The Total Failure Of The War On Poverty

[lektrode]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

Respectfully, we've covered a lot of this ground already. And I'm not going to argue from false premises put forth by Rector and the Heritage Foundation. We've demostrated Rector and Heritage to be wilfully deceptive and that's all she wrote for me.

as long as we can agree, woody? - that the other side is JUST AS WILLFULLY DECEPTIVE.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

As I see it, there's an underlying Darwinian dynamic going on with regards to society, poverty, industry, jobs, and wealth that just can't be avoided. It can be papered over in the short term by using tax money confiscated from productive people but eventually it will win out. There's no avoiding the "survival of the fittest" competition in life. It's built into life on every level from bacteria to human beings. And in the human version of that survival of the fittest competition, there is ongoing incentive to use intelligence and energy to eliminate the need for labor. Automation, in a word.

I am going to speak bluntly and say that when stupid people have numerous children, propagating their low-IQ genes to a new generation that doesn't have the intelligence to do anything much more than labor, then the ugly truth is that in the longer run nature is going to try to eliminate them through that Darwinian selection.

The War on Poverty and all the progressive programs are well-intentioned efforts to try to repeal the natural Darwinian law of life. And ultimately they will fail because they are working against evolution, and evolution always eventually wins.

The future belongs to high-IQ people who make discoveries and develop technologies that eliminate more and more of the need for labor. If you are not intelligent, you can compete for one of the shrinking pool of jobs that don't require intelligence, but there will be less and less demand for those.

Those high-IQ people will get richer and richer and richer, because nature wants it that way. Nature wants to reward intelligence and productivity - like finding a way to use knowledge and energy to eliminate the need for labor - and to penalize dull-wittedness.

A society that tries to pretend you can legislate away Darwinian realities will be outcompeted by more realistic societies that are more in tune with the realities of nature. They will eventually be conquered and perhaps enslaved to some extent; their resources will be taken by the more competitive society; and all of their well-intentioned progressive notions will have been for naught. They will disappear because progressivism is highly damaging to the Darwinian fitness of a society.

You can say that's heartless, but that's not my design. That's nature's design. You can try like King Canute to defy nature, and I expect the demographic changes in the West will result in the election of more and more left-wing governments that try to do so, just as Hugo Chavez tried to do so. And the results will be what we're seeing happen to Venezuela. And a lot of people will suffer and eventually the progressive-minded will be destroyed and the creative and intelligent will triumph, though that may be on the scale of centuries or millenia. But nature's in no hurry.

The closest thing to a real solution would be social policies that discourage dull-witted people from reproducing, or limit them to one child, instead of the current system which rewards them with welfare for having more children and penalizes the smarter people for having more children. But our values are enough out of line with nature's imperatives that there is no real chance that such policies could be even seriously suggested in the wider political arena, much less implemented. We're currently in the grips of the progressive worldview that says that all human beings are equal and have equal "rights" and "entitlements". There's a lot of ideological stupidity there that's going to be very painful to burn out of society.

[Woodsman]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

That is about the most vile thing I have ever read here. Fred and EJ can boot me today if it suits them, but this needs to be said as unequivocally as possible lest someone outside this community get the sense that we endorse the horror you propose.

I don't know how you can call yourself an American and believe that nonsense, MN. The last set of men who tried to govern under those principles put chidren in ovens while they were still alive. It's a repulsive idea and I pray I am not the only one here who will call you out on this. But if that is the case, I am happy to be a minority of one.

[lektrode]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

As I see it, there's an underlying Darwinian dynamic going on with regards to society, poverty, industry, jobs, and wealth that just can't be avoided. It can be papered over in the short term by using tax money confiscated from productive people but eventually it will win out.....

altho the egyptians were quite productive, too

They will eventually be conquered and perhaps enslaved to some extent; their resources will be taken by the more competitive society; and all of their well-intentioned progressive notions will have been for naught. They will disappear because progressivism is highly damaging to the Darwinian fitness of a society.

as the romans clearly noted, it was the conquered who eventually won?

You can say that's heartless, but that's not my design. That's nature's design. You can try like King Canute to defy nature, and I expect the demographic changes in the West will result in the election of more and more left-wing governments that try to do so, just as Hugo Chavez tried to do so. And the results will be what we're seeing happen to Venezuela. And a lot of people will suffer and eventually the progressive-minded will be destroyed and the creative and intelligent will triumph, though that may be on the scale of centuries or millenia. But nature's in no hurry.

The closest thing to a real solution would be social policies that discourage dull-witted people from reproducing, or limit them to one child, instead of the current system which rewards them with welfare for having more children and penalizes the smarter people for having more children. But our values are enough out of line with nature's imperatives that there is no real chance that such policies could be even seriously suggested in the wider political arena, much less implemented. We're currently in the grips of the progressive worldview that says that all human beings are equal and have equal "rights" and "entitlements". There's a lot of ideological stupidity there that's going to be very painful to burn out of society.

well..... thats a bit harder-over to the.... uhhhh... 'right' than i'd wanna go, MN - but you do have a point - its why i think the tendency of the US.gov to be 'all things to all people' is the ultimate trap.

[Penguin]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

You're not Woodsman, I'll stand beside you on this one.

The very idea that we currently have a society that rewards intelligence and hard work is about as flimsy a premise as I could imagine upon which to try and justify the status quo. We have a system that has been highjacked in favor of special interest economic sectors which have declared war on the other, less favored, economic sectors. As an example, does anyone ~really~ believe that those 15,000 engineers that were permanently discharged from their work in the auto industry during the last crisis were in any way inferior to those who received record bonuses for driving their respective investment banks into insolvency?

Come on.

Again, this is the mindset I mentioned earlier in one of my posts. What exactly did the authors of the plan to extinguish the industrial base expect those who would work in it to do? As I asked earlier, sit in a corner, stop breeding, and wait for their time to expire? Apparently this hyperbole was not strong enough... some want exactly that and also that these guys accept it as all part of nature's plan to keep the inferior from taking over.

Will

[lektrode]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

That is about the most vile thing I have ever read here.....

no, it actually isnt - not during my time anyway - cant even remotely remember what thread it was - but there was one maniac who popped in one day and was spewing the most racist-hatred eye've ever seen typed - after Mr J launched at him, me and metalman chased him off - much to the disappointment of MM - he wanted to have some fun with him for awhile (and ya dont wanna piss off a dude like metalman...)

;)

[jiimbergin]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

That is about the most vile thing I have ever read here. Fred and EJ can boot me today if it suits them, but this needs to be said as unequivocally as possible lest someone outside this community get the sense that we endorse the horror you propose.

I don't know how you can call yourself an American and believe that nonsense, MN. The last set of men who tried to govern under those principles put chidren in ovens while they were still alive. It's a repulsive idea and I pray I am not the only one here who will call you out on this. But if that is the case, I am happy to be a minority of one.

Woody, you and I disagree on many things, but I am with you here completely

[EJ]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

Weren't food stamps supposed to eliminate hunger? Are they trading food stamps for other things? Certainy we don't want to see people not receiving nourishment.

But why hasn't $20 Trillion been able to reduce poverty? As EJ says it is poor government policy and FIRE. We have structural unemployment, an educational system that is not preparing people for jobs, poor job skills for some, and lack of mobility to get workers to job sites.

It's worth noting that not all wages have been stagnant.

Workers in the Mining Industry enjoyed a 41% increase in salary in the decade between 2002 and 2012. Roughly the same increase went to workers in the Oil and Gas sub-sector of the Mining Industry off a high base.

Re-tooling for a new career in a new growing industry is not easy, especially after age 50. But people do it all the time.

A household in a community that's been abandoned by an employer in a dying industry may not want to move away from families and friends, but many do and bring their families with them.

On a trip to Texas last year I met several families who had done just that. In fact I got the impression that hardly anyone in Texas is from Texas.

They came from Florida, Chicago, and California looking for jobs and high wages in the Oil and Gas business. Parents, aunts, uncles, and for some close friends moved, too.

I asked one couple from Chicago how they were adjusting to the Texas summers. He said, "Like Chicago but in reverse. There in the winter you run from your heated house to your heated car into a heated building before you freeze to death and here in the summer you run from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car into an air conditioned building before your brain bakes."

I don't know that there is a way to guarantee that an industry can stay viable and a business in business in one place forever. Except in recessions there are more rising than falling industries.

A. Losing Industries: Wages are projected to decline quickly in these industries over the next ten years.
Each $1,000 in income in a job in Apparel manufacturing is expected to be $425 in ten years based on a -8.3% compound annual wage decline rate.




B. Winning Industries: Wages are projected to grow quickly in these industries over the next ten years.
Each $1,000 in income in a job in Home health care services is expected to be $1625 in ten years based on a 4.8% compound annual wage growth rate.

The glib strategy to increase wages: Leave A for B. Easier said than done for families that are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with kids to feed and no savings to finance the household during re-training. But the point is that there are rising wage alternatives to declining wage jobs.

[wayiwalk]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I'll make a quick response to EJ's post here since he happened to cite the example in Home Health Care Services. I co-own a business (not my primary source of income) that provides home health aides (and limited nursing).

We're under tremendous pressure from our public sector clients to cut our costs (reimbursement rates being cut). Our survival strategy amongst other things, is to grow away from those markets. Our peers in this business are under the same pressures. I don't see home health care wages increasing that much on a macro level, as the public sector (states/medicaid) and private sector (boomers who haven't saved enough) don't have the money to support that kind of growth.

[wayiwalk]

Re: The Total Failure Of The War On Poverty

For a serious, fact-filled analysis of poverty in the US I recommend:

Poverty in the United States: 2012
Thomas Gabe
Specialist in Social Policy
Congressional Research Service
November 13, 2013

Below is a chart from that paper with my comments.

The data are hard to argue with. The first 13 years of the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the poverty rate by half.

Note that before the FIRE Economy era, recessions had little impact on the poverty rate even though increases in
unemployment were as high as produced by recessions thereafter.

The poverty rate today is where it was 30 years ago after the two recessions of the early 1980s that launched the FIRE Economy.

I don't see a failure of government to eradicate poverty, I see a failure of economic policy. An economy oriented around
the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries has done little to help reduce poverty. Crashing the economy up and down
every ten years is ratcheting the poverty rate upwards.

I expect that after the next recession, before 2018, the poverty rate will be percentage-wise back where it was in 1960, in the low 20s.

Europe's models are no better and Asia isn't leading the way out, either.

A new model is needed and the US needs to lead.

This graph is really interesting, I followed the link to the report and when looking through it, it caught my eye. Whereas through the years, unemployment tracked the number of poor persons and also the poverty rate fairly well, it doesn't look like the drop in unemployment (we're missing data for 2012-2013 for # poor and poverty rate) will track anymore....but the divergence is quite drastic.

I suppose it is driven by part time jobs providing wages too low along with....I can't come up with the right word....flawed?....fudged?....unemployment numbers.

[lektrode]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

It's worth noting that not all wages have been stagnant.
.........
Workers in the Mining Industry enjoyed a 41% increase in salary in the decade between 2002 and 2012. Roughly the same increase went to workers in the Oil and Gas sub-sector of the Mining Industry off a high base.

would guess thats why the local economy of the intermountain west region (SLC at its hub) - beyond all the construction/FIre activity to keep up with the population growth, which tanked pretty hard during the meltdown (const/FIre, not pop-growth - the locals like big families) - while the rest of its economy wasnt hit all that hard/bounced back quicker than most other regions?

housing prices never really got too far out of whack in relation to incomes there either - which likely also benefitted that area (which is typically ignored by the stats-publishers/hypers) - which also didnt suffer nearly as bad on unemployment stats, again bouncing back quicker.

having CHEAP energy, a very well-developed/functional transportation system - esp public transport - hasnt hurt, either.

Re-tooling for a new career in a new growing industry is not easy, especially after age 50. But people do it all the time.

thats my main issue - esp having crested 55 and no degree - having been self-employed = no track-record - for most of the past 35 isnt helping much either, i'll admit (but the benefit of NOT being chewed-up/spit out by the corporate machine has had its fringes...)

B. Winning Industries: Wages are projected to grow quickly in these industries over the next ten years.

Each $1,000 in income in a job in Home health care services is expected to be $1625 in ten years based on a 4.8% compound annual wage growth rate.

The glib strategy to increase wages: Leave A for B. Easier said than done for families that are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with kids to feed and no savings to finance the household during re-training. But the point is that there are rising wage alternatives to declining wage jobs.

yep - interesting to note that 'home healthcare' services are the #1, Mr J - is this due to running out of space to 'warehouse' the growing senior population (that arent part of a nuclear-family demographic ie: multiple generations under one roof)??

and THANK YOU SIR - for 'rescuing' the discussion here at 'the war on poverty' - it was starting to get a bit too hot...

;)

[Raz]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

... I am going to speak bluntly and say that when stupid people have numerous children, propagating their low-IQ genes to a new generation that doesn't have the intelligence to do anything much more than labor, then the ugly truth is that in the longer run nature is going to try to eliminate them through that Darwinian selection.

Margaret Sanger would be proud. Hitler would certainly agree.

This is the blessed fruit of eugenics: euthanize the mentally deficient Germans as the Nazis did in the late 1930s.
They called them "useless eaters". Hey, they were only trying to assist "nature"!

Such an attitude breeds contempt for ones fellow human beings and callouses a human heart, making it fit only for eternal ruin.

The War on Poverty and all the progressive programs are well-intentioned efforts to try to repeal the natural Darwinian law of life. And ultimately they will fail because they are working against evolution, and evolution always eventually wins.

Evolution takes place in a fallen world. It shows no feeling or compassion whatsoever.
This is the fruit of a cosmic rebellion that took place eons ago as one being cursed the Light and became the Lord of Darkness.
For the sake of mercy don't befriend it.

You can say that's heartless,...

Okay. I say it is indeed heartless.

The closest thing to a real solution would be social policies that discourage dull-witted people from reproducing, or limit them to one child, instead of the current system which rewards them with welfare for having more children and penalizes the smarter people for having more children. But our values are enough out of line with nature's imperatives that there is no real chance that such policies could be even seriously suggested in the wider political arena, much less implemented. We're currently in the grips of the progressive worldview that says that all human beings are equal and have equal "rights" and "entitlements". There's a lot of ideological stupidity there that's going to be very painful to burn out of society.

I suppose sterilization is preferable to the gas chambers. But if one sees their fellow man in this regard it is a certainty that the gas chambers and ovens will of necessity soon follow.

I hope you will rethink this entire post. You are in the grip of real darkness.

[Forrest]

Re: The Total Failure Of The War On Poverty

I have no party, no affiliation, no allegiance to any political party or movement.

+1

Until we throw out both sides of both Houses of the Federal Legislature, nothing will be done.

[Forrest]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

as long as we can agree, woody? - that the other side is JUST AS WILLFULLY DECEPTIVE.

They are all liars...deception is a requirement to get elected these days, with the news reporting only what they are ordered to print. YHVH forbid that they should actually tell a truth that would be printed accurately, but they are not going to be so open. You cannot be elected telling the truth if no one will report it accurately. So they lie, and so do the journalists...if you could call them that...propagandists is more accurate.

[Rajiv]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

You may want to read this article - The real measure of poverty: 1 out of 6 Americans