McConnell the Father of Poverty; US Poor Grows by 6 Million

[Howel]

No I was talking about knowledge and not stupidity, they're not the same thing. For example toddlers always lack important knowledge but that doesn't mean they're inherently stupid, it just means they need to develop and learn more about how everything works.

And if that toddlers' environment to self develop and learn, is harmed by the fact that its parents are poor, not being able to give sufficient dietary plan for full brain development capacity, as well as tools and later on education at a decent level; at which point is the toddler supposed to turn around this disadvantageous upbringing to ensure maximum chance off becoming rich or well off?

The debt off a poor upbringing, is big.

[PC2]

people like this are a waste of time to argue with, they all probably just got lucky with them being suported by rich mommy or daddy and thus are very far out of touch with what poverity is like.

It's better to talk about ideas instead of engaging in ad hominem. Why would you even use internet forums if you're only interested in talking to people who are exactly like you and agree with you on everything? That's called a circle-jerk.

[TigTone]

It's better to talk about ideas instead of engaging in ad hominem. Why would you even use internet forums if you're only interested in talking to people who are exactly like you and agree with you on everything? That's called a circle-jerk.

Cause your ignorant to the consequences of the harmful environment poverty is.

And ignore the talks about it by other posts.

[JohnBrown1917]

It's better to talk about ideas instead of engaging in ad hominem. Why would you even use internet forums if you're only interested in talking to people who are exactly like you and agree with you on everything? That's called a circle-jerk.

Talking about wrong information is not an 'idea'

[Mihalik]

I don't think hyperspecialization is a fisable alternative since those who can usually do enter the skilled workforce rather then scratch out a living in the unskilled sector.

Hyperspecialization doesn't necessarily mean tech skill or training related. Hyperspecialization is a much broader concept.

It can range from making Manchego cheese or Bordeaux wine, Mexican Mezcal, Cuban Cigar, Haitian Rum, Russian Caviar (this is why internationally recognized, regulated and enforced Protected Origin rules are so important) all the way to someone learning 16th century blacksmithing skills for creating replicas or restoring original items for a niche market.

These sort of businesses often have issues with securing proper financing and having legislation in place for protecting them. They also often struggle with drawing in new generations of people as educational channels like apprenticeship programs rarely exist for them, so the skills often get lost DESPITE being economically viable professions. But if you create the right economic and regulatory environment for them they can actually be wildly successful and can revitalize local economies while simultaneously being part of a global supply chain.

Politicians love and I mean loooooooooooove talking about small businesses but are rarely actively willing to put in the work to help those businesses. This for 2 reasons, small businesses have limited visibility (they typically make up the majority of a nation's GDP as aggregate but due to their diversity and small individual size they lack direct communication channels to the government). Take a small town that is let's say know for having a car factory. The factory will employ like 20% of the population directly and another 20% indirectly...still 60% will be employed by small businesses and the government itself, but it's much easier and flashier for a politician to talk about how a tax break or a subvention to the car manufacturer created 3000 new jobs than for him to actually go into the nitty gritty of dozens of small programs, laws, international treaties, educational programs, small businesses tax breaks etc created 6000 jobs in 400 different businesses. It's just not as flashy and doesn't sound as cool at political rally or in a 45 second news sound bite.

And of course the second problem is the lack of lobbying power. Oddly enough historically the greatest advocates for small businesses have been labor unions and trade unions (not talking about the Chamber of Commerce here). Labor unions create strong standards the protect small businesses from races to the bottom where they lack the financial means to compete with big businesses and trade unions used to protect small businesses from abusive businesses practices like the ones companies like Walmart, Amazon, the Textile industry etc base their success on.

Decades of deregulation destroyed or handicapped trade unions not just in the US but also in Europe, and decades of targeted union busting have done the same for the unions. Oddly enough big businesses have been wildly successful at setting trade unions and labor unions at each other's throats when in reality their interests have historically always been aligned.

[PC2]

Cause your ignorant to the consequences of the harmful environment poverty is.

And ignore the talks about it by other posts.

No I'm aware of the harmfulness of poverty. What I'm saying is that it's caused by a lack of useful knowledge and it's not caused by Mitch McConnell or any other person you want to use as a scapegoat. If you want a Republican to offer more welfare then you're free to your opinion but you can't by any means say that they are the root cause for why poor people are poor.

[Krakan]

It is likely a bit easier and less time consuming, than having to do a complete restructure of your economy (by the market itself, I might add) and have it finds it way to a viable balance, which would need to be done if you abandoned the global market

Albeit, that abandonment would likely make the obviousness of that unfairness a bit more transparent, so that'd likely do at least something against it; but unlikely to a big enough extend. Heck, they might just leave, and you can do nothing against it.

That is the dilemma. The "nobles" as it were have no real roots or loyalty to any one nation they transcended it. It makes it extremely hard to call them to account.

[TigTone]

No I'm aware of the harmfulness of poverty. What I'm saying is that it's caused by a lack of useful knowledge and it's not caused by Mitch McConnell or any other person you want to use as a scapegoat. If you want a Republican to offer more welfare then you're free to your opinion but you can't by any means say that they are the root cause for why poor people are poor.

A party ,Mitch McConnells party, that’s has no problem with brain drain polices and under funding education especially for poor communities.

You now those places that provide that “knowledge” you keep talking about.

They are responsible because their policies are part of the reason for the poverty in this country.

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That is the dilemma. The "nobles" as it were have no real roots or loyalty to any one nation they transcended it. It makes it extremely hard to call them to account.

Their is books on their secluded culture of the super rich.

They have this belief they are above everyone and everyone below them was born to serve them.

A Queen bee view of the world.

[Krakan]

Hyperspecialization doesn't necessarily mean tech skill or training related. Hyperspecialization is a much broader concept.

It can range from making Manchego cheese or Bordeaux wine, Mexican Mezcal, Cuban Cigar, Haitian Rum, Russian Caviar (this is why internationally recognized, regulated and enforced Protected Origin rules are so important) all the way to someone learning 16th century blacksmithing skills for creating replicas or restoring original items for a niche market.

These sort of businesses often have issues with securing proper financing and having legislation in place for protecting them. They also often struggle with drawing in new generations of people as educational channels like apprenticeship programs rarely exist for them, so the skills often get lost DESPITE being economically viable professions. But if you create the right economic and regulatory environment for them they can actually be wildly successful and can revitalize local economies while simultaneously being part of a global supply chain.

Politicians love and I mean loooooooooooove talking about small businesses but are rarely actively willing to put in the work to help those businesses. This for 2 reasons, small businesses have limited visibility (they typically make up the majority of a nation's GDP as aggregate but due to their diversity and small individual size they lack direct communication channels to the government). Take a small town that is let's say know for having a car factory. The factory will employ like 20% of the population directly and another 20% indirectly...still 60% will be employed by small businesses and the government itself, but it's much easier and flashier for a politician to talk about how a tax break or a subvention to the car manufacturer created 3000 new jobs than for him to actually go into the nitty gritty of dozens of small programs, laws, international treaties, educational programs, small businesses tax breaks etc created 6000 jobs in 400 different businesses. It's just not as flashy and doesn't sound as cool at political rally or in a 45 second news sound bite.

And of course the second problem is the lack of lobbying power. Oddly enough historically the greatest advocates for small businesses have been labor unions and trade unions (not talking about the Chamber of Commerce here). Labor unions create strong standards the protect small businesses from races to the bottom where they lack the financial means to compete with big businesses and trade unions used to protect small businesses from abusive businesses practices like the ones companies like Walmart, Amazon, the Textile industry etc base their success on.

Decades of deregulation destroyed or handicapped trade unions not just in the US but also in Europe, and decades of targeted union busting have done the same for the unions. Oddly enough big businesses have been wildly successful at setting trade unions and labor unions at each other's throats when in reality their interests have historically always been aligned.

The issues I can see at a glance with this are as follows. Some of these trades for a lack of a better term require extensive infrastructure and resources to get off the ground and it begs the question of what do you do if someone is unsuccessful?

These feel like they need to be personal ventures as any capital put into them would be a risky venture at the very best. I also don't really know how large such a project can get... at least as a national strategy. I know it can have success one can look at craft sites like etsy's for proof it's just how large of a scale that works on and how to financially support it are the issues I see.

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A party ,Mitch McConnells party, that’s has no problem with brain drain polices and under funding education especially for poor communities.

You now those places that provide that “knowledge” you keep talking about.

They are responsible because their policies are part of the reason for the poverty in this country.

- - - Updated - - -



Their is books on their secluded culture of the super rich.

They have this belief they are above everyone and everyone below them was born to serve them.

A Queen bee view of the world.

The issue is it appears as the correct view or at least an exceedingly difficult one to challenge in practice.

[Adam Jensen]

No I'm aware of the harmfulness of poverty. What I'm saying is that it's caused by a lack of useful knowledge and it's not caused by Mitch McConnell or any other person you want to use as a scapegoat. If you want a Republican to offer more welfare then you're free to your opinion but you can't by any means say that they are the root cause for why poor people are poor.

Mitch and his friends make it harder for poor people to have the resources they need to not be poor. It's not a "lack of intelligence" on the part of the poor people, but a lack of resources and opportunity.

[Elegiac]

I wasn't being judgemental and I wasn't judging poor people. Every person or family tree started out poor and has to build up wealth from a starting point. There's no shame in that, it's simply the reality of evolution and life on Earth.

Social darwinism is pseudoscience, just so you’re aware.

[TigTone]

Social darwinism is pseudoscience, just so you’re aware.

If he wants to argue that’s it’s just evolution and life then poor people are far more successful than the rich “knowledgeable” ones.

Outside of humanity all other animals goal is simply to survive and reproduce.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ome-in-the-us/

[Themius]

It's better to talk about ideas instead of engaging in ad hominem. Why would you even use internet forums if you're only interested in talking to people who are exactly like you and agree with you on everything? That's called a circle-jerk.

Brutus said specifically that the congress would become the new aristocracy as the yeomen wouldn’t have means to win.

[Omega10]

The Republican Party is like the evil stepdad who will give you openly a beating with his belt in the living room until you've got a pair of blue eyes and a nosebleed.

The Democratic Party is more like the evil stepmom who acts all nice in public and gives you a cookie once in a while, but at night when you're sleeping she will pinch and poison you making sure you'll be feeling sick, tired and ill for the rest of your days.

The democrats have definitely done a lot of really bad things while in power.

And they have also done a lot of really really good things.

Democrats are who made gay marriage legal throughout the country. A lot of democrats got voted out of office after supporting civil rights legislation that made crucial steps towards reducing racial and gender inequality. Without democrats, there wouldn't have been a reasonably effective EPA and FDA for Trump to ruin and destroy. All of the welfare projects that Trump and republicans have been dismantling for years would not have existed in the first place. Social Security, which substantially reduced poverty among the elderly, would not exist. Neither would Medicare.

Why don't democrats do more in this direction? Because the ones that lead the charges for these changes get voted out of office in their next election. And, of course, in the 60s republicans used their second amendment rights to take out leaders like John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and others. Ok that last line was a bit over the top.

On the one hand, it's easy to blame the drug industries for the fact that we don't have universal health care in our country. And they have done a LOT to prevent the US from getting good health care because it cuts into their profits. But middle class and working class Americans have worked hard to guarantee that they get ripped off as much as possible by the drug companies. When George Bush put in a plan to prevent the government from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices for middle class and working class Americans, middle class and working class Americans supported George Bush's efforts. When Obama tried to put in a health care plan to make health care cheaper and better for middle class and working class Americans, middle class and working class Americans rose up and said NO NO NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. They loudly rose up and protested town hall meetings. They got their message heard, and Obamacare was watered down so that middle class and working class Americans could pay higher prices for less service from the health care industry.

Creating structures to make health care cheaper, or provide some sort of UBI, or even building up our infrastructure, is hard hard work. Obamacare ended up being over 1000 pages if I remember correctly. This is because these things are hard, and there are a LOT of details to cover.

One comment on UBI, and this paraphrases a poster here: We need to create a UBI system that corporate America can't game for their own benefit at the expense of the people it is supposed to help.. This is a VERY non-trivial problem to solve.

And, one final note: let's assume the election goes well and Biden wins reasonably handily and democrats take the Senate.

IT WILL TAKE OVER A YEAR JUST TO FIX SO MANY OF THE THINGS THAT TRUMP HAS BROKEN.

With republicans sabotaging the country the whole time, it could take longer.

[PC2]

Social darwinism is pseudoscience, just so you’re aware.

Yeah exactly that's because social darwinism is based on the theory that some people are innately better, which is impossible.

It's not a "lack of intelligence" on the part of the poor people,

I agree, it's not intelligence and metrics like the "intelligence" quotient(IQ) is largely irrelevant and useless.

but a lack of resources and opportunity.

I disagree because even if you gave a low knowledge person plenty of resources they still wouldn't have the knowledge to *generate* a decent income. A low knowledge person can only consume resources but not generate new resources and opportunities for themselves.

[Elegiac]

Yeah exactly that's because social darwinism is based on the theory that some people are innately better, which is impossible.

Then why are you out here repeating social darwinist nonsense about poverty being a function of "evolution" when in fact poverty is a function of systemic failure.

If you admit human systems are not perfect then by definition you're acknowledging the system can fail people through no fault of their own - that is irreconcilable with the idea poverty is a result of "not having marketable skills" or w/e nonsense they taught you in economics back in the 80s.

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A low knowledge person

Who are these people and can you actually point to them existing outside nonsense economic hypotheticals?

Because there are not "low knowledge" people - there are people whose skillsets are not valued in a capitalist economy. The same system that assigns negative value to a perfectly thriving ecosystem because it's not helping the GDP number by being logged or fracked.

[Felya]

Well it will sound naive but I believe most people want to help others...granted only in so far as it doesn't overly inconvince them.

This is one time in the thread, you are not being naive. If most people want to help others, let’s say empathy, what does it mean to compete with the few that don’t care? or... a corporation that has not capacity to care? The act of incorporating doesn’t just dissolve financial liabilities, but also the moral.

Your really trying to beg the question though of why is it that people ask in their own self interest rather then for the betterment of others consistently. I would say it's a flaw of humanity in general.

Understanding... If this was indeed a human flaw, it would be far easier to exploit than the fortunes spent to do so by politicians. To the extent it is more profitable to lobby in favor of said exploitation, than any change to a product.

What mistake do you believe I've made so far if I might ask?

There were several, the most absurdist is the USSR being the manufacturing arm of the world. I used Iron Curtain in jest, to emphasize the ridiculous nature of the assertion. The reason China is winning and USSR lost, China lifted their Iron Curtain just enough, almost a decade before perestroika.

I disagree I would argue it comes down to scale as well. I believe people have inherently different abilities. I don't really see people who are capable of skilled labor not taking up apprenticeships in the states.

I disagree...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

Let’s continue with development as an example. You can be an artist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoter...mming_language

A mathematician:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB

Or even close to god:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

We might not all take the same road, but we are all capable of reaching the goal.

[Dezerte]

No that is a moralization and it's your personal emotional feeling that is not objectively true. In order for that claim to be rigorous you would have to give me a methodology for determining what is a "fair" or unfair wage quantity that has an objective basis.

If there exists a job that pays a wage that makes a person poor, then that means that society/people/businesses are creating poverty. As long as these low paying jobs exist there will be poor people. If the poor working person gets a better job, great - but that just means another person takes the previously poor persons job which will continue perpetuating poverty in society.

There are of course many other factors that also contribute to poverty, mental health (etc), or even 'lack of knowledge' as you say - but that's just one part of it and does not explain poverty fully. Getting 'more knowledge' is not only just one part of it, but also a bit vague and generalized (not to mention an absolutist statement).

[Elegiac]

If there exists a job that pays a wage that makes a person poor, then that means that society/people/businesses are creating poverty. As long as these low paying jobs exist there will be poor people. If the poor working person gets a better job, great - but that just means another person takes the previously poor persons job which will continue perpetuating poverty in society.

There are of course many other factors that also contribute to poverty, mental health (etc), or even 'lack of knowledge' as you say - but that's just one part of it and does not explain poverty fully. Getting 'more knowledge' is not only just one part of it, but also a bit vague and generalized (not to mention an absolutist statement).

Americans like to get out of this hole by claiming that these jobs are intended to be "temporary" positions for people to hold while they acquire "more marketable skills" - which then begs the question of a) why high schoolers should need to hold jobs in the first place or, b) if not high schoolers, then how are people working for poverty wages able to afford skilling up.

Which then leads in to some cop out nonsense of "learn a trade and become a plumber/electrician/carpenter" which a) shows no real working knowledge of what those positions are actually paid in the current economy, or b) again, still deflects from the actual point of contention was that these service jobs pay poverty wages.

[Shalcker]

Tariffs aren't a one way street and just leads to an economic escalation in which everyone loses but the ones not participating. So no, tariffs don't work. Never have, never will.

That escalation isn't infinite, and most countries don't have perfect trade balances for even retaliatory tariffs to be sufficiently symmetric. Generally they just shift their production elsewhere.

Tariffs do encourage local industry growth, and thus work perfectly in that regard.

See for example Russian pork industry.