When Poverty Attacks!

[PoliticalChic]

Like cancer or a broken fibula, poverty knows no bounds! One can be ambling along, whistling a happy tune....when "BAM"!
Poverty!


Yup....I learned that from the featured article in the most recent Columbia Magazine, thanks to the tireless efforts of Columbia University School of Medicine.....no, wait,...it's the Columbia University School of Social Work, Contemporary Urban Problems Department. [http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/summer-2014/fickle-fortunes]




1. We learn of Jessica, "A thirty-year-old high-school dropout" and "and her four-year-old son," ..."In November, Nolan began having tantrums so violent he had to be hospitalized. Doctors said he had a combination of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and mixed receptive-expressive language disorder. [Gee....good thing we have Ouija- board psychologists around!]...Lopez, with no help from Nolan’s imprisoned father, was forced to quit her job to care for her son."




2. And that's the biographical info provided....but not as a cautionary tale, warning of mistakes and poor choices leading to the unenviable situation, but as a "see what could happen to any of us," an emotional appeal that, actually, is quite effective as most folks want the best for their fellow citizens.

Do you imagine that the story discussed these questions?

Should Jessica have dropped out of high school?
Should she have had a child outside of marriage?
Should she have made a better choice in sperm-donors?
To what degree did her parenting skills result in her child's behavior?

Seems that those of the Liberal persuasion are not allowed to turn the spotlight on those queries....



a. These are the questions asked in this Columbia study:

"Have you missed a rent or mortgage payment lately?
Have your utilities been turned off?
Have you or your children gone without food?
Is anyone in your family seriously ill, and if so, has he or she received medical attention? Some questions were more personal: Have you been depressed lately?
Are you worried about money?
How satisfied are you with your family’s situation overall?"


Why?

These only deal with events occurring once one has journeyed down the poverty path....or has been suddenly 'stricken with poverty...'


(Cue Toccata and Fugue in D minor)

 

[Mad Scientist]

When I was a kid the point of the story would be "Don't let this happen to you". Now it's as you pointed out "This could happen to anyone!".

My Uncle said as much about 20 years ago: "Hey man, we're all just a paycheck away from being homeless" and I said "No, not you. You've always had that self-sufficient attitude. You never complain and you are always looking for solutions".

He's been running his own Alarm Installation company for more than 30 years and is still doing just fine.

 

[Moonglow]

Poverty can also occur over health issues, but don't let me interrupt you hard love session...

 

[PoliticalChic]

When I was a kid the point of the story would be "Don't let this happen to you". Now it's as you pointed out "This could happen to anyone!".

My Uncle said as much about 20 years ago: "Hey man, we're all just a paycheck away from being homeless" and I said "No, not you. You've always had that self-sufficient attitude. You never complain and you are always looking for solutions".

He's been running his own Alarm Installation company for more than 30 years and is still doing just fine.

Perhaps I've misunderstood...but I hope you aren't buying the "This could happen to anyone!".


"Brookings whittled down a lot of analysis into three simple rules. You can avoid poverty by:
1. Graduating from high school.
2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.
3. Having a full-time job.
If you do all those three things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class."
Three rules for staying out of poverty | members.jacksonville.com

 

[PoliticalChic]

Poverty can also occur over health issues, but don't let me interrupt you hard love session...

Why are 47 million Americans on food stamps?
Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis


Shall I wait while you gather up the statistics of the number of those 47 million accepting food stamps due to "health issues"?



Or you can simply admit that you're willing to accept even the tiniest possible number as good enough to validate destructive Liberal policies?


As soon as you do one of the two options I've offered, you may begin this session of penitential prostration.



Begin.

 

[Mad Scientist]

When I was a kid the point of the story would be "Don't let this happen to you". Now it's as you pointed out "This could happen to anyone!".

My Uncle said as much about 20 years ago: "Hey man, we're all just a paycheck away from being homeless" and I said "No, not you. You've always had that self-sufficient attitude. You never complain and you are always looking for solutions".

He's been running his own Alarm Installation company for more than 30 years and is still doing just fine.

Perhaps I've misunderstood...but I hope you aren't buying the "This could happen to anyone!".

"Brookings whittled down a lot of analysis into three simple rules. You can avoid poverty by:
1. Graduating from high school.
2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.
3. Having a full-time job.
If you do all those three things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class."
Three rules for staying out of poverty | members.jacksonville.com

No not at all, but there ARE some people who live paycheck to paycheck and it's PROBABLY because they haven't followed the simple rules that you posted.

 

[PoliticalChic]

When I was a kid the point of the story would be "Don't let this happen to you". Now it's as you pointed out "This could happen to anyone!".

My Uncle said as much about 20 years ago: "Hey man, we're all just a paycheck away from being homeless" and I said "No, not you. You've always had that self-sufficient attitude. You never complain and you are always looking for solutions".

He's been running his own Alarm Installation company for more than 30 years and is still doing just fine.

Perhaps I've misunderstood...but I hope you aren't buying the "This could happen to anyone!".

"Brookings whittled down a lot of analysis into three simple rules. You can avoid poverty by:
1. Graduating from high school.
2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.
3. Having a full-time job.
If you do all those three things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class."
Three rules for staying out of poverty | members.jacksonville.com

No not at all, but there ARE some people who live paycheck to paycheck and it's PROBABLY because they haven't followed the simple rules that you posted.

Since we realize same, and many others do, as well....there can only be one explanation for Liberal policies.....and it is not to cure poverty.

 

[PoliticalChic]

3. "Today, Lopez gets by on a combination of cash assistance ($138 a month), food stamps ($210 a month), Medicaid (about $300 a month for Nolan’s medication), and Supplemental Security Income ($740 a month). She is still unable to work, because Nolan often can’t go to school or must be retrieved early..... “So I’m not working. I worry about money every day. It’s that kind of life.... some fifty million people in the United States, or about one in seven, are now living below the official poverty line — which, for a single parent of one child, means earning less than about $16,000 a year —.” Fickle Fortunes | Summer 2014 | Columbia Magazine


"...earning..."?????




But...if one actually works and earns a living.....

a. ...A companion piece to this sad tale is this, from Wyatt Emerich of 'The Cleveland Current,' who "... analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that "a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year." And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks."
In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year | Zero Hedge



So....Liberal welfare policies actually provide more disposable income that actually working????

And they claim said policies are designed to move people out of welfare???




(You came to catch)
You thought I'd be naive and tame
(You met your match)
But I beat you at your own game, oh

(Who's zoomin' who?)
Take another look and tell me, baby
(Who's zoomin who?)
Who's zoomin' who?
(Who's zoomin who?)
Now the fish jumped off the hook, didn't I, baby?
(Who's zoomin who?)
Yeah
ARETHA FRANKLIN LYRICS - Who's Zoomin' Who


Of course, the tune doesn't apply to Liberals.....

 

[PoliticalChic]

4. "Whereas some fifty million people in the United States, or about one in seven, are now living below the official poverty line ..."
Columbia Magazine, Op.Cit.





a. This might be a good time to inquire whether the reader knows how that ' official poverty line' is calculated....

" .... is based on misleading statistics that not one American in 100,000 could possibly understand, says columnist Robert J. Samuelson. That's because the new calculation would measure poverty on a sliding scale. Thus, if the average income of families in the United States increases so too does the poverty threshold. Talk about keeping up with the Jones.

This new measure provides the perfect climate for left-leaning politicians to promote equalization of wealth through redistribution. The measure would bump poverty up 30 percent: more poverty equals more political fodder to argue for increased welfare. Unfortunately, the method currently used to calculate the poverty rate is already skewed, creating a "crisis" of poverty in the United States... "
New Poverty Measure Doesn?t Add Up
Robert J. Samuelson - Why Obama's poverty rate measure misleads



And...as we have learned, the Liberal mantra is "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel



Like the Hokey-Pokey.....that's what it's all about.

 

[SAYIT]

When I was a kid the point of the story would be "Don't let this happen to you". Now it's as you pointed out "This could happen to anyone!".

My Uncle said as much about 20 years ago: "Hey man, we're all just a paycheck away from being homeless" and I said "No, not you. You've always had that self-sufficient attitude. You never complain and you are always looking for solutions".

He's been running his own Alarm Installation company for more than 30 years and is still doing just fine.

I hope his experience and attitude rubbed off on you.
The point of the story, IMHO, is poor choices often lead to poor situations. She has the right to live her life as she sees fit and yet we are responsible when she fails. We can only make so many bad choices before our house of cards collapses.

 

[g5000]

If you are white, lived in a two parent family, graduated high school, and got married before you had children, you have the best chance for success in America.

You often hear politicians use anecdotes to support their pet theories. Oftentimes, those anecdotes don't match up with objective data.

So let's look at the anecdote in the OP. Jessica.

You will never hear a politician point to someone like the single mother in the OP and say, "Now let me give you an example of a complete fuckup who demonstrates what not to do. Hey, Jessica, stand up so everyone can see you!"

That just won't happen.

But, yeah, Jessica is a fuckup who has painted herself into a real corner. Yep.


We can poke a stick at Jessica all day long. But what is your motive for doing so? Are you just using her to confirm your personal biases? Are you using her as an anecdote that does not match up with objective data? Are you using her to paint all people in poverty as being Jessica clones?

Methinks that is the aim of the OP.

 

[PoliticalChic]

If you are white, lived in a two parent family, graduated high school, and got married before you had children, you have the best chance for success in America.

You often hear politicians use anecdotes to support their pet theories. Oftentimes, those anecdotes don't match up with objective data.

So let's look at the anecdote in the OP. Jessica.

You will never hear a politician point to someone like the single mother in the OP and say, "Now let me give you an example of a complete fuckup who demonstrates what not to do. Hey, Jessica, stand up so everyone can see you!"

That just won't happen.

But, yeah, Jessica is a fuckup who has painted herself into a real corner. Yep.


We can poke a stick at Jessica all day long. But what is your motive for doing so? Are you just using her to confirm your personal biases? Are you using her as an anecdote that does not match up with objective data? Are you using her to paint all people in poverty as being Jessica clones?

Methinks that is the aim of the OP.

"Methinks" is obviously a poorly chosen term, in your case, as it suggests that thinking has been accomplished.

What, I believe, is apparent to any of average or above ability who read the thread...and there is more coming...is the indictment of the Liberal welfare system....one that encourages taking rather than earning, and grows poverty rather than reduces same.


While the first part of your post is a correct summary of the view, ....you should have quit while you were ahead.


I don’t want to say you’re stupid…..let’s just say you’ve got bad luck when it comes to thinking.

 

[The Rabbi]

It is a strategy. It is meant to say to the audience, "X is not just someone else's problem. X is your problem too."
I remember seeing a poster in the late 1980s in DC that said "if you're fucking, or getting fucked, you're at risk for AIDS."
It was nonsense. You're at risk for AIDS if you are having unprotected homosexual sex, if you're a needle drug abuser, if you're an African or Haitian, or in those days had blood transfusions.
But by framing it in those terms suddenly everyone who had sex, even monogamous married couples, was at risk. Therefore AIDS was also their problem.

Same here. Sure, everyone looks at a fuckup like Jessica and draws the obvious conclusion: if you make stupid decisions, you get stupid results. Dont make stupid decisions.
But the organization sponsoring this doesnt want you to ahve that response. They want you to get the idea that any one of us could be Jessica: just the bug on the windshield of life. It isn't true. But that wont bring greater funding to their projects. And that's the point.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So....how did we arrive at the "official poverty rate"?

5. Big Government devotees invented the definition of poverty, a sort of Liberal "moveable feast," so that it:
a. removes any stigma, it encourages acceptance of welfare
b. it allows for ever-increasing size of the bureaucracy, and
c. it can be manipulated to influence the voting public.




6. 'Poverty’ may be illusory. It exists in the context in which we discuss it, based on a dollar figure, …the government “developed poverty thresholds. based on the "thrifty food plan," which was the cheapest of four food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture.


The food plan was "designed for temporary or emergency use when funds are low," according to the USDA. Based on the 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey from the USDA (the latest available survey at the time), Orshansky knew that families of three or more persons spent about one third of their after-tax income on food, then multiplied the cost of the USDA economy food plan by three to arrive at the minimal yearly income a family would need.

Using 1963 as a base year, she calculated that a family of four, two adults and two children would spend $1,033 for food per year. Using her formula based on the 1955 survey, she arrived at $3,100 a year ($1,033 x3) as the poverty threshold for a family of four in 1963….Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau updates the poverty threshold to account for inflation.” How We Measure Poverty How We Measure Poverty - Oregon Center for Public Policy



a. But.... "the poverty threshold is outdated and point to studies showing that currently only one-seventh of the American family's spending is for food [source: CSM]." HowStuffWorks "The Poverty Threshold"




"...only one-seventh of the American family's spending is for food..."
Not " ....one third of their after-tax income on food..."



Got the math? It was first fabricated by guessing that folks spent 33% on food....turns out it's 14%....so the poverty rate is really less than half of what government claims.

So....it didn't really matter how accurate the determination was.....after all, the bureaucrats aren't paying for it....and the more folks the program 'gobbles up,' the bigger government grows!



Starting to get the picture?

 

[PoliticalChic]

Let's go over that point again....the "official poverty rate" is a totally made up figure designed to keep Liberals in power.


Here, let's document that point:

7. "It’s important to remember that the official poverty rate came about largely by happenstance and was not the result of a carefully thought through analysis.
An economist named Mollie Orshansky at the Social Security Administration made the first estimate of the poverty rate in 1963. Ms. Orshansky, who died in 2007, had some data from the Department of Agriculture on food budgets for families of different sizes and incomes. She saw that food constituted about a third of spending by poor families and thus assumed that three times the budget for food would approximate the poverty rate.

This back of the envelope calculation was seized upon by the White House under Lyndon Johnson, which turned Orshansky’s figure into the official measure of poverty. Since that time, the original poverty measure of $3,000 for a family of four has simply been increased by the rate of inflation. In 2010, the official poverty threshold for a family of four (two adults and two children) was $22,113.
: Poverty Rates: How a Flawed Measure Drives Policy | The Fiscal Times



a. "The cost of the Economy Food Plan was the lowest of the four food plans developed by USDA (Cofer, Grossman and Clark), but it was not a minimum cost at which nutritional needs can be met. They state that, “plans for adequate diets at still lower cost could be developed, but they would deviate further from average food habits” (p. 8)."
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/20301/PDF




Did you get that part: "... but it was not a minimum cost at which nutritional needs can be met."
Not the lowest cost food plan..." the lowest of the four food plans developed by USDA..."

So...it is not a scientific measurement in any way....the determination is political.



Shocker, huh?

 

[shart_attack]

We sharts typically attack best after poverty has attacked.

When little communities and inner cities have been ravaged by poverty's malicious teeth, the areas' infrastructures have been irreparably wrecked — meaning that their water and sewage facilities have been reduced to third-world spectacles.

That's where we sharts come in, see. Yay, poverty!

 

[PoliticalChic]

8. I got a kick out of this line in the article, which refers to the 'researchers' in the study that Columbia was undertaking....
"Not surprisingly, the work can be emotionally taxing." Fickle Fortunes | Summer 2014 | Columbia Magazine


Ironic?
The Columbia researchers wanted to know about the factors in their lives that "forced" folks into poverty.....

Perhaps our tireless but emotionally taxed researchers should consider what those who work to pay for the gratis welfare feel on a daily basis....and see a possible reason why many remain on welfare.
They don't become "emotionally taxed" by actually holding down a job.


And, take another look at the first three letters in 'taxing.'




a. And, on the topic of 'ironic,' note this paragraph:

"For the past eighteen months, he has been overseeing one of the most richly detailed studies of poverty ever undertaken in the United States. He and several colleagues at the School of Social Work, including professors Julien Teitler and Jane Waldfogel, and researchers Kathryn Neckerman and Christopher Wimer, have teamed up with the Robin Hood Foundation, the largest antipoverty organization in New York City, to conduct a meticulous long-term survey of 2,300 New York households across all income levels."


The 'Robin Hood Foundation'???

Do I recall something about 'stealing from the rich..'
This may be a clue as to the real import of Liberal policy.




Let's leave this with a pithy note from George Orwell, of particular pertinence for Liberal welfare policy:
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

 

[NYcarbineer]

I guess it's a tribute to some sort of creativity that one poster can find 50 different ways to start the same thread.

 

[Jackson]

I would like to see how children's free lunches and free breakfasts calculate in the food alottment that is already given to the people on welfare.

 

[francoHFW]

Thanks for wrecking the middle class and the nonrich over 30 years AND the corrupt world depression, GOP hater dupes, and blaming the victims...at least after 5 years of mindless obstruction and phony crises, a US recovery is now being allowed...see sig.