Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

To prevent factories from avoiding low worker wages by producing in an area where those abusive salaries are allowed by the government, or even are the pervasive wages.

I would have no problem with producing locally where it makes sense, but not to avoid minimum legal standards for wages (or for that matter for other things like environment).

Internationalism on the left was going to force the world to become leftist by having a border between leftist and other governments. THAT border was going to have huge import taxes.

So no, I think not revisionist at all.

Sorry, my comment started as a reply to the comment about “better than most countries” [1] (hence the comparison).

I explicitly didn’t want to make this comment about advocating for a policy, but first to make sure we’re all on the same page: the US minimum wage isn’t enough to get by on. I should have added that a huge portion of the labor force is at or near this rate, except again I’m on my phone, so I couldn’t back that with the precise number.

Since you asked, I’m one of the Basic Income folks :).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17966080

Well jobs absolutely are the solution for the 85% of Americans living above the poverty line. That said...

The article completely ignores the major cause of Vanessa's struggles: she is a single parent trying to raise three children. Where is the father of her children?

If you are not married, do not have children. Just going by the statistics, I suspect Vanessa's children were born out of wedlock.

Also, if you are very young (still in high school) and not on financially sound footing yet, do not have children.

Remedying these problems alone would massively reduce poverty.

Children are a massive financial and time sink, yet according to the Brookings Institute [1]:

"...more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage."

Many of these children are raised by single mothers and fathers. Sure, married people get divorced, but the number of children raised in single parent households is far less among those born to married adults than those who are not.

It's been clearly shown that the average child raised in a single parent household has worse outcomes than the average child raised in a two parent household.

Cultural issues must be addressed in this country, but everyone seems unwilling to do so because they worry about "blaming the victims".

Well in this case, poverty is clearly being perpetuated by poor decision making on the part of individuals and cultures which perpetuate this poor decision making. The "victims" are at fault.

Culture can be changed, but we must identify and talk about the problems before that change can occur.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...

> If you ignore the religious association, how is this concept any different from the notion that society functions better when people are industrious and maximise their efforts to do things that are useful and valuable to others?

Probably the religious connection helps illuminate the problem more than it is hiding anything.

The reason this is called a Protestant work ethic is that some Christian sects don't think deeds matter, for them working isn't important, what matters is believing. So a sincere believer who rapes and murders is good, whereas an atheist who is kind and generous is evil. This quickly goes down a No True Scotsman rabbit hole with real Christians, but that's the summary. So the belief that what you do even _matters_ is fundamental to the PWE.

But it turns out that "what you do is what's important" is almost as flawed as "what you believe is what's important". In both cases these rely on a personal God keeping a running tally, they just disagree on what He's counting. But the real world has no personal God keeping that tally, it doesn't exist.

Your parents lives are consequential in their _effects_ not in terms of how much labour they put in to achieve those effects. The PWE quite intentionally doesn't care about those effects, what possible effect could you have next to the will of God anyway?