Should the US make being "poor" a crime?

Why stop there? Why not just imprison them? Wouldnt that be even MORE incentive to not be poor?

 

Debtors prison and poorhouses were once viable institutions in America as poverty was looked upon as a dishonorable state.

Now it's a badge of honor...

I'm poor, woe is me...
the suffering Olympics...who can have the most hard luck story wins the coveted prize...a SNAP card for life.

Poverty is easy. Just stop working...buy stuff until you're broke, make babies you can't afford

Voila...

Poverty.

Any fool can be poor...
and many are just that...

Fools.

 

The poor shouldnt be given the status of US citizens and shouldnt be allowed to vote. They are a burden to this great nation.

 

You think too highly of yourself. There may be a day where ANY of us may need 'charity'.

Don't think that you are above the same.

 

Then we are right back where we started from. We are paying for them again.

 

Uh, debtors prisons are very ubiquitous in today's America. They never left, most people simply (and justly, and correctly) look down upon their wealthy creditors in this day and age for being greedy, effeminate, out-of-touch parvenus.

 

The two most pervasive causes of poverty are single parent households and lack of education.

Public schools are free from K - 12, yet many squander their chance to get a foundational education....and people choose to have children they can't afford...

I'm educated, I don't have children floating around with unwed mothers.

I may end up poor, but it won't be from a lack of trying to not be...I avoid bad decisons that will lead me quicker in that direction. I don't do drugs, I don't fornicate and breed irresponsibly...and I maintain gainful employment.
I want to work, I don't want to be on some government dole just to stay alive...I want to provide for myself.

That's reality, it's not about thinking "too highly" of myself...I've prepared for a myriad of worst case scenarios...
I'm preparing as I type this...money invested well can make money with little to no input necessary.

Would you like to know what the #1 searched term was in 2013, in all of the internet?

Twerking...

yes you heard me...

Twerking.

I pay taxes, state, local and federal...I tithe a percentage of my income to my parish...I also donate to charity in addition to tithing.

I'm weary of the sob stories...when in reality more often than not people bring misery upon themselves..
people are stupid...for the most part.

 

Whenever the Dems declare war on something that only assures it's proliferation.

War on Drugs?

War on Poverty?

How's that workin for us?

See my sig.

 

Fine. lets just kill them then.

 

Ah yes, regressing to the 19th century must be a good thing. Why don't we also colonize Africa and be wary of the threat that Napoleon poses?

 

Being stupid is its own punishment. A side effect of stupidity is having no money and thinking it's someone else's.

 

Why not simply jail Persons who apply for corporate welfare, first?

 

According to the high-information voters, that would be anti-capitalist.

 

Absolute bull(*)(*)(*)(*)!! Poor people individually receive a tiny fraction of federal resources, where the wealthy receive enormous benefits from government on an individual level. The wealthy and government have simply constructed a system which impoverishes many at the expense of those few, so the number of poor is very large. We therefore spend a lot of money on the poor as a collective, while spending almost nothing on the poor individually. So raising taxes on individual poor people, because the system has created a lot of poor people, seems like the most counterintuitive idea I have ever heard of.

 

No one thinks shoveling money onto the poor is a good idea, except for the elite. They do this because they know poor people radicalize politically and cause social problems if they are not beholden to the state. So they give the poor just enough to keep them from causing trouble, but never do anything to address the real and pernicious structural realities which make people poor in the first place. That would require real political will and real social change, which would threaten the power of the elite, so we will never see that happen!!

 

Both parties are beholden to the same set of interests, this information is hardly news to anyone who pays attention. There is no party of business and the rich and another party that is the party for the poor. There are two parties for the rich, and one rhetorically plays to rural white poor and working class people to garner their votes, while the other plays to urban poor and working class voters to garner their votes. Neither cares one bit about either of those groups though, they only care about the wealthy interests whose bribes allow them to prosper and stay in office.

 

About 1.4 million people make up the upper 1% of wealth. This "1%" could have their taxes increased by 50%, with a net revenue enough to redistribute $1,000 per person to the 158 million Americans living within one standard deviation of the poverty level.

The solution is not to tax the rich...the statistical reality is this would distribute roughly $1,000 to those who we would delineate as impoverished. I'm sorry but a thousand dollars will not lift anyone out of poverty.

I do not believe there is a solution. I think this is the new order of things. Among the fastest growing jobs, nearly half are in the lower wage category. Retail workers, waiter, waitresses, house cleaners...jobs which pay at or slightly above minimum wage. America won't rebound to where it once was in that a person with a high school education could work in a factory and make enough in wages to lift themselves and their family above poverty. America is competing with global labor now, and corporations want the cheapest bang for their buck. One can argue, the morality of a purely capitalistic system...but socialism has proved to be equally unsustainable.

There is no perfect system...there is no sustainable system. I believe, this is it...
The income disparity will remain, if not grow larger...we will always have the haves and the have nots.
The best advice I can give is to minimize the bad decisons...don't have children you cannot afford...don't fall into drug use and criminality...and in addition to a high school education, seek some sort of technical skill. The government cannot lift you out of poverty, it can sustain you while in poverty but it won't get you out of the cycle....

Seriously..we're on our own.

Taxing the 1%, punishing corporations, growing the government...is not a sustainable solution.

If you're stuck in a low wage job, do your best to advance..but this notion that if only the government taxed more, or regulated more or mandated to corporations to pay a livable wage and stop out sourcing, is unsustainable.

There will be no happy ending for many Americans...poverty will grow, before it ever shrinks.

A dark story perhaps, but I truly believe the sooner this is accepted that a knight in shining government armor is not going to rescue you from poverty, the sooner one can at least try to lift themselves out of the cycle..and that process begins with better problem solving skills...
Being poor is a problem...on that we can all agree. Exacerbating a problem by bad personal decisions doesn't help.

 

why? aren't the wealthy, poor; just as bad as the least wealthy poor simply for needing income transfers from Other Peoples money?

 

compared to the rest of the world... yes, FAKE.

Not having enough money to buy cigs at the end of the month, or gas for your vehicle /= true poor

you are not poor because you drive around in a 2000 pontiac that cost 1000$ while your boss has 3, $40,000 vehicles that his son drives
you are not poor living in Section 8 housing when you have heat/ac, pool and hottub with gym in a gated community when the rest of the world has to steal electricity in their favelas...

it's not satirical, it's point out your hypocracies.

west Oakland


Kiberia


living in a high crime area /= poor

 

Being poor is only a crime if the person who is poor is unhappy, and the condition is self-inflicted. As such, both the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, and that person serves their own punishment.

 

Then where would you like to place the goalposts for being poor? My grandmother can barely afford sustenance. Is that poor? Or only if she has pennies per day like third world countries?

 

Are you suggesting that the poor neighbourhoods in the US should look like Kiberia before we consider them poor?
It costs a lot more to live in the US than it does in Kiberia, even for the poorest people. The US also has a different climate.
So what's your point?

 

You make an excellent point with regard to the potential $1,000 benefit from taxing the extremely wealthy - however that is a limited equation. The need is to increase taxation for everyone, on a progressive scale, from the middle classes upwards, and to spend that income on infrastructure and other agents of social justice. The need is also to diminish the chasm between the pay rates of the cleaner and the CEO.

When there is efficient and cheap public transport, when there is health care free at the point of delivery, when a public education is at least close to the equal of private education, when there is free university education - and when the poor are considered unfortunate, rather than lazy and criminal - all these things combine to make relative poverty much more bearable in any given society. They also combine to make that society a less violent and more humane place.

This is what an ostensibly right wing organisation has to say about poverty in the USA.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p17s02-cogn.html

 

I believe we should ban (official) poverty with existing infrastructure and justify the income transfers through eminent domain via public policy.

 

*someone else's fault.

^I love it when you try to be condescending and it ends up backfiring. [/humbled]

The point still stands, though.