That’s this week’s Occupy message from the LA Times, as the “Let’s get the Dirty Effing Hippies” counter-movement rolls on in cities like LA and elsewhere across the country. AEI Junior Randian, Third Class Nick Schulz explains why America’s massive income inequality is reality, and it’s because of you bloody poor people.
The reason is straightforward. The role that human and social capital plays in helping a person generate income in an advanced economy has increased over the last half a century. And over that same time, the primary institution for inculcating human and social capital has badly weakened.
Social scientists routinely find that individuals raised in intact families are generally better equipped to thrive in the economy. Today’s 99% is teeming with tens of millions of Americans who were not raised in a stable home environment, and their earnings potential is compromised as a result.
If you had simply inherited your money from a rich, stable two-parent family (where dad’s on his third wife and mom’s on her second husband), you wouldn’t be poor. Why can’t you peons understand this? Because single women aren’t putting all their babies up for adoption by rich families, you’re doomed to a life of servitude and toil. You might as well get used to it because that’s how the system works, and it’s run by people who will do anything to perpetuate the system.
Besides, if you hippies are so smart, why haven’t you fixed income inequality yet? Taxation clearly has failed, people have been paying taxes since America started and income inequality still exists, so clearly taxation on the rich cannot be any part of the solution. Immigration can’t work, we’ve been allowing immigrants since the 1600’s and look, income inequality! Failed policies of a worldview relegated to the dustbin of history!
If only rich people were allowed to have kids, that would fix this problem you know. Now stop using your sexual organs, you silly 99-percenters!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I have no words.
NobodySpecial
He has a point, in that unstable homes lead to worse outcomes.
Now the question is – short of forcing people not to have kids (anathema to the GOP) or building a safety net for said people (anathema to the GOP), how do you fix it? No points for invisible free hands.
joeyess
Sorry about the edit, it just had a ’50s nostalgia that our conservative betters seem more comfortable expressing. After all, mom can’t be on a second husband, that would make her a harlot.
r€nato
Fixed that for him.
dmsilev
I know right-wingers think that George Orwell was writing instruction manuals, and I guess we can now say the same for Jonathan Swift.
Mmmm, Baby Ragout.
joeyess
The only point he’s got is the tip of the turd that is extruding out his of ass on an hourly basis.
Larv
Yes, clearly unstable home environments lead to poverty, and not the reverse. Why? Because shut up, that’s why.
burnspbesq
When you’re going to grossly mischaracterize what someone else has written, providing the link makes it awfully easy to compare the description to the original and see that it is grossly inaccurate.
You have the better of the argument without engaging in stupid stunts like this, and all it does is damage your credibility. Why bother?
rikyrah
They truly are loathesome.
Knight of the Living Memes
LOL poor people are poor!! roffle
Brian S
Didn’t our last two Democratic presidents come from what could reasonably be called unstable home environments? Hmmmm.
joeyess
@burnspbesq: I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about here.
Villago Delenda Est
“Mr. Nick Schultz? A tumbrel with your name on it is waiting at the curb.”
Southern Beale
Seems like this is blaming women, as usual. Those mommies who insist on working to fuel their egos instead of staying home and playing Donna Reed like they’re supposed to. You know, like how great everything was back in the 1950s when everyone knew their place. Everything was so awesome back then in this fictitious America we always harken back to.
Wasn’t it?
Brian R.
“Let them eat trust funds.”
DKF
So, inequality exists because of inequality?
bin Lurkin'
At the end of a rant wherein he only says what we cannot do, raise taxes on
the richhis homeboys.Mino
@Larv: Yes, nothing insures a stable family like grinding poverty, hum?
And the writer starts lying in the fourth paragraph. Not encouraging.
r€nato
@burnspbesq: I read it and I don’t consider it a ‘gross mischaracterization’.
Once again, the Randian straw-man ‘have the government steal money at gunpoint from the Producers and give it to the Parasites’ argument rears its head. What this lackey for the AEI is proposing, is to allow the completion of the grand theft scheme from the middle class and the poor by the wealthy which started with Reagan. Reagan raised FICA (Social Security) taxes. That money has ended up helping fund the deficit (most of which was run up by Republican presidents and Congresses), and the non-FICA tax revenue was given away by GW Bush, largely to the wealthy, thus creating a ‘deficit crisis’… the answer to which, is to either take away or slash away Social Security and Medicare and other social safety net programs.
If the Occupy movement is proposing anything (and they do NOT have a monolithic, uniform set of demands, he should know this), it’s to increase taxes on the wealthy by a fairly trivial amount in order to STOP, slow and/or reverse this theft.
This condescending-as-hell argument assumes that most or all of the Occupy demonstrators are unskilled workers, lazy idiots who didn’t study hard in school and are competing for low-wage jobs with undocumented migrants. In fact, many of the people struggling to just get by in our economy did all the right things that they were told to do – study hard, get a degree (or two), and you’ll be virtually guaranteed middle class status. I don’t think there are a significant number of undocumented migrants competing for jobs as teachers, accountants and IT specialists.
I stand by my previous comment on this, only to add that his premise that a substantial amount of the 99% come from one parent families and broken, dysfunctional families while this phenomenon is barely known among the 1%, is ridiculous, condescending, and patently false.
But I do give him credit for readily acknowledging that there’s a huge and growing wealth disparity in this country. This is tantamount to heresy among the right these days. The rest of his argument boiled down to its essence is, ‘they deserved every dollar of it because they are superior to the rest of you.’
Waynski
This. It’s my increasing belief that all Republicans fall into one of two categories: A) People born on third base who are unshakably convinced that they’ve hit a home run and befuddled by the notion that anyone would suggest that they’re successful for any other reason than that they put their shoulder to the wheel, so clearly, you didn’t and are therefore lazy. B) Authoritarian religious freaks… and Muslims are bad also, too.
Mark S.
@burnspbesq:
If we all chip in and get you a leather jacket, can you go hang over here?
@Southern Beale:
What they don’t like to point out is that a lot of women work because it’s become increasingly hard to raise a family on one income. That might have to do with nearly all the growth of the last thirty years going to the 1%.
Linda Featheringill
@dmsilev:
Oh! You’re bad!
:-)
Mudge
Just yesterday Ruth Marcus used a form of inculcate, now this Schultz fellow. New 1% buzz word? And what he is saying is that poor outcomes are largely the result of poor starts. What a surprising observation. Surely he must be advocating improved head start, WIC and early childhood education to help alleviate the poor starts…
Linda Featheringill
@Southern Beale: #13
You have to have some years on you to understand just how crappy the overall culture was in the 1950s. Like me.
Schlemizel
It is not important that there is no truth and no solutions in what he is saying. What is important is that people realize that THEY are not part of the 99%. The majority of people struggling (not struggling the most but most of those struggling) came from stable backgrounds, got an education and are still being screwed over by the 1%. It is vitally important for the 1% that those people never realize that they are part of the 99%, that they are being screwed on purpose, that OWS is fighting for them and that the government can make a difference in the fight.
Sludge like this is laid out to implant the idea that YOU are not the 99%. They play on the parochialism of the low information voter.
Chris
@Waynski:
My own beliefs are close but not identical. All Republicans fall into one of two categories:
A) People born on third base who are unshakably convinced that they’ve hit a home run and befuddled by the notion that anyone would suggest that they’re successful for any other reason than that they put their shoulder to the wheel, so clearly, you didn’t and are therefore lazy.
B) People who were not born on third base and are unshakably convinced that they WOULD have hit a home run if Teh Libruls hadn’t messed with society in such a way that it unfairly benefits blacks, immigrants, gays, Muslims and DFHs (by failing to keep these people In Their Proper Place), and in so doing denies them their own right to be born on third base.
A bunch of the racists, religious loons and other garden-variety wingnuts come from that second category.
The Dangerman
So we should massively extend educational opportunities through tuition cuts, etc., and pay for it by raising taxes on the 1%.
Easy. My fee will be in his mailbox.
Edit: Exactly, from the above (I guess you geta cut of the consulting fee): “improved head start, WIC and early childhood education to help alleviate the poor starts”
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah. As much as I would’ve loved the economics of the 1950s, that society would’ve driven me insane in every other possible way. Thank God for a ton of the social changes that occurred in the 1960s – desegregation being the biggest but definitely not the only one.
RSA
Social scientists also routinely consider multiple possible causes for a given effect, as well as the direction of causality. AEI fellows, in contrast, will happily say that the breakdown of the nuclear family causes low earnings, and that’s it.
Swellsman
So let me be sure I understand this correctly. People are poor because families are breaking up. It couldn’t possibly be the case that families find it harder to stay together because so many people are now so friggin’ poor!
Got it. Good to know.
Mino
@Chris: Yes, but the cars were neater.
willard
What will be the outcome if the current trend in inequality continues until reaching some metastable state?
Is this what we want as a nation?
Is there a better way to address increasing inequality than taxes?
Veritas
Am I the only one who gets that they are actually talking about things like single moms who start having kids at 16 despite the fact they have no means to support them, and not working women? But hey, keep burning that straw.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Obviously the answer is for poor people to stop fucking and to curl up and die. Obviously, considering they’ve crusaded against family planning, birth control, family assistance, abortion, gov’t feeding programs, and anything designed to help create stable home situations rather than having one grow like a fucking plant or something out of nowhere.
It’s all fucking Economic Predestination bullshit. And somehow, it’s the prevailing rule of the fucking country now.
cathyx
@Southern Beale: Well, let’s just throw this back at the man’s feet. If he were a real man, he’d earn enough money so his wife didn’t need to work, and if the father of the children isn’t in the picture, why is he a deadbeat and not paying enough to support them?
Veritas
Birth control? These kids watch shows like 16 and Pregnant and think it would be cool to have a kid at 15. There’s not shortage of condoms and birth control pills in this country, in fact way more than in 1950, yet out of wedlock and teenage births have exploded. Its cultural.
A Conservative Teacher
You also wouldn’t be as poor if you worked instead of spending all your time camping out smoking dope at a park, or saved your money and invested it rather than buy fancy Ipods and laptops. And you also wouldn’t be as poor if you compared your wealth now to most of the world, and to most of the history of humanity- you might come to the conclusion that working hard, long hours, and having a house and a car and modern conviences and food on your table is pretty good in comparision. If you leftists got your way, the world would look like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, or Cuba- and that is a much worse place to be. Grow up, get a job, and be thankful for what you got.
Silver Owl
The peasantry just needs to develop better skills and have better access to insider trading, having people in powerful positions turning their head when committing fraud, having the ability to purchase senators, house representatives, governors and mayors. Knowing how to commit financial fraud, cheat customers would help too.
Or all of us peasants can just adopt rich people as pets and use their pretty little contacts to wheel and deal.
cathyx
@Veritas: And I guess single moms having kids at 16 amount to 10’s of millions of Americans.
Hoodie
@burnspbesq: WTF? The premise of the article is that this is an “inconvenient truth” for OWS. Why is this particularly “inconvenient” for OWS, instead of the assholes who think inequality is just a matter of the poor pulling themselves up by the their own bootstraps? The article is just a cheap — and particularly lame — shot at people who are pointing out the toxic effects of the status quo.
The most obvious flaw is the convenient dodge of requiring OWS has to come up with “new” solutions, because this asshole doesn’t like the ones we already know, like providing childcare and healthcare, to help families stay intact, all of which may require the rich to actually invest in the country they’ve gotten so much from:
If you don’t recognize that this is utter horseshit, you must be eating it for breakfast.
cathyx
@Veritas: And where is the stud in your story? Does he have no responsibility?
Mino
@Veritas: Uh, single mothers do not account for 99% of the population, do they?
Villago Delenda Est
@Veritas:
Black single girls. Certainly not girls like, oh, I don’t know, Bristol Palin?
maya
And here I thought the leading cause of unstable homes was hurricanes and ARMs.
DFH chant: 5, 1,3, 8, we don’t want to inculcate!
Veritas
@cathyx out of wedlock births fathered by deadbeat unemployed dads no doubt do.
Veritas
@Village good job at putting words in my mouth. Now how about an actual argument?
The Moar You Know
Whoa, I just went deaf from the sheer volume of that dogwhistle.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@cathyx:
Of course not, since teen pregnancy is always the stupid girl’s fault and no one else’s. I mean, DUHHH.
Villago Delenda Est
@A Conservative Teacher:
You realize you’re a cretin, right? I mean, you’re showing all the signs of being a habitual Faux Nooze viewer who has not been informed, but has instead been propagandized.
Waynski
@Chris: Thank you for expanding the definition. Your categories are more inclusive and therefore as a liberal, I support them.
Mino
@A Conservative Teacher: I hope this is snark. If this leftist had her way, this country would look more like Sweden.
Silver Owl
People can stop the sex if they would just teach their sons to screw trees instead of girls. See? No penis no baby. lol
I would like to know is why when a nation is failing always the peasants f*cking that caused it rather than the piss poor decisions of the people in power?
r€nato
@A Conservative Teacher:
Yes, because Wall Street is not at all a casino where you can lose your money and the house usually wins because it always has access to better information and sooner than any of the rest of us will hear it.
Your argument also ignores the fact that many of the people who are struggling to barely get by or are sinking under… DID invest their money… but they used it all up trying to stay afloat during bouts of extended unemployment (which, I’m sure, you attribute to a sudden, widespread desire to not have to work for a living once Obama was elected) or having to pay medical bills due to illness (which, I’m sure, you believe would never have happened if they were responsible people).
Many of the people you are shitting all over, did all the right things you smug, glibertarian shitheads told them they should do. Get a good education, save, invest, buy a house, you’ll be fine. And now you don’t want to own any of the responsibility for admitting that maybe it wasn’t that simple.
Llelldorin
What’s particularly awesome about this little sleight-of-hand is that a household earning, say, $350,000, is part of the 99% (the 99th percentile of household income starts at $504,000, according to the WSJ). You have to love an argument that dusts off Reagan’s old welfare queen stuff and applies it as an explanation of incomes in the low six figures.
schrodinger's cat
@burnspbesq: In what way do you think Zandar misrepresented the author. I read the original article and agree with Zandar’s take more or [email protected]A Conservative Teacher:
The last 30 years or so has seen a tremendous rise in the wealth of the 0.1% while incomes of middle class Americans have remained stagnant.
To function well markets need institutions that promote transparency, all the deregulation from the Reagan era onwards has added layers of opacity to the financial system.
Information asymmetries make markets inefficient.
bemused
It’s all so simple in rightwing world as opposed to reality.
Did anyone see the Orphan Annie vid parodying Gingrinch’s sweet idea of kids replacing janitors titled “Really, Newt”? Everywhere I looked, it was removed by user. Why would it be removed? I just saw a bit of the ad and wanted to see the whole video.
Chris
@A Conservative Teacher:
Yeah, you’re right. Instead we should let you conservatives have your way, and give us a society where everyone has a gun, government has been “drowned in the bathtub,” and religious fundamentalism runs rampant. You know, like Somalia.
Waynski
Who let the trolls out?
andrewsomething
The only thing worse than a conservative who just makes shit up is a conservative who read one study once and thinks it allows him to say things like “social scientists routinely find.”
Stupidity or evil? I think this time I’m going to vote for both.
Benjamin Franklin
“Grow up, get a job, and be thankful for what you got.”
Just a suggestion; If you really want to engage, rather than echo snark, the WAY you say something will have a lot to do with the direction of dialogue.
Nuff said…
Villago Delenda Est
@Veritas:
Why don’t you answer the questions put forth by other posters?
Couldn’t possibly be because you’re an intellectually dishonest sack of shit, can it?
birthmarker
@A Conservative Teacher: I worked with poor whites. It’s a bit hard to save and invest when your paycheck covers necessities on a good month.
Don’t tell me poor people don’t work. Have you ever met people who heat exclusively with wood they chop themselves? And their family’s primary protein is deer meat?
Have you ever met a logger, a dirt worker, a dry waller, a roofer?
Have you ever known anyone who has had to move their family to a cheaper rental in January because the December utility bill made it impossible to pay the January rent?
If you are a teacher then you are college educated. I would bet there was some kind of safety net there for you. You may have used a Pell grant or college loans, you may have lived at home while attending and worked too. Your family may have been able to foot the bill. I don’t know. But I bet you didn’t eat deer meat that you killed yourself 365 days a year to get there.
Soonergrunt
@r€nato:
Here, let me fix that for you:
bin Lurkin'
@A Conservative Teacher: I give you about an 8.5, your form was OK but your overall artistic impression just hasn’t really jelled yet.
Remember Heifetz’s directions on how to get to Carnegie Hall..
Xenos
@Veritas:
Utter horseshit. Utter horseshit.
Exploding? A 40% drop over the last 20 years is ‘exploding’?
Fuck off, troll.
bemused
@Veritas:
Teen pregnancies in the US have dropped by up to 37% over two decades although the red states haven’t caught up.
liberal
@A Conservative Teacher:
No, actually all we want is for government to stop redistributing wealth upwards to parasitic rent-collectors.
I’m sure you won’t understand that, however, since right-wingers usually don’t know enough about economics to know what rent is.
Waynski
@Xenos: For the win with honorable mention for bemused and liberal.
Xenos
@A Conservative Teacher: This is a joke, right? The vast majority of the people here are employed or retired. And while OWS has supporters here, nobody is posting from an OWS campsite.
Some of us are in the 95th or 96th percent, even. Hell, I grew up in the top 1% – so I know what fuckers they can be. Hint – they are really fucking amused by the proles like you who swallow their propaganda and go out and punch hippies on their behalf. You are more pathetic than the hippies, for all that.
Judas Escargot
@Veritas:
Teen birth rate is at a new low.
geg6
@Veritas:
No, you have it all wrong. Here’s reality:
Am I the only one who gets that they are actually talking about things like single moms who start having kids at 16
despite the fact they have no means to support thembecause they are denied information on and access to inexpensive birth control and who then are denied child care and the social and economic support required in order to bring up their children so that they can even begin to hope to be productive citizens simply because their mothers are dirty sluts, and not working women?Mino
@Soonergrunt: TP has a piece up right now on a Chase op who claims naif minorities were pushed into subprime loans because the commission incentive was designed that way. Even if they qualified for prime loans.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/01/379332/former-banker-subprime-pushed/
But of course they broke no laws in doing that. Or if they did, we’ll all agree to ignore it.
GregInMA
Naaahh…more like Sweden or Denmark, but with more brunettes and better barbecue.
Judas Escargot
@A Conservative Teacher:
FTFY.
We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. (I’ll let you google the source for yourself, “teacher”).
Redshift
@burnspbesq: You’re right. The rest of the article is a range if different false claims and unsupported arguments. That makes so it much better.
My favorite bit is quoting Andrew Cuomo about how you can’t have a rosy economic future if you raise taxes on the wealthy, which he actually employed as an argument against renewing the millionaires’ tax even though there is no evidence it harmed the state economy.
Schlemizel
@willard:
Yes actually, there is. If the 1% would pay living wages while giving up a small fraction of their perks, if they would stop taking money under false pretenses (see CDS and how they knew it was a disaster) and quit taking advantage of non-public information, if they would give up their kids preferred place in admission lines at university and not leave them with multi-million dollar trust funds (unearned) there would be a great deal less income inequality with out raising taxes a dime.
But that is not going to happen, is it? Instead someone has to step in and claw back some of their ill gotten gains because they will not given them up voluntarily. Nobody is asking them to give it all up. Back in the ’80s the average CEO only made 35x the average worker, today it is closer to 500x. That is pure greed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Xenos:
Also dipshit has a mistaken view of how the 50’s were, he’s got the standard conservatard past that never was syndrome.
Schlemizel
@A Conservative Teacher:
Scary, I’m not sure what you teach but my guess it is at an institution of higher ignorance like Liberty U.
Of that list of yours only two countries are, nominally, leftist – Cuba and North Korea – the rest are oligarchies and not that much unlike the one the 1% is building here.
Ben Cisco
@A Conservative Teacher: Congratulations – you nailed almost all of the standard conservatroll tropes; had you managed to sneak in a throwaway line about President Obama, you’d have gotten 10s across the board.
__
Have some boysenberry, or perhaps in celebration of the season, some mincemeat?
TR
@A Conservative Teacher:
First of all, no. If we leftists got our way, the world would look like England or Germany.
Second of all, Iran and Syria? Remind me, are “leftists” in this country the ones who embrace religious fundamentalism, second-class citizenship for women, hostility to gays, and attacks on the infidels?
Third, if conservatives got their no-government, free-market, libertarian paradise, the world would look like Somalia. I’d take any of the countries you listed over that pathetic Ayn Rand Fantasyland.
Benjamin Franklin
‘Teach’ did her drive-by and highjacked the thread.
Mission Accomplished
r€nato
yes, I am so grateful and thankful that the 1% haven’t stolen everything from us just yet.
But don’t fret, they’re still working on stealing Social Security and Medicare. Only when they succeed at that, should we fetch the pitchforks and torches, right?
toujoursdan
@Schlemizel:
As someone who just went to North Korea in August, I can tell you that it is far more fascist than leftist. There certainly is no premise of economic, ethnic or gender egalitarianism. The 1% control everything (and arguably prop up the Kims as figureheads.)
If you’re interested:
North Korea photos
North Korea video
And if this leftist had his way, the U.S. would be more like Sweden, Denmark or Germany.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Schulz’s argument is BS, unsurprisingly. Rates of illegitimacy are higher in Northern European countries (Netherlands, Finland, the Scandinavian countries) have higher rates of illegitimacy and much lower inequality rates (as measured by Gini coefficients).
Yet another example of Conservatives Just Making Shit Up.
gelfling545
@Judas Escargot: If that person is a teacher, I am the pope of Rome. I have lived and worked among teachers all my life and it is just not possible to stay that ignorant of real life over the course of a teaching career.
andrewsomething
@Benjamin Franklin:
It was certainly a successful highjacking, but at the same time there’s something kind of nice about it as well. We can all put aside our petty intra-left squabbling and metaphorically join hands in revulsion of ConTeach’s stupidity.
r€nato
@toujoursdan: well, according to conservative dogma, fascism = leftist. Because Hitler was a vegetarian and Nazis were National Socialists, so there.
Which means the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a shining beacon of liberty and democracy.
LittlePig
Re:”Getting back to the 1950s”
Well gosh, hully gee, it couldn’t be the 50’s were so prosperous for America because we had the only non-bombed industries on the planet, couldn’t it?
The 1950s were a major outlier because of the Second World War, *not* because Daddy wore a suit and Mommy stayed home. Then came ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘Leave It To Beaver’ to cement the fallacy that everything was hunky-dory back then.
I saw how the mentally retarded were treated in the 60’s. As an assistant to an air-conditioning repair man (aka my dad), I went into places that I will never, ever, forget. Hell that’s probably why I’m a damn liberal. The 1950s were great economically for the plutocrats, and then all that damn foolishness in the 60’s about black folks and women and the handicapped actually getting help just ruined everything for them. They want to go back to those days when money fell from the sky and all their lessers knew there place.
It’s all about getting back to the Gilded Age. Bastards.
The Moar You Know
translation: ungrateful darkies
One thing America does better than anyone else is exploiting the politics of resentment.
Benjamin Franklin
@andrewsomething:
‘Teach’ has no traffic at her blog, so she’s hoping to add to her tip jar.
But this is interesting. Another slap to Obama’s plea deal with the Banksters?
http://www.boston.com/Boston/businessupdates/2011/12/coakley-sue-largest-banks-over-foreclosures/wTrZYEwnr0T21kYuT429iN/index.html
toujoursdan
@r€nato:
I think about going back to the DPRK for another tour. The propagandized, brainwashed, low information people who live there were so reasonable.
Benjamin Franklin
More on topic, is this…..http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/kristof-a-banker-speaks-with-regret.html?_r=1
“One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.”
r€nato
@Benjamin Franklin: See? Fox News was right. It was the darkies and minorities who got us in this mess.
Svensker
There is a germ of truth in what he’s saying: 14 year old parents tend not to be particularly good at the job and the 30 year old grandmother in the picture probably isn’t helping much either. But this clown seems to think you can scold people into living better lives and not being poor. That and give tax breaks to rich people who will almost certainly create jobs for those poor folks. Won’t they?
r€nato
@TR:
you say that like it’s a bad thing. They wouldn’t care if that’s how the world looked, because they all assume it would be they who would be behind the walls of the fortified compound that keeps out the teeming, desperate rabble.
r€nato
@gelfling545: oh, I believe it. I had a teacher like that in HS and this was well before the days of the right-wing noise machine. He dedicated every day to justifying the Confederacy and right-wing dogma in general.
ed drone
@Southern Beale:
Well, the top income tax rate was 90% or thereabouts, most big industry was unionized, and government was leading the way to improving things, through programs like the Interstate Highway system, so, yeah, there is a lot to say for the ’50s.
The Republicans wouldn’t point to those examples, of course. And that little voice in my head talks about the Civil Rights, Free Speech, and Ban the Bomb movements, “Harvest of Shame”, and other crusades, and also remembers McCarthy and his ilk, not to mention the beginnings of the John Birch Society (these days, indistinguishable from the John Birth Society), but the point is that many factors go into the life we lead, and those who point to certain factors always denigrate the other factors.
Thus we have the confusion of cause and effect between poverty and family stability as shown in the article.
Ed
Mark S.
Frank Lutz offers some advice to Republican assholes on how to speak to the proles. Some highlights:
Stop using the word “capitalism.”
Don’t give your underlings bonuses. Give them “pay for performance.”
Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’
That’s why Frank earns the big bucks. Personally, I don’t know anyone who isn’t a
mindless zombieconservative who says “job creator” in a non-ironic way. Shows how little I know.People love them job creators, and have a big sad if they have to pay one extra cent in taxes.
Benjamin Franklin
@r€nato:
” See? Fox News was right. It was the darkies and minorities who got us in this mess.”
Imagine them getting all ‘uppity’ and wanting their own home.
Jay in Oregon
Hat tip to the Twitternets for this:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/12/1/11534/8446
Rafer Janders
@Veritas:
Am I the only one who gets that they are actually talking about things like single moms who start having kids at 16 despite the fact they have no means to support them, and not working women? But hey, keep burning that straw.
Really, why bring Bristol Palin into this? Hasn’t that family suffered enough?
r€nato
@Benjamin Franklin: wanting a home is one thing.
Being able to afford it, is quite another.
Having a scum-sucking mortgage broker take advantage of that desire to sell them toxic mortgages when they could have been given a non-time-bomb mortgage (or not given a mortgage at all, because they couldn’t afford it) is still another thing.
It was the stated policy of the Bush administration to get more and more people into the home-owning class. That was the whole point of the “Ownership Society” they peddled.
His administration implemented policies towards the goal of raising the percentage of home ownership, which led directly to the wave of irresponsible lending that got us into a bubble-and-burst economy.
But when you talk to right-wingers, this gets truncated into, ‘the government made this problem, so the answer is deregulation, not re-regulation!’
(The most prominent example being Rep. Joe Walsh’s rant, caught on video and posted to YouTube.)
As you can see, I have little patience for the right-wing’s propensity to constantly lie and distort the truth in order to arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion that an honest assessment of the facts would lead one to, or to distract from the fact that it was their irresponsible policies that made the mess in the first place and let’s do more of the same.
The Spy Who Loved Me
While teen births have gone down, since 1980, the overall unwed birth rate has more than doubled, from 18.4% to 40.6% in 2008, per the CDC. Broken down by race:
Black 72%
Native American 66%
Hispanic 53%
White 29%
Asian 17%
http://savannahnow.com/news/2010-11-07/blacks-struggle-72-unwed-mothers#.Tte8ZLLNltM
Compare the rates to the rates of poverty by race: http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparebar.jsp?ind=14&cat=
I’d guess that yes, increases in the unwed birth rate have had an effect on income disparity.
Benjamin Franklin
@r€nato:
Thanks for the memory boost. I am discussing the same subject with my antagonists at JustOneMinute.
Cool as a Jewel.
Chris
@The Moar You Know:
What America does better than anyone else is exploit the politics of baseless resentment.
I mean, I can understand politics of resentment: I can understand radical, nationalist, or whatever movements cropping up among people who’ve had a raw deal and resent dictatorship, inequality, racism, and all the world’s other little injustices. Poverty and class oppression = communism; 2,000 years of oppression = Zionism; colonialism and neocolonialism = islamism and dictatorships like Mugabe’s. Even the Germans who supported Nazism can point to the trauma of the Great Depression and the injustices of Versailles.
But American conservatives have nothing like that to “resent:” they’re people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth and are simply furious at the notion that someone else might end up with a spoon of their own. I can’t wrap my head around that level of entitlement, or how you can possibly justify “resenting” other people, let alone basing your entire worldview on it.
Caz
Are you seriously suggesting that income inequality is a bad thing, damaging to this country, and that we should strive to eliminate all income inequality? Sounds like you got that right out of Marx’s Kommunist Manifesto.
You think it would be better if everyone was at the same income/prosperity level?
I can’t believe that someone actually needs to sit down with you and teach you about your communist views and why they have never worked and will never work.
What is it about communism that you find so attractive that you’re willing to push for it in America, even though you know it wreaks havoc on a people every time it’s tried, it’s contrary to human nature, and stunts efficiency and quality in the marketplace.
The worst thing about all this is that you don’t even realize you’re supporting communist views. I’d shoot myself if I woke up as ignorant as you in the morning. I’m glad my parents and teachers took time and effort to teach me the basics of capitalism, communism, basic economic principles, and how and why America became the greatest nation on earth – it was precisely because our early leaders followed the exact opposite views that your spew out here. Idiot.
Yutsano
@Caz:
Uhh…yup. You know who agreed?
Henry Ford.
jake the snake
@The Spy Who Loved Me:
Chicken or egg? I say chicken and in the majority of cases, poverty is the chicken.
Chris
@Caz:
WOO WOO WOO!!! The “you’re all communists” card, the refuge of all conservatives who’re out of arguments since… damn, I don’t think there’s anyone alive who can remember that far back.
I always find it curious when they actually come HERE and tell us that, though. I mean, I know why Bill Whittle at PJM calls us “lousy stinking commies” – his audience is made up of the people who desperately want to be told (by someone with better diction than them) that all the people they hate are really America’s enemies and that they’re therefore right to hate them.
But this isn’t PJM. Or RedState. This is Balloon Juice, where the vast majority of people aren’t communist and KNOW they’re not communist. There’s no audience of freaks and mouth-breathers to entertain. What do they hope to gain by coming here and acting as if we were? Is Caz actually enough of a dumb motherfucker that he ACTUALLY believes all this shit?
It appears the depressing answer is “yes.” I’ve always wondered if there were Germans in the 1930s who were stupid and gullible enough to go up to their Jewish neighbors and go “but WHY are you trying to take over the world? But WHY do you want to hurt us? WHY? WHY? WHY?” As if any of it were actually true. If Caz is any indication, there were probably quite a few.
Benjamin Franklin
“Are you seriously suggesting that income inequality is a bad thing,”
Joe Plumber comes to mind. I often wonder why Republicans vote against their own interests.
It’s the bilious notion that everyone, can be rich. Joe the Plumber is worried about taxes in the future, when the unemployed, un-licensed contractor whose business went bankrupt, once again rises like the Phoenix.
MarkJ
Social capital is a fancy term for who you know. So his argument boils down to “If only all those poor people knew as many rich people as the rich people do, they could use that network of wealthy friends to jump on the gravy train and become rich themselves.” How this observation is a solution to the problem remains a mystery. Maybe we could mandate that all rich people live in homeless shelters so poor people could meet them and have access to their social network.
schrodinger's cat
Deleted posted in the wrong thread.
just a question
Let’s leave aside everyone’s opinion of the article and the author. The simple fact is 70% of families living in poverty are headed by a single parent.
Can anyone please suggest how to solve that problem?
Karen
I didn’t see all the comments so if this is being repetitive I apologize in advance.
Isn’t this the definition of a caste system? Or is it the first time they’re being so blatant about the caste system we already have and have always had?
Karen
@just a question:
Better enforcement of child support would be a great start.
Bex
@Caz: Who said anything about communism?
licensed to kill time
@Bex: That’s Caz’s pet name for his large straw man erection.
jefft452
“Today’s 99% is teeming with tens of millions of Americans who were not raised in a stable home environment, and their earnings potential is compromised as a result.”
Sure, 99% of the US is like 310 million people
It’s probably “teeming with tens of millions” of left handed red heads too
The bigger problem with wingnut explanations for our current state is that they have been trotting out the same bullshit for ages
Is it just a coincidence that 10% of us suddenly got too lazy to work, stopped bathing, and had our parents divorce at exactly the same time that Lehman Brothers collapsed?
A Conservative Teacher
By creating a more powerful government, as you all want to do, what exactly did you think would happen? Some sort of glorious communist paradise, like what happened in… wait, every time government has gotten more powerful to ‘help the people’ or some sort of garbage like that, the result has been more inequality, less prosperity, more civil rights and liberties broken, and less happy people.
The very policies and ideas which you are arguing for are the very policies and ideas that have led you into the problems you find yourselves in today. Many of you pretend you don’t like bailouts and government helping out select groups in society- but in reality, you just want your groups and friends helped out and are upset that you don’t have the power to do so.
The policies and ideas you should be supporting are those of the Tea Party and the right wing- less government involvement in the economy, less bailouts, less government spending, less government in general, equality before the law, decisions made at the local (state) level, and responsibility for individual actions. Those policies and ideas will lead to where you want to go- stop opposing them!
Bex
@A Conservative Teacher: Communism’s really the trollword of the day, innit?
Chris
@A Conservative Teacher:
You can tell from the way 1950s society was totally more unequal than 1920s society. And less prosperous. And less happy.
Christ. Trollword of the day indeed. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone on some conservative blog paid these guys to troll.
jefft452
“wait, every time government has gotten more powerful to ‘help the people’ or some sort of garbage like that, the result has been more inequality”
The US, 1936-1980 powerful government’s “alphabet soup” and less inequality plus rising standard of living
1980-present – “gov is not the solution, it’s the problem” – deregulation, decentralization, contract with America, the era of big gov is over, get the gov off our backs, – the tea party wet dream – and more inequality, declining wages, bank failures, massive unemployment, massive budget deficits
Were you in a coma for the last 30 years?
birthmarker
I thought s/he was referring to the Bush years…
dead existentialist
I guess I picked a bad day to stop hating conservatives.
Paul in KY
@Waynski: They will tell you that it was Hell being nice to those asshole rich parents/relatives so they could get their inheritence & that was as much work as hauling coal in your big wheel at age 8.