Cut in food stamps will hit retailers
Nov. 2nd, 2013 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyOne in five U.S. households is on food stamps, and many people could be rattled as their benefits are chopped.
I hate the phrase "is on food stamps". Why not simply "uses" food stamps or "needs" or "receives" food stamps instead? "Is on" makes food stamps sound vaguely like drugs.
http://lat.ms/HzPVV7
So here is one of the top level comments for that article, reproduced in all its vicious glory:
Liberals like to to think that poor people are poor through no fault of their own. They like to think the poor worked hard in school and got good grades, but just didn't get lucky enough to get the good jobs. They also think that poor kids are raised in households that have parents who each work 3 minimum wage jobs, or, if it is a single income family, the mom works 3 minimum wage jobs and left her husband because he was abusive.
Reality, these people screwed around in school and now feel like they should be paid for screwing up.
How is this bullshit, let me count the ways....
But seriously, let's just imagine for a second that every single person in the nation decided to agree with his proposition that you should be punished your whole life for the mistakes you made in childhood. And let's say that in response to that belief, students worked their little asses off, universally. Not just here and in Asia, all over the world! (Except maybe Finland.) Those kids at sucky schools had the insight to realize it and worked just that much harder, and the difference between the highest ranked student and the lowest at any large high school was only a matter of a few thousandths of a percentage point, if that.
And then what would happen? I can tell you what would happen. We would have an awful lot of doctors and lawyers and engineers, and none of them would get paid very well because supply would indeed have outstripped demand. We would have a lot of highly educated janitors and truck drivers and cashiers, and they wouldn't get paid well either because ANYbody can do those jobs. And we would have a very small number of mechanics and electricians and plumbers who would get paid pretty darn well, relatively speaking, though since nobody else would you would find a lot of people would just live with clogged up basement sinks.
Not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor. There really is a limit to how many of those the market needs. Everybody, even the ones with the stupid jobs that anybody can do, deserves to make a living wage from ONE job working REASONABLE hours. Because somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets.
I hate the phrase "is on food stamps". Why not simply "uses" food stamps or "needs" or "receives" food stamps instead? "Is on" makes food stamps sound vaguely like drugs.
http://lat.ms/HzPVV7
So here is one of the top level comments for that article, reproduced in all its vicious glory:
Liberals like to to think that poor people are poor through no fault of their own. They like to think the poor worked hard in school and got good grades, but just didn't get lucky enough to get the good jobs. They also think that poor kids are raised in households that have parents who each work 3 minimum wage jobs, or, if it is a single income family, the mom works 3 minimum wage jobs and left her husband because he was abusive.
Reality, these people screwed around in school and now feel like they should be paid for screwing up.
How is this bullshit, let me count the ways....
But seriously, let's just imagine for a second that every single person in the nation decided to agree with his proposition that you should be punished your whole life for the mistakes you made in childhood. And let's say that in response to that belief, students worked their little asses off, universally. Not just here and in Asia, all over the world! (Except maybe Finland.) Those kids at sucky schools had the insight to realize it and worked just that much harder, and the difference between the highest ranked student and the lowest at any large high school was only a matter of a few thousandths of a percentage point, if that.
And then what would happen? I can tell you what would happen. We would have an awful lot of doctors and lawyers and engineers, and none of them would get paid very well because supply would indeed have outstripped demand. We would have a lot of highly educated janitors and truck drivers and cashiers, and they wouldn't get paid well either because ANYbody can do those jobs. And we would have a very small number of mechanics and electricians and plumbers who would get paid pretty darn well, relatively speaking, though since nobody else would you would find a lot of people would just live with clogged up basement sinks.
Not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor. There really is a limit to how many of those the market needs. Everybody, even the ones with the stupid jobs that anybody can do, deserves to make a living wage from ONE job working REASONABLE hours. Because somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-03 02:02 am (UTC)I was with you right up to "supply would exceed demand".
Actually, no. You're right that "not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor", but the limiting factor is not "how many of those the market needs".
It's not actually the case that "somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets". We do not need anybody to sweep the streets. Or, shortly, do any a number of low-skill, noxious, dangerous or dirty jobs. We actually have the technology now to do that with automation.
For more than a hundred years we have been eliminating whole vast sectors of the job market with automation, and that process is only escalating. As a society, our mechanical ability is now adequate that most lower-end, unskilled jobs are disappearing.
No, the limiting factor is that not everybody can be a knowledge worker. Not everybody had the facility with abstraction, even with the best of educations (and we aren't really into providing the best of educations, but let's let the scenario stand). Even among those many who can in some sense do the remaining work that can't be automated, there will be those who can't both do it and be happy.
There will always be -- may there always be! -- people whose muses call them to work with their hands, to work out of doors, to be wise in their bodies. But our society has been disenfranchising them wholesale, demanding more and more of us spend our lives chained to desks, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for those not called to booklearning to earn honest livings.
I think in a decent society, people have ways to follow their gifts, whatever they may be. And I don't think we have a decent society.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-03 03:10 pm (UTC)http://conuly.livejournal.com/2103883.html?thread=12710219#t12710219
With that said, what would you suggest a decent society do with those folks?