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Sarcastic, but you willfully lack imagination. There are urchins who choose not to work and do just fine. It's fairly straightforward to scam Social Security

Sarcastic, but you willfully lack imagination. There are urchins who choose not to work and do just fine. It's fairly straightforward to scam Social Security Disability for main income and then collect EBT, food stamps, and get some housing in the projects. It's not a great life, but it's a living, and there's plenty more help to pay for phone and utilities. If one is wicked, then they can sprinkle in some identity theft or plain old theft to pay for luxuries like a car or the newest iphone! Work does suck, I can sympathize with wanting to avoid it. And if you're constantly told you'll never make anything of yourself and that you're a perpetual victim from childhood, well that'll beat you down too. I just don't buy the assumption that every impoverished soul is noble.

mikeash 9y ago
What about all the poor people who want to work but can't find a job, or all the poor people who do work but just don't earn enough to stop being poor?
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  I wasn't talking about those people, was that not clear? I wrote because you were being either sarcastic or snarky or chronically compassionate. There are scam artists that stitch the rich tapestry of welfare programs together to make a living. You might choose to look the other way, out of compassion, whereas I choose to look straight at it and call it theft, out of compassion. I am being compassionate (tough love). You are being compassionate (empathy). Both of our voices are important in this discussion. I actually don't believe you have to sacrifice your belief system to acknowledge there are fraudsters in the system who are a drain on society. Everything I have read about SSD says the fraudulent claims are anywhere between 1% and 25% of the total. I'm willing to accept that as few as 1% of claims are fraudulent, but even 1% would be 106000 out of 10.6 million (2011 numbers), and that's still a ton of fraud just in that one benefit.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I was talking about those people. Was that not clear? I was being sarcastic because I was replying to a person who said that avoiding poverty was simple, all you have to do is get a job. I don't see what any of your comment has to do with this.
    - EdSharkey 9y ago
      You appreciate only your side of this debate. Whereas I appreciate both. My comment has to do with one-sidedness.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        This is an interesting tactic: try to forcibly shift the conversation in a completely different direction, and then criticize the other person when they don't follow. I can't say it's working, but it's not a bad attempt.
        EdSharkey 9y ago
        Tactic, pfft. I never downvoted you even though you started out with useless sarcasm. You didn't launch with name calling as your peers so often do. But now you're skating on thin ice with this useless negativity. Can't we have a conversation anymore? Try getting involved by making an argument next time and bolster your philosophy rather than throwing shade on others.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  If those people managed to graduate high school and didn't have children out of wedlock, then there's a 98% chance they'll escape poverty. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Graduate, hold off on kids, and get a full time job. Thus my sarcasm. Escape poverty by making money. It's a miracle! By the way, your 98% figure is incorrect. The study says that 2% of all Americans who did these three things are in poverty. The vast majority of those people were never in poverty to begin with, so didn't escape it.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Escape/avoid, now you're just arguing semantics. I'm not even really sure what your point is. The only thing I stated is that we know the recipe for avoiding and/or leaving poverty. It's not necessarily easy but it is simple and it has three major factors. All I stated was our social policies should reflect the things we know work. Yes, to a certain extent jobs don't just fall out of the sky. But it's much harder to get and maintain a job and/or move up the ladder when you don't graduate high school and pop out kids in a single parent household. And don't pretend it's that hard to maintain basic employment. We're not talking about making everyone doctors here.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        There's a huuuuge difference between escaping poverty and avoiding poverty. 70% of Americans who are born poor will die poor. I can't find solid number for how many non-poor Americans will become poor, but given that the poverty rate is about 15%, and 70% of that 15% was born into poverty, we can straightforwardly estimate that about 6% of non-poor Americans become poor. In other words, the chances of any random poor American escaping poverty are about 30%, while the chances of any random non-poor American avoiding poverty are about 94%. With 94% of non-poor Americans avoiding poverty, saying that 98% of Americans who do X, Y, and Z escape or avoid poverty is not terribly compelling. I'm sure that obtaining and maintaining full-time employment really helps people escape from poverty. My point is just that this is not really useful to say, because it's fairly obvious, and because the difficult part is having jobs for poor people to work. Saying that we should help poor people escape poverty by ensuring they can work full-time jobs is like saying we should help put people on the moon by giving them altitude. Yes, it's true, but not really helpful advice. So much social policy already revolves around jobs that I just don't see why you act like this is some revolutionary idea. The question is not whether we should help poor people work. The question is how.

mikeash 9y ago

What about all the poor people who want to work but can't find a job, or all the poor people who do work but just don't earn enough to stop being poor?

EdSharkey 9y ago
I wasn't talking about those people, was that not clear? I wrote because you were being either sarcastic or snarky or chronically compassionate. There are scam artists that stitch the rich tapestry of welfare programs together to make a living. You might choose to look the other way, out of compassion, whereas I choose to look straight at it and call it theft, out of compassion. I am being compassionate (tough love). You are being compassionate (empathy). Both of our voices are important in this discussion. I actually don't believe you have to sacrifice your belief system to acknowledge there are fraudsters in the system who are a drain on society. Everything I have read about SSD says the fraudulent claims are anywhere between 1% and 25% of the total. I'm willing to accept that as few as 1% of claims are fraudulent, but even 1% would be 106000 out of 10.6 million (2011 numbers), and that's still a ton of fraud just in that one benefit.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I was talking about those people. Was that not clear? I was being sarcastic because I was replying to a person who said that avoiding poverty was simple, all you have to do is get a job. I don't see what any of your comment has to do with this.
  - EdSharkey 9y ago
    You appreciate only your side of this debate. Whereas I appreciate both. My comment has to do with one-sidedness.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      This is an interesting tactic: try to forcibly shift the conversation in a completely different direction, and then criticize the other person when they don't follow. I can't say it's working, but it's not a bad attempt.
      - EdSharkey 9y ago
        Tactic, pfft. I never downvoted you even though you started out with useless sarcasm. You didn't launch with name calling as your peers so often do. But now you're skating on thin ice with this useless negativity. Can't we have a conversation anymore? Try getting involved by making an argument next time and bolster your philosophy rather than throwing shade on others.
Consultant32452 9y ago
If those people managed to graduate high school and didn't have children out of wedlock, then there's a 98% chance they'll escape poverty. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
- mikeash 9y ago
  Graduate, hold off on kids, and get a full time job. Thus my sarcasm. Escape poverty by making money. It's a miracle! By the way, your 98% figure is incorrect. The study says that 2% of all Americans who did these three things are in poverty. The vast majority of those people were never in poverty to begin with, so didn't escape it.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Escape/avoid, now you're just arguing semantics. I'm not even really sure what your point is. The only thing I stated is that we know the recipe for avoiding and/or leaving poverty. It's not necessarily easy but it is simple and it has three major factors. All I stated was our social policies should reflect the things we know work. Yes, to a certain extent jobs don't just fall out of the sky. But it's much harder to get and maintain a job and/or move up the ladder when you don't graduate high school and pop out kids in a single parent household. And don't pretend it's that hard to maintain basic employment. We're not talking about making everyone doctors here.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      There's a huuuuge difference between escaping poverty and avoiding poverty. 70% of Americans who are born poor will die poor. I can't find solid number for how many non-poor Americans will become poor, but given that the poverty rate is about 15%, and 70% of that 15% was born into poverty, we can straightforwardly estimate that about 6% of non-poor Americans become poor. In other words, the chances of any random poor American escaping poverty are about 30%, while the chances of any random non-poor American avoiding poverty are about 94%. With 94% of non-poor Americans avoiding poverty, saying that 98% of Americans who do X, Y, and Z escape or avoid poverty is not terribly compelling. I'm sure that obtaining and maintaining full-time employment really helps people escape from poverty. My point is just that this is not really useful to say, because it's fairly obvious, and because the difficult part is having jobs for poor people to work. Saying that we should help poor people escape poverty by ensuring they can work full-time jobs is like saying we should help put people on the moon by giving them altitude. Yes, it's true, but not really helpful advice. So much social policy already revolves around jobs that I just don't see why you act like this is some revolutionary idea. The question is not whether we should help poor people work. The question is how.