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Maybe because they have too much pride. Think of that?
Or maybe, just maybe, being poor ain't all it's cracked up to be. It might, just might, be possible that being middle class is still better than being poor.
I have yet to see a "middle class" person ever say "you know the poor are living so good, I am quitting my gig today and going on welfare so I too can live like that". Not once. Not a single co worker where I work. No, they never quit to go on welfare. In fact, on the rare occasion one is sorry enough to get fired, they fight like all hell to get their jobs back.
Where do you think many of the poor come from? Many were working middle class until they saw the light and realized why work when they can have more by not working.
A black mother with two kids in my college told me that in a way it was unfair because she was trying to leave the welfare life and was taking advantage of the free college they were giving her but when she went to get a part time job so she could build job skills and a resume, they told her they would cut her children off form some of the handouts. She decided it was better not to work even if that meant having a patchy resume later.
You have to consider that one of the big hurdles for people with pride who do want off welfare is that their living standard drops considerably when they leave the welfare life for the life of working for a living.
I wish the schools in my poor neighborhood got half of the funding as the ones in the middle class neighborhoods get.
Around here the so-called poor neighborhoods get significantly more funding for their schools. All the drop out prevention programs, after school programs, free lunch and breakfast programs, a "paycheck" for the unwed mothers if they stay in school, free laptop computers while the schools in the middle class neighborhoods don't even get books.
I don't know many poor people with the "latest" systems and games. They may have earlier versions of Playstation or Nintendo but not the new $300 systems and $50 games. I know a "poor" family and those kids have one of the old games that you plug cartridges into the top of. They also do not have a flat screen TV or much of anything that would be "new".
Actually they do. You see people living in old beat up travel trailers with a new Ford truck with all the extras sitting in front of it. A lot has to do with their priorities but it would be rare to find a poor family whose kids don't have a $300 player and some of the latest games.
It's much like the liquor store sales being higher in so-called poor neighborhoods, and lottery ticket sales are higher in them also. When you don't have to pay a doctor bill, pay for your own housing costs and grocery bills, the "extras" are easier to afford.
Our poor are a joke...poor is living in a ditch like the people outside our house when I lived in Indonesia. No clothes, no roof...nothing. 99% with fridges and tvs implies they all have electricity, too. Geezus.
So true. It's gotten so whenever you see a family of 5 or 8 kids and another on the way filling a couple of grocery carts with nothing but steaks, soft drinks, premium ice creams, all the brand name expensive junk foods, you can predict with 99% certainty that they will be pulling out a food stamp card at the cash register. Even with the top dollar suitcase of beer because they'll have plenty of cash on hand for that.
Thank you China for your cheap goods and Walmart for selling them! I don't see how having a TV player makes anybody richer. It cost money to run them and they only depreciate in value.
So true. It's gotten so whenever you see a family of 5 or 8 kids and another on the way filling a couple of grocery carts with nothing but steaks, soft drinks, premium ice creams, all the brand name expensive junk foods, you can predict with 99% certainty that they will be pulling out a food stamp card at the cash register. Even with the top dollar suitcase of beer because they'll have plenty of cash on hand for that.
Are you so bored that you conduct your own study on the purchasing patterns of food stamp recipients? Nah...you may be bored, but with 99% certainty, you haven't the skill to conduct such a study. It's obvious, with 99.999% certainty, that you just made this up.
Yes, while the poor starve and die of simple diseases that the rich take for granted, they should all thank St Reagan for their microwaves, washer and dryers and televisions...very cool things that make life worth living if you are poor, right?
Seriously, there apparently arent many poor people here.
Nice point. The fact that we "guarantee" a certain standard of living in this country encourages people to not put out the effort to work, and in turn, their enrollment in welfare "increases poverty" by the way we measure it. It is a paradox that, if the benefit had not been offered, this person would not necessarily have been a "poverty statistic"---they might have become productive instead.
Most are born that way, with little chance of getting out of that condition. That you don't understand that is not surprising, there are, unfortunately, too many others similarly impaired.
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