EPT They will never improve. The culture is too ingrained and their entire community isn't properly educated.
I personally feel this is a much bigger problem among people in power and moderate+ affluence than poor people.
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GreenHorizons
United States23924 Posts
I personally feel this is a much bigger problem among people in power and moderate+ affluence than poor people. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:17 GreenHorizons wrote: I personally feel this is a much bigger problem among people in power and moderate+ affluence than poor people. Its probably fair to say most people are shitty and leave it at that. But my point is that spending time trying to reform the behavior of the poor is not time well spent. They will continue to be their own undoing forever. We need to make life easier for them and not try to bootstrap them into being better people. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23924 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:21 Mohdoo wrote: Its probably fair to say most people are shitty and leave it at that. But my point is that spending time trying to reform the behavior of the poor is not time well spent. They will continue to be their own undoing forever. We need to make life easier for them and not try to bootstrap them into being better people. I know what your point is. I think it is wrong and paternalistic elitist garbage. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:26 GreenHorizons wrote: I know what your point is. I think it is wrong and paternalistic elitist garbage. I'm not bothered by your perspective. I've lived among the poor for enough of my life to have confidence in what I am saying. Can you elaborate on why my perspective is incorrect? | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On November 19 2020 08:36 farvacola wrote: Consumption taxes are also highly regressive and are thus generally only efficient and non-punitive when levied on luxuries and non-essentials. On the flip side, it eases strife with the people critical of "welfare free-loaders" and the rest in that category. Your income isn't being gouged by a progressive income tax system (speaking as to states at the moment) to pay for the net takers. They're also paying the same taxes proportionate to their consumption. It's done wonders for Texans and the immigration/illegal immigration issue. It's underrated in terms of pro-integration and anti-intergroup strife. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26740 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:31 Mohdoo wrote: I'm not bothered by your perspective. I've lived among the poor for enough of my life to have confidence in what I am saying. Can you elaborate on why my perspective is incorrect? What’s wrong with the poor’s behaviour, as per your experiences? | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:37 WombaT wrote: What’s wrong with the poor’s behaviour, as per your experiences? Lack of self-examination, lack of ambition, a fundamental belief that their lives will never change regardless of what they do. A strong tendency to make the exact same mistakes throughout their entire lives. Note: This does not apply to all of the poor, but it applies to quite a bit. A lot of this could be fixed with a super injection of education, work-study programs, parenting-assistance programs and a lot of other intervention to shift the tide. It is entirely cultural. Its not like they are genetically predisposed to being shitty. Shitty parents tend to raise shitty people and being poor makes it extremely hard to be an effective parent. Working long hours, prolonged stress and job insecurity are all things that make poor parents worse parents, even disregarding the cultural failings of poor communities. I would support taxes to do all the things I described above. But without those things, it will be an endless cycle. They can't be expected to rise up from such a terrible situation. Plan on them not doing that rather than saying "if only poor people would get their act together everything would be fine". The situation is such that we should assume the vast majority of poor people will never rise out of their situation. When we are defining national policy, we need to assume those people won't pull themselves up. It isn't reasonable to expect them to rise to such a huge challenge. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Zambrah
United States7393 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:44 Mohdoo wrote: Lack of self-examination, lack of ambition, a fundamental belief that their lives will never change regardless of what they do. A strong tendency to make the exact same mistakes throughout their entire lives. Note: This does not apply to all of the poor, but it applies to quite a bit. A lot of this could be fixed with a super injection of education, work-study programs, parenting-assistance programs and a lot of other intervention to shift the tide. It is entirely cultural. Its not like they are genetically predisposed to being shitty. Shitty parents tend to raise shitty people and being poor makes it extremely hard to be an effective parent. Working long hours, prolonged stress and job insecurity are all things that make poor parents worse parents, even disregarding the cultural failings of poor communities. I would support taxes to do all the things I described above. But without those things, it will be an endless cycle. They can't be expected to rise up from such a terrible situation. Plan on them not doing that rather than saying "if only poor people would get their act together everything would be fine". The situation is such that we should assume that won't happen for a large portion of people. I think this is a fair belief though, class mobility in the US is god awful, while not STRICTLY true, it points to a tangible phenomenon in the US and I think it warrants looking at the US as a whole to not only figure out why and how to deal with class immobility but what leaves the impoverished feeling so utterly hopeless that their lives cannot improve for the better. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:48 Zambrah wrote: I think this is a fair belief though, class mobility in the US is god awful, while not STRICTLY true, it points to a tangible phenomenon in the US and I think it warrants looking at the US as a whole to not only figure out why and how to deal with class immobility but what leaves the impoverished feeling so utterly hopeless that their lives cannot improve for the better. What I am saying is that people should assume the poor will fail themselves. That is NOT the same as saying "performing poorly relative to the tools they are being given". BUT, it is also important to note that major cultural problems also contribute. If you have lived in a very poor community, you know what I'm talking about. Prolonged helplessness leads to extreme cultural deterioration. It is an injustice, but once that damage is done, the situation becomes even worse. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
9052 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:26 GreenHorizons wrote: I know what your point is. I think it is wrong and paternalistic elitist garbage. Mohdoo may be a romantic in this sense, but so are you. The sentiments Mohdoo expressed aren't entirely without merit and we can see it time and time again. The first thing people point to are famous/rich people that pulled themselves out of poverty. Those people had a talent that 99% of the world will never possess and even those people will fail at times (the rate of people who have the talent and can't escape far surpasses those who do). They next point to the capitalistic machine in which we all live in and think that without that, lives would be equal and fair and everyone would have their day. That is a fantasy of pure imagination only Willy Wonka could dream of. The truth of the matter is, that the vast majority of people with insufficient resources and education will not rise above their economic status no matter how hard you try to get them to understand. Then they point to the disenfranchisement and historical pillaging of cultures and think that justifies the poor not being better. While it does, to some degree, explain the above, it doesn't end the conversation there. The people who choose to be better and educate themselves, are rare in the impoverished areas of the world. The criminality of America shouldn't stop you from being better and seeking a better life. It may make it infinitely more difficult, but it shouldn't stop you. A lot of the people quoted by romantic revolutionaries started in this manner. The best you can do is push forward. Hope those who are in the poor economic class realize and jump aboard the train moving toward progress. Those who can't, unfortunately, should be left behind. You can't save everyone if they don't want to be saved. Why waste the resources on them? | ||
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mikedebo
Canada4341 Posts
The Democrat connection to "real voters" is a popular point of argument, as is needing to mobilize disenfranchised voters, and Shor covers a lot of this while being able to cogently compare the impact of these trends on actual change. There's also a (short) nod at the end about the difficult concessions that "successful" socialist movements in other countries needed to make in order to get to the point they are now. An excerpt on a topic that gets batted around here pretty frequently: + Show Spoiler + So how do you change a party’s national brand? This does get to your earlier question and to this very real tension that exists right now in the Democratic Party. Voters are now determining their opinions about parties in a unified way and not reading about individual local candidates. There’s arguably less local news. But people’s consumption of local news has definitely decreased, while their consumption of national news has increased. So it’s hard for candidates in redder areas to differentiate themselves from the national party than it used to be. This is part of why ticket-splitting is declining. And that does create some awkward trade-offs. Like, it is now true that what a left-wing congressperson in a deep-blue district says will get transmitted adversarially by the Republican media, and to a significant extent by the mainstream media, to people who disagree. And those people won’t say, “Oh, this left-wing congressperson, well, he’s crazy. But Max Rose? He’s dope.” They’re just going to say, “Oh, Democrats support socialism now, because there’s this one socialist congressperson.” I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. But I think it’s a natural consequence of polarization and ticket-splitting declining. I think progressives try to get around this awkward reality by saying, “Well, Republicans are going to demonize us no matter what we say or do.” But I don’t think that kind of nihilism is justified. What they say actually does matter. Parties and candidates that say less controversial things, and are associated with less-controversial ideas, win more elections. I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary. But moderates don’t have a monopoly on popular ideas and progressives don’t have one on unpopular ideas. There are a lot of left-wing policies that are both popular and transformational. Worker co-determination. A federal job guarantee. There’s still a lot we can do. And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26740 Posts
It would seem to me, especially given pretty terrible rates of mental illness even amongst the middle classes in much of the West that the ladder doesn’t work particularly well even for those who have climbed it. Very vague sure, bit time-stretched to expand properly. I don’t think you’ll have a huge amount of success even with good interventions if you’re throwing people into bullshit jobs, atomised and isolated living and a rampant culture of consumerism. Capitalism has matured over time to be ever more predatory in making people feel their lives are deficient, know I’ve hit the booze pretty hard in the past. But yeah I think there’s just a wider malaise of the culture and sure the poor get the worst of it but they’re not alone there. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7393 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:53 Mohdoo wrote: What I am saying is that people should assume the poor will fail themselves. That is NOT the same as saying "performing poorly relative to the tools they are being given". BUT, it is also important to note that major cultural problems also contribute. If you have lived in a very poor community, you know what I'm talking about. Prolonged helplessness leads to extreme cultural deterioration. It is an injustice, but once that damage is done, the situation becomes even worse. I cant begin to understand what you mean by cultural deterioration, thats a lot of something to unpack and I dont feel particularly comfortable trying to unpack it myself. However, I do believe that assuming the poor will fail themselves is not particularly fair, and I believe the reason is that its poor framing, I believe our system fails the poor and that they can almost only really fail themselves within that system. My mother has been very fiscally solid with regards to her decision making, she was never particularly frivolous (okay not never, but she grew out of it quickly enough) she saved and continues to save money, but at the end of the day all of her fiscal responsibility hasnt actually amounted to anything because the system in the US is designed in such a way that its incredibly unlikely and incredibly difficult for anything like fiscal responsibility to be enough to offer more than temporary comfort. Its a systematic issue at its core and I find it difficult to assign things as inherent to a poor person culture while that culture exists within a system that does its best to propagate the poverty and hopelessness. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:26 GreenHorizons wrote: I know what your point is. I think it is wrong and paternalistic elitist garbage. There's also the Trump dimension to the paternalistic, elitist garbage. It starts as one of the well-meaning leftist people here saying, in essence, why aren't the poor people (predominantly whites in this context) supporting us? We're doing all these great programs on their behalf, and our policies are objectively better, and we simply have the technical know-how to make their lives better, but we can't convince them of it? Major media outlets have this sense too, and send some 20-30 year old reporters to poor-ville in Appalachia or declining manufacturing towns in the iron belt. They return with the report that they're too dumb to know what's good for them, and definitely too racist, patriotic, and generally unenlightened to benefit from outreach. The political calculus follows to keep blacks and latinos on their side (stoking up fears in their communities that Republicans are too racist to vote for) and win big in affluent suburbs that generally think like them. It misses major areas of cultural outreach, and patriotism, and a couple others. These explanations can get into huge walls of texts, so I'll just give some snippets. Did Trump increase his vote share among minorities? It's gotta be the Power of White Patriarchy according to the New York Times (Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Supremacy subtitled Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with their oppressors. That's a significantly dehumanizing cultural viewpoint: that Blacks and Latinos are owed their votes to oppose Trump, and if you don't, it's because you're some kind of race traitor and slave to White Patriarchy infecting your brain. Like a minority has to agree with prevailing thoughts (Trump's a racist so your vote must be decided on that basis), or you must have been fooled/tricked (False Consciousness ~ Engels, What's the Problem with Kansas ~ Thomas Frank). Think like us, vote like us, or you're a victim of powerful magic. It's off-putting, whether you're selling out your race, or too dumb to vote your interests according to your class. The patriotism angle is that you can't be happy for the successes and positives of America in the world, because those were only due to past injustice, and most of them don't count because of systemic injustice lasting until today. That's the messaging problem for Democrats. If you're kneeling for the anthem, you have the right view of what the flag stands for, and if you think that's disrespectful, you have the wrong view of what the flag stands for. If you're proud of your country and what it does, without dissembling for 30 minutes about all the blemishes right now and bad points of history beforehand, you're not welcome in the Democratic party. The cops are racists (ACAB), the only police reform that should happen is Defund the Police, and people rioting for both should only receive your empathy and support. + Show Spoiler + Related cultural note: Black Lives Matter protests don't spread COVID, Biden victory celebrations don't spread covid, but Notre Dame wins and your thanksgiving dinners do. Democratic politicians will join in these and retweet the photos like Chicago Mayor Lightfoot, or go to big dinners like Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom, and announce further restrictions on your family activities right alongside it. Republicans suffered a narrow election defeat, probably maintained control of the Senate they were expected to lose (yes, I remember people assuring me that Cunningham couldn't lose on the back of his marital infidelity), and cut Pelosi's comfortable lead in the House to an extremely thin margin (when she was expected by polls to expand her advantage). My own state of California has flipped several seats to the Republicans in the House, my own included. I'll have to look up what the Cook Political Report turned out, but it's something like Republicans winning 11/13 tossups and a good chunk of the Leans Dem. After seeing four years of Trump, this is a massive reason to re-examine the Democratic messaging. | ||
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5776 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:47 JimmiC wrote: Most pro economy people are anti consumption taxes because they lower people's consumption. People don't notice the money coming off their taxes but they sure notice the extra 10% (or whatever) on things. It encouraging saving which is not what drives a rip roaring economy. You also need to take into account that if you put it on nessicites then you are making it very punitive on your poor and if you put it on non nessicities it has to be much higher and discourages spending. I do however like sin taxes, I would love for the black market to disappear and instead have the gov profit from everything currently illicit along with booze, cigarettes, gambling, sugar and so on. Give people financial incentive to be healthy and those who choose not too can pay for their extra burden on things like Healthcare education plus just pay more into infrastructure and so on. Not to mention the massive savings to society from ending the epicly failing drug war. I'm not sure what you mean by pro economy people (business leaders perhaps?). From experience, most economists (which might be classified as pro economy) would be pro consumption tax in large part because of, like you say, encouraging savings, but also that income tax would discentivize work (a small note: from what I recall, empirical studies on the former more or less confirms it, but empirical studies on the latter are a mixed bag) | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 10:18 Zambrah wrote: I cant begin to understand what you mean by cultural deterioration, thats a lot of something to unpack and I dont feel particularly comfortable trying to unpack it myself. However, I do believe that assuming the poor will fail themselves is not particularly fair, and I believe the reason is that its poor framing, I believe our system fails the poor and that they can almost only really fail themselves within that system. My mother has been very fiscally solid with regards to her decision making, she was never particularly frivolous (okay not never, but she grew out of it quickly enough) she saved and continues to save money, but at the end of the day all of her fiscal responsibility hasnt actually amounted to anything because the system in the US is designed in such a way that its incredibly unlikely and incredibly difficult for anything like fiscal responsibility to be enough to offer more than temporary comfort. Its a systematic issue at its core and I find it difficult to assign things as inherent to a poor person culture while that culture exists within a system that does its best to propagate the poverty and hopelessness. Cultural deterioration is what happens when a population loses hope. They begin to accept their bad situation and do nothing to remedy it. They laugh off the idea of going to school to be a doctor as if its physically impossible to do so. I don't want to offend you by discussing your mother, so I will instead illustrate my point using a friend of mine. He grew up poor, his parents weren't particularly successful and after high school he basically just kept working his retail job. He would get fired or laid off from time to time and here we are 14 years after graduating high school and nothing has changed. He didn't believe he could be an engineer or a doctor, so he never tried. He just assumed all he could ever be was what he was. If he would have endured all the things working against him to just go to school to make good money, he'd be 999999999x happier than he is today. Regardless of how or why, the right thing to do is to push through it. There are a lot of really unjust parts of our country and it takes a lot of work to climb out of a bad situation because the US has very poor mobility. I've already described all the things that make the phrase "its very expensive to be poor" true. The deck is stacked against America's poor. But the cultural deterioration occurs when that injustice makes people lose hope and stop trying to better themselves and escape the bad situation they are in. I want to be clear that cultural deterioration is a reason to SUPPORT social programs aimed at empowering poor communities and INCREASING mobility, not an argument against it. I bring up the cultural issues with America's poor because it is impossible to solve a problem that isn't being accurately framed. It is important to consider all components of a problem, not just the pleasant parts. America's poor rightfully are very deflated and sad. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Zambrah
United States7393 Posts
On November 19 2020 12:13 Mohdoo wrote: Cultural deterioration is what happens when a population loses hope. They begin to accept their bad situation and do nothing to remedy it. They laugh off the idea of going to school to be a doctor as if its physically impossible to do so. I don't want to offend you by discussing your mother, so I will instead illustrate my point using a friend of mine. He grew up poor, his parents weren't particularly successful and after high school he basically just kept working his retail job. He would get fired or laid off from time to time and here we are 14 years after graduating high school and nothing has changed. He didn't believe he could be an engineer or a doctor, so he never tried. He just assumed all he could ever be was what he was. If he would have endured all the things working against him to just go to school to make good money, he'd be 999999999x happier than he is today. Regardless of how or why, the right thing to do is to push through it. There are a lot of really unjust parts of our country and it takes a lot of work to climb out of a bad situation because the US has very poor mobility. I've already described all the things that make the phrase "its very expensive to be poor" true. The deck is stacked against America's poor. But the cultural deterioration occurs when that injustice makes people lose hope and stop trying to better themselves and escape the bad situation they are in. I want to be clear that cultural deterioration is a reason to SUPPORT social programs aimed at empowering poor communities and INCREASING mobility, not an argument against it. I bring up the cultural issues with America's poor because it is impossible to solve a problem that isn't being accurately framed. It is important to consider all components of a problem, not just the pleasant parts. America's poor rightfully are very deflated and sad. Ah okay, thats a good clarification, I think I understand better. In the case of our friend, a problem I see is that what if he DID go to school to become an engineer or doctor and for some reason he wasn't able to finish it? He'd be considered financially irresponsible for taking on something he couldn't finish and be admonished for that fact. What if he couldn't get accepted into a program to become a doctor, engineer, or something equivalent? I think youre simplifying how the hard work aspect, part of the reason that class mobility is so limited isnt just because poor people are less inclined to be engineers or doctors, but because they face significant barriers to successfully becoming doctors or engineers, from the hideous states of publics schools to difficult home lives making getting good grades difficult to having to wrestle with the nature of the kind of immense debt student loans leave people with in the US. I think this is just far, far, far too simplified to be broadly applicable. Yes, poor people could make better life decisions, but in the end life decisions are in no way shape or form a guarantee of a better life, which is where I'd argue the cultural deterioration as you put it comes from. That they ARE to some degree powerless, not every poor person can become a doctor or an engineer, few poor people manage to transcend their socioeconomic status in any major way and I think putting any emphasis on the attitudes of the poor is a mistake before we've actually taken material steps to address the problems they face when dealing with class mobility. Fix the problem and observe those results, we may find that the cultural deterioration will simply go away when the poor are presented with fair opportunities to actually improve their lives and they stop having to feel so hopeless. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23924 Posts
On November 19 2020 09:31 Mohdoo wrote: I'm not bothered by your perspective. I've lived among the poor for enough of my life to have confidence in what I am saying. Can you elaborate on why my perspective is incorrect? Why? Succeeding under capitalism basically requires integrating exploitative hegemonic beliefs like you're articulating (the liberal version) to one degree or another. The what is the framing and blaming of 'culture' for a system that is dependent on having poor people no matter how hard-working and well educated they are. As well as the idea that being a retail worker is less worthy of dignity and a living wage than something better paying or requiring specific certification like being an engineer, coder, or working in a lab. | ||
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