I would suggest we be careful with definitions here. Certainly certain policies impact certain jobs. My grandfather was a farmer. That is, until the economy changed. Then he wasn't a farmer any more.The policy may have had negative impacts on farmers, but it could only have a very limited impact on my grandfather.
I would also distinguish between "making somebody poor" and "poverty", which is a state of existence. Likewise, I would also distinguish between internal poverty, ie, despair, and external poverty -- lack of money.
The definitions always get you on these things. For instance, most people are familiar with studies that show "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" in some western societies like the United States. What readers fail to gleam from these studies is that while the numbers for the quintiles do show those movements, people move around between quintiles a lot more than is acknowledged. So when we say the poor get poorer, we are confusing the statistical average of a category of random people with actual, real people. Actual, real people move about in income levels quite a bit. The statistical bottom fifth of people in general, however, is not doing so well.
Likewise when we talk about poverty, or the economy, or social policy, we're dealing in large, averaged groups of things, not individual people. It makes a difference because we are individual, unique people, not statistical clumps.
I'm not saying that the internal attitudes of a person is enough to overcome any external obstacle. What I am saying is that the way we internalize external challenges is a better measure of anti-poverty and future happiness than the amount of money we have in the bank. Therefore, you cannot "kill" me, make me poor, by taking away my money. My internal wealth is outside of your ability to change.
I create wealth by increasing efficiency and destroying jobs. I have made many people redundant and gotten them laid off. It's the name of the game hop from one useful skill to the next or become obsolete.
I don't really care about these lost jobs but saying it's their fault that they become redundant is missing the point. Luck is a large factor in both the generation and retention of wealth. The risk of true poverty limits society’s just as excessive crime by reducing people’s willingness to take risks. Young people are more likely to do a startup because they have lower risk of failure. Losing everything at 25 is vary different than losing everything at 55.
Note: I am not saying we need to do anything with the 3rd world but I feel limited job training and basic welfare help many people bounce back. Spending a small percentage of GDP on such things is an investment that may or may not pay off but saying it's useless as an ideological stance is missing the point. However, the numbers I have seen on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state) suggest that we spend 14% of GDP on welfare which seems insane. Are they looking at SS as welfare?
Yeah, skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems that they are classifying social-insurance programs like Social Security as "welfare", whereas most people would define "welfare" as programs that are specifically targeted to poor people.
And one of the reasons Social Security is so politically secure--even at the height of the Dubya Administration's influence, a proposal to privatize it went down in flames--is that middle-class as well as poor voters expect to benefit from it.
No one benefits from social security.The average payout is below the input.
Members pay so that more senior members may benefit and then hope that newer member will pay enough so that they may benefit as well. It functions like a large, mandatory pyramid scheme and only survives because people who have paid fortunes into it expect to be compensated.
The benefit you get from Social Security is that if you retire before you die, if a spouse or parent who provides your family income retires or dies before you die, or if you become too disabled to work, you don't have to worry about outliving your savings, and you don't have to worry about inflation making your annuity worthless.
Both of the problems could easily be solved by replacing SS with an ordinary savings account. Not to mention that Fed loans to SS aggravates inflation greatly.
An "ordinary savings account" can't give you a stream of income for the rest of your life that adjusts for inflation, even if you have to retire early due to disability, regardless of the state of the stock market or interest rates.
And right now, Social Security loans money to the rest of the government, not vice versa.
If a man from a wealthy family background spends six years in college with a trivial income (from a part-time job at the college bookstore, or whatever) and then lands a well-paid professional job, he has jumped from a low quintile to a high quintile, but is not the sort of "income mobility" that most people hope their children will have access to.
I'm really just replying to the idea that 'murder' doesn't count, or that outside influences cant cause poverty. I'm not interested in internal vs external poverty. To me poverty is an extreme lack of resources such that it impacts on the basics of life. So while you might not rate external poverty as very important, that's all I'm talking about here.
I would also distinguish between "making somebody poor" and "poverty", which is a state of existence. Likewise, I would also distinguish between internal poverty, ie, despair, and external poverty -- lack of money.
The definitions always get you on these things. For instance, most people are familiar with studies that show "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" in some western societies like the United States. What readers fail to gleam from these studies is that while the numbers for the quintiles do show those movements, people move around between quintiles a lot more than is acknowledged. So when we say the poor get poorer, we are confusing the statistical average of a category of random people with actual, real people. Actual, real people move about in income levels quite a bit. The statistical bottom fifth of people in general, however, is not doing so well.
Likewise when we talk about poverty, or the economy, or social policy, we're dealing in large, averaged groups of things, not individual people. It makes a difference because we are individual, unique people, not statistical clumps.
I'm not saying that the internal attitudes of a person is enough to overcome any external obstacle. What I am saying is that the way we internalize external challenges is a better measure of anti-poverty and future happiness than the amount of money we have in the bank. Therefore, you cannot "kill" me, make me poor, by taking away my money. My internal wealth is outside of your ability to change.