The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(04-18-2020, 02:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(04-17-2020, 03:09 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-17-2020, 09:53 AM)David Horn Wrote: So your counter argument is: things were worse in the distant past, so bad things aren't important today?  And yes, it was the Southern Democrats who made Jim Crow work -- until LBJ.  After that it was the GOP in the South and North, not that party politics has a bearing here.  It was a culture-wide phenomenon, and a lot of people got hurt, just not white people.  It will take along time to rebalance that error, but it's not surprising at all that the people still affected by it are getting antsy.

So saying that there are poor whites doesn't cut it.  Of course there are, but it's the extent of the damage that's the issue.  If 10% of whites are below the poverty line, while it's 25% of the black community, that's a societal hurt that 's been inflicted, not just laziness or bad attitude.  FWIW, I'm good with lifting up everyone.  There will be a lot of need soon, when the COVID-19 Depression ends, and the damage is devastating.

The whites have more people living below the poverty line than the blacks do right now. My point is that there are no more slaves or southern confederates that exist today. We still have some slaves but they're associated with illegal/criminal l activity referred to a illegal human trafficking that's directly associated with illegal immigration. I don't live in the past. You can bring it up and call us racist or meanies for disagreeing, not feeling guilty and not supporting slave retribution these days.

Blacks still have more people living in poverty.

The US Census declared that in 2014 14.8% of the general population lived in poverty:[82]

10.1% of all white non-Hispanic persons
12.0% of all Asian persons
23.6% of all Hispanic persons (of any race)
26.2% of all African American persons
28.3% of Native Americans / Alaska Natives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in.../ethnicity

If whites are getting poorer too, that is the direct result of the Republican policies they have supported. They largely supported them for social-issue reasons, for their religion and their resentment over giving welfare to black people with their taxes. Resentment over immigration has also been stoked recently by Trump. The result has been big breaks for big business, resulting in stagnant income for most of the population, white and people of color alike, while prices have skyrocketed.

The southern confederates still exist, and have become more racist recently. Whites in the South vote for these Republican policies in 80 to 90% margins.  Most of the people today are pretty much wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck, while rich people (and I'm pretty well off myself now) get more and more of the pie, thanks to the low taxes and low wages which your Republican Party has instituted over 40 years.

Good point. There are more white people living in poverty than there are any other groups, but as a proportion of themselves, fewer even than Asian-Americans. This is like saying that there are more poor people in Massachusetts than in Mississippi. Massachusetts simply has more people! 

Over the last forty years, real wages have plummeted. Part of this reflects the creation of huge numbers of low-skilled, "throw-way" jobs that are easy to learn, take comparatively little time for getting people up to speed, but pay little and offer no internal chance for advancement. If one isn't born with special advantages in getting the jobs with futures other than more of the same poverty, numbing routine, and harsh management, then this is what one gets. Management cracks the whip. American dream? For more people (both in absolute numbers and proportion) what passes as a career is often a stopgap and nothing more. We get first-world costs, Soviet-style management, and third-world wages. Of course such is great for the elites.  

But things have been getting far better for shareholders, executives, and landlords (the latter, of course, only if they are in the 'high-rent' urban areas such as New York, Boston, Miami, Seattle, and coastal California). But try getting a job in the low-rent communities. 

We are finding out the hard way that certain ways of management will not work. Pushing people to their limits even to the point of expecting people to do hard physical work even when sick has imploded. Need I mention that one of the places where such was mandatory was a pork-processing plant? Maybe we have gotten some incredibly-cheap pork lately because workers could be sweated so badly. 

We have gone as far as we can with an economic model imploding due to its contradictions. If we no longer have scarcity allowing easy profits by meeting it, then we do not need poverty except as chastisement of the imprudent, improvident, incompetent, lazy, rebellious, criminal, and inflexible. Honest work in a prosperous society should pay well. Capitalism at its best rewards imagination, wisdom, competence, skill, dedication, conformity, and integrity. Pre-capitalist orders such as feudalism reward people for being part of the right family; degenerate capitalism (such as crony capitalism as especially appears in fascist regimes)  rewards people for having power and privilege and little else.