Wow, that is one pointedly political article. Bloomberg is now solidly in my 'partisan source' category.
(Read the article before downvoting, please. Give it a fair read.)
Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
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Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#12Funny that at the point high quality LED tv's and digital signals come onstream, the world moves from Free-to-Air into pay-to-watch. So the poor can afford amazing TVs but cannot afford to buy the content we rich get to watch.
Absolute poverty improves but relative poverty goes backward is a constant. Taxing cigarettes to contain cancer risks is a no brainer, which rich people can buy themselves out from but poor addicted smokers get penalized on, and then have to wear "you are poor because you are sick and make bad choices" pushback, and are denied basic health support.
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#13Wow, that is one pointedly political article. Bloomberg is now solidly in my 'partisan source' category. (Read the article before downvoting, please. Give it a fair read.)
It appears to be in their "opinion" section.
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#14Who exactly is blaming the poor for their poverty?
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#15This acts as if it’s presenting an unpopular opinion against a popular opinion, when it’s actually the opposite. Would any of Noah’s colleagues not be horrified if he had written an article stating “blame America’s poor for their poverty”? Where is the signal, if everyone already thinks this way? It’s just masturbation.
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#16There will always be relative poverty. In other words if we "solved poverty" and there were no more hungry people without health insurance sleeping in the streets, you would still have people who had less than others around them. But we can try to solve absolute poverty. We can try to make sure everyone has medical coverage, adequate nutrition etc. An important element of that is we need to design systems where havin…
Do you mean inequality? Poverty has a specific meaning. We define poverty thresholds. Middle class is not in "relative poverty" compared to billioners.
No, I mean relative poverty.
Many years ago, I saw a study that indicated that less than 1/2 of 1% of Americans were poor by the standards of India. Even homeless people in the US typically ate better than people classified as poor in India.
But we still have homeless people here in the US. They typically have serious personal problems, such as serious medical conditions. Being homeless in the US is a genuine hardship and it's partly caused by the lack of cheap, small housing.
We've torn down about a million SROs.* There are homeless people in the US who could afford an SRO if they could find market rate SROs.
If you live on Social Security as your only income and can no longer work, we don't have any market based housing for you and many government housing projects have wait lists that are years long.
We've raised the bar so extremely high in this country that it's a genuine problem for a high percentage of the country. It actively creates hardship and privation in a wealthy country that really ought to be able to virtually eliminate homelessness.
But we don't. And after tearing down a lot of very basic housing for literally decades, when someone ends up homeless, we don't blame the lack of housing supply for people with low incomes. We say they have a personal problem and are probably just a junkie.
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#17There will always be relative poverty. In other words if we "solved poverty" and there were no more hungry people without health insurance sleeping in the streets, you would still have people who had less than others around them. But we can try to solve absolute poverty. We can try to make sure everyone has medical coverage, adequate nutrition etc. An important element of that is we need to design systems where havin…
>... (I don't think UBI accomplishes that.) Does anyone have a flashlight? I can't quite see, it's so dark all the way down here where this lede is buried.
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Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#18It's a complicated issue.. but every person or family that makes a level up transition (without rent-seeking) like.
poor -> middle
middle -> upper
upper -> rich/millionaire
millionaire -> billionaire
have my respect.
Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#19Wow, that is one pointedly political article. Bloomberg is now solidly in my 'partisan source' category. (Read the article before downvoting, please. Give it a fair read.)
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Re: Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty
#20Who exactly is blaming the poor for their poverty?
Libertarians and conservatives, are we pretending otherwise?