Poor and working class people have truly busy lives compared to professionals. We should all remember that.
I think the solution is pretty simple: raise that income maximum well past where you would normally put it and make it trivial (like sign up on the internet trivial) for anyone who qualifies to receive assistance and make it just as simple to stop receiving it. Someone should be able to sign up and receive assistance on the next distribution cycle. This makes it easy for people in that dangerous spot to get assistance because you remove it and those with pride can get it quickly, easily and as temporarily as they want with no humiliation.
Here's why: Today you must commit a lot of time and effort as well suffer humiliation to get assistance. You have to stand in line, wait in a waiting area, fill out forms and finally talk to a worker about what a fuck up you are. If you have kids and can't get/afford a babysitter your kids are right there with you losing their minds. If you can't take time off work you don't get assistance because this government office is closed in the evening and on weekends. It may be hard to imagine something worse than the DMV but that's exactly what this is. And then you have to deal with doing it all over again because they are looking for the tiniest possible reason to turn off your assistance and force you to appeal.
Why is it so painful? Because welfare queens, drug dealers, drug users, lifers and frauds can't be allowed to get assistance even if the cost in terms of dollars and opportunity are much greater to prevent them from doing so. We've let it become about who we deem "deserves" it rather than a simple monetary calculation.
The working poor are a revenue source. By keeping people indebted, they remain predictable consumers and fixed-income assets, like a human bond.
The impoverished are effectively trapped by the welfare system itself, because it reduces benefits as incomes rise at a faster rate than can be made up by the equivalent amount of work. If the minimum wage was a living wage, like in Australia, then this wouldn't be a problem. But instead American welfare/min-wage clearly incentivizes staying just poor enough to keep getting benefits, or else you are actively making yourself poorer by working more.
This is why so many Walmart employees are on food stamps.
> many Walmart employees are on food stamps.
Are you implying that Walmart employees are not 'working poor', or is the first sentence a dramatic over-generalization that doesn't contribute to the conversation?
Poverty depends on perspective. Most Revolution-Era Americans were living in what we today would call extreme poverty. But you can have a tv and a smartphone today and still be quite poor, because of the difference in consumer cost between things we need and things we don't need.
www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-stuff-we-really-need-is-getting-more-expensive-other-stuff-is-getting-cheaper
>There is a big difference between poor and working poor. The poor get handouts, the working poor get fines because they can't afford Obamacare. Then people wonder why the poor don't struggle their way to working poor.
This isn't true. The CBO extensivesly evaluates changes in benefits and taxes to calculate effectice marginal tax rates across the income distribution to make sure that you never make less money from working more. There are a couple of ranges where you will lose money from working more, but none of them are larger than 25c/hr.
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
California has some incentives that cliff at around $40k per household, no graduation (e.g. renters deduction).
The marginal tax rates include the combined effects
of federal and state individual income taxes, federal
payroll taxes, and benefits from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program and cost-sharing subsidies
for health insurance, generally on the basis of 2016 law.
Now I do think it's true that the income ranges where the effective marginal "tax" rate is over 100% are fairly narrow for most households. But the ranges where the rates are less than 100% but not much less are far wider. And that gives you an effective take-home hourly wage that is tiny. If you happen to have kids, it almost certainly doesn't cover daycare costs, for example...
Granted is there some small(~1-3%) portion of the poor who have a marginal effective tax rate greater than 100%. Probably. Are they representative of the vast majority of the poor? I don't think so.
United States job training programs do not work - they are a 1980s Reagan-era privatization scam to funnel tax dollars to private scam "training" and "job" centers that do not provide effective training or result in any meaningful employment outcomes: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...
Job training needs to be stopped being mentioned as a realistic or viable option - it is a Republican distraction to free public universal vocational and university schooling in certified and accountable programs with qualified instructors: "why do we need free trade schools, we already have job training!"
Quite frankly it's disgusting and repulsive. Community rules be damned.
Call them the "lucky poor" or whatever you want. Come to Las Vegas (not the strip) and see for yourself. Unfortunately, I'm living it first hand right now, coding away on my own self-funded project--yes, making decisions about which bills to pay etc.
I'm an anomaly. You are an anomaly. Perhaps you went from one anomaly (extremely poor) to extremely rich, and along the way missed the common scenario I'm bringing up. I'm simply stating the welfare state IS REAL (yes, even if they offer far more in Europe) to make my initial point that: the aforementioned group of people are NOT CONSCIOUSLY AWARE of the value they cannot create, and that it's "out of touch" to think they are. For the group I'm talking about, that's simply not their pain point.
We tech people are obsessed with creating value and assume for the majority its the same. We are projecting ourselves on to them, yet we are very different. They aren't seeing life through the same lens. If we really want to help people, we can't go from 0 to 60--we cant take people that aren't thinking about creating startups, tell em to their face "if only they created value they would be happy" and tell em to climb a mountain to do so. They won't make even the first step. We can't help bring others up unless we truly understand what they're dealing with, and what the initial baby-steps actually would be. So I apologize for my insensitive tone. It's a sensitive subject and I expressed some of my own frustrations with such people that I'm dealing with on a daily basis, which from my standpoint seems to be everyone but me. That all said, I think opportunities to create value is the answer--just, we must recognize we can't sell them a better future by telling them: "you aren't creating value, if only you were, you would be happy." That's as condescending as it gets.
Ultimately, it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Education and more opportunities for future generations is the best we can do. That's my current standpoint. My perspective is that it is very impractical and unlikely to teach a 50 year old cashier anything else. If we could magically produce statistics it wouldn't be looking good. This is reality. There's legions of people with minimum wage jobs that will have minimum wage jobs their whole life. One group may be in utter despair because of it, and another (the lucky poor) might be able to make it work well enough. The best we can do is show future generations the satisfaction, pride, etc that comes from the mastery of skills and creating things. The problem is in these communities there isn't the role models for success like in NYC or LA/SF. I grew up in NYC. I'm living in Las Vegas now. I see the difference in mindset daily. In NYC everyone is a hustler and about something. In Las Vegas once you get away from the strip and people who service it, virtually nobody is. Young people are absorbed with being wannabe gang-bangers and are not thinking about creating some enterprise or becoming an artist or whatever. I AM IN THIS DAILY and see this first hand. Have nephews and family members living like this.
NOW FOR MY RESPONSE TO YOUR PERSONAL ATTACKS: It sounds ultimately like you have lived your life siloed in an elevator from the bottom to the top and barely took a second to look around. It seems you care more about telling us all about how far you've come and how much money you now make. That's your ego at play. For you, it was very stressful being poor. So stressful you did something about it. What I'm saying is that for many it's nowhere near as stressful for them to do as much as you did about it. Put that in your pipe in smoke it, what do you say about that. There's no much you can say. It doesn't sound like you did very well at being poor. It sounds like you got one taste and as soon as you were of age, you headed for the hills. It's a common story. No shame in that. And I'm happy for you. However, I'm doubtful that in your later more inevitably conscious years you were around much to watch it first hand. Whatever it is, your words don't help. I'm apprehensive as to how much you actually do want to help. Typically the words you have shared--about how far you've come and how much money you now make--serve no purpose but to make you feel good about how far you've come. So for those that actually do want to help, THERE IS A PROBLEM: people are under-educated, are not surrounded by models of success, and perhaps if they were actually conscious of how little value they are creating and how accessible it is to create value, they might. But to pretend like they are all aware of this lack is completely unproductive. If they were they would be taking the first step to clawing their way out of that dead-end scenario.
NOW FOR A SOLUTION: well for one, there never is a silver bullet. This is a large country overseen by a bloated stagnating government that each year wastes a larger percentage of taxpayer money than the last. That likely isn't changing any time soon unfortunately. We can't rely on them to overhaul our schools. Technology has become cheap--and as poor as everyone is--they all manage to have modern phones and TV setups. Education technology is simply the key. Not necessarily in the traditional sense, but that too. As technologists it is our mandate to bring as many opportunities as possible to small screens in people's hands. I think we also--going along with the theme of this discussion--need to put pressure on people to be somebody. Simply put, many people are not growing up with any urgency to do something great, be somebody, call it whatever you wanna call it. If you don't grow up with the urgency to hustle, you likely won't. As a controversial of a point as it is, it's just the reality. The people in this forum--us--got the "do something big" bug. I think it can be taken to negative extremes, but overall I think it's a positive thing. So I'll just sign off by saying abstractly that through our apps we need to convey this vision, this mandate, so future generations between LA and NYC are inspired.
Despair is exactly the word I would use to describe the feeling of not being able to make your bills and not being sure if you'll ever be able to save enough to afford moving to a more prosperous place. I'd say the majority of my friends and acquaintances at the time felt that way, too. The only reason I was ever able to escape was luck; my grandparents had to rescue me from a variety of financial disasters that would be extremely minor for somebody not on the edge of being able to make rent. It's amazing how much damage getting a $25 parking ticket because you had to work late can cause when you're working a minimum-wage -- (at the time: $5.15/hr) -- job. Lack of aspiration is definitely not the problem; lack of hope definitely is, though.
I don't mean to engage you in a debate about this, though; it seems like you have already made up your mind. I just don't want your comment to go un-challenged.
I think that's the view that's easy to come up with for smug HN software creators.
I've lived in poverty while working a minimum wage job, and while it was only for a couple years, it utterly destroyed my morale. There was no reliability; nothing I could count on. If something happened; if I got sick or if something broke down, then I would have had to go to a loan shark. Not because I was stupid or because I didn't understand that I'd never be able to pay the loan back, but because there would simply be no other option.
Long story short, I escaped that situation largely through luck, but I try to keep reminding myself of what it was like in the days where I had to double-check my bank balance before agreeing to go out for Chik-Fil-A.
While I understand the sentiment and may have even expressed similar feelings when younger, the reality is a bit more nuanced.
It's more like they hit walls and repeated failure when trying to move up the ladder and eventually just gave up. You may not have been around for that, but it did happen.
And yes, there are plenty who are so persistent that they never stop trying and eventually do experience some level of success ... but that doesn't excuse a society which is openly hostile to those who want to do better and instead shoves a government check in their mouth.
Have that happen to you often enough and you'll choose to play video games instead too. At least with video games, success is just around the corner. They were designed with you winning in mind.
I could also add, that very few on the outside are truly looking into the glass room. Some will be aware of it and its inhabitants, but of those most are uncomfortable or even offended. For some those feelings arise when considering the inhabitants; for others considering the glass room itself. "I did not create the glass room", they think. "I did not put those people there". While they may feel some sadness at this state of affairs, they do not at all see themselves as causally connected to the glass room or its inhabitants.
Some of the inhabitants of the glass room may try and communicate their presence and their dissatisfaction to those outside the room. But largely, those communications are either misunderstood, or ignored. Many of those that tried to communicate conclude that the minds of the "outsiders" are as impervious as the glass walls of the room itself.
To those on the outside, it does indeed seem as the glass-room dwellers have lost any fight. "How can we help those that won't even help themselves?". "Knowing nothing other than the glass room, perhaps that is where they are most suited to stay. They seem content enough."
Perhaps the walls contain an unknown but fatal flaw? The walls seem able to absorb vast quantities of anger without exhibiting any faults. Yet upon reaching a (very high) threshold, that pent up anger may cause the walls to suddenly shatter. I wonder, how much fight will the glass room dwellers will show then?
Edit: grammar fix.
I condense your analogy to the aphorism:
Until people realize they can change, they won't try
However, I think your version could be subject to misinterpretation. When you are referring to change, are you implying "themselves", "their circumstances", or both?
In the story above the glass room dwellers did change themselves - from aspirational to resigned.
So perhaps, the compression was "lossy" after all ;-)
Well, I know the opposite first hand. The idea that poor are content being poor is totally out of this world, especially in the US where the welfare and "handouts" for poor people are a joke (compared to Western Europe, nordic countries, etc).
>Things work and all you need is to be able to hold a minimum wage job for a few years at a time and when you get fired you can take a few years off while another friend or family member is on deck, meanwhile you're contributing food stamps the whole time, 6 months of an unemployment check, money from a few scams here and there, electricity bill deductions and many other such benefits you can get if you are below the poverty line.
This is crazy talk compared to all the people I've known and listened in such conditions. This is much closer to how poor people working such "minimum wage jobs" actually live:
https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0...
Yet you are actually addressing a different point than the commenters in this thread. The rest of the commenters are talking about the unlucky poor, those who are trapped and aren't able to live comfortably with the support of family and friends.
As to what proportion of poor are the unlucky vs the lucky, this is less easily discovered. I imagine the "unlucky" poor are at least half. I don't have any data for that.
And that's kind of the whole point of the article, isn't it?. The poor and working class people in my life don't complain about how "busy" they are nearly as much as the more well-to-do, despite being so much busier than the middle-class-and-up. They don't talk about it like that, because they're much more grounded in reality. Meanwhile, many college students, lawyers, doctors, engineers, programmers, etc. are acting like they can barely spare a minute because of how busy they are. Maybe these people are busy, in a sense, but the whole point of the article is that they're not nearly as busy as they believe they are.
I think there's a deeper issue at play that the article doesn't touch on: that acknowledging you're not busy is perceived as laziness. There's a certain culture of shared misery, where we all agree to tell each other that we're all so busy, and then we can all feel good both about what we do and about what we don't do.
Here's an anecdote (that's meant to illustrate a situation, not talk myself up): when I was in school, on more than one occasion I had someone tell me that I must be "so busy" because of my major and programs I was enrolled in (and the fact that I was pulling off good grades). When I told them that no, I really wasn't that busy, they were incredulous. There always had to be some explanation for why I wasn't busy, like that I was cheating or taking easy classes or something. The problem was that they thought they were busy, and they figured I must be doing at least as much work as they were, so by deduction I must be busy too. Well it turned out I was doing just as much work as they were; I just didn't think that qualified me as "busy." One person, after drilling me on how much time I spent on school work, scoffed: "Oh, so you are busy then," and thought I was just trying to act cool or something.
I don't believe that you're not allowed to write about a social phenomenon just because there are people in world to whom it doesn't apply. It's very clear the types of people the author is talking about.
That said, free days on the beach? Midday naps or sleeping all morning on a hotel room while traveling? I sleep less on business trips, and can't fathom just sitting around the beach all day.
I'm not saying my life is harder than hers, it's almost certainly not -- I'm just saying if I had 1 kid, let alone 4, it would put that to shame.
I'm not sure if you meant it literally, but I do know a lot of people who do. They literally get offended and defensive if I suggest they have some free time to do something.
But there really isn't anything shameful about successfully budgeting time, just as there isn't anything shameful about having spare money left over from your paycheck. Quite the opposite, actually.
"I spent a mere 9.09 hours weekly on housework and errands"
How is that possible? Housecleaner? Personal shopper? Nanny?
We spend 6-8 hours each week shopping around trying to save money on just groceries, and that's not including clothes or haircuts etc.
Of course I spend a lot of time with the kids, playing, dressing them up, changing diapers etc. All day basically. But that's more like hanging out than housework.
Curious, How much money are you saving in exchange for that effort?
HN Comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429693
Specifically my comment on the guest writer being fairly privileged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433360
...You know cause everyone can easily retire to Manhattan...
Have you priced day care centers vs nanny shares? You do realize that most people using a nanny would trade that arrangement for quality government child care in a heartbeat? It is not uncommon for several dual-income working families to be sharing the services of a nanny making $20/hour, very often under the table, meaning there are all kinds of potential liabilities and risks for both the parents and the nanny.
Imagine a working middle class family just trying to be modestly successful. They go to college, they move to where they can make the most money. There is no extended family nearby. They end up shelling out a huge portion of their income for child care.
You're right, the poor have it worse. And you're probably right that the writer is on some level "out of touch." But god, it has nothing to do with the fact that she is "talking about nannies." Nannies are not some luxury thing in this country; due to the near total lack of government support, there is huge demand for them, which is often met by vulnerable workers (immigrants) connecting with other vulnerable workers (parents essentially forced to turn to unvetted nannies if they want to both work an keep their head above water).
Except it's not true. The poor and working class have a lot more financial stress and less power to change.
That doesn't make them busier or mean they work harder.
her husband: high up in McKinsey & Co
1%ers or 0.1%ers? maybe even 0.01%ers?
I'd venture they are approximately as out-of-touch as the people who give the poor and working class those extremely busy schedules in the first place.
A billionaire can buy a new Mercedes Benz every day, and burn it to the ground in a pile of $100 bills at the end of that day, and not run out of money their entire life. So...
Most professionals have a financial safety net the working class do not. That is a huge psychological difference.