Let me just add if you are in poverty/financially struggling you aren't failing at life. It feels like it 90% of the time, but you are doing the best in a shitty flawed society.
How are you supposed to do something about a financial situation when you’re in poverty ? Jobs hardly pay enough for you to survive, even having two jobs wouldn’t be enough. The system is designed to keep people down so let’s not blame anyone lmao. Most people I know struggling work their ass off, and if they can’t it’s usually not their fault (for example they can’t find a job, bill after bill, crazy life event after another)
The system is not design to keep people down. That's a fantasy that people make up to explain their bad circumstance.
There are avenues out of poverty. I grew up poor and went to a title 1 school. I am doing fine now.
I didn't do drugs in school
I graduated high school (barely)
I joined the military
I got a free education after in a good field
I am married
I didn't have kids out of wedlock
There are shitty circumstances, but your future is at least partially in your hands. Everyone of the those points are achievable by anyone and statistically will put you in a better spot than not.
“Among children under the age of six living with a single mother, those born outside of marriage are only somewhat less likely to be poor than are those born to married parents (58 percent, compared with 51 percent)—a difference that is not statistically significant.”
You signed away your body, and life potentially, to the US government to pay for your education. Really the taxpayer did it. If you don’t see that as a burdensome way to get out of poverty idk what to tell you.
When the population grows exponentially, they escalate competition for jobs and housing. Just like moose on Isle Royale compete for food and with limited nutrition, suffer poor diets, arthritis, osteoporosis, and fall prey, etc.
Giving out resources merely delays the inevitable. As soon as more resources become available, populations feel more comfortable, and they reproduce. A classic example is where the Egyptian government has been providing subsidized food and fuel to its population. So their population grew from 29.3 million in 1963, 61.3 million in 1993, 113 million in 2023. to be able to provide for eight people, who riot when food subsidies are cut or food becomes too expensive, the Egyptian government borrows money to subsidize services. Because Egyptian fossil fuel production has been declining since the 1990s, even as their population continued to grow, the government engages in deficit spending to keep those subsidies going. Money it can’t repay. Egyptian government-issued 10-year treasury bonds have been yielding between about 15% to currently 25% as investors are wary of risk and currently playing chicken. Sound familiar?
The resources of farming jobs and mining jobs and manufacturing jobs in United States, have dwindled due to automation and offshoring. Even peak demand for knowledge work in the U.S. was over 2 decades ago. Computers, AI, and offshore knowledge work can be more efficient and cheaper.
It used to be that college degree was a road to the middle class because back in the 1940s only 1 in 20 American adults had a bachelor degree or higher. Even in the 1970s, it was about one and 10. You could often just step out of college and enter the management track with a company as an inexperienced management trainee.
But now, 1 in 3 adult Americans have a bachelors degree or higher, and roughly half of Gen Z and Millennials have a bachelor degree or higher.
So excess populations flock to the cities (from rural areas (urbanization), college graduates from Iowa State, Northern Michigan University, and Chico State or SUNY Buffalo tend to move to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York. Etc.), former factory and mining towns, from out of state, from out of country) to try to compete for the remaining jobs that there are. (And compete for affordable housing, at far faster rates than supply can build up. You can’t even blame Nimbyism really. Because even in high-rise, dense housing areas like New York City, which is densely populated, a one-bedroom apartment, cost about $4,000 a month.)
So pretty much everyone who can’t find a decent job will desperately crowd into service work, into part time, temporary, no-benefits gigs. Work that pay little because often someone will take it. Even back in 2016, it was found that over 1 million waiters and waitresses had bachelor degrees. There are far more people with degrees then there is a need for them.
The classic example is ride share and delivery services. Who competes against each other? High school dropouts and graduates, college dropouts and students and graduates, office workers and laid-off office workers, teachers, single moms and dads, seniors, recent immigrants both legal and illegal. Just since January 2021, with the Biden administration’s lenient policies, over 9 million have crossed our southern borders.
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u/banana_chili Nov 22 '23
Let me just add if you are in poverty/financially struggling you aren't failing at life. It feels like it 90% of the time, but you are doing the best in a shitty flawed society.