suppose he looks to see if the fellow is employed and is gradualy bettering his position. then he's the morally worthy poor, and fortunately for us, needs no help.

OR the fellow is unemployed OR not getting anywhere: then it's because he's lazy and/or destructive. so folks, save your pennies. and to hell with his kids, who will in any case, turn out like him.

comforting worldview, rox. "invisible hand" takes care of everything at no cost to you.
--
sound like a LOT of tax cuts are in order, right? the Murray solution to US poverty: do nothing. reminds me of the medieval warrior during the crusades who was instructed by the pope, regarding a beseiged town: kill them all; God will sort them out.

 

[Pure]

note to jbj

The solution to the problem is draconian. Stop the welfare, and substitute it with real training and education and jobs. At the same time make every other option lethal to them.

good ideas, jbj. a trifle ... fascistic. but hey you'd do something. you see a problem. you'd spend a nickel to fix it. you are open and not a hypocrite.

consider rox. she pretends the social darwinian struggle will take care of everything and the gov't just needs to do nothing and keep her taxes low. the moral and the thrifty course of action--actually total INaction-- just happen to co incide.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

What's the solution? You already know what Murray's "Plan" is, Pure: Give every adult $10,000/year including a health insurance voucher, and that's it - no welfare, foodstamps, medicare, social security, etc.

This would accomplish the goal inferred by JBJ, but without the "fascism" (if that's what it is to just leave people on their own).

Murray:
"The Plan confers responsibility for dealing with human needs on all of us, whether we want it or not. Some will see this as a step backward, thinking that it is better to pay one's taxes, give responsibility to the government and be done with it. I think an alternative outlook is wiser: The Plan does not require us all to become part-time social workers. The nation can afford lots of free riders. But Aristotle was right. Virtue is a habit. Virtue does not flourish in the next generation because we tell our children to be honest, compassionate and generous in the abstract. It flourishes because our children practice honesty, compassion and generosity in the same way that they practice a musical instrument or a sport. That happens best when children grow up in a society in which human needs are not consigned to bureaucracies downtown but are part of life around us, met by people around us."

Without those conditions all the the government programs and handouts in the world won't do a damned thing to save the people who Pure denies exist.

How's that for wealth redistribution? How's that for establishing the kind of society decribed in Liar's "hard work required, bad luck not a disqualifier" post?

(BTW, the stipend phases out above around $50k/year, but everyone gets the insurance voucher.)

 

[Pure]

lets get this straight

[the Murray Plan]: Give every adult $10,000/year

if he's "underclass", this is the fellow who can't be bothered to get out of bed in the morning and has no concept of thrift [see quote below]. he cannot or will not plan for his economic betterment, nor if that is shown to him, act accordingly.

nice plan, rox!

[didn't anyone let you in on the secret? the plan, like the analysis, is a fable.]
---

murray We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Actually, fascism doesnt leave people out in the cold. Everyone gets a modest level of subsistence with ample public services...like healthcare, education, and transportation, AND competition is eliminated. Fascism acts more like organized labor and the mafia. That is, no one sleeps in a refrigerator carton and no one makes a fortune. You can go to medical school or sell your body, the government doesnt care....but you cant show your ass in public or have a politcal opinion.

 

[Pure]

jbj?

i take it that as a fascist, you are not quite sold on the murray plan of ten grand for each adult in the underclass [and some other poor adults, besides, iirc]

---
as to leaving people out in the cold. of course not. as you know hitler and others borrowed ideas from the social democrats. i don't have a serious problem with the DIS envenomed late "fascism" of Franco, ca. 1970. hey, at least it's real! unlike objectivist la-la-land of plenty with "voluntary taxes" only.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

[the Murray Plan]: Give every adult $10,000/year

if he's "underclass", this is the fellow who can't be bothered to get out of bed in the morning and has no concept of thrift [see quote below]. he cannot or will not plan for his economic betterment, nor if that is shown to him, act accordingly.

nice plan, rox!

[didn't anyone let you in on the secret? the plan, like the analysis, is a fable.]
---

murray We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

That's it? That's all you got? Carping, denial, bottomless and eternal welfare, and socialism?

Stick to philosophy, Pure. Your views there may be hopelessly miguided but at least you know what you're talking about in that field.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Actually, fascism doesnt leave people out in the cold. Everyone gets a modest level of subsistence with ample public services...like healthcare, education, and transportation, AND competition is eliminated. Fascism acts more like organized labor and the mafia. That is, no one sleeps in a refrigerator carton and no one makes a fortune. You can go to medical school or sell your body, the government doesnt care....but you cant show your ass in public or have a politcal opinion.

Everyone works hard, toes the line, and lives in poverty with no hope of advancement. Except for the looters at the top, who get ahead by being buds with the commissars, or gauleiters, or whatever label they carry.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Having never read the Murray Plan or anything, from a purely ideological standpoint I think it'd be really interesting--maybe very telling--to see what happens to people who are given the means alone (money) calculated to cover their needs (less income than is able to make basic goals certain like food and shelter)...

...and then see whether that works.

I'm not saying its the greatest plan ever, just that we'd have easier accounting of how much it takes to support our underprivileged. Instead of complex bureacracies, it'd be awfully clear from one year to the next "welfare costs us X"--if its not enough, we recognize that's going to cost more; if its plenty, we can plan for the future with it.

And if people blow it on ridiculous stuff, we can have some moral authority to say "tough".

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

ROXANNE

What you characterize as fascism is our present American system.

James Michener made many visits to Spain when it was a monarchy, republic, and fascist dictatorship. I lived in Spain 2 years while Franco was in power.

Under the monarchy and republic, people lived in poverty and starved. Under Franco they didnt.

What I observed was: Clerks earned crap and there wasnt any hope of earning more, so long as you were a clerk. But you werent locked into being a clerk. You could go to medical school if you wanted to...or you could work as a hooker and buy several taxis. And each vocation or profession had income limits; the hooker likely made more than the doctor, but she couldnt sell her wares for whatever she wanted, nor could the MD.

In the paper Sunday is a story about our local state legislator. In the general scheme of things his job is piss-ant size, yet he collected 500K from the medical industry for the election. The legislature meets 3 months a year and pays 25K. He says he's a hardcore conservative, but tried to push through a bill to increase the sales tax to pay for illegals hospital care. He's forever pushing new, mandatory medical interventions that people are forced to get if they enroll in school or go to the ER. Being a guy I dont need a vaccine for uterine cancer.

How is this different from a dictator?