Conservatives, this is what poverty looks like.

I have a couple of questions and a little story of my own.

Point #1: First of all, I have to question the validity of your story. Not that I don't think you're handicapped, however in the very first paragraph I find something rather disturbing. Your ENTIRE boohoo story is predicated on the idea that your mother was UNFAIRLY fired from a job because she was pregnant with a disabled child. You then make the statement, "Of course, my mom could have fought them in court, but didn't make enough to hire a lawyer and made too little to afford legal aid" and that's pretty much all you say about that. Which of course is simply a load of BS.

There are lawyers ALL OVER THIS COUNTRY that would beg and drool for a case like that. They would take that case with absolutely zero charge to your mother for the consultation to find out she could win that case hands down (if it is what you say it is). Not only would the consultation cost absolutely nothing but there are lawyers ALL OVER THIS COUNTRY that would take that case with zero fees WHATSOEVER to your mother until they got her some sort of settlement which would be worth far more than the fees she would have to pay for it.

So again, I have to question he veracity of your story. The entire story is pointless if your mother would have simply done what any sane person would have done and sued the pants off of her employer for unlawful termination and discrimination. So I have to question was she REALLY fired for discrimination or was it for some other purpose? If it really was discrimination then the individuals at fault for her situation is herself and her employer. She had every ability to seek compensation for an unlawful firing... and if she had done so, the rest of your story wouldn't have meant anything would it?

Point #2: The AGAIN false assertion of " In addition, in order to keep the SSI and Medicaid, my mom had to have a low enough income. Not wanting me to be without the Medicaid, she had no choice but to work minimum wage jobs. My mom did not start working a job befitting her skills until I was in high school, even then, she couldn't show her true capacity, if she did, she risked being promoted too fast and putting my Medicaid at risk, her company didn't offer a comparably cheap medical insurance."

So let me get this right. Rather than get a REAL job, budget and prioritize so that SHE could afford insurance (as she had a "good" job beforehand)... she decided to stay on the taxpayers dime, work a part-time job, get you into school where you were at for at least EIGHT HOURS a day and STILL she didn't get a full-time job and purchase her own insurance so she could cover you. So let me ask .... what the **** was she doing during that eight hours while you were at school every day (which we were also paying for)? Sitting on her ass at home collecting her welfare paycheck?

She had more than ample opportunity to begin to provide for herself and for you and she CHOSE not to do so. Would it have required some budgeting, some pain and some hard times? Absolutely, but guess what, we ALL have to go through that at some time or another. I'm not sure why your mother is better than the rest of us, that she would not be required to do the same.

Point #3: Where was your Father? I will refrain from commenting on this until I get an answer but the ramifications are sobering depending upon your answer.

Now my little story. I can't really make my story as effective as I would like to do so until I get an answer to Point #3... so I await your answer.

 

the so called poor here in America live better then the middle in other parts of the industrialized world

The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:
◾Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
◾Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
◾Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
◾The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
◾Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
◾Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
◾Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
◾Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

 

where was dad?

ok,

just saw the answer below. You mom chose to have an out-of-wedlock child, with what is apparently an unstable man (I guess he didn't keep up support in a meaningful way?) and carry a disabled child to term. Choices all, the buck stops with your mother's poor judgment.

 

Ahhhh I see you did answer it.

Well at least your father did the right thing after making a mistake and got an actual job and helped to pay child support. He apparently also helped provide you with medical insurance with HIS own money.

And it's always nice of you to tell the whole story.

So in reality your mother DID have support for medical care after you were 4 or 5. So she refused to get a full-time good job to assist in paying the medical bills and expected the tax payer to make up for it. That's just swell. Doesn't sound like a mooch to me at all.

Point #3 (cont. from earlier): If your father and mother never married, why didn't your mother ask for help taking care of you from your father? Rather she limited his ability to see you by placing restrictions on when he could see you? Doesn't sound like she was TOO desperate for help was she? Furthermore, why did she and him have a child in the first place? They were not married.

So let me make sure I have this right. Your mother laid down ON PURPOSE with some guy, got pregnant with a child and didn't have the resources to take care of the child. And she KNEW before she had sex with the guy that they weren't in a position to take care of a child if she got pregnant.

And because of that, WE all have to pay for their pathetic decision making and mistakes?

No thanks.

 

Liberals are usually better off financially than conservatives are, so this idea that leftists living in their bubbles come up with that no conservative has ever seen poverty is not only wrong, it's projection.

Live in Oakland for awhile, work in or with law enforcement in any form, and you will see that the truth about a lot of these poor does not mesh well with giving them anything for free.

 

I've been to the bay area a lot, truly baffling. Poverty surrounded by huge liberal wealth, yet nobody seems to want to 'redistribute'. Isn't Marin one of the wealthiest places in the US?

 

Ding ding ding.

Sitting on a 7 figure case. Lawyers would be cage fighting each other for this one. This story stinks of something

 

With respect PT, you want to come with me the next time I visit the north of Laos. You haven't seen poverty until you walk into an ethnic hill tribe village.

 

Depends on how old he is and for whom his mother worked. If it was prior to the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, or after if she worked for an exempt employer, that would have been a much tougher case to litigate, especially in my state.

 

If you have to ask the question, you have no possibility of understanding the answer.

 

Guy with minor spine problems in a family that obviously has the money to go skateboarding on a regular basis becomes a star from wheelchair tricks. Not seeing the correlation. I didn't see anything in that wiki about his family struggling to pay bills, etc. It's a nice story, but far from the norm. I do agree that self pity leads nowhere, but some situations are more dire than others and the wiki didn't talk about the guy's money situation, it only talked about how he used his ailment and discovery of wheelchair tricks.

 

You got the answer in your first line: "so-called poor." The government statistics you are quoting define poverty by reference to income, not assets, so lots of well-off retired people who own their own homes and can afford quite affluent lifestyles are classed as, "poor" on the basis of having little income. They are in fact not poor at all, because they have so much in assets that they don't need much income. Poor people don't own real estate, sorry. Until you have some statistics that actually look at people who are actually poor -- homeless people, people who are paying most of their sub-poverty-line income in rent and trying to pay for food and utilities out of the rest, etc. -- you are just trying to mislead readers.

 

"WILD OATS!!!"

 

if you have a problem with the definition of poor take it up with the government and the Census Bureau not me. I didn't create the definition they did

"The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:"

 

But you are accepting and using their definition, and quoting their statistics, as if it were valid. It's not, as any good dictionary will confirm.

 

so who gets to define the poor? do you? ya right like Im going to go by your definition of poor there for so you can define it so it fits your narrative. It doesn't work that way

 

You and Think4achange insulted the (*)(*)(*)(*) out of her.

 

Flat negative income tax.

No disincentive to make more money, no threat of a poverty trap, no one is penniless in a given year and best of all, you can do it with 1 equation:

(income)*(flat tax rate) - (universal tax credit) = (income tax owed)

Healthcare? Plenty of good examples to look at in Europe. The Netherlands might be the most palatable to Americans, I'd recommend something along those lines.

With the basics out of the way, you can let capitalism do its magic and raise you up further.

Now if only bleeding heart liberals would only listen to reason instead of misguided hate of everything "private" and conservatives would stop treating poor people like scum...

 

Liberals this is what fiscal reality looks like due to entitlement spending.

 

We'll, while you appear to be "feeling" yours tonight, why not answering post #10 that you conveniently avoided? Or are you not "wild oats" enough to tackle the question? And if you do answer, don't be brief. I want details out the ying yang too. Get to it. Your behind schedule. And if you can't answer, you should apologize to PTPlauthor and his mother for shooting blanks in this debate without backing up your claims to the question I asked.

 

1: This was before the FMLA and other laws as someone else pointed out.

2. My mom had a high school education and a CNA certification. She couldn't work as a CNA because she needed too much time off to take me to and from Madison and Milwaukee. Any job is a real job, she took what she could get and what could work around my medical needs. What is it with people thinking jobs don't qualify as a "real job"? Do you know what it's like to be a single parent of a child with a disability? Until you do, I suggest you cease Monday-morning-quarterbacking my mom's situation.

3. I have answered that in other replies. Had he been around, the situation could have been worse, two incomes could have easily invalidated me for Medicaid before my dad was covered by employer insurance, and this was before the time when pre-existing conditions had to be covered. My dad's insurance helped cover whatever the MA didn't.

Yes and no on doing better. In all honesty, I got slammed with a triple whammy right off the bat when I looked to start my life on my own--disability started worsening (it's BS that CP isn't progressive at least somewhat), the economy crashed, and my mom and I got roped into going to one of the worst "colleges" in the country..

My disability isn't "disabled" enough for the disability-work programs around here, I was told that point blank with two crutches on my arms, my grandpa's jaw dropped when he heard the worker say that. I'm biding my time, getting my medical issues sorted out, and should be able to get into the workforce in a year or two. I hate being on a fixed income.

It was well before FMLA or the other laws. My mom would have fought them if she could have, but then again, it was a public company she would have been fighting. Small odds, and oh, by the way, did I mention I was in and out of the hospital for the first three years of my life? Yeah, a parent has enough stress with a sick kid wants to also fight a lawsuit that's probably going to take years and in the end she'll lose anyway.

Yes, you insulted her. You don't know my mother, and honestly, I'm glad you don't, because I know her....

Well, let me enlighten you. Medicaid is a federally-mandated but state-administered program. There are thresholds that once a recipient, or in the case of a minor child, the recipient's guardian(s), has an income beyond that threshold, the benefit is stopped. Each state has a different setup. In Wisconsin, child support payments counted toward that income limit. Child support didn't cover enough of the bills. My mom couldn't go on Section 8 because the school with the best physical therapy was in an area where no landlord was going to take Section 8. When I finally could go without almost daily in-school PT, my mom was able to move in to a different apartment, our rent was lowered because my mom did maintenance and other things for the complex.

I just pulled up the monthly statistics from last month from the SSA, there are less than 19 million SSDI or SSI recipients. If millions of them were cheating the system, the system would have been shut down. It took me three years to get my benefits because some brain-dead judge thought he had "MD" tacked to the end of his name. Despite what you and many others think, it's hard as hell to get on disability in the United States. The risk of fraud is so high that I only know of one case of all the people I have ever talked to about this got their disability on their first application.

My mom taught me ethics, something your mom and your nursing education seems to have skipped over if these posts are any indication.

So she could be lumped into the category of "lazy druggies" by you the other people like you? So she could end up fully in the cycle of welfare dependency that has caused so many other good people to give up hope? Man, when you DO end up crashing into the brick wall called reality, look me up, I want to watch Karma kick your ass all over the place.

 

Personally, I don't know anybody that hasn't face difficulties in life. At this point in our history the majority of the "new" jobs are part time work because of the ACA. Employers get out of paying for their employees medical insurance by only working them 30 hours a week, that makes them part time workers. Now, if you raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour it will all be relative because my wages will go up to $80 and inflation will make the buying power of that $20 an hour the same as the current $7.00 an hour. So, good luck with you noble ideas and ideals, sit back and see if what I said doesn't happen. I've watched it to many times to not know better.

 

thanks for even further evidence of you inability to understand the written word. The list he made was titled Republican Talking points. So in essence you have become the defender of Republicans in this thread. Thanks for the help not that we needed it...

 

In my expereince, anyone making less than 2.5 times minimum wage was having a pretty rough go of it. All they do raising minimu wage is make everyone's life more difficult without helping the people they wish to help an on top of that hey can't help but increase the number of people making minimum wage.

 

Amen, brother!!