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Are you seriously begrudging us for our country being able to afford a higher minimum standard? My family was briefly on SSI decades ago, but my parents worked
by mkr-hn 15y ago
Are you seriously begrudging us for our country being able to afford a higher minimum standard? My family was briefly on SSI decades ago, but my parents worked hard to get to a point where we didn't need it to survive. No one wants to have to rely on the social safety net, but I'm glad it's there. And I really hope that some day your country will be able to provide basic protections against destitution to its poor.
- kamaal 15y agoNo I'm not. Seriously. I would hope some day my country has such a thing too! But I talking on the lines of gratitude. Gratitude is important. You can't really complain about stuff you got for free.
- mkr-hn 15y agoIt's not free. It's an insurance pool. People pay a little bit of their paycheck into it so they're not screwed if their life hits a speed bump and they have no money either due to poor planning or things outside their control.
- infinite8s 15y agoThe difference is you can still collect welfare (although not social security) even if you've never worked a day in your life (and you get even more if you have lots of kids). India and most other poor countries have no such social safety net. The point kamaal is making is that most poor people in the US live better than 70-80% of the population in India (even those considered "middle-class"). This is slowly changing as India's economy is modernizing, but there's still a long way to go before the standards of living between both countries will be anything close to par. As an aside, when I was in grad school in the US, my lab mate and I (both of us of indian descent, although born in the US) used to joke that for half our yearly stipend (about 25K) we could afford to hire a full time Ph.D. chemist in India to do our experiments while we slept. 10K USD in the India is considered middle/upper middle class.
- mkr-hn 15y agoI get the point. I just don't see why it's necessary for someone to point out the disparity in perception every time a story about America's poor comes up. We have different standards due to the difference in national wealth. Do you see Americans dropping in to talk about how out of touch people in better educated European countries are when they talk about problems in their schools? It wouldn't make sense. People get to aspire to better things for their country, even if other countries aren't quite there yet.
- kamaal 15y agoAmericans talk endlessly about how much cheaper <foreign work> destinations have stolen their jobs. They have stolen your jobs because of my aforementioned arguments. In other words you are in this 'poor' state because of your very high standards of living.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoI'll make an analogy. In the hypothetical nation of Robotopia, most people live in mansions, have flying cars, all the education and health care they want, and robots handle most menial labor. This is true even for the "poor", who have their robots (5 year old models, occasionally a little scratched), mansions (only 10,000 sq ft instead of the normal 20,000 sq ft) and flying cars provided by the state. However, due to a massive corruption scandal, one of the poorest parts of Robotopia now can't afford to provide robot house cleaners. The "poor" (who mostly don't have or want jobs) are now forced to clean their own houses. As a result, those poor people are complaining, threatening to riot, etc. Whatever your feeling are about the poor complaining Robotopians, that's probably how someone from India feels about the American poor.