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People who want to tweak the definitions just want to talk about something that is more arms length, objective and doesn't involve facing personal feelings and realities.
Mots often, I find they are neocons, bureaucrats or just mean-spirited (coming from the "I did it so can you")... or all 3 (as in Stephen Harper)
Really? Are you saying that a person is incapable of learning if they are poor?
You don’t need money to, at the very least, become self-educated. My family’s (American) history is rooted in rural farming (before that, they were very poor immigrants from Europe—they had absolutely nothing but the “rags”, to use your term, on their backs). My great grandmother lived in a sod house with a dirt floor on the Dakota prairie). But, what is interesting is that that side of my family valued learning—it was expected of everyone—even though they didn’t have any money. I had a great uncle who learned French and, for his pastime, he translated all of Voltaire into English. He lived in a very tiny house in rural Hamilton, ND. He had no money but was educated.
Did their hard work instantly cause those generations to instantly become wealthy? No. But what has happened was that those expectations were passed down to later generations and each generation took things a few steps further. My dad, a rural school teacher, left no doubt in my mind that all four of his kids were going to college (all did, and three have advanced degrees). Do you know how much money I got from my dad after I turned 18? 200 dollars!! Today, that would be considered “child abuse”.
Same thing with my sig other. Her dad (who was quite old when she was born in his second marriage) raised six kids during the depression—by himself. Literally. He killed deer throughout the year to eat. They were about as poor as you can get. But, he instilled in them, and later in my sig other, the absolute importance of learning. Was he ever rich? No way. He was the janitor in the county court house and shoveled coal into the bins for the boiler. But, his daughter is now a very successful attorney who is licensed to practice law in that same court house.
I know that many progressives absolutely hate “pull-up-the-bootstraps” stories because they illustrate that a person has a significant degree of control and responsibility for their own future and they show that it’s not essential to cry for the government to make everything better…or even easier.
I look at the history of my family and how poor they were and how, despite their meager financial condition, managed to inculcate the importance of learning in their children. My brother’s Ph.D. thesis was dedicated to his paternal grandparents because their attitudes towards education—not their wealth, or lack of wealth—was the reason he valued education and achieved what he did.
Most of the people often labeled as “poor” today aren’t even close to being what real poor was a very, very short time ago.
No, you said that. What I'm saying is that children learn more when they are stimulated, and that means having books and magazines and writing materials, the kinds of things people with means have and that cost money to buy. Kids do learn from an early age onward, and studies have shown that there are children who just aren't experiencing the same life oppportunities for stimulation in low income groups compared with those families living anywhere above the poverty line. In Canada, we have an unofficial poverty line defined by the feds called LICOS, I believe. Someone may want to correct me on that.
And I believe the U.S. government is still using poverty guidelines defined in the 1960's wrt to what a family needs to get by. It doesn't say very much about what a family needs in order to fully participate in American society today.
You're describing a bygone era, a time when anybody could could come to America and make good. Times have changed dramatically, and it looks like the bulk of immigrants wanting to come to the U.S. are from oppressive little countries just a few days drive from Texas.
My dad's paycheque from the Steel mill was somewhere around $350 every two weeks. He had a grade nine education, and his paycheque supported my mother and four kids easily in the 1970's.
This isn't the 1950's or 60's. A friend of mine paid a visit to his birth country, Scotland, for the first time since immigrating here in the 1960's. He says the reason he came here in the first place was that Scotland wasn't very prosperous back then. He says it looks as if the situation is reversed today. Everybody in Scotland has money to spend. His 78 year old mother had to give him money to afford to go to a soccer game with his brothers. And she lives rent-free in a flat for seniors.
Savings is way down in North America, Sven. And, the U.S. and Canada are now considered having the largest low wage workforces among richest countries. We can continue shovelling more of the national income to the richest few, but we're creating income gaps that are now a canyon, and wealth gaps between rich and poor that have become a chasm. MIT economist Paul Krugman says inequality in America is nearing, or at, 1920's levels.
Poverty is relative, yes. But let's not go saying that our politicians have come good on promises to reduce child poverty, like is already shown possible in other countries, when they haven't. The numbers living in poverty have increased in the U.S. since Bush but not lowered. Canada has 20 percent more children living anywhere below the unofficial poverty line since Brian Mulroney signed the free trade agreement. And there are over 30 million Americans reporting food insecurity at least once a month, and several million more don't report anything to anybody because they have no physical address, so who can they complain to?.
There are people out there who cannot afford to go college or university to upgrade themselves because they or their family are too poor. Not everyone had the same circumstances as you and yours. Perhaps some had to drop out of school to keep a roof over their heads?
One thing I noticed in your post was that your parents/grandparents lived in rural areas which allowed them to supplement their food supply with gardens and deer etc. This is obviously no longer as widely available in the past and certainly not for urbanites. What, in today's society is available to supplement people whose income is as meagre as your families'was in the past?
Regardless, until we comes to grips with the fact that our economic system is designed to enrich one group and impoverish another, most of this is just window dressing.
To have the same purchasing power in 2006 as $350 purchased in 1975, a person would have to earn $1,311.52, according to U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI). Or, to put it another way, that is equivalent to $31,500 per year in today's dollars (which is roughly an hourly rate of $15.13 (for one wage earner for a six-person family).
But, the way many people complain today, those kind of wages are criminal!! And, BOTH parents have to work. And, not only do both parents have to work, they have to work TWO jobs each!!! Which, as you have illustrated, is such a canard.
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Sven ]
Assuming that’s correct, why might that be so?
Personally, I don’t think people want to work as hard as is necessary in order to create wealth. Look at Europe and the prevalent “work to live, not live to work” mantra. Fine. If someone doesn’t want to work hard, they can’t expect the benefits. Is hard work going to guarantee success? Absolutely not. But hard work does greatly increase the probability of success. Likewise, not working hard greatly increases the probability of never getting ahead.
And, “hard work”? Very few people work as hard today as people used to have to work. It wasn’t too long ago that people (farmers, for example) worked all day, every day. Did they have vacations? Ah, probably not. I work way harder than the average person does today. But, I don’t work anywhere near as hard as people had to not to long ago (and for time immemorial before that).
I'm not going to go in to American poverty, except to say that the Census Bureau is using dated guidelines for poverty that haven't changed since 1960. The U.S. feds report 35.9 million living anywhere BELOW those outdated poverty guidelines, including over 12 million children.
And in Canada, half of working Canadians don't earn $30 thousand a year. Almost one in four Canadian workers doesn't earn ten dollars an hour. The cost of living always goes up, Sven, never down.
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
Then how do you find the time to fill up these babble threads?
And I'll just FF us to what would ultimately be the conclusion of a debate on American poverty. Washington-based http://EPInet.org says earned income tax credits work in tandem with an updated minimum wage in alleviating poverty but not by increasing one without updating the other to reflect inflation.
But the problem in America, and now more prevalent in Canada than before, is the phenomenon where people work two and three jobs and still can't make ends meet. Having a job is no longer a guarantee that people won't be living in poverty.
Again, things are quite a bit more different in North America than two or three or four decades ago. It's more a case of income doesn't cover outlays, and I think it tends to be with the big items, like rent, groceries, transportation, and things that are considered necessary now that didn't exist in the 1960's. A grade twelve education is no longer a guarantee of the good life like it was 35 years ago. A new teacher in Maine or Connecticut can't afford the median rent for a one or two bedroom apt across major U.S. cities at something like $910/mo.
Work for welfare was as much a one-off up here as it was for Reagan and Bush. They can't push a million or two million people on social assistance into low wage work and not expect another one to two million to be displaced into unemployment and poverty(Robert Solow, Nobel laureate economist). There are only so many low wage jobs to be had and so many hours of work in a day. No other country's citizens work as many hours as Americans do, Sven. And no other rich country has as high a child poverty as the U.S.
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
memories...
As I mentioned in another thread, as a kid growing up in a working class family I remember my mother having 'scrimping money' and my Dad always talked about working to make 'ends meet'.
I thought he was a butcher making ' ends MEAT' ... lol
(he was an aircraft mechanic)
That's already accounted for in the $350.00 to $1,311.44 differential.
So, let's say that $110,000 is "rich". That's a couple with two pretty fair incomes. But, they both have to WORK.
Now, compare that to a person with $10 million (or, God forbid, someone like Bill Gates with $50 BILLION). To call the couple making $110,000 "rich" strips the word of any meaning because it throws that couple in the same class as the woman with $10 million who doesn't have to work.
So, how do YOU define "rich" and "poor", M. Spector?
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Sven ]
The terms rich and poor in this thread and in the Walkom article are relative terms. There is no need to decide whether "rich" means $100,000 a year or $250,000 a year. There is no need to have a fruitless debate about whether people who live on minimum wage are "poor".
You are just derailing the thead with this line of inquiry.
I understand the concept of relative wealth. And, there are a couple of ways of looking at it. Wealth relative to others and wealth relative to what an individual used to have.
The politics of envy looks at (fixates, really) on what "the Jones" have. But, even using the numbers you were citing, the poorest 20% are relatively better off than they were before.
Personally, I don't give a shit about the wealth of Bill Gates or people who are truly wealthy. I'm more interested in seeing my own income increase over time so that I have more than what I had before. Why should I care what is happening to others, other than to burn with envy about them?
ETA: The reason the definition of "rich" and "poor" is relevant to this discussion is that all classes of people are better off than they were a mere 100 years ago (and for all time immemorial before that).
And, if you really want to get into comparing "poor" with "rich" in relative terms to each other, why don't you compare the Canadian "poor" with the truly poor people of the world. With that relative comparision, all Canadians are "rich".
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Sven ]
Some of us actually think it's a matter of legitimate concern that we live in a society where economic disparity is increasing. And it's not just out of personal envy.
What is fundamentally wrong with economic disparity if, over time, all classes of incomes are increasing in real terms? If a teacher can purchase, say, 10% more housing, food, clothing, etc., etc. than they could ten years ago and a physician can purchase 20% more of those things than they could ten years ago, they are both better off. But, let's give everyone the same income (perfect equality). Then, we could completely destroy the incentive to work and the entire wealth of the economy would tank. Now, that sounds like a great idea!!
Again, if you really cared about relative poorness, you would have to admit that the Canadian "poor" are wealthy compared to the billions of people in this world that are really poor. But, if you did that, people wouldn't be able to bitch and moan and wring their hands about how the awful Canadian "rich" were so much better off than the Canadian "poor". Instead, you'd have to spend your time looking at trying to see what can be done for those in far away countries...and that's no fun.
But the living wage in the States for a family of four is
$17,690 a year,($1474.16/mo) or $8.20 an hour, in 2000
And the BLS inflation calculator says the same purchasing power represents $20,710.24 USDN in 2006.
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
And?
And according to the U.S. Dept of Health, living wage for a family of six in 2000 was $22, 850, or $1904.16 USDN per month. In 2006 dollars that's $26,751.22
I just thought I'd give you a chance to explain yourself wrt the bullshit figure you nailed up above without reference to base year or cost of living or family size or whatever your excuse may be.
Then allow me. There is a difference between poverty thresholds and poverty guidelines. BLS poverty guidelines are more current.
If Archie Bunker comes home to Edith elated over his three percent pay raise, Meathead will tell him that he was ripped off, because inflation was running at five percent in that episode. Even in the re-runs. [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]
[ 01 February 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
My point of the $31,400 figure was simply to equate what income today would be needed to equal the purchasing power your pa had back in the 1970s. You said that your pa was "easily" able to support a family of six with an income (in 2006 dollars) of $31,400. My point was that most progressives would think that that level of an income for six people today would be damned near criminal.
In 1917 (or thereabouts), the US government instituted the first federal income tax. The tax rate on the first $25,000 was taxed as a rate of 1%.
$25,000 of 1917 income is equivalent to $394,000 of 2006 income. And, the marginal tax rate of that level of income today is around 34%!!!
But, lefties are screaming that we need to start taxing "the rich" like that more so that they pay their "fair share".
Shit. My sig other and I have paid more in taxes in just the month of January than probably 60% of the population pays in a YEAR. Now, as much as I hate to admit it, I wouldn't mind if my tax rates were left at the current levels. But, goddamit, I sure as hell don't want my tax rates to be jacked up so that I can pay my "fair share". I'd say I pay plenty of taxes and more than my "fair share". That's what pisses me off about all of the screaching about "the rich" and how they get away with not paying their "fair share".
But, Fidel, your ol' pa did it...and "easily"...in the 1970s!!!
I think Democrats are saying Americans earning anywhere below, I dunno, $390K a year are being screwed by the Republicans. Anybody with incomes below that have no business supporting the hawks because they wouldn't rate a cold sandwich at a Republican fund raiser, or something like that.
In Forbes article, David Kaye Johnson says the very rich in your country aren't actually paying the legal tax rate for whatever ginormous tax bracket they're in. The superrich are making sweetheart deals behind closed doors with state governors and maybe paying a third to a half of what the going tax rate should be.
Ya but those cost of livings I don't think account for food and energy costs. And, my parent's house was paid off by late 70's, it was a VA house. The poor aren't living well today, Sven. Min wage doesn't earn what it used to. Everything costs, including an education. In some coutries like Sweden, kids just go to school and study without worrying about whether they can afford books and lunch money. Grade twelve was aok in the 70's. Not now though.
Please, if you would be so kind, explain to me how it's possible to avoid paying half to two-thirds what the "going tax rate" is? What kind of "sweatheart" deals are you talking about? Besides, state governors have no control over FEDERAL income tax rates (and many states don't even have an income tax to begin with). So, what on earth can governors be doing to cut taxes as you claim???
I'm not sure what percentage the deals end up being for, and I don't know if Johnson mentions sliding out of tax obligations in a
Forbes interview. I think he was on Charlie Rose talking about it. He won a Pulitzer for exposing loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code.
In Canada we have "Family Trusts" since Mulroney's time in the sun. I imagine if you're supperrich with billionaire status, bills, outlays, cars etc can be paid from the trust without the person ever declaring an income. Are the superrich in your country obligated to file a personal tax return, Sven ?.
[ 02 February 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]