The social issue that I find most troubling of all is poverty. Mainly the poverty that exists in the United States. I find it mind boggling that there are so many resources that the United States has, but yet 37 million people still live in poverty in our country. We are the United States of America; we are supposed to be one of the wealthiest and powerful countries, so it astonishes me that so many Americans lack the basic needs to sustain a suitable life.
Poverty is an extreme social problem that is so complex to unravel, but can something be done?
I firmly believe that if more people were educated about the poverty that exist in America then more people would take action. People could take action by helping to change government policies and elect more goal oriented government candidates. I think the most powerful action can be taken by participating in hands on project that attempt to reduce poverty. The Social issue of poverty requires much thought and deliberation in how to attack it. There is no immediate solution to poverty, but a lot can be done to reduce it if people were to open their hearts and minds.
Well, we have to consider the poverty in America. It in no way, shape, or form compares to that of Africa (for example). Could you expand on what poverty means in America?
RESPECT LIFE
http://progressiveu.org/blog/respectlife
"It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."
~Mother Teresa
Personally, I don't view poverty in America as big of an issue as poverty in 3rd world countries such as Haiti. Here in America, there are opportunities, everyone has the chance to get a job and attempt to make some sort of life for themselves, not everyone is going to be the richest person in the world, but there is still opportunity to succeed.
Instead of giving a jobless person money, give them a job; why should you have to work for something even they won't work for?
poverty is difficult to deal with. i am guessing i would attack children in poverty first. They are the future.
I completely agree that poverty is a major issue, not only in USA, but in the world. What I do not understand is why the government has to fix it. Private companies and citizens can fix the problem as well as, if not better then, the government can. After all the goverment would only make more debt.
Love is like a box of chocolates; if you chose wisely you won’t be disappointed and have to spit it out. ~T
The global financial crisis, brewing for a while, really started to show its effects in the middle of 2007 and into 2008. Around the world stock markets have fallen, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems. A movie entitled "Slumdog Millionaire" has been a big hit and won as the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The movie was so inspirational. It has called attention to the terrible poverty that people in other countries experience. Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, two child actors featured in Slumdog Millionaire, are both to be moved to new homes with their families. The Indian government has agreed to pick up the check, citing that the film, and the two diminutive thespians, has made their country proud. The kids featured in Slumdog Millionaire are both residents of India's slums.
I was a kid when Lyndon Johnson announced his "War on Poverty". Since that time we have transferred TRILLIONS of dollars from hard working people to the poor. The result is that we have as much poverty as we ever did. A couple of things have happened.
First, the government socialism has created a cycle of dependence. We have literally put chains of kindness around the people we were trying to help. Our laws encouraged pathologies like fathers abandoning their children that greatly increased the likelihood that the next generation would be poor.
And secondly, to the extent we have raised some of our poor out of poverty we have replaced them with a whole new batch of poor people in the form of immigrants from the third world. Twenty years ago we barely had a Hispanic minority. Now it is fast becoming our largest minority and a very large part of its is poor. We have literally IMPORTED POVERTY from the third world. This new wave of poverty not only burdens the taxpayers who are required to support them but it also puts downwards wage pressure and job competition and school degredation and crime problems on our existing poor making it much harder for them to climb out of poverty.
The reason we have poverty is because the ELITES WANT POVERTY. The big business types want cheap labor. The Democrats want poor people to vote for socialism. The labor unions (leadership NOT rank and file) want more dues paying members. The Catholic church want to fill pews. The race hustlers want victims.
The way to end poverty is to demand that our elites quit creating poverty by importing ever more poor people.
There are steps the government can take to fix poverty here without simply pushing it to other countries. Public education lifts hard working poor people out of the cycle of poverty. Federal New Deal-esque projects give poor people opportunities to work hard. Federal government is a way to get everyone - even selfish lazy rich people - to do their share. Private contributions drop to pathetic levels exactly when they are needed most - economic crises. Basically Obama is doing the right thing.
You really think welfare leads to abandoned children? Shady motives behind encouraging immigration are interesting and perhaps true to an extent (I'm cynical too) but closing our borders won't solve poverty. If we had more upward mobility then importing poor people wouldn't be such a problem.
Public education lifts hard working poor people out of the cycle of poverty.
Then why haven't they done it? Most of the nations worst schools are located in inner cities and most of these inner cities have been run by liberal Democrats for 50 years. Why haven't they fixed the schools? In many cases, the inner city schools are spending a lot more per student then suburban schools and they still stink. Washington DC, for example, has among the worst schools in the country and spends more per student then just about anywhere else. An appalling number of Washington DC kids are below grade level in reading and math.
Federal New Deal-esque projects give poor people opportunities to work hard.
Almost every make-work program the Federal Government has ever tried has been a miserable failure.
even selfish lazy rich people
People do not get rich by being lazy. Most people who earn over $250,000 per year are working their butts off. And the way they got the high paying jobs in the first place was because when they were kids they completed school and worked hard in college. Some of them may be selfish. But studies have repeatedly shown that conservatives give more than most people to charity so you must be talking about the liberal rich.
In contrast to the hard working rich, many of the poor are poor because they were lazy and made bad decisions. They didn't study and they dropped out of school. They abuse drugs and alcohol. They would rather deal drugs and risk prison rather than work at a low-paying but honest job. They allow their kids to run wild and embrace the gangster/hip hop life style. Etc. Laziness is an attribute that is far more common among the poor than the rich.
Basically Obama is doing the right thing.
Apparently the stock market does not think so. It is forward looking and since he was elected it has dropped 30% and 15% since he was sworn in. That has destroyed a tremendous amount of wealth that average working people were depending upon for retirement. The ranks of the poor have grown considerably. The engine of America's ability to create wealth thinks Obama is not doing the right thing.
The problem with socialism is that rather than lifting people up, it destroys the incentive for people to create wealth and it tends to drag people down. The gap between rich and poor is indeed narrowed. Everybody is poor and equally miserable.
You really think welfare leads to abandoned children?
The black family was very comparable to the white family in terms of stability in the 1950s. Now, the rate of black children raised in single family homes is about 3 times as high as for whites. The Great Society actually had incentives which encouraged single parent homes because a single mother could get lots more welfare then an intact family. You bet I believe that welfare encourages child abandonment.
If we had more upward mobility then importing poor people wouldn't be such a problem.
Importing poor people kills upwards mobility. The new immigrants share the same poor neighborhoods as our native born poor. These means schools are wrecked by having a high percentage of ESL students and our own children are deprived of attention. Everybody pays higher rents for crappy homes. Wages are depressed by an over-supply of unskilled cheap labor so people can't get ahead.
Beyond that, it is one thing to ask taxpayers to pay to lift our existing poor upwards. But once this investment has been made, where is the justification for importing a whole new batch of poverty and putting this burden on taxpayers yet again? Why must poverty in America be a problem that can never be solved be it is continuously refreshed by a new batch of poverty?
Local control. Poor school districts pass fewer levies and don't have the resources to figure out what kinds of reforms will help. That's why federal coordination is important - not increased testing and vouchers (Bush did that), but ambitious attempts to shake up public schools based on large-scale patterns in test results.
DC also has among the highest costs of living in the country and at the same time has more people below the poverty line (about 1/5) that just about anywhere else. Now I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure cost of living impacts the price of teachers, administrators, and even school supplies. Poor families means worse home environments, which contributes to low scores. Despite this I believe Obama's reform plan has a good chance of improving scores.
I wonder how you formed such a strong opinion, when the evidence seems to point tentatively the other way (how do you post images? The FAQ seems wrong):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gdp20-40.jpg
GDP stopped plummeting in 1933 (the year the New Deal began), then rose to pre-depression levels by 1938 (the year it ended).
Did those studies control for income and wealth? I bet if you looked at the percentage of income or wealth donated it would look much different. And even then we shouldn't expect impoverished people (who overwhelmingly swing left) to donate as large a fraction of their income, should we?
I'm sure your story about laziness has some merit but you can't forget that poor people are forced to work harder just to survive while rich people can get away with sloth and gluttony. And when it comes to making money, I'd love to believe all it takes is hard work but the fact is that luck and greed are important too.
Interesting point about single families... I'd hope they could prevent that kind of thing. I'll do some research on it.
DC also has among the highest costs of living in the country and at the same time has more people below the poverty line (about 1/5) that just about anywhere else. Now I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure cost of living impacts the price of teachers, administrators, and even school supplies.
In addition to among the nations most abysmal public schools, Washington also has some of the nations most elite and celebrated for excellence private schools. (President Obama sends his children to one of these.) Your arguments about local control and the cost of living and all that would make sense if the FACTS did not so soundly REFUTE them. Here is a study that shows that the failing public school system spends almost $10,000 per year more per student then the excellent private schools yet both the public and the private schools contend with the same high cost of living and the private schools are subject to even GREATER local control.
The Real Cost of Public Schools
I wonder how you formed such a strong opinion, when the evidence seems to point tentatively the other way
Posting a graph of GDP during the Great Depression and implying that the WPA and other make work programs paid for by the Federal Government were successful because the GDP eventually recovered proves nothing. Correlation does NOT prove causation. The GDP might have recovered faster without those programs. Many economists argue that those programs prolonged the Depression by depriving the private sector of capital and labor that would have fueled the recovery.
But here is a study from the 1990s that actually looked at several more contemporary make-work and government funded job training programs. It paints a picture of vast wastes of money and poor results supporting my original statement that these types of programs have been a miserable failure.
Welfare and Job Training Programs: What Congress Doesn't Know will Cost Taxpayers Billions
Did those studies control for income and wealth? I bet if you looked at the percentage of income or wealth donated it would look much different.
Yes they did control for income and wealth. Here are the findings from one of those studies:
-- Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
-- Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.
-- Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.
-- Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
-- In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.
-- People who reject the idea that "government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.
Conservatives More Liberal Givers
As I stated above, these ideas you are pushing are ideas that have been tried before and failed. It is just a warmed over bowl of socialist gruel.
I'd like to point out that just because a district gets a certain amount of money, it does not necessarily mean that a given, individual school gets a proportionate fraction of that money. How much money individual schools get in a district is entirely up to the Administration.
I can only speak for the districts I was involved in, so I'm not saying this is typical, but in a corrupted district, that financial power can lead to highly skewed results in a district, as well as unnecessary changes that waste the money allotted to the district.
For example, the district I had the most issue with had five high schools and about a dozen elementary schools. The smallest and the largest high schools were self-sustaining (that is, they generated enough tax revenue to cover their own "day-to-day" expenses), and would only need additional funding to improve conditions and make large changes (such as large renovations or additions to the building, or upgrading computer labs).
However, the district used the smallest school as a guinea pig and intentionally cut off improvement money. For example, the district refused to upgrade the school's computer lab. In 2002, while everyone else was running computers that had been bought within the past couple of years (Gateways with, at worst, Windows 2000, many started having Windows XP), the smallest school was still running on old Apple Color Classic IIs (a model they stopped making in late 1995, and the school had obtain quite some time before that). One of the teachers for the smallest school was able to obtain a grant from the Gates Foundation to upgrade the computers, and when the district found out, they attempted to make the smallest school give the computers to one of the larger schools (to no avail, thankfully).
The smallest school, as well as the other two smaller schools, were repeatedly denied funding for building repairs and improvements, despite the fact that they were practically falling apart due to the neglect of funding from the district to make the repairs while they were small.
The district also required the smallest school to use what's called "block scheduling." Using that type of system, students have approximately four classes per day, two of which are "block classes," or classes that go twice the length (an hour and a half, instead of 45 minutes). These classes would go for half a year, then change in the second half. It's a good system in a school with enough resources and teachers to make use of it, but in a small school with few teachers (and the teachers that are there teach multiple different classes) and little funding, the system made the situation with the district even worse. This was due, in part, to the lack of availability to take other classes due to the scheduling. It also hindered the students from taking other specialty courses (or forced them to take courses that were not suited to them, if they chose the specialty courses), such as Vocational-Technical (VoTech).
A year or two later, the district moved the high school portion of the school (it was a K-12 school) to one of the larger schools, citing financial reasons (a load of crap, since they kept the school open, but it was just K-6 instead of K-12 and still took nearly the same amount to run and took the same amount to run the building itself). They also claimed that the class sizes were too small and there were too many "empty seats," despite the school having the ideal student-teacher ratio of about 12:1.
Like I said, while the district was receiving X amount of money, not all the schools within the district were receiving the money they needed. However, most of the reports you'll find only go to the district level. So, while a district may appear to be failing and spending more, it may be due to only part of the schools in the district actually receiving the funding they need.
The problem I see when it comes to education is that the people making the decisions (even at a district level, let alone a government level) refuse to actually go to the schools and see what's going on. Instead, they make decisions from their removed positions. Instead of looking at why a school or district is not performing, they only look at that a school or district is failing, and in doing so, never actually fix the problem in a failing school/district.
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
I don't dispute what you wrote. I have no idea if it is true or not but it sure sounds like you know what you are talking about.
But I'll say it again, most of the worst schools are in areas that are controlled by Democrats. In many cases they have had 50 years to fix these problems. In many cases the schools in these areas have gotten worse, not better.
If liberal ideas work, why have these schools not been fixed? For that matter, why are these areas that have been experimenting with socialism for decades still filled with poor people? Why has this not been fixed?
Well, my point is that I don't think it's entirely a Democrat/Republican or Liberal/Conservative thing because they don't have that fine tuned of control. It's possible that it's a contributing factor, but I'm more inclined to believe that it's not the whole reason.
It'd be interesting to see various demographics of the different schools and districts for things like funding (per school and per district), school size, charter school locations, etc.
Please bear in mind that I'm not arguing the whole "Democrats vs Republicans" thing. I agree that government needs to take more of a hands off approach and let the communities take control. It's just that my experience has taught me that it doesn't matter which side is making the legislation, it can all be twisted.
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
Here is a map based school web site of Chicago which gives some of the demographic information you are looking for. There are loads of different maps there that slice and dice the info in different ways. It is worth looking at.
Chicago Schools That Are Failing
I found them quite interesting. The strongest correlation I saw between failing schools and the demographic data was that most of them were in neighborhoods which were mainly populated by minorities. That is no surprise.
The Democratic Mayor Daly machine has controlled Chicago since 1955. Chicago has been a rich successful city for most of that period. Why have they not fixed the schools?
I see a major correlation -- income of the communities in which the schools are located. There are more failing schools in areas where there are large percentages of people below the poverty line than there are in areas where there are few or no people in poverty.
I also noticed with your link is that it's using the No Child Left Behind program. I apologize, but I don't have much respect for the NCLB act in the vast majority of the areas it affects. There are too many ways the NCLB can be twisted to someone's agenda. Articles in the Washington Post, as well as New York Daily explain some of the issues with NCLB. This article also gives a nice overview of the flaws of NCLB.
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
Inner city public schools have much higher transportation and special ed expenses. In many districts, nearly half the budget goes to transportation. They also tend to have higher maintenance costs because of aging buildings. So, yes, they spend more per student, but the extra money spent is unlikely to go directly to student instruction. This has nothing to do with anyone's political affiliation. It just is what it is.
"Never go with a hippy to a second location."
~Jack Donaghy
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/ediblewoman
Your source probably cherrypicked his data. He used data from 3,003 respondents and included only one year. He could have used data from 51,020 respondents over 34 years.
He might have used data from the 26,700 "community respondents" in addition to the national sample of 3,003 but that would be misleading in an entirely different way. Believe it or not, the other survey found that conservative families make more money than liberal ones. If this is true then none of the stats you cited are particularly impressive.
Which is more likely: liberals are a bunch of stingy pricks, or poor people want their government to help the poor?
I'll check out your other sources later - if they're like this one it should be pretty fun.
Did you actually read the conclusion of the one critic that you posted of the study by Arthur Brooks that I posted?
He nitpicks quite a bit but in the end he does not find much to disagree with:
On the whole, I think that Who Really Cares is a valuable book with much sound analysis, but it appears that some of its main conclusions are based on the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, some of whose demographics don't appear to match national representative samples such as the GSS and ANES. And in Brooks's book, sometimes liberals are accused of being ungenerous when it appears that they may be more generous than political moderates. Generally, his otherwise strong analysis is weakened by focusing too little on what I have called the forgotten middle: moderates
I'm sorry but that is a pretty weak rebuttal. And Arthur Brooks findings have been widely reported on and reviewed. If his analysis was badly flawed you would think that you could come up with something stronger than that.
and it seems reasonable enough. This isn't about destroying your credibility, its about arguing specific points. He found specific flaws that suggest your stats were chosen because of their implications - I never claimed the entire book was garbage. Presumably much of the book attempts to refute the stereotype that conservatives are selfish - a claim nobody here has made. You're the one associating laziness with politics, and you know what they say about extraordinary claims.
I found an interesting comment that casts more doubt on your conclusions:
Although not false, I think the headline and focus of this piece is misleading. Halfway through, it's acknowledged that the most consistent predictor of charitable giving is not political stance, but religion (which is in turn a predictor of political stance). What is unexplored (here, at least) is how much of the religious' "giving advantage" is going to religious organizations, which could be taken as mostly a form of self-affirmation, like (according to skeptics) liberals' shopping at Whole Foods, assiduously sorting recyclables, and buying Fair Trade coffee. [In 2006, 32.8% of all recorded donations went to religious organizations; we can assume religious donors donate disproportionally to religious organizations, but I don't know exactly how much. Anyone?] Of course, both the religious/conservative giving to her denomination and the secular/liberal paying $5 for a cup of coffee to ensure farmers' welfare both think they're doing something for someone else, and they're doing it at cost to them. But the religious/conservative gets a tax write-off and credit in the aforementioned book. You could even argue that the secular/liberal was taking a more market-oriented approach by buying Fair Trade coffee instead of giving to a church or other charity that helps African farmers, but I'm sure both conservatives and liberals would be aghast at this muddying of the labeling waters.