Conservative Pundit Says the Poor "Choose" to Be Poor

[Polly]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzgyZWFiOTkxMTJiMTBlMGNkYTgyOTViZGIxNjQ0YjY

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely "poor" people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you're poor today, it's almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue....

This editorial is in response to Bush vetoing the SCHIPS health care plan for low income children.

Polly

[Kristen]

I don't know. I do know that a lot of Americans are in bad financial shape due to very poor money management and poor financial decision-making(buying more than they can afford, failing to plan, failing to save, etc). but, I'm not that well educated on the state of people who a truly on the lowest end of the poverty scale here in America.

I can easily understand how people get into bad financial shape...I work very, very hard to handle our money wisely and carefully, and as a result, we're not sinking. But, we're not that far off from sinking, so someone who is less motivated and less educated about frugality could, with our same income, be in bad straits.

I don't think I made a worthwhile point there at all, but I'm going to hit submit anyways! :p

[Lori]

I have two issues with the pundit. One is the idea that we make choices in a vacuum. We don't. Our choices are conditioned by all sorts of things. So even if somebody *does* "choose" to be poor through bad choices, they are making their choices within a set of social and historical circumstances that they have very little control over. Do a lot of people in Detroit seem to be making extremely poor choices, which lead to the extremely high rate of poverty here? Absolutely. But, when you look at the history, those choices start to look less like free choices and more like people acting in the way they know how in circumstances they didn't create (even if they are perpetating them). This sort of came up in my class on Friday, when we read an essay that was talking about poverty in cities, and my students started debating homelessness. I keep my mouth shut during those discussions ;), but I guess my take on it is that, even though many homeless people do "choose" to be homeless, it seems pretty obvious that there are reasons for making that choice that are beyond their control.

The second thing is that somebody else's personal responsibility doesn't negate our responsibility to help them. IMO, whether or not somebody chooses to be poor is irrelevant when it comes to my and society's responsibility to help them. They are two different things. I see myself as having two sets of responsiblities: I do indeed have the personal responsibility of making the best choices I can for myself and my family, so that we can get by, but I also have a responsibility to help those who, for whatever reason, can't. Maybe they are being irresponsibile and failing in their personal responsibility, but that doesn't negate my responsibility to them or, IMO, society's responsibility to them. I think it's a shame when we allow "personal responsibility" to become an excuse for neglecting our individual and collective responsibility to others.

[Lori]

Sean and I were talking about this issue on the way to the grocery store this morning, and one thing that we were both saying is that really nobody is making particularly smart financial choices right now. We are so inundated with ads that are designed to make us want things we don't need, and to convince us that we need to acquire more and more money and things, that I don't even know how to talk about things like good and bad choices. Adam Smith himself said that capitalism would cease to work when the poor stopped acting in their own interest. Now, advertising and consumerism are so all-pervasive that I'm not sure anybody is acting in their actual self-interest. I don't think this was ever supposed to be how capitalism was supposed to fuction; it wasn't supposed to be about the very rich pouring massive amounts of money into convincing everybody they needed things they don't really need. So I do think there are larger forces at work than just individual bad decisions.

I have an uncle with a lot of money, and he once spent $20,000 at Christmas for plasma TVs for his house. That was wasteful and unnecessary. Because he's rich, though, he can get away with it. A poor person, on the other hand, misspends $100 one month, and suddenly find themselves unable to pay the rent and out on the street. So, the poor have much, much less room for error. I'd love to see what the author of the OP has in her home; I bet we'd find evidence of all sorts of bad financial decisions. But, because she's wealthy, she's allowed to make them; a poor person isn't. The less money you have, the better you have to be if you don't want to fall into dire poverty. So I really don't think it's fair to somehow claim that the poor are making worse choices, when in fact many of them are either making exactly the same choices as everybody else but feeling the effects more because they have less income or are actually making better choices (they aren't blowing $20K on plasmas) but are still suffering because their budgets are so small that even a tiny financial mistake will be disastrous for them.

So I guess that's a big part of why I feel opinions like that are unfair. The poor suffer more for bad financial choices than the rich; the less money you have, the more that a tiny bit of mismanagement is going to cause massive problems for you. So we can say that the poor are poor because of bad choices, but the fact is that pretty much EVERYBODY in our society right now is making a lot of bad financial choices. It's just that the poor suffer the consequences of them much, much more than the rich. The fact is that, for the poor to get by, they need to be BETTER than everybody else; they need to make smarter choices, they need to be much more responsible with their money, they need to weigh every decision with a care that almost nobody does. So what the OP author is really faulting the poor for is not being better than everybody else, but is it really fair to say the poor deserve their fate because they are making the same poor choices that everybody else is also making?

[wendygrace]

Heck, Lori said what I was thinking but much more eloquently. Thanks Lori. :)

[Jeri]

Lori pretty much summed it up for me, too - especially the part about choices not being made in a vacuum.

[Homebuddy]

Well, there's just not much in between being poor and being in a really bad situation. It's hard to live poor because you are just one step away from homelessness, hunger, or living with serious illness. I was collecting pecans from our tree and the neighbor's tree, and I was thinking how cool it is to have this free food fall from the sky. There's not enough of that kind of thing. Even growing a garden seems to take money, not to mention that you have to live somewhere you have a garden. We are also lucky enough to be able to have chickens, and they give us eggs, but I buy them food and we pay the mortgage on the land. Do you see my point? If you are poor, its hard to have a garden, or chickens, or a cow - things that help you survive when there's no money. So you have to have money, and you have to have a certain amount of it, and it doesn't take much to keep a person from being able to have that money. Illness, divorce, bad credit, a child with special needs. And then it tends to spiral. You can't afford a good car, so the car you can afford breaks down. You can't afford regular health care, so the emergency care bills swamp you. Its the people who are struggling in this type of situation that I feel most drawn to helping out of the bounty of my life, and I am nowhere near rich.