roachboy

so for you there's no need to engage with any data about unequal distribution of wealth or think about the consequences of the existing inequalities in the united states---which are very considerable and which affect you----because you work with an a priori assumption that the state has no business redistributing wealth.

and the enormous list of services that you are likely to support, from a standing military to roads, all of which rely upon a redistribution of wealth....?

or are things ok but not people?



what's clear is that you don't like taxes. but that's not really a politics, any more than my saying i don't like marzipan is. it's an aesthetic preference.

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it make you sick.

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Cimarron29414

rb - I guess my biggest challenge is understanding whether there is any room in your position for exploring some other influences. How much of the current disparity do you attribute to government/business policy and how much do you attribute to internal cultural influences? Obviously, this takes it to antecdotal realm and there has been a lot of strife in here surrounding opinions and facts and such. So, if you'd prefer not to go here, I'm fine with that. In reading through your posts, they present almost as if you are suggesting "If we just throw more money at the problem, it will go away." I don't think you believe that, so perhaps some insight would clear up my confusion. Thanks

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Jinn

If the problem were entirely caused by cultural behavior and poor people simply being terrible at managing their finances, would it make it less of a problem? The trend here seems to be that it's simply not a problem, not that it is a problem but there may be different ways of solving it.. dog has made it clear in his position, at least, that it's a non-issue (for him) and so no solution is necessary.

I for one am shocked to hear someone with privilege talking about how problems for people with less privilege are simply not his concern and/or simply not issues. /s

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roachboy

first off, cimmaron, spare me retro-cliches like this:

which has nothing to do with anything that i actually have said in this thread.
when i made this, the last thing i would have expected is to find myself 80 posts in having spent alot of time fighting of conservative phantoms and/or boogeymen and almost none talking about the actual topic.
so forgive me if i'm a bit tired of it and want to make that move stop.


i think the core of the problems, the space from which most depart and one way or another seem to return to, lay with the history of the united states since the reconstruction, in the fights that were waged against federal attempts to redistribute land, for example, to the african-american population after the end of the civil war. this was at the origin of the southeastern right's obsession with states as a theater of conflict. knowing that their often racist politics would get shot down at a national level even in 1870... so it lay in a regressive-to-racist politics in the southeast triggered by apparent status anxiety by petit bourgeois whites.

it lay in the development and repetition of patterns of spatial segregation by class and race, a pattern that repeated across several reorganizations of capitalism and so is more a quirk particular to the us. spatial segregation is a real problem: what you don't see doesn't exist, yes? that's the "common sense" approach. spatial segregation coupled with local control over school funding has generated enormously bad results for a whole spectrum of people---but folk prefer to pretend somehow that the educational system in the united states is a meritocracy---and conservatives who have some Problem with the notion of the public just as they have a problem with the social and a problem with history pretend that privatizing the problem will solve it. but that's about diminishing the quality of education in order to produce more conservatives, in my view, all this "voucher" shit.

it lay in long-term patterns of discrimination as to credit and ownership, long term policies aimed at treating the african-american population as a management issue.

so we collectively, socially, reap what we sow.

the insistence on trying to locate some "internal cultural factors" disconnected from reference to the history that shaped them, that they repeat, is just an attempt to blame the population for the effects of the policies that have conditioned them as a population--in other words, the same old conservative nonsense.

i have tended for a long time to find the message of people like malcolm x a whole lot more coherent than that of mlk---without substantive economic reorganization, the united states is an oligarchy in which people walk around bragging about how free they are by centralized command. so i think to address these problems--the general problem of the inequalities in the distribution of wealth and the disproportionate effects of this inequality on african-americans, will require a significant socio-economic reorganization.

which would start with a wholesale rejection of everything about neoliberal ideology.

i'm at work, so this is a kind of preamble. i doubt i'm the only person who thinks along these lines tho, so feel free to add stuff or change stuff or write something else.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cimarron29414

No need to add any more on my account.

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

roachboy

well, that's interesting isn't it.

undoing the effects of material history is far more difficult than undoing the effects of some set of shared dispositions which, if they exist, don't come from anywhere outside the group to which they're attributed. it gets ugly, difficult, problematic.

and you should perhaps know that if the above is correct and structural characteristics that shape the material situation outlined in the report that's way back there in the op derive from history, they also derive from particular internalized relations to that history, internalized relations which are generated by contexts, by the educational system, by opportunities which may or may not exist (spatial segregation makes it hard to talk in general terms...spaces differ one from the other)

in my more residual left moments, i would say that alot of what the right would attribute to essence i would be inclined to attribute to domination, an effect of domination. what that would lead to would be an idea that this domination could be reversed to the extent that its consequences or effects could be recognized and the chain of repetitions potentially broken. but i don't know whether that's naive or not.

to go much further would require going back through the brief again to look for the specific features it references and think about what might be done to alter them. as if it were up to me to fashion alternatives. fact is that no alternative would happen all at once. nothing happens all at once--everything is a process & every process changes with the environments they interact with. so pragmatically it should be enough to agree politically that this unequal distribution of wealth is a problem, something important enough to address, and to fashion attempts to deal with it and put them into motion.

but it seems everyone is so timid these days, so worried about the way things play on a tv news cycle temporality--so policies become like toasters and problems something you stick inside that toaster and something either happens or it doesn't. but that's itself part of the problem, yes? this tiny time-frame people work with that reduces processes to objects and being to having...

but i digress.

ok cimmaron: your turn.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cimarron29414

rb - I've added some material to expand the discussion, I've asked for some clarification of points/positions. I'm not getting involved beyond that. Sorry.

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"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

Derwood

So I take it that you tell the government "thanks, but no thanks" every time they provide you something that's paid for with rich people's tax money, right?

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FuglyStick

He paves his own street and built his own school, fire department and post office, thank you very much.

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dogzilla

What privilege? As I posted earlier, I started my career at the lower end of the income scale. Not once did I get any kind of government assistance. After working a few years an opportunity to switch jobs occurred and I took the chance. Between on the job training and my own time learning new technology and keeping my job skills current (not one day in a university classroom in the last 20 years), I busted my butt to make myself valuable to my employer. The fact that I have been employed thru several recessions since 1974 and a number of layoff cycles at my employer in the last 20 years means I have some value to my employer.

So, unless you have some kind of disability that prevents you from working, I don't owe you a penny. If you made a career choice that you wanted to do something that you enjoyed but didn't pay well, that's an honorable lifestyle choice. But you made your choice and I don't owe you a penny.

---------- Post added at 05:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:37 PM ----------

Actually, being one of the 54% in this country that pays income taxes, I have paid for the roads, etc. It takes me until sometime around the beginning of April each year to pay my federal, state and local taxes. That's 1/4 of my paycheck. Now do you see why I have a problem with paying for people who think the government has to redistribute income?

Hektore

Presumably you attended a public school? travelled by road to and from said school? Slept soundly through the night with the benefit of police protection? Didn't have to worry about fire destroying your whole block?

There are others, but I believe those sufficient to make my point, which is: What are those things if not government assistance?

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dogzilla

That doesn't sound much like privilege to me. Pretty much everyone in the US has access to all of these, which fall within the basic responsibility of the government, basic education, public safety and national defense. Roads and such should be covered by use fees. If some service is not sustainable, it goes away.

Jinn

I'm not sure you know what 'privilege' means. No fault to you, based on your self-described history, but it's far more than warm meals and beds to sleep in.

Make it through this, if you can. It's an excerpt based on the timeless essay by Peggy McIntosh..

Alas, a blog The Male Privilege Checklist

This is simply male privilege. There are a number of privileges associated with being white, too.

Think about it sometime. Privilege is the counter-point to 'bootstrappy' conservatism, but it's unfortunately largely ignored by those who'd benefit most from understanding it.

McIntosh's "Invisible Knapsack" if you're interested: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

All of these things contribute to socioeconomic status, whether we like it or not. It's par for the course to excerpt individual points and say "ooh, but *I* didn't have *that* privilege" to discredit it, but understand that privilege acts on a society-wide level, and your individual experience does not a case against systemic inequality make.

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Hektore

I didn't mean to say it was privilege and perhaps should have removed that part of the quote as well. My point is that you did, in fact, receive government assistance in the form of schooling and public safety (etc.). It's pretty blindingly obvious that nearly everyone does in some combination. What I presume you're against is unfair or unwarranted governmental assistance, which I also suppose everyone is against.

So then the question moves on to the idea of whether or not certain social programs do or do not provide unfair (or unequal) assistance. Certainly they do, and one of the ways they divide up the assistance unequally among children is through education and access to quality public schools. Lower class children have less access to quality education, lower quality of education leads lower class adults which, naturally, have lower class children.

I have more thoughts on this, but they can wait until morning.

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The advantage law is the best law in rugby, because it lets you ignore all the others for the good of the game.

Hektore

I guess it's about time to get around to finishing my thought...

Children do not receive equal opportunity growing up. There are differences public safety, education, financial resources, etc. Which I suppose I could support if the results were solely as a result of the affluence of the parents, but it isn't. The system is set up in such a way that the assistance government provides reinforces the advantages of affluence. Kids of affluent parents in the burbs get safer, higher quality schools that provide more services in the form of extracurricular activities. The also get safer neighbourhoods, better parks etc.

As for connecting this back to the OP, given the history of blacks in this country it is unsurprising that they should have considerably less wealth and assets than whites. A mere two generations ago the entire population was dumped into the very lowest class and then through structural reinforcement the vast majority then remained there (as most of their white counterparts in the lowest class did as well).

What is interesting, which I don't currently have an explanation for (other than racism is alive and well) is why the gap is maintained within the same class.

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The advantage law is the best law in rugby, because it lets you ignore all the others for the good of the game.

raging moderate

I can't seem to find it now, but whoever posted that we should have mandatory financial education in school hit the nail right on the head.

This is the problem - people don't know what the fuck to do with their money when they have it, even if they only have a little. I don't represent 2000 families studied from 1984 to the present, so take this as you will - but I've seen in my own experience many many examples of people with "a little bit" of money, say five hundred bucks, go out and buy a new TV or something rather than use it in a more constructive way such as investments or groceries. Then, when they've got the "thing" that they wanted, they're back to zero. Anyone else know anyone in this situation? They call it "living paycheck to paycheck."

It's easy to say that parents should teach their own kids about finances. Well that's fine, if your parents are financially-savvy and not poor and destitute. Clearly if you are not good at something you shouldn't teach someone else how to do it and expect them to succeed. Hell you could say that parents should teach their own kids about history, or math, or science, also, but many parents don't know much about those subjects either, that's why we have school.

Mandatory financial education would go a long way towards closing the gap. Wouldn't change things overnight, but it damn sure would make a difference in the long run. Hell, in my own life, it wasn't until after I started seeking financial education that I was able to put together a plan to increase my wealth and stop being a poor, in-debt and frusterated.

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formerly Murp0434

Baraka_Guru

The mandatory financial education thing isn't a one-size fits all fix.

It think an issue for many people that's becoming more prevalent is that post-secondary education is becoming a kind of "golden straightjacket." Many people need to take on a huge debt load just to get a required education for a desired career. The cost of education has spiked quite astonishingly over the past 20 years.

I guess my point is that the problem may not be as simple as we might think.

In my own case, I'm widely knowledgeable about money and how it works on a personal level. You might be surprised by what I get by on. The problem? I have a low income and a high debt load. I'm one of the educated poor.

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