Compared to places like Nigeria or Pakistan, the poor in the US live pretty large. Most people that fall in to the classification of "poor" will never starve and often have consistent shelter.
Yeah, but saying that encourages the gap. "The world needs ditch diggers too!" We have lost any sense that America has a group goal, a reason we should help each other toward something. We gave up somewhere, or we lost hope on hitting goals and stopped picking up new ones. For a goal-oriented nation, that's a bad thing. Various presidents have tried to come up with replacements goals, but they've been crap. Some of this was because the replacement goals were images of the previous goals without the same need. The last Giant Honkin' Goal, "stop communism" (stupid as that was, it ran several giant economies of production), ended when the Soviet Union unceremoniously ran out of funding for the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev told Poland's General Jaruzelski that he was not going to fund any martial action, so Jaruzelski said the equivalent of "I'm done with being dictator, the Pope's right, and price controls can be someone else's problem." We "won", right? Unfortunately it freaked out Bush the Elder, who was president when the Berlin Wall fell in the fall of '89. He'd been a director of the CIA. He had spent his entire life preparing to be the fusion of Yale elite and Cold War insider. Suddenly there was no Cold War and he was left with blue balls -- oh, and a recession. GHWB (Bush the Elder) tried his hand at making up a war in Kuwait. That worked in that it cheered up a lot of Americans -- it finally cleared up the stink from losing Vietnam, something that even the prosperity of the 1980s couldn't do. Then the war ended but the economy was still sagging. The War on Terror? another attempt at a replacement for the Cold War. This has lasted longer, but it's clear that the only propaganda war we've come close to winning in a long time has been the War on Cancer. Let's see if I can tie my tangents back in. We waste time focusing on how much better off we are than economies that have never come close to ours (or whom we've bombed one too many times into their present states). That's like an alcoholic saying "yeah, but I hold down my job. I'm not a smackhead or a crackhead. Rehab is for losers." We're one of the top economies in the world. Shame is clearly not enough to get us to stop screwing more and more people into poverty. We need to give business a financial incentive for fighting the split it has been encouraging.
How sad, that it's come to this -that'd you have to compare the US to places like this. You're essentially saying "at least our poor are not as bad off as they are in some of the poorest nations on earth".Compared to places like Nigeria or Pakistan ...
What I'm saying is that this is likely why they aren't as up in arms, in no way am I saying this is a good state of things. The reality is most of the poor people in the US aren't going to starve to death or die of malaria. Does that mean that I think they live in an enviable state of conditions or that there is justice in their circumstance, not it doesn't. When 6 people have more wealth than the bottom 30% of your country, there's something wrong.
The only problem I have seen mentioned that results directly from income diversity is envy. No one says they are envious, but they worry that others are. I can't bring myself to feel bad for people if their biggest problem is that they are not the richest folks in town. As you say, America's poor do well compared to people in most countries, and they are also better off than America's poor in the past. I don't see why it is "sad" to welcome the fact that American poor have a better standard of living than those in Nigeria or Pakistan. Thought experiment: Imagine that Carlos Slim (net worth: US$70 billion) moves from Mexico to the United States. Imagine, if you can, that he is able to get a working visa and then becomes a citizen. Obviously, this will result in reduced wealth diversity in Mexico and increased wealth diversity in the United States. Do you argue that this change would be good for Mexico and bad for the United States? I asked a similar question here but so far got no reply.there's something wrong
I am one of the silver-tongued apologists for the gap that humanodon mentions. I don't understand what is wrong.
I have no problem with people being wealthy. I aspire to be wealthy so that I can afford comfort for my family and future generations of my family. I'm also a big proponent of "teaching a man to fish." That said, there's no doubt in my mind that the way our system is set up, the system is rigged to advantage the wealthy with little regard for raising the station of the poor. I'm not talking about a guy that is worth a few million, I'm talking about the big-dogs, the ones that are worth hundreds of millions and more. They're able to grease the wheels of legislation in a way that benefits that which they manufacture, wield or aspire to. It's cyclical, it's systemic and it's not changing. The people that are somewhat wealthy have just enough to lose to not ever want to disrupt the system. The middle class is shrinking and the poor have very little chance of making it out of their situations. I'm not in favor of just handing people money, because I really think it would do little to change the generational cycle's of poverty, but I do think we need to take vastly more resources and allocate them towards "teaching the poor how to fish." But the power brokers aren't interested in that.
I think we may find we have more in common than you think in regards to this topic. I have no time at the moment for the comment I'd like to leave. Hopefully, I can get back to this this afternoon or evening. I just wanted you to know I wasn't ducking the comment. It's worth discussing. I welcome the conversation.