Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper
Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
America. The only country in the world where being poor means you only have one car instead of two.
And just as an FYI, 30% of "poor" families in the US are two car families.
What percentage of those cars are in good working condition? What percentage are reliable? What percentage were manufactured in the past five years? What percentage are clunkers?
Do these people own their own decent homes or do they rent cruddy little apartments? Can they afford health insurance and dental procedures? Can they afford decent food and clothing? What kind of debt do they have?
Can they find work that allows them to achieve and to create wealth to the best of their abilities, or are many of them underemployed?
I'll grant you that a great many people are poor because they've acted self-destructively or irrationally (drug use, having children they cannot afford, etc.). But on the otherhand, a great many people are poor because the economy does not support enough solid middle class jobs for all of the people who have the ability and desire to work them.
For example, consider the plight of the bright college graduate who ended up unemployed during the Bushcession and who can only find menial labor jobs for near minimum wage.
Consider the MBA who's over 50 and who cannot find a decent job because he suffers from massive amounts of age discrimination and rejections due to his being "overqualified".
Consider the poor guy who worked hard all his life to obtain good grades, who graduated from a good college with a professional degree, but who graduated into a horrific employment market. As a result he ends up working out-of-field for a couple years and thus becomes unemployable because of discrimination against the unemployed and those who work out-of-field, losing most of the value of his educational investment.
What if someone just doesn't have good interviewing people skills in spite of having tremendous work ethic and productive ability?
Open your eyes to hard reality. There are a great many hard working, ambitious, moral people out there who end up living in genteel poverty in spite of their work ethic and productive ability. (On the otherhand, you can find people of lesser ability but good interviewing and schmoozing skills perhaps who earn upper middle class wages in spite of their lack of ability and work ethic.) The hard truth that many people wish to evade is that in today's American society, in today's depressed employment market, meritocracy is often a myth and often people do not get what they deserve.
Of course, if you want to believe that we have a meritorcracy as a matter of dogma or religious faith, well, then keep drinking the Kool-Aid. It's far easier to make the blanket generalization that people get what they deserve than it is to ask difficult, probing questions that often carry unpalatible implications. It's easier to pretend that your nation and it's economy are a prosperous cuckoo-cloud world than it is to face the hard reality that it's headed towards third world nationhood.
It's easier to maintain the belief that your own success was based 100% on your own effort, virtue, and ability than it is to consider how luck and the avoidance of bad luck played a large role. Consider how lucky you are to have had your personality develop so that you could naturally get people to like you during the interview process and so that you would have the right demeanor and say the right things almost naturally. People of much greater ability probably didn't get the same job simply because they didn't have the right kind of interpersonal chemistry during the interview even though they would have done a spectacular job had they been hired. Consider how lucky you are that your employer didn't go out of business or engage in mass layoffs at the beginning of the recession. Consider how lucky you are to have decent looks, a decent voice, and to not be bald (a member of the good looks lucky sperm club) and how that affected your ability to obtain employment.
Horror stories about how good people with ability and work ethic have suffered during the past couple years abound up and down the Internet. You don't have to look very hard. Try the Wall Street Journal's Career Journal website and read the stories from people over age 50. Lots of college-educated people are having trouble, including those with professional degrees and advanced degrees. Wake up and see reality.
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