Get a job! Part II

Persistent poverty and economic inequality are with us.  Not everyone has a choice about being short at the end of every pay period. Not everyone has a choice about where they live or go to school or even about an adequate diet.  No one chooses poverty, of course; it's done to you.  Skills and a job and maybe a hand up would be a big help for many.

So what goes wrong when we attempt to help?

Every large program is a generalized solution applied to many, and it works for perhaps 80%.

Public education works well for most, perhaps, but a portion of the children are bored to tears and must wait for it to be over before they can do anything meaningful.  It's actually time wasted for them.  Common core and standardized tests serve well enough in most circumstances, but not all.

Public health programs do well enough, perhaps, but they're now managed by insurance companies for profit rather than for efficiency or essential health benefit.  Ever had office visits you didn't need, tests that weren't relevant, or follow-up that wasn't needed?

The poverty rate in the U.S. has not improved
significantly in the fifty years since the
War on Poverty began.

Moving on then to poverty and inequality.

Public assistance, like other programs, serves well for most.  Perhaps.  Then there are those who are trapped by it, or worse, and there are those who abuse and defraud the program's intent.

Building a bigger government agency hasn't given better results.  The War on Poverty, begun in 1964, has had mixed results.  

"For the past 50 years, the government’s annual poverty rate has hardly changed at all. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty, roughly the same rate as the mid-1960s when the War on Poverty was just starting. After adjusting for inflation, federal and state welfare spending today is 16 times greater than it was when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S. How can the government spend so much while poverty remains unchanged?"  ~The Daily Signal

From the Brookings Institute

There are still about 47 million Americans, including 15.5 million children living below the poverty line.  We have seen fifty years of persistent poverty, welfare policies that have encouraged abandonment by fathers, and financial dependence rather than personal advancement.

 
The questions before us as the election approaches, do we want a 'big government' solution, a privatised solution, a competitive solution, a state rather than federal solution, an austere solution, an incremental solution, ...?  The candidates have offered their various positions, some with greater clarity than others.

Any of them look to have a good plan?  Any appear to understand the problems faced by those living in poverty?

No one chooses poverty; it is done to you.  Do you see a candidate that understands?

















In case you missed it, here's Get a job! Part I

Get a job! Part I

It's such a common thought, it doesn't occur to us that it might not work out.  Jobs are a relatively new idea, incidentally, and not yet fully fleshed out for many.  Curious?

Before our modern world of businesses and jobs, 90% of folks lived self-sufficiently.  Crops and herds on the home farm plus hunting and fishing, it was everybody's job, everybody's source of income, everybody's home and retirement plan.  Today, more than 70% of folks in the world still live that way.

In the U.S., the 20th century gave us the largest changes as the industrial revolution and two world wars reshaped the national economy.  Innovation brought efficiency to the agricultural realm and farms grew in size while the workforce became a smaller percentage with each passing year.

Workers migrated to the industrial areas and the denser populated areas hoping for a better standard of living. That worked fairly well although there were and still are difficulties with fair wages.  In the early days, the robber barons became obscenely wealthy on the backs of abused laborers.  Government got involved with a minimum wage intended to ensure a decent living.  That hasn't worked out particularly well, and there's a new problem emerging with the obscenely wealthy.  It's called the GAP.

When the country was populated by just a few million, there were unlimited resources and unlimited growth opportunities, or so it seemed.  As population increased, and particularly as population density increased, resources often fell behind the demand.  Employment wasn't as easy to come by as many hoped, and business policy wasn't particularly concerned as long as there was enough labor to exploit.  Jobs that pay a living wage aren't automatically available even if you've got skills.

In periods of recession, reasonable wages for reasonable skills decline, and under-employment blossoms.  In the same periods, big businesses shed personnel and demand more from those who are retained.  That's the way capitalism works, and it's gotten progressively more ruthless since the 80's when business schools set the bottom line of profitability as the only goal of management.

Wages have been generally flat for more than four decades.  The majority of households have lost ground financially, and most single wage-earner homes are now led by a single mom; 30% of them live with their children in poverty.  Greater indebtedness, less saving, and increased costs for pretty much everything are the norm.  The top quintile has done well enough, and the top decile has done spectacularly well.  That's where the GAP shows up.  The wealthy have good progress and expect it to continue, while the average household is struggling to keep up with the basics of housing, food, and education for their kids.  The numbers are an insult to Americans and everything they stand for.  Economic forecasts suggest it will get worse quickly as governments continue to serve business rather than citizens.

Telling someone who is struggling to 'get a job', or criticising someone who gets assistance because their full time employment plus a part-time gig don't provide a living wage, that's the sort of comment that comes from someone who is privileged, uninformed, and perhaps selfishly uninvolved in the real world.

That's the informed conservative perspective.  The liberal narrative on the subject is a bit more harsh.

Everything has changed.  This is not the 50's when everyone was expecting a step up for their kids.  You could work your way through college, you could be a stay-at-home mom while your kids were in elementary school, you could own your house, and if you both worked, you could have two cars, perhaps.  Neighborhoods were safe, doctors and hospitals and medicines were cheap, and upward mobility was the norm.   ... and nobody wanted a government handout.  Everybody wanted to make it on their own, no matter how hard they had to work.

Can we see  with clarity what's changed, and more importantly, can we see why?

_________________________________________________

- Candidates' thoughts on the subject of persistent poverty.
- Workforce decline and forecasts.

Proof-texting

1Ti.5:23  "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities."  I've actually heard that one used as justification for inebriation.  :)

Offering a bible passage as justification for anything is not particularly well received these days, and there's a reason.  Called cherry-picking or proof-texting, it usually offers an out-of-context or incomplete answer.  And it often sounds like ignorance.

The passage above about wine is the advice and permission from an older brother to his friend and fellow worker.  Timothy was probably rather strict about alcohol for cultural reasons.  Alcohol abuse was a problem then as it is now, and the safe path was to perhaps avoid it altogether.  Paul, maybe recognizing some physical problems Timothy was dealing with, gave his advice on the available help for the times.  

Now, if we were to suggest that this is permission to drink wine with meals, or beer at parties, or mixed drinks at the end of the day, we'd be both out of context and incomplete, would we not?

Some have strong convictions about not drinking as an extension and expression of their faith, and some with similar faith have no such convictions. It's fairly easy to find a bible text or three for either side, but there's more to the subject than just do or don't.  There's a larger context, of course.  And then there's dancing!  And manner of dress and swimsuit styles and skirt length and and appropriate sports for girls and who can be your friend ...

The real task at hand is not to persuade the world to our group's particular set of rules, but to be personally and continually refined by the author of our faith.  Our hope is represent Him brightly and graciously and to serve His purposes well, not to impose and enforce rules.  Even a kid or a young teen can do that, right?  So how might we go about that ... today?


... he said, reminding himself yet again.  :)  Perhaps it's a question we might ask ourselves at the beginning of each day.

Original wrong, right?

There's a dividing line for right and wrong that pretty much everyone sees.  Eating and sleeping are good.  Having a place to live and clothes and health and employment and ..., those are all right and good.  

But then, all of those become wrong when acquired in excess, particularly when the price for our having includes someone else being deprived.  Values erode.  Wrong becomes right.  The powerful and elite are self-justified as are oligarchs and dictators and the mega-wealthy.

That's the common path of human nature as we've noted over time.  History offers no exceptions as civilizations crumble and fall with similar narratives. Somebody gets greedy or angry or covetous, and what follows is calamitous. Emperors compete and citizens are slaughtered, cities collapse, cultures and economies disappear. Politicians compete with similar results.  It's downhill unless something forces a change.

When one person sees himself as superior and others as inferior, there's a logical decline that follows.  Values get bent and twisted, character is corrupted, and the individual is nuts forever after ... unless something changes.

A culture can encourage such wrong thinking, and folks are encouraged to play along. Expectations are imposed, conformance is the norm and particularly difficult to resist.  How does one individual hold on to a truth that isn't popular when the cultural norm says otherwise?

The solution is not religious.  We needn't revert to a King James-ish vocabulary or to Puritan laws, and neither is whom we might elect likely to save us.  We're faced with a couple of possibilities -- we can conform to the world we live in, or we can aspire to something better, something right and good and just.

Ro. 12:2

The Crooked Fast Track

"Why is it that corporations give millions of

dollars to elected officials? Do you think

it's simply public-spirited behavior?"

  ~Walter E. Williams

In the spring of '15, the Senate voted on Fast Track, aka the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA).  It's a controversial bill giving the president power to negotiate trade treaties and limiting Congressional ability to interfere. 

The first round began in May when TPA was blocked. Most Democrats voted against TPA from even being debated. However, 48 hours later, the TPA bill passed cloture. What happened that changed the minds of those opponents?

Corporate members of the U.S. Business Coalition for TPP handed out money for "yea" votes. A total of $1,148,971 dollars went to Senators for "yea" votes.

• Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 "yea" votes.
• The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.
• The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.  The corporations were not supporting the senator, they were purchasing the legislation.

For individual Senators:

• Bennet, Murray, and Wyden -- all running for re-election in 2016 -- received $105,900 among the three of them.
• Senator Rob Portman of Ohio received $119,700 from 14 different corporations
• Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia received $102,500 in corporate contributions.
• Arizona senator and former presidential candidate John McCain received $51,700 in the first quarter of 2015.

In the run up to the Senate vote, there had been an impressively financed battle in the House of Representatives totalling $197,869,145 given to Representatives for a yes vote and $23,065,231 given in opposition.

• John Boehner (R-OH) received $5.3 million for a "yea" vote and was the highest paid legislator.
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) received $2.4 million for his "yea" vote.
• Paul Ryan (R-WI) received $2.4 million for a "yea" vote and came in at the third highest paid legislator.
• Pat Tiberi (R-OH) follows Paul Ryan, coming in the fourth spot having received $1.6 million for his "yea" vote.
• The fifth highest paid legislator is somewhat of a "hero" in comparison to others. Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) received $1.6 million for a yes vote and only $282,710 for a no vote. Despite the contributions from those in favor of TPA, he still voted no.
• Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) received $541,746 for a "yea" vote and no money at all for a "nay" vote and he still voted "nay!"
• Andy Harris (R-MD) received $254,803 for a "yea" vote and no money at all for a "nay" vote and he still voted "nay".

(Many think our government is for sale. At the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and associated monitoring sites, you can see how it works. See S.995, HR1890 & HR1394)

Whether you are for or against this particular legislation, you'll notice the process.  We are past the point of needing campaign finance reform.  We've reached the point of corrupt influence that is indistinguishable from bribery.

Corporations exercise inordinate influence over government policy, and legislation generally favors the most generous; not perfectly, but it usually works that way.  Do your own research.  Although perhaps legal, this is corruption and an abuse of power.  

Here's the TED talk on how it works and what comes next.

Shattered Reality!

Nothing changes you like real life.

You can watch a million miles go by the window, but an afternoon spent in one spot along the way can change you forever.  That one step closer can shatter everything.

Kids and parents at the river welcomed the old white guy.
Those are my glasses.

She's just two weeks old, sir.  Let me hold her up
so you can see how pretty she is.
Her extended family (huge) adopted my wife and me,
and our friendship has continued over the years.

I avoided Africa for decades, choosing instead assignments in the developed world.  The Cold War was my philosophical context, and until the Wall came down, that was my focus.  Years later, my job required a first foray into western Africa, and my worldview was changed yet again.  I hadn't known what 'normal' was until folks took me in and taught me about real life.  It took a year, a difficult year, for my wife to assimilate what she experienced there.

This isn't the life we had expected.  Not remotely similar to anything we'd imagined.

I recall planning for marriage.  At twenty, I deliberately quit dating, and I planned on waiting until thirty before tying the knot.  I read books on the subject, got my career and finances on track, had a life plan ... but at twenty-three, I met and married the most extraordinary woman.  Everything changed, of course, and for seven years we grew and grew closer.  Then ...

We weren't inclined to have children; we'd seen too many tumultuous families, but there was this family in Spain; mom and dad, a missionary couple, and their wonderful children inspired us.  Soon, a young couple on their way to the ministry prayed for us.  They'd been prayed over and had conceived the same day, so they prayed over us, and we had the same results.  Odd, but instructional.

Our little princess grew up as an only child; healthy and practical, she became a rather magnificent person who continues to teach us new things.  She and her husband gave us our little princess granddaughter who follows in her mom's footsteps.  At two years old, she's stunning.  Of course.

I recall how in my twenties, I felt as though I had arrived at adulthood.  I had the knowledge I needed, a healthy personal philosophy and theology, credentials and skills, and ... every last piece was disassembled and much was discarded along the way.  Now we laugh a lot at how much we've changed and lament that personal growth and wisdom aren't the product of an easy path.

The horizon ahead is bright and much wider than we thought it would be, an unexpected blessing from a loving Father.


There's stories and hundreds of pictures at TexasEx.Org
And if you'd like to, you can go see for yourself.  :)