Controversial Political Opinions

[pbrower2a]

(07-12-2022, 09:48 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: A lot of Democrats and Republicans complain about people working 40 hours a week and still being given food stamps or some other form of social security.

Excluding people in sheltered workshops (you don't want them having money to be blown; you don't want them to drive cars) anyone working 40 hours a week should be making a living wage. Many are not making a living wage. This may reflect brutal costs of living in some places. The people working 40 hours or more in a fast-food place are typically being paid for 40 hours but working 60 or so as "assistant managers". Some are seasonal workers such as migrant farm workers who may work 70 hours a week in planting or harvest seasons and go without pay much of the year. 

I'd be leery of taking a job in a high-cost part of the country. Rent can eat what you earn. That has skyrocketed far more than any cost of living due to America having nearly twice the population than it had in 1970. 

    

Quote:Imo, that's...exactly how the system is supposed to work: aid for people who are willing to work for an honest day's wage and still struggle to make it. Of course, you also have the (physically or mentally) disabled and the elderly, but if a high percentage of people on welfare programs worked 30+ hours a week, that would be a sign of progress, not a bad sign. When we look both at the cost-per-recipient and behavioral incentives encouraged, it's vastly preferable to the alternative of learned helplessness, and high rates of single parent homes, crime and mental illness.

Maybe we still need some minimum amount of work to meet the basic needs of us all. If forty hours a week were deemed adequate in the 1930's and we are twice (or more) as efficient at what we do, then why are we working just as much. OK, we have more and better bling. (That may be questionable, as tabletop radios of the 1930's were fiendishly expensive by the standard of the time. I can buy a cheap cell phone that does most of what a radio did (use headphones and you can get FM radio; a camera, a calculator, and something else thrown in), or a 32" flat-screen color TV for about $100 (which is not far off from what I paid for a portable transistor radio back in the 1972 - about $25. Cars, appliances (small or large), food, and furniture seem to have inflated much the same over fifty years. 

Oh, so we have more stuff? It was certainly easy to load up on LP's at one time, 8-track tapes (arrgh!), VHS tapes,  and CD's before we got to pre-recorded movies on video disks. These are now often available cheaply at Goodwill as people divest themselves of those as they downsize their housing when they retire or go to the nursing home. Does anyone want an LP of Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, or Perez Prado? Those LP's weren't cheap in their day; the people who listened to them are no longer around. 

I have done some indexing of the 1950 Census, and I have noticed that many people were then boarders. They were living in a room in someone's house, and obviously they couldn't own much. They were people making a tentative move to the Big City with the fear that they might have to return to the family farm if their job as a clerical worker failed or if they didn't make it as a retail sales clerk (one might do the job, but one rarely got paid). Many boarders effectively included live-in domestics or hired farm hands. A boarder's life had little privacy, and anything that one has that is worth stealing will be stolen. Few people now live that way anymore. If you had a record player (which wasn't cheap) or some records of Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, or Perez Prado those might be stolen. 

Few people would now be boarders, although it is easy to achieve "Twelve in one room in a-may-REE-caw" due to brutal urban rents.