A new Pew poll shows that Republicans believe you have the power to be rich or poor and that poor people are poor because they don't work as hard.
FIfty-one percent of Republicans surveyed believe that people are poor due to a lack of effort.
Republicans also think rich people are responsible for their wealth.
Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said that people are rich because they "worked harder than others," compared to 32 percent who say it's because they had more advantages.
src: http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/1-23-14%20Poverty_Inequality%20Release.pdf
rich vs poor is too broad of a spectrum. If you're making over $150k (even $100k in some areas) you probably had more advantages than others.
If you're making less than $20k, it's probably your own fault. Everywhere in between is completely attainable imo, if you try/use your resources.
Some people don't know what there is out there to benefit them, though. And that's sad. People could live up to a much higher potential if they knew how to use the resources available as a hand-up to a better life.
If you think someone raised in an inner city, poverty filled, single parent home, that went to a shitty school, and was raised on substandard food has the same opportunity as someone raised in a middle or upper income home you're simply deluded.
Recent studies have also shown that the poor make worse decisions – not that they are poor due to bad ones, but rather being poor makes it harder to make correct ones as your more stressed.
I was not raised in middle or upper class nor was I raised in the inner city. I did not have good food to eat, and I was not in the best of schools during my teens. But I did make my own path. And I do know of people from the inner city that have done the same thing and make more money than their parents did or ever will. I chose to go to a vocational school for training. I decided to work minimum wage jobs while I live with my mom to save up for and pay for community college, and now I have a career making a decent amount of money. I even worked un-paid internships (two at different times) while working full time jobs to pay my own bills so I could get my foot in the door for my Holden career. The opportunity that I had that others may not have had, was the ability to live with my mom for a while. And even then, I only did that until I was 19. So do I think you can change your path and succeed above your parents, yes.
Again, the problem is that people don't know what resources are out there for them, and that is what is holding our youth back when they grow up in poverty. But with the community centers and youth centers that are free to many inner city youths, all these young men and women need to do, is listen, learn, and choose to make a difference in their life.
+Thomas Wrobel I would believe that. I firmly believe that you make decisions on what you know. And if you don't know better, you won't do better. However, movies and tv show all the time that if you try, you can achieve. You may fail along the way, but that's what helps us build up stronger if we keep going. I say this because tv was really my only guidance. My mom tried, but only to the best of her known ability and she never went beyond that. And she grew up in middle class with all the opportunities to succeed and brought herself to practically poverty level. We were right on the line.
And here I am, making double her income and still have more success ahead of me., while she sits with a dead-end job and has no desire to make things better for herself. She's ok being where she is even though she is not happy with where she is. I never wanted to just be ok with life. I wanted to be happy with it.
And I should say- do I think they have the same opportunities? No. I don't. But I do think they have the ability to do better than they grew up in and I hope many more find the opportunity. One of the things I have always wanted to do was to make enough money to build a center to help those that grow up in poverty situations, and show them how to utilize resources available to them.
Well, this wasn't strictly about knowledge (although that applies), this was about basic financial decisions. That is, useful logic needed to mange your money better, or otherwise improve your life.
My own view is an AND situation not an OR one – you always need your own effort to get anywhere, but you also need a degree of either luck, or a suitable environment. The less you have of one, the more you need of the other.
And, arguably, its getting increasingly hard to move up. Never impossible, but harder and harder.
Which is why we need to make resources easier to find. I do agree it is getting harder, but it wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties before I realized how many resources really are available to people. I would like teenagers to know these things and not find out later. But even if they do find out later, there's no shame in working on starting a career in your mid thirties or fourties. And yes, that makes it harder too, but I think, by a certain age, people have either made too many bad decisions to know how to make good ones, or they feel shame and don't think they can do better because of their age.
"The study found, for instance, that about 8 percent of children born in the early 1980s who grew up in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution managed to reach the top fifth for their age group today. The rate was nearly identical for children born a decade earlier."
"…including sharply rising incomes at the top of the ladder, which allows well-off families to invest far more in their children — were holding back talented people,…"
"For all the continuity over recent decades, the authors emphasized that parents appeared to cast a longer shadow over their children’s lives, in some ways, than before. As inequality has risen, pushing the rungs on the income ladder further apart than they once were, the average economic penalty of being born poor has grown over time.
“It matters more who your parents are today than it did in the past,” Mr. Chetty said."
SRC: http://goo.gl/ZTFhSX
Studies by neuroscientists have found that low-quality nutrition during childhood can be detrimental to the development of cognitive capabilities, such as learning, problem solving and memorizing. Early malnourishment can lead to deficiencies in vision, fine motors skills, language and social skills as well as an array of chronic illnesses lasting well into adulthood.
src: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/pubs/learning.pdf
Those in lower income have less access to nutritional foods so are BIOLOGICALLY at a disadvantage. I'm not saying nobody has upward mobility. People can and do "pull themselves up by the bootstraps", but those are the exception and not the rule. However, to say that it's really just up to the person working hard and keeping their nose to the grindstone is disingenuous and… not backed by facts of any kind.
Agreed +Sarah King. I think the biggest impact we could have is to decouple the funding for schools from the taxes generated by where they live. By doing that… we're essentially locking poorer people with less resources into lower levels of education.
1. I never said it was 100% up to the person to make those decisions. I admitted that they need help finding the resources and to know they don't need to be stuck there just because the statistics say they will.
2. I don't know where the comment about school funding came from. I didn't bring that from what I recall.
If anything, I think it is outrageous that we spend more money housing prisoners in a year, than we do educating our children. And maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if we decoupled funding from schools based on the taxes generated in their area. Maybe we should put more of an emphasis on what it takes to educate a child with all the proper resources, and distribute the funding based on population so every child has a fair chance at the same education. Will that ever happen? No, or at least probably not in my life time. So why not bitch about these people not having the same resources and while sit on our educated asses?
I know if we all continue to bitch about the government and how it handles the lower classes, then change will happen, it's magic. Right?
Now, you're right, I'm not backing anything up with actual studies. I'm going on the basic nature of the beast- personal experience. So please, continue to diminish what I came from and where I am going in my life into something statistical instead of meaningful. But lets not forget, since I grew up with poor nutrition, have bad health from it (I do, too, this is not sarcasm), that I'm not smart enough to have this debate. I only received a lowly Associates Degree in a specialized technical field where I worked my ass off and was discriminated against as a woman. I should have listened to the statistics, made my minimum wage, and complained about it, instead of working twice as hard with my defective brain to prove myself and finally get a job where I am appreciated and compensated, (well, I might add), for my abilities.
So 49% of D's think you can get ahead if they work hard but only 27 of D's think people got rich by working harder then others? Seems to be a little bit contradictory doesn't it?
Not really "get ahead" and "get rich" can be too quite different things.
You could work your arse of and get in the top, say, 10%, but then youd need a lot of luck to get in the top 1% (or even 0.1%) which counts as "rich" these days. (That was just an example of the top of my head, the idea is it isnt one big scale of "working harder")
+Thomas Wrobel is being the 1% the only way to be considered rich though? that too is very subjective depending on your current economic situation.
I only meant "rich" as in whatever those people interviewed on the survey count as "rich". So its of course, very subjective.
+Thomas Wrobel I think that the title of the G+ post is misleading at best since it appears that getting ahead is not being poor and half of D's agree with that statement.
+Sarah King I don't think anyones trying to lesson your accomplishments in life here. And yes, it seems horrible to refer to a life as a single anecdotal datapoint, but when your talking about many millions of people how else can it be done? everyone's situation is unique, and while we can learn from individual examples, we cant state that everyone is able to take the path you did. And, imho, surely no one should have too?
The fact you worked against the odds should be praised, but shouldn't the odds have been less stacked against you to start with?
And while it goes without saying that everyone should try their hardest to do their best…..doesn't that also mean the harder everyones tries the harder it is for everyone trying? I mean, the more people that struggle against the odds, the more people those that are struggling are struggling against in the Job market?
It seems the problems are far deeper then merely people having to try harder.
As for bitching about government. Well, it seems the general public has increasingly small effect on politics. Maybe bitching is futile, but its hard for people to know what to do.
And while correlation isnt causation, its at the very least suspicious that the gap between the rich and the poor is larger then ever, at the same time the amount of money in politics has spiked up hugely. Corporations are people. Money is speach. Superpacs allow anominious unlimited donations. Banks can get away with anything they like.
Is it any wonder that the non-rich feel powerless to do anything but bitch? That a vote is worthless compared to lobbying.
+Sarah King I never intended to diminish any of your achievements, nor to insinuate anything about your personal level of intelligence or health. I was speaking broadly. As +Thomas Wrobel pointed out, single instances are awesome but only by looking at a large dataset do we see the full picture.