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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would posit that the destruction of the nuclear family unit at lower income brackets (and more common among certain ethnicities) is more at the root of the problem than dream hoarding or unequal application of the law.  This seems to be a growing and self-perpetuating problem since like begets like.  The only fix I can see is a return to more traditional values like the importance of getting (and finishing) an education, successfully landing and sticking with a full time job, getting married before having children, etc.  There are statistics all over the place correlating deviation from these values with a lifetime of poverty and unfulfilled dreams.  What I do for my own kids has little to do with it, but the fact that I am present with DH in the home working with our kids on their schoolwork and fostering an environment that focuses on the importance of education, hard work, service to the community and financial responsibility probably has a lot more to do with how they will turn out than whether or not I fought a multifamily housing development.[/quote]

How much room do you have in your time-machine to get everyone back to the 50s/60s?  Where is this plethora of affordable education and full-time jobs that everyone with traditional values can go take advantage of -- oh, wait, higher education costs are skyrocketing, jobs are being outsourced, and the "gig" economy is on the rise - awesome for employers because they don't have to provide benefits or be liable for you!  Or people, including two-parent households, who have to work multiple jobs that prevent them from being present in the home if they want to stay in the home.  As for your "nuclear family unit" idea - why don't you do some research on the effects of mass-incarceration and the war on drugs where large segments of the population - primarily minority and/or lower socio-economic status - were sacrificed to build up the profits of the prison industry. Start with [i]Inequality for All[/i],  [i]Thirteenth [/i] and maybe go retro with [i]Harlan County USA [/i].[/quote]
You are eliminating one important aspect - choice.  People have choices.  Poor people have choices.  Puerto Ricans have choices.  Black people have choices.  Poor people may not have as many choices to select from as rich people, but you get the idea.  Your post reads like a long litany of excuses for people who have no choices of their own and have had this forced upon them by an evil state.  A good analogy would be a train car headed for Auschwitz.  Do you really believe that is what is going on here?  That these groups have the same predestined fate as concentration camp bound train cars full of Jews?  Those were people with no choices.  These people have choices and I will argue that some of the choices they are making are positively limiting their ability to attain these "dreams" that we are posting about.  Sure, some people have it better than others, but to argue that all the problems that lower class/minorities have are a result of an unfair system stacked against them and they have absolutely no choice but to end up like they are is preposterous.  IMHO, the choice to play this victim role like you are describing and using that as an excuse while waiting around for someone else to come along and make everything fair is one of the choices I alluded to that is keeping some from attaining their dreams.[/quote]

Wow, straight to the Holocaust?  Nothing makes your point like dramatic hyperbole, I guess.

Of course people have choices, but to pretend that people who grow up in poverty have the same choices and opportunities that other people do belies a blinding amount of privilege.  I'll freely admit that I shared many of the up-by-the-bootstraps ideals you're espousing when I was younger, but, being a class migrant myself and having married someone who grew up poor, I've gotten a first-hand view of just how disadvantaged people in generational poverty are and how difficult it is to break out of that cycle.  And not because of lack of grit but because many of the things we take for granted -- learning about financial management, working through bureaucratic systems, knowing the unwritten rules of professionalism, someone to help you with your homework -- it all gives someone who grows up in a community that models those things for them a huge leg up.  Both my spouse and I are class migrants -- but it was a combination of working our asses off AND having lucked into a few good opportunities that got us where we are.  Had those opportunities not arisen, we'd probably be part of the shrinking middle class struggling to make ends meet ourselves.

I am a big believer in personal responsibility, but I think that there is an overall betterment of society if help is available to people who are making the effort.  I am not in favor of continuing to create generations whose primary income is welfare and disability, but cutting them off and telling them to get to work is not going to solve the problem.  Simply telling anyone who struggles to make ends meet that it's their fault because they're not trying hard enough is ignoring the current economic reality of what's going on in the country.  And pretending like everything's fair and level is bullshit - it's a steeper hill to climb for the disadvantaged, and you're acting like there's no difference between throwing them a rope to help with the climb and installing a diamond-plated lift to carry them to the top.  Poverty is a significantly more nuanced problem that doesn't make for good soundbytes for the politicians.[/quote]

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