The population of people born with all those advantages but who still end up on the dole is pretty damn large. What's the difference between them and their whitebread suburban brats who *don't*?
And we've seen plenty of the inverse (or is it the contrapositive?) of "put one of those pampered, designer-coiffed, $400 shoe-wearing wall street masters of the universe who GOT AWAY with wrecking the economy so they could have those stupid $400 shoes, in the same starting place as virtually any poor person, and they will turn to shit, too..." Lots of stories of poor people winning the lottery and being broke again in a few years.
Certainly there is a difference in starting position for everyone. Paris Hilton exists, and it sucks ass that someone like her gets everything. But there are many many people who have succeeded on their own. Not everyone succeeds like Oprah, either, but Oprah's story is certainly compelling.
What, pray tell, has 50 years of the war on poverty and all its social welfare programs costing $22T and counting (and adding about $1T annually now) done to *actually* change the life of the inner-city urban poor, the rural poor, the homeless drunks and addicts? Maybe you're right, and we just need to keep spending that money to placate the masses. If that's the case, though, can we do it more efficiently? Can we do anything about women like this "I got 15 kids & 3 baby daddy's"... "Someone's gotta pay for me and my kids"?
I also delivered pizzas as one of my first jobs (and one I enjoyed quite a bit) and saw the same exact thing. I often wondered to myself "These people are living in this shit-hole, but they've got a big TV--there was always a big TV--and just spent $60 on pizza." Invariably, they were smoking a cigarette when they answered to door too.
Progressive liberals regularly and with malice aforethought attempt to portray poverty in the most negative possible way, when in reality the standard of living among the poor in the United States has steadily increased to the point where a US person living in poverty has a standard of living similar to middle-class Europeans, and would be the envy of much of the world’s truly poor.
These folks did a nice job capturing this idea
[Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor]
“For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests near destitution: an inability to provide nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter for one’s family. However, only a small number of the 46 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.
“Although the mainstream media broadcast alarming stories about widespread and severe hunger in the nation, in reality, most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages. The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:
* 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food. * 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat. * 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
“Other government surveys show that the average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and is well above recommended norms in most cases.
“Television newscasts about poverty in America generally portray the poor as homeless people or as a destitute family living in an overcrowded, dilapidated trailer. In fact, however:
* Over the course of a year, 4 percent of poor persons become temporarily homeless. * Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers, 49.5 percent live in separate single-family houses or townhouses, and 40 percent live in apartments. * 42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes. * 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 typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom. * The vast majority of the homes or apartments of the poor are in good repair.
“By their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed.
“Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. The poor clearly struggle to make ends meet, but they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning, and a car, as well as for food on the table. The average poor person is far from affluent, but his lifestyle is far from the images of stark deprivation purveyed equally by advocacy groups and the media.
A Department of Energy Survey [www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/#undefined], includes a part of which breaks down appliance use in US homes by household Income.
For example it states that 16.9M households are below the poverty line, and of those 15.6M have microwaves, 8.6M have coffee makers, 10.6M have top-door (top freezer) refrigerators, 1.8M have a 2nd refrigerator, 3,9M have a separate freezer, 4.8M have a dishwasher, 10.9M have a clothes washer in their home.
For TVs, of the 16.9M households below the poverty line, only 0.3M had no TV, while 4.8M had one TV, 5.9M had two TVs, 3.5M had three TVs, 1.6M had four TVs, and 0.7M had five or more TVs. Some 8.9M had TVs between 21 and 36 inches in screen size, and 4.4M had “big screen TVs” of 37 inches or more, with 5.7M being LCD or plasma TVs. Some 6.1M had cable TV boxes connected to their primary TV, and 3.9M had a video game console, and 7.1M had a DVD player.
In addition 5.8M of the 16.9M households below the poverty line had computers, while 1.8M more had two computers (and nearly1M had three or more). Some 7.2M had internet access, of those 2.7M had cable broadband, 3.1 had DSL or fiber. And 5.2M had at least one printer.
8.0M (of 16.9M poverty-level) households have cordless phones, 5.2M have answering machines, 0.8M have fax machines, and 0.8M have photocopiers. 5.8M have stereo equipment.
"Living in poverty": in the US is hardly the same as being destitute. Considering how prevalent the trappings of modern-day middle-class lifestyles are in the households living below the poverty line, one may find themselves wondering "Wait, they have a big-screen TV with cable, but I've gotta fork over taxes to give them foodstamps that they can spend at McDonalds?"
In my mind the notion that I am being forced to pay welfare benefits even one household that chooses to squander their real income on Playstations and big screen TVs is too many. If they can afford to buy a TV, they can afford to buy their own food. If they’ve got a big TV from before they were poor (they lost a job perhaps), then sell the TV first to buy food, then when you’ve truly got nothing left, we can talk about your “needs”.
So we should be paying benefits so that more people can have a dishwasher, cordless phone, and computer? Progressives seem to support the notion that everyone should be able to live a lower middle-class lifestyle, one that includes all those things, and that our welfare state should provide it without question of other lifestyle choices that may have been made, without requiring work on their part.
No one needs a dishwasher. It is a luxury, work-saving device. No one needs a TV. It is an entertainment device. No one needs a Playstation, it is a game. No one needs a tattoo. It is a personal choice. No one needs Big Macs, Coke, beer, booze, or cigarettes. If you're on welfare and spend money on those things, you can afford to meet your basic needs, but are choosing not to and expecting others to subsidize your decisions.
My definition of “need” vs "want" comes in much lower than progressive find tolerable, and includes minimal support–I don’t want anyone to starve in this country, and want to provide a helping hand. But if you want more than the most basic subsistence level of support, get it yourself. And I mean *basic*, like here's you sack of rice and beans. Of course, though, people who simply lack the basic mental or physical ability to support themselves cannot be excluded from a reasonable level of support.
I guess the question for progressives boils down to "How rich do you want the poor people in this country to be?" The onus should be on them,since they want to forcibly take money from me and others to redistribute it to those they feel do not have enough. They never have defined “enough” but the level of expectation on the word “need” seems much higher than mine.
$22T spent in the war on poverty over the the last 50 years in the US. Poverty level essentially unaffected for the last 45 of those 50 years.
People are smart enough the cooperate too. It's called charity. The problem the progressive socialist movement seems to have with charity is a) it is not forced on people by the state, therefore it "can never work" and b) it by its nature discriminates in favor of the deserving poor and against those who choose not to try. It is true that charity will never meet the endless demands of the "gimme free stuff" people, but I simply don't care very much about them. I do care about the sudden widow with two kids, the wounded veteran, the mentally disabled, i.e. people who simply cannot provide for themselves and people who *temporarily and unexpectedly* find themselves in need of assistance. It's an oldie-but-a-goodie: the safety-net system should not be a hammock.
Spending $22T hasn't done fuck-all to alleviate poverty. But keep shoveling the money into that pit, keep putting large and larger burdens on fewer and fewer people to carry more and more dead weight. Or maybe, just maybe, we admit that the way the war on poverty (much like the war on drugs) cannot be won by throwing money at the problem--hasn't worked so far. After we admit that, maybe we can at least *try* something different.
Our Government is a classic enabler and we are all codependent. An enabler is a person who by their actions make it easier for an addict to continue their self-destructive behavior by rescuing the addict. The codependent party exhibits behavior that controls, makes excuses for, pities, and takes other actions to perpetuate the obviously needy party's condition, because of their desire to be needed and fear of doing anything that would change the relationship.
As for "The get a job rant when there are no jobs is stupid." You've obviously never posted a job opening and had to deal with the endless stream of people who simply want you to sign their "I applied for this job" paperwork so they can keep their checks coming. They have no interest in even discussing the job. They don't want the job. They just want their check.
"Mar 12, 2012 - Although the employment picture is improving, the job market can hardly... lack of work, however, there are jobs that employers can't seem to fill." [CNBC]
"Jul 19, 2013 - Despite millions of workers still looking for jobs, there are a wide variety of positions employers just can't seem to fill, new research shows." [Business World Daily]
"Jul 10, 2014 - A lower unemployment rate doesn't mean all jobs are getting filled. A new survey reports many businesses are having difficulty finding workers." [CNBC]
"The staffing company ManpowerGroup, for instance, reports that 52% of U.S. employers surveyed say they have difficulty filling positions because of talent..." [WSJ]
when you were already out plowing or harvesting or fertilizing the fields? Why wouldn't you just do this continually over time to improve your maps, once you made the investment in the GPS receiver?
Before declaring the "War on Poverty" LBJ was warned that if "something isn't done" the poverty rate would skyrocket . After the trillions of dollars and years spent fighting the war of poverty, what's the poverty rate, 15.something percent? Before the war on poverty the rate had dropped dropped over 32% in 1950 to below 20%.
The poverty rate is pretty much flat for the last 45 years. Can we at least consider to prospect that what we've been doing, at close to $1T per year nowadays, is simply not working? Can we at least consider alternatives? Or are we destined to forever throw good money after bad--pouring money into a system that simply does nothing to actually "solve" the poverty problem.
Two things get you and keep you out of poverty: 1. Not having kids that you cannot afford (*) 2. An unquenchable drive to improve oneself: education, trade skills, getting that first or next job, getting that first or next promotion or pay raise, entrepreneurship...the basic theme of every rags-to-riches story
(*) A single person working full-time (40 hours/wk for 50 weeks) and earning minimum wage is not, by Federal standards, living in poverty. In fact, they are at about 125% of the poverty line. Add a kid, and bam, both parent and child are living in poverty. Two minimum wage earners, OTOH, could support themselves and up to 3 children without being below the poverty line.
Seems like every person in line in front of me at the grocery store using foodstamps has two or three kids with them and every one of them has an iPhone, usually two generations newer than my own.
Self-employed people have no problem with the fact that their employee may not have a college degree. They didn't wait around for someone to hand them a job.
No one said it was easy, and you're spot on with your last statement: many of the people in question are not driven, intelligent or motivated.
If you have no drive or motivation (aren't those the same thing?), even if you are intelligent, you will almost certainly fail. Why should the rest of us bend over backward to compensate for the shortcomings of unmotivated people with no drive to better themselves? Why should we be expected to provide them with a (lower)middle-class lifestyle at our expense?
I already said that's I'd eliminate the foodstamp program as it is. A side effect would be to also eliminate the crony-capitalist aspects it may have on top of removing the disincentive to work. Are you saying you support foodstamps at McDonalds?
If the program is indeed sop for the megacorps, I say disallow it. If it is sop for the lazy, I saw disallow it.
Under what circumstances is it a good idea to support anyone's ability to use foodstamps at McDonalds?
"Personally, I quite like living in a world where people who can't get a job don't die of starvation. "
Me too. Which is why I advocate a voucher system for as much rice and beans as a person could want, and will throw in multi-vitamins and a rice cooker to boot. and turning closed military bases into homeless shelters where anyone can come to live, so long as they work in the fields to help grow their own food, help cook the meals, help wash dishes, help paint the walls, etc.
No one should starve, but there's no reason to provide them with McDonalds (The states of Florida, California, Arizona and Michigan already allow select restaurants like Golden Corral, McDonald's, Subway, some Yum! properties and others to accept food stamps.) and rabbit tarragon (http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/). Likewise, no one should go homeless, but neither should they expect to have a home provided to them without any effort on their part. And if you can't afford to feed, house, and clothe your kids (Somebody need to pay for my 15 kids - YouTube), perhaps we should take them from you and place with with families and/or facilities that can.
You seem to expect taxpayers to provide a lower-middle-class lifestyle via a negative income tax or minimum guaranteed income to everyone and not even minimal effort on their part, no any negative consequences for abusing the safety net system.
See how faar that goes before the latte sippers complain about the power going out all the time.
Polution is bad, mkay, and we should be preparing for the day when cheap fossil fuels are not available, And dumping CO2 into the atmo is probably exacerbating if not causing "global warming".
But it seems like every week we get something like this. They sure are trying hard to sell their fantastic (pun intended) power supply be it wind, solar, or Tesla's magic battery dust.
Then they won't mind paying annual H-1B visa fees in the amount of 250% of said worker's salary.
I mean, their argument is there there exists no local workers, or even workers within the *entire* US, that they can hire that could perform the same job.
On that show and others like it, *everything* on this planet is a result of meddling by visitors from outer space. Every ridiculous claim proffered, like George Washington cross the Delaware on the advice of some little green man, or that Bigfoot is an on-going genetic experiment by aliens, is preceded by the phrase "Ancient Astronaut theorists believe that...".
They will be pilloried for not helping the poor, at best, or be brought up on charges of racism (equal opportunity lending) at worst (no matter how unfounded or what race the borrowers might actually be).
In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore — equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird — Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening’s dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth.
“I have $80 bucks left!” Magida said. “I’m so happy!”
“I have $12,” Mak said with a frown.
The two friends weren’t tabulating the cash in their wallets but what remained of the monthly allotment on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program debit cards, the official new term for what are still known colloquially as food stamps.
Magida, a 30-year-old art school graduate, had been installing museum exhibits for a living until the recession caused arts funding — and her usual gigs — to dry up. She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she’s used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.
“I’m eating better than I ever have before,” she told me. “Even with food stamps, it’s not like I’m living large, but it helps.”
Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.
“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”
Funding for the FAA expired on July 23. At that time, Delta stopped collecting several taxes imposed on ticket sales, including a 7.5 percent tax on the base ticket price, a $3.70 segment tax and facilities taxes on international travel and travel to and from Alaska and Hawaii.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has advised that travelers who paid for tickets on or before July 22, 2011, for travel beginning on or after July 23 and prior to the reinstatement of FAA funding, may be entitled to a refund of those taxes.
OTOH, Congress *retroactively* reinstated the tax about 2 weeks after it expired (Aug. 5, 2011, with collections resuming Aug 8, 2011), so the airlines probably had a good reason to keep the fare+tax cost the same even when the tax portion temporarily went to $0.
All in all, a poor example of "the market doesn't work to lower prices".
Slashdot Mirror
The population of people born with all those advantages but who still end up on the dole is pretty damn large. What's the difference between them and their whitebread suburban brats who *don't*?
And we've seen plenty of the inverse (or is it the contrapositive?) of "put one of those pampered, designer-coiffed, $400 shoe-wearing wall street masters of the universe who GOT AWAY with wrecking the economy so they could have those stupid $400 shoes, in the same starting place as virtually any poor person, and they will turn to shit, too..." Lots of stories of poor people winning the lottery and being broke again in a few years.
Certainly there is a difference in starting position for everyone. Paris Hilton exists, and it sucks ass that someone like her gets everything. But there are many many people who have succeeded on their own. Not everyone succeeds like Oprah, either, but Oprah's story is certainly compelling.
What, pray tell, has 50 years of the war on poverty and all its social welfare programs costing $22T and counting (and adding about $1T annually now) done to *actually* change the life of the inner-city urban poor, the rural poor, the homeless drunks and addicts? Maybe you're right, and we just need to keep spending that money to placate the masses. If that's the case, though, can we do it more efficiently? Can we do anything about women like this "I got 15 kids & 3 baby daddy's" ... "Someone's gotta pay for me and my kids"?
I also delivered pizzas as one of my first jobs (and one I enjoyed quite a bit) and saw the same exact thing. I often wondered to myself "These people are living in this shit-hole, but they've got a big TV--there was always a big TV--and just spent $60 on pizza." Invariably, they were smoking a cigarette when they answered to door too.
Progressive liberals regularly and with malice aforethought attempt to portray poverty in the most negative possible way, when in reality the standard of living among the poor in the United States has steadily increased to the point where a US person living in poverty has a standard of living similar to middle-class Europeans, and would be the envy of much of the world’s truly poor.
These folks did a nice job capturing this idea
[Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor]
“For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests near destitution: an inability to provide nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter for one’s family. However, only a small number of the 46 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.
“Although the mainstream media broadcast alarming stories about widespread and severe hunger in the nation, in reality, most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages. The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:
* 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food.
* 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat.
* 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
“Other government surveys show that the average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and is well above recommended norms in most cases.
“Television newscasts about poverty in America generally portray the poor as homeless people or as a destitute family living in an overcrowded, dilapidated trailer. In fact, however:
* Over the course of a year, 4 percent of poor persons become temporarily homeless.
* Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers, 49.5 percent live in separate single-family houses or townhouses, and 40 percent live in apartments.
* 42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes.
* 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 typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom.
* The vast majority of the homes or apartments of the poor are in good repair.
“By their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed.
“Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. The poor clearly struggle to make ends meet, but they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning, and a car, as well as for food on the table. The average poor person is far from affluent, but his lifestyle is far from the images of stark deprivation purveyed equally by advocacy groups and the media.
A Department of Energy Survey [www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/#undefined], includes a part of which breaks down appliance use in US homes by household Income.
For example it states that 16.9M households are below the poverty line, and of those 15.6M have microwaves, 8.6M have coffee makers, 10.6M have top-door (top freezer) refrigerators, 1.8M have a 2nd refrigerator, 3,9M have a separate freezer, 4.8M have a dishwasher, 10.9M have a clothes washer in their home.
For TVs, of the 16.9M households below the poverty line, only 0.3M had no TV, while 4.8M had one TV, 5.9M had two TVs, 3.5M had three TVs, 1.6M had four TVs, and 0.7M had five or more TVs. Some 8.9M had TVs between 21 and 36 inches in screen size, and 4.4M had “big screen TVs” of 37 inches or more, with 5.7M being LCD or plasma TVs. Some 6.1M had cable TV boxes connected to their primary TV, and 3.9M had a video game console, and 7.1M had a DVD player.
In addition 5.8M of the 16.9M households below the poverty line had computers, while 1.8M more had two computers (and nearly1M had three or more). Some 7.2M had internet access, of those 2.7M had cable broadband, 3.1 had DSL or fiber. And 5.2M had at least one printer.
8.0M (of 16.9M poverty-level) households have cordless phones, 5.2M have answering machines, 0.8M have fax machines, and 0.8M have photocopiers. 5.8M have stereo equipment.
"Living in poverty": in the US is hardly the same as being destitute. Considering how prevalent the trappings of modern-day middle-class lifestyles are in the households living below the poverty line, one may find themselves wondering "Wait, they have a big-screen TV with cable, but I've gotta fork over taxes to give them foodstamps that they can spend at McDonalds?"
In my mind the notion that I am being forced to pay welfare benefits even one household that chooses to squander their real income on Playstations and big screen TVs is too many. If they can afford to buy a TV, they can afford to buy their own food. If they’ve got a big TV from before they were poor (they lost a job perhaps), then sell the TV first to buy food, then when you’ve truly got nothing left, we can talk about your “needs”.
So we should be paying benefits so that more people can have a dishwasher, cordless phone, and computer? Progressives seem to support the notion that everyone should be able to live a lower middle-class lifestyle, one that includes all those things, and that our welfare state should provide it without question of other lifestyle choices that may have been made, without requiring work on their part.
No one needs a dishwasher. It is a luxury, work-saving device. No one needs a TV. It is an entertainment device. No one needs a Playstation, it is a game. No one needs a tattoo. It is a personal choice. No one needs Big Macs, Coke, beer, booze, or cigarettes. If you're on welfare and spend money on those things, you can afford to meet your basic needs, but are choosing not to and expecting others to subsidize your decisions.
My definition of “need” vs "want" comes in much lower than progressive find tolerable, and includes minimal support–I don’t want anyone to starve in this country, and want to provide a helping hand. But if you want more than the most basic subsistence level of support, get it yourself. And I mean *basic*, like here's you sack of rice and beans. Of course, though, people who simply lack the basic mental or physical ability to support themselves cannot be excluded from a reasonable level of support.
I guess the question for progressives boils down to "How rich do you want the poor people in this country to be?" The onus should be on them,since they want to forcibly take money from me and others to redistribute it to those they feel do not have enough. They never have defined “enough” but the level of expectation on the word “need” seems much higher than mine.
$22T spent in the war on poverty over the the last 50 years in the US. Poverty level essentially unaffected for the last 45 of those 50 years.
People are smart enough the cooperate too. It's called charity. The problem the progressive socialist movement seems to have with charity is a) it is not forced on people by the state, therefore it "can never work" and b) it by its nature discriminates in favor of the deserving poor and against those who choose not to try. It is true that charity will never meet the endless demands of the "gimme free stuff" people, but I simply don't care very much about them. I do care about the sudden widow with two kids, the wounded veteran, the mentally disabled, i.e. people who simply cannot provide for themselves and people who *temporarily and unexpectedly* find themselves in need of assistance. It's an oldie-but-a-goodie: the safety-net system should not be a hammock.
Spending $22T hasn't done fuck-all to alleviate poverty. But keep shoveling the money into that pit, keep putting large and larger burdens on fewer and fewer people to carry more and more dead weight. Or maybe, just maybe, we admit that the way the war on poverty (much like the war on drugs) cannot be won by throwing money at the problem--hasn't worked so far. After we admit that, maybe we can at least *try* something different.
Our Government is a classic enabler and we are all codependent. An enabler is a person who by their actions make it easier for an addict to continue their self-destructive behavior by rescuing the addict. The codependent party exhibits behavior that controls, makes excuses for, pities, and takes other actions to perpetuate the obviously needy party's condition, because of their desire to be needed and fear of doing anything that would change the relationship.
As for "The get a job rant when there are no jobs is stupid." You've obviously never posted a job opening and had to deal with the endless stream of people who simply want you to sign their "I applied for this job" paperwork so they can keep their checks coming. They have no interest in even discussing the job. They don't want the job. They just want their check.
"Mar 12, 2012 - Although the employment picture is improving, the job market can hardly ... lack of work, however, there are jobs that employers can't seem to fill." [CNBC]
"Jul 19, 2013 - Despite millions of workers still looking for jobs, there are a wide variety of positions employers just can't seem to fill, new research shows." [Business World Daily]
"Jul 10, 2014 - A lower unemployment rate doesn't mean all jobs are getting filled. A new survey reports many businesses are having difficulty finding workers." [CNBC]
"The staffing company ManpowerGroup, for instance, reports that 52% of U.S. employers surveyed say they have difficulty filling positions because of talent ..." [WSJ]
when you were already out plowing or harvesting or fertilizing the fields? Why wouldn't you just do this continually over time to improve your maps, once you made the investment in the GPS receiver?
Still wrong. 50 acres is about 0.2 square kilometers.
"solving" those sorts of problems.
Before declaring the "War on Poverty" LBJ was warned that if "something isn't done" the poverty rate would skyrocket . After the trillions of dollars and years spent fighting the war of poverty, what's the poverty rate, 15.something percent? Before the war on poverty the rate had dropped dropped over 32% in 1950 to below 20%.
The poverty rate is pretty much flat for the last 45 years. Can we at least consider to prospect that what we've been doing, at close to $1T per year nowadays, is simply not working? Can we at least consider alternatives? Or are we destined to forever throw good money after bad--pouring money into a system that simply does nothing to actually "solve" the poverty problem.
Two things get you and keep you out of poverty:
1. Not having kids that you cannot afford (*)
2. An unquenchable drive to improve oneself: education, trade skills, getting that first or next job, getting that first or next promotion or pay raise, entrepreneurship...the basic theme of every rags-to-riches story
(*) A single person working full-time (40 hours/wk for 50 weeks) and earning minimum wage is not, by Federal standards, living in poverty. In fact, they are at about 125% of the poverty line. Add a kid, and bam, both parent and child are living in poverty. Two minimum wage earners, OTOH, could support themselves and up to 3 children without being below the poverty line.
Seems like every person in line in front of me at the grocery store using foodstamps has two or three kids with them and every one of them has an iPhone, usually two generations newer than my own.
Self-employed people have no problem with the fact that their employee may not have a college degree. They didn't wait around for someone to hand them a job.
No one said it was easy, and you're spot on with your last statement: many of the people in question are not driven, intelligent or motivated.
If you have no drive or motivation (aren't those the same thing?), even if you are intelligent, you will almost certainly fail. Why should the rest of us bend over backward to compensate for the shortcomings of unmotivated people with no drive to better themselves? Why should we be expected to provide them with a (lower)middle-class lifestyle at our expense?
I already said that's I'd eliminate the foodstamp program as it is. A side effect would be to also eliminate the crony-capitalist aspects it may have on top of removing the disincentive to work. Are you saying you support foodstamps at McDonalds?
If the program is indeed sop for the megacorps, I say disallow it. If it is sop for the lazy, I saw disallow it.
Under what circumstances is it a good idea to support anyone's ability to use foodstamps at McDonalds?
"Personally, I quite like living in a world where people who can't get a job don't die of starvation. "
Me too. Which is why I advocate a voucher system for as much rice and beans as a person could want, and will throw in multi-vitamins and a rice cooker to boot. and turning closed military bases into homeless shelters where anyone can come to live, so long as they work in the fields to help grow their own food, help cook the meals, help wash dishes, help paint the walls, etc.
No one should starve, but there's no reason to provide them with McDonalds (The states of Florida, California, Arizona and Michigan already allow select restaurants like Golden Corral, McDonald's, Subway, some Yum! properties and others to accept food stamps.) and rabbit tarragon (http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/). Likewise, no one should go homeless, but neither should they expect to have a home provided to them without any effort on their part. And if you can't afford to feed, house, and clothe your kids (Somebody need to pay for my 15 kids - YouTube), perhaps we should take them from you and place with with families and/or facilities that can.
You seem to expect taxpayers to provide a lower-middle-class lifestyle via a negative income tax or minimum guaranteed income to everyone and not even minimal effort on their part, no any negative consequences for abusing the safety net system.
See how faar that goes before the latte sippers complain about the power going out all the time.
Polution is bad, mkay, and we should be preparing for the day when cheap fossil fuels are not available, And dumping CO2 into the atmo is probably exacerbating if not causing "global warming".
But it seems like every week we get something like this. They sure are trying hard to sell their fantastic (pun intended) power supply be it wind, solar, or Tesla's magic battery dust.
An NMB Technologies RT8255C+. Have had them both for years and years. Lovely train of legacy to usb adapters on each of them too.
I also have 3 Logitech TrackMan Marble/FX. Bought two on ebay when they stopped being sold.
When forced to use different keyboard and normal mouse, can barely get through the day.
as the operating system of choice.
Then they won't mind paying annual H-1B visa fees in the amount of 250% of said worker's salary.
I mean, their argument is there there exists no local workers, or even workers within the *entire* US, that they can hire that could perform the same job.
The last bastion of desperate statists.
Awesome!
On that show and others like it, *everything* on this planet is a result of meddling by visitors from outer space. Every ridiculous claim proffered, like George Washington cross the Delaware on the advice of some little green man, or that Bigfoot is an on-going genetic experiment by aliens, is preceded by the phrase "Ancient Astronaut theorists believe that...".
Big stink on that one.
" Because fuck banks, we can get more votes from people who don't like paying bills and want free cars."
Well, this is Slashdot, so this is about right for lots of people here.
They will be pilloried for not helping the poor, at best, or be brought up on charges of racism (equal opportunity lending) at worst (no matter how unfounded or what race the borrowers might actually be).
In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore — equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird — Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening’s dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth.
“I have $80 bucks left!” Magida said. “I’m so happy!”
“I have $12,” Mak said with a frown.
The two friends weren’t tabulating the cash in their wallets but what remained of the monthly allotment on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program debit cards, the official new term for what are still known colloquially as food stamps.
Magida, a 30-year-old art school graduate, had been installing museum exhibits for a living until the recession caused arts funding — and her usual gigs — to dry up. She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she’s used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.
“I’m eating better than I ever have before,” she told me. “Even with food stamps, it’s not like I’m living large, but it helps.”
Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.
“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”
Far too many times this will be the claim. No matter what color the borrower and lender might be.
From Delta.com:
Funding for the FAA expired on July 23. At that time, Delta stopped collecting several taxes imposed on ticket sales, including a 7.5 percent tax on the base ticket price, a $3.70 segment tax and facilities taxes on international travel and travel to and from Alaska and Hawaii.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has advised that travelers who paid for tickets on or before July 22, 2011, for travel beginning on or after July 23 and prior to the reinstatement of FAA funding, may be entitled to a refund of those taxes.
OTOH, Congress *retroactively* reinstated the tax about 2 weeks after it expired (Aug. 5, 2011, with collections resuming Aug 8, 2011), so the airlines probably had a good reason to keep the fare+tax cost the same even when the tax portion temporarily went to $0.
All in all, a poor example of "the market doesn't work to lower prices".