
Extreme poverty in America: read the UN special monitor's report - rbanffy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/15/extreme-poverty-america-un-special-monitor-report
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doublerebel
Dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15939995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15939995)

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rbanffy
Part of a series, actually.

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jlg23
Direct link to full report:
[http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?Ne...](http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533&LangID=E)

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tinalumfoil
> I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the
> invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of
> extreme poverty in America

I'm confused. This statement makes it sound like Philip Alston is a third
party investigating the US on behalf of the UN, however the top results on
Google indicate he's an employee and beneficiary of US-based federally-funded
institutions.

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noselasd
Well, yes - but where is the confusion ?

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tinalumfoil
I guess its my fault for being ignorant of how the UN chooses who does these
reports, but I didn't expect someone with such close ties to the US to be
writing reports about the US. For instance if this was "extreme poverty in
Russia" I would be surprised to find Moscow State University faculty as the
author. Although now that I know better I probably won't be as surprised in
the future.

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SolaceQuantum
Having read the full report, this is an extremely damning and bleak view on
how USA treats its poor on every level: employment, disability, law
enforcement, healthcare, race, gender, and media depiction. I believe if there
is one thing to take away from this is the following: This is not purely about
what we can see (housing, dilapidation, "single mom" stereotypes) but also
what we cannot see (poverty on full-time employment, incarceration rates,
healthcare).

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scarface74
Whether you agree or disagree with it on a moral level, eventually the tides
are going to turn where the government is going to tax the rich and give to
the poor just because the poor are going to so vastly outnumber "the rich"
that they are going to vote a true populist into power.

Red state representatives will only be able to appease the masses by blaming
people who don't look like them and quoting scripture for so long.

Once they toughen illegal immigration and can't use the boogeyman of "Mexicans
taking their jobs" or the evil Muslim non American former President trying to
implement Sharia law" something is going to give.

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gremlinsinc
Let's hope so. There has to be a reckoning... Income inequality HAS to be a
bubble... the rich getting richer at everyone else's expense has to end
someday right?

Let's hope it's amicably via someone like Bernie Sanders as President rather
than through a war that the poorest have no chance of winning. Numbers don't
matter when it's pitchforks verses tanks.

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scarface74
Don't get too excited. It only takes around $140,000 household income to be in
the top 15%. When "they" start voting to redistribute wealth they will come
after software engineers, doctors, lawyers and a lot of two income earners who
don't think of themselves as "the rich".

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grecy
In ever increasing ways the US is more comparable to Developing countries than
to Developed countries.

I wonder when it will officially be downgraded and recognized as such.

Remember, the first step to fixing a problem is admitting there is one.

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tankenmate

      About 55.7% of the U.S. voting-age population cast ballots
      in the 2016 presidential election. In the OECD, the U.S.
      placed 28th in voter turnout, compared with an OECD
      average of 75%.  Registered voters represent a much
      smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just
      about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S.
      voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was
      registered in 2016, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and
      the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in
      Japan (2014).
    

This is a comment from the report itself. This comment was probably the one
that stood out to me the most. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the case that
disenfranchisement of the poor would always or almost always lead to a society
that doesn't properly care for its less well off.

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Fej
The poor and minorities have been systematically disenfranchised recently in
many states, since they tend to vote against the party currently in power
(especially minorities in red states).

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davidf18
The reason why there are homeless in SF and other US cities is because of
rent-seeking: a market failure which creates artificial scarcity in housing
through zoning density restrictions, overuse of historic landmark status, and
overregulation.

It is emotionally convenient (esp. for main-stream media) to blame President
Trump for everything, but it is typically local city councils, usually
Democratic and not Republican, that is responsible for the rent-seeking. The
results are housing scarcity, the high costs of housing, renters paying much
more they would in an efficient market, and landlords getting far more money
than they would get in an efficient market.

Japan fixed this problem by having federal laws that overrode local laws that
supported rent-seeking to disallow zoning density restrictions. The results:
in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs 20,000 in NYC and less than
90,000 in all of California.

The lesson: don't blame President Trump. Seek out and destroy rent-seeking
market inefficiencies. Let the market do its thing and you'll see far more
affordable housing. Japan has already demonstrated this fact.

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Joeri
I think solving the poverty crisis in the U.S. requires a few insights to
become broadly accepted:

\- There are many causes of this systemic poverty and no specific regulation
or deregulation can fix it. Only broad systemic change can lead to genuine
improvement.

\- The causes and fixes of the poverty crisis are not partisan. Placing either
blame or solution with one political party is uninformed and
counterproductive.

\- America must fix its income inequality to fix its poverty. Tax hikes for
the rich are unavoidable. There are no free lunches or quick fixes. Everything
has been tried before somewhere in the world and the only proven anti-poverty
strategy is wealth redistribution.

\- Things can always get worse, passively waiting until they do is actively
contributing to the problem.

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curun1r
I'm curious how you can reconcile your second and third bullet points. If tax
hikes on the rich are an unavoidable part of the solution, one party just
rammed through a huge tax cut for the rich and the other party did everything
they could to stop it. It can be argued that the Democrats don't really care
about fixing income inequality and that they like to use it as a talking point
more so than they like to actually make progress, but to pretend that the
Republicans are anything less than a roadblock to fixing this issue seems
disingenuous if you believe what you said in the third bullet point.

