How much poverty is a choice?

I have found that, as my income has increased quite a bit over the last 25 years, it has become less stressful to not make bad decisions.

A bad decision used to be 'I think I am going to eat 3 meals a day this month instead' instead of the better decision of skipping one to have the money to change the oil in the car.

Now a bad decision might be 'Maybe I'll buy a new car to replace the car that is getting older and requiring more maintenance.'' instead of the better decision of settling for a late model used one.

 

I'm sure most of us struggled when we were younger and had to make decisions on how to stretch our money but could you ever imagine missing a meal or an oil change while paying for something like cable tv or cell phones? When did these become necessities?

 

Poverty as a Social Problem:
We have all felt a shortage of cash at times. That is an individual experience. It is not the same as the social problem of poverty. While money is a measure of wealth, lack of cash can be a measure of lack of wealth, but it is not the social problem of poverty.
Poverty as a social problem is a deeply embedded wound that permeates every dimension of culture and society. It includes sustained low levels of income for members of a community. It includes a lack of access to services like education, markets, health care, lack of decision making ability, and lack of communal facilities like water, sanitation, roads, transportation, and communications. Furthermore, it is a "poverty of spirit," that allows members of that community to believe in and share despair, hopelessness, apathy, and timidity. Poverty, especially the factors that contribute to it, is a social problem, and its solution is social.
We learn in these training web pages that we can not fight poverty by alleviating its symptoms, but only by attacking the factors of poverty. This handout lists and describes the "Big Five" factors that contribute to the social problem of poverty.
The simple transfer of funds, even if it is to the victims of poverty, will not eradicate or reduce poverty. It will merely alleviate the symptoms of poverty in the short run. It is not a durable solution. Poverty as a social problem calls for a social solution. That solution is the clear, conscious and deliberate removal of the big five factors of poverty.

 

I am amazed at how much of that I actually agree with. But, boy, do we have diametrically opposed solutions. To paraphrase an old adage, you are forever proposing methods of supplying them with fish while David and the rest of the right, are trying to teach them how to fish. Somehow, supplying the fish forever seems to me like fighting "poverty by alleviating its symptoms" rather than "by attacking the factors of poverty".

 

David in response to what you said to Clembo let me ask you this, what is better for the Bank getting back all the cash they loaned out with interest (regardless of the rate) or not getting anything back at all? The rates would go up a hell of a lot more if people defalted all the time and yes he paid them back every cent he borrowed plus interest The Bank lost nothing it regained it's Capital and made on the loan

 

To those that have no clue: My example of giving a billion dollars to a million poor people versus a group of large corporations was just that, an example. The less clueless should know that the point was about which of the two was a better way to stimulate the economy, and not a call for a billion dollars to be given to poor people just to give a billion dollars away. The smartest should have realized it was also a call against giving large corporatons large amounts of our tax-dollars, and that I... like David... don't want to see tax-dollars spent unwisely.

 

I have nothing against the idea of teaching someone how to fish, and I've stated as much before. What I do have an issue with is someone saying "You can't have any fish, since you don't know how to fish."

 

Yeah, unless you're the one expected to learn...

 

My opinion is that the word "poverty" was a poorly chosen word in this context and selected without much thought as to what poverty actually is. Do people make bad financial choices? Sure they do each and every day. I've seen it, you've seen it, everyone has seen people spend money unwisely. I'd be willing to bet every single person here has done it from time to time. However, that does not constitute poverty.
Nor do I believe that, through individual financial decisions, you can contribute to poverty. Poverty is a social problem apart from the individual financial decisions you or I might make on daily basis and has its roots in systemic institutional realities. Proof of this assertion is that people can be born into poverty, be impoverished, and spend their entire lives in poverty without ever making any bad financial decisions.
Now if the OP had asked, "Do people make unwise or poorly thought out financial decisions that contribute to their own financial downfall?", I'd agree and so would anyone else but that wasn't the question was it?
If being poor or impoverished were just a matter of bad financial decisions, poverty wouldn't hit minorities, women, women with children, immigrants, and the elderly with such disproportionally high rates. Nothing predisposes those groups to making financially poor decisions yet the statistics tell us that these groups suffer more poverty than their number represent in the general population.
Those that blame the victims of a system that regularly ignores the idea of social justice and perpetuate the stereotypical poor person as a self-made class do so by paying far more attention to the myth of poverty than they pay to the reality of poverty and the statistics that debunk those myths.

 

Right wingers breed greed. That's definitely their plan because it's much more profitable, and we all know profit is above everything and everybody else.

 

A clueless response from you, as usual. I'm all for efforts to teach people how to fish, so they can feed themselves. To the point though, your interest, something I see in a lot of Republicans, isn't in teaching someone how to fish, it's in not giving fish to anyone... whether they know how to fish or not. That's the opposite of generousity... it's selfish and more than a litlle uncaring.

 

You're off-track. Conservatives give more to charity than liberals. Look it up.

 

tomc & iqless may or may not be the same person but they do have one thing in common: both hate any discussion of personal responsibility.

For iqless....it's funny how you claim to support the idea of "teach to fish" yet when one does attempt to "teach" you label it "judgmental". Odd.
Odder still is your claim conservatives don't give when the facts prove you are dead wrong, not to mention this thread was started about helping a family that found itself in an emergency situation.

 

The facts also say that conservatives have lower IQ's. I can prove this fact right here and now. 1 in 2 American in this country now live near or below the poverty line. The conservatives here would have you believe that this poverty is a matter "choice" and of course a lack of "personal responsibility". They say that these people simply need us to teach them to fish.

Interesting that we see poverty skyrocketing during the deepest recession this country has experienced since the 1930's yet they contend that poverty is just a matter of choice. I find their narrative rather convenient given that after 8 years of Bush policies, the policies they desperately want to return to, this country was left in the worst shape since, well Hoover, another conservative left office.

Isn't just possible that their narrative is more or less just an excuse that they are trotting out for inflicting the pain they have wrought on millions of low income people and blaming those same people for their own situation? Adhering to the myths of poverty in my opinion demonstrates a lower IQ.

 

Seems ol' moen is getting back on message & attacking conservatives.

Actually, rhetoric & hyperbole like this are exactly what compelled me to ask the question in the first place.

 

Oh, please get off the "Let's blame everything on Bush" bandwagon. You know as well as I do that Bill Clinton was behind much of the financial disaster:

The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, (Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999) or the Citigroup Relief Act[1] is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001). It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. With the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were allowed to consolidate. The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Many believe that the Act directly helped cause the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. President Barack Obama has stated that GLB led to deregulation that, among other things, allowed for the creation of giant financial supermarkets that could own investment banks, commercial banks and insurance firms, something banned since the Great Depression. Its passage, critics also say, cleared the way for companies that were too big and intertwined to fail.[23] Economists Robert Ekelund and Mark Thornton have also criticized the Act as contributing to the crisis. They state that "in a world regulated by a gold standard, 100% reserve banking, and no FDIC deposit insurance" the Financial Services Modernization Act would have made "perfect sense" as a legitimate act of deregulation, but under the present fiat monetary system it "amounts to corporate welfare for financial institutions and a moral hazard that will make taxpayers pay dearly."[24]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has also argued that the Act helped to create the crisis.[25] An article in the liberal publication The Nation asserted that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was responsible for the creation of entities that took on more risk due to their being considered “too big to fail."[26]

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) is United States federal legislation that officially ensured the deregulation of financial products known as over-the-counter derivatives. It was signed into law on December 21, 2000 by President Bill Clinton. It clarified the law so that most over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions between “sophisticated parties” would not be regulated as “futures” under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 (CEA) or as “securities” under the federal securities laws. Instead, the major dealers of those products (banks and securities firms) would continue to have their dealings in OTC derivatives supervised by their federal regulators under general “safety and soundness” standards. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) desire to have “Functional regulation” of the market was also rejected. Instead, the CFTC would continue to do “entity-based supervision of OTC derivatives dealers.” [1] These derivatives, especially the credit default swap, would be at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The first provision of the CFMA to receive widespread popular attention was the “Enron Loophole".[74] In most accounts, this “loophole” was the CEA’s new section 2(h). Section 2(h) created two exemptions from the CEA for “exempt commodities” such as oil and other “energy” products.[75]

First, any transaction in exempt commodities not executed on a “trading facility” between “eligible contract participants” (acting as principals) was exempted from most CEA provisions (other than fraud and anti-manipulation provisions). This exemption in Section 2(h)(1) of the CEA covered the “bilateral swaps market” for exempt "trading facilities."[76]

Second, any transaction in exempt commodities executed on an “electronic trading facility” between “eligible commercial entities” (acting as principals) was also exempted from most CEA provisions (other than those dealing with fraud and manipulation). The “trading facility”, however, was required to file with the CFTC certain information and certifications and to provide trading and other information to the CFTC upon any “special call.” This exemption in Section 2(h)(2) of the CEA covered the “commercial entities” for exempt "electronic trading facilities.”

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The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1977, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901et seq.) is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to help meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.[1][2][3] Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining.

In July 1993, President Bill Clinton asked regulators to reform the CRA in order to make examinations more consistent, clarify performance standards, and reduce cost and compliance burden.[51] Robert Rubin, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, under President Clinton, explained that this was in line with President Clinton's strategy to "deal with the problems of the inner city and distressed rural communities". Discussing the reasons for the Clinton administration's proposal to strengthen the CRA and further reduce red-lining, Lloyd Bentsen, Secretary of the Treasury at that time, affirmed his belief that availability of credit should not depend on where a person lives, "The only thing that ought to matter on a loan application is whether or not you can pay it back, not where you live." Bentsen said that the proposed changes would "make it easier for lenders to show how they're complying with the Community Reinvestment Act", and "cut back a lot of the paperwork and the cost on small business loans".[36]

By early 1995, the proposed CRA regulations were substantially revised to address criticisms that the regulations, and the agencies' implementation of them through the examination process to date, were too process-oriented, burdensome, and not sufficiently focused on actual results.[52] The CRA examination process itself was reformed to incorporate the pending changes.[40] Information about banking institutions' CRA ratings was made available via web page for public review as well.[36] The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) also moved to revise its regulation structure allowing lenders subject to the CRA to claim community development loan credits for loans made to help finance the environmental cleanup or redevelopment of industrial sites when it was part of an effort to revitalize the low- and moderate-income community where the site was located.

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Relation to 2008 Financial Crisis

Economist Stan Liebowitz wrote in the New York Post that a strengthening of the CRA in the 1990s encouraged a loosening of lending standards throughout the banking industry. He also charges the Federal Reserve with ignoring the negative impact of the CRA.[100] In a commentary for CNN, Congressman Ron Paul, who serves on the United States House Committee on Financial Services, charged the CRA with "forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks."[105] In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Austrian school economist Russell Roberts wrote that the CRA subsidized low-income housing by pressuring banks to serve poor borrowers and poor regions of the country.[106]

During a 2008 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the financial crisis, including in relation to the Community Reinvestment Act, asked if the CRA provided the "fuel" for increasing subprime loans, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines said it might have been a catalyst encouraging bad behavior, but it was difficult to know. Raines also cited information that only a small percentage of risky loans originated as a result of the CRA.

 

Funny how you can zero in on the one portion of the entire post that compels you to attack me personally but have absolutely no answer for the substantive portion. No matter how much I post actual facts, arguments, and logic, you only seem be drawn into the personal attacks as if actually discussing the topic is just beyond your abilities but personal attacks come easily.

Is this all you have?

 

I guess "substanitive" "logic" etc are in the eyes of the beholder. Nothing you posted was particularly impressive or relevant.