If I'm a single mother I can work two jobs (atminimum wage), work 50 hours per week and still live in poverty. I would much rather live off disability and/or welfare and be home to raise/influence my children than work away from home and still live in poverty.
As someone who believes part of our tax dollars should be used to help the less fortunate, I have to say that there is something seriously with our country if it pays more for a single mom to be on welfare than it does for the single mom to work. Work is supposed to create a higher standard of living than welfare, not the other way around.
I blame capitalism practiced to its nth degree. It is every leader of industry needing to satisfy the stockholders demands. Yet these leaders are not innovative. Their solution is outsourcing jobs and creating competition amongst labor....a race to the bottom. No sense of communal responsibility. And strict adherence to the philosophy that greed is good.
Also, you see that there are many of these leaders today that were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They had all the opportunities in the world. How can they empathize with those in poverty when they never had to struggle themselves?
*nodnod* I heard it said once (someone on NPR or some article in a newspaper, probably) that one downside of the current structure vs. that in the 1950s and earlier (despite us getting *closer* to equal opportunity for people other than white men since then) is that "back in the day" there was an understanding that you were working for something where you'd be passing a legacy down- basically, that honor and morality regarding the work you were doing mattered.
Of course, I sorta doubt that was
really usually the case even in earlier times, but hey, I'm cynical.
And, again, exactly- it's cheaper to outsource labor, so labor gets outsourced. On the one hand, if this stopped happening, the price of good would probably rise. On the other hand, more people in America would be able to get their basic needs met by working.
Lower-skill jobs that used to be for high school kids are now filled with workers across all ages- there's more competition to work in a damn grocery store nowadays than people even a decade ago would have believed possible. Wages aren't rising as fast as the cost of living is.
This is true, and its an excuse to get angry and try to change things. But its not an excuse to give up.
What do you propose we do, Rage? What do you propose otherwise-candidates for disability do?
If I'm a single mother I can work two jobs (atminimum wage), work 50 hours per week and still live in poverty. I would much rather live off disability and/or welfare and be home to raise/influence my children than work away from home and still live in poverty.
As someone who believes part of our tax dollars should be used to help the less fortunate, I have to say that there is something seriously with our country if it pays more for a single mom to be on welfare than it does for the single mom to work. Work is supposed to create a higher standard of living than welfare, not the other way around.
Exactly. And there is. (I'm assuming you left out the word "wrong.")
Also- the single mom in the example would be in poverty even without childcare factored in. Factor childcare in, and all of a sudden she's almost working for nothing until her kids go to school. Believe me, I see this often enough- it's very fucking real, and it's a real problem.
A balance that I am alarmed by us the current balance in the US between record corporate profits and 8% unemployment.
It used to be theorized that full employment 4%or less) was needed in order to generate buyers to keep this old consumer based economy working.
Business does not care about the system. Their loyalties are to profits, not borders.
I know this is a thread about disability 'claims' I think it's all connected.
Well, take "record corporate profits" with something of a grain of salt, because depending on how the data is juggled, you may not properly be accounting for inflation and/or the fact that corporations are just plain BIGGER so the numbers are also bigger and would be even if profit per worker was the same. That said, yes, multinational corporations are (pardon the pun) a giant problem. Monopolies used to be illegal. There's a damn REASON they used to be illegal. Now, we just have ways of sorta-kinda
masking when things are monopolies. When was the last time you heard about any "trusts" being "busted?" There's an ever-widening gap between rich and poor in America. Social mobility is more and more of a lie. It *is* getting worse.
And you're actually talking about some of the issues I hoped would be raised. It *is* all connected, and I wonder what on earth the solution even COULD be, let alone WILL be.
There's other factors, too- things are just plain more automated nowadays (and there goes factory jobs even without outsourcing- hell, there go taxi drivers, in a decade or two, with smart cars- and I'm sure that's just scratching the surface). Not only is high school expected, now
college is expected (even if it really does nothing more than high school for employability, and adds crazy-debt in the process). The population *is* aging, and that will get worse before it gets better (the baby boomer generation had, I believe, higher fertility rates than nowadays- thank god- but they're the generation that's hitting retirement age around now).
The current *expected* employment and income structure just plain isn't sustainable, in my opinion, even if all the other bullshit was removed from the equation (and I know I'm not alone in thinking this). So, even if the conglomocorps and corruption and all that jazz got taken away, we're STILL left with the question of how the economy should look in the future- and how it WILL look.
