Welfare and the work ethic.

[HappySqurriel]

Luney Tune said:

ironman said:

I disagree wholeheartedly. You sir, are not using the venues avalable. You can go to food shelves, you can go to charitable organizations, you could even live in a homeless shelter or in your car (if you didn't have a friend kind enough to let you crash at his place) untill you got a job. If anybody does not have the skills necesary to make it out in the work force it is their own fault. I have no pity for those who chose not to get training.

My family has NO money, and yet I still found a way to make it through college. Guess what? Nobody helped me through. I am paying off the loans I took out. I took them out because I knew that college was an investment that would help my net worth. I chose a feild that I knew would not tank, and one where I could make a decent living.

Social liberal welfare states have the highest social mobility in the world. In the developed world, the US and the UK is at the bottom of the list. In the UK social mobility used to be much higher, but dropped like a rock during the 8 years of Margaret Thatcher's libertarian rule.

I hope you understand that by supporting right-wing libertarian politics you are making it much harder for people such as yourself to escape poverty in the future.

 

" Despite this formal opportunity for social mobility, recent research suggests that Britain and particularly the United States have less social mobility than the Nordic countries and Canada.^[10][11] These authors state that "the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced." " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

" Researchers at the London School of Economics found that Britain appeared to have one of the worst records for social mobility in the developed world.

The report focused on how education affected the life chances of British children compared with those in other countries. It put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries, with Norway at the top followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Canada.

Family income in the childhood years does make a genuine difference to educational outcomes. Income inequality has risen at the same time as the gap between the educational attainments of the richest and poorest has grown." http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/apr/25/socialexclusion.accesstouniversity

" But for most of the poor, the United States is no longer the land of opportunity. Economic research in the past decade has found that upward mobility has faded; most of the children of rich parents stay rich and the children of the poor remain poor. "Economists in the past have underestimated the barriers to the children of the poor getting ahead," says Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute. " http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0127/p21s01-coop.html

 

A couple of questions ...

If you have a country where the top 5% of earners makes $45,000 or more and the bottom 5% of earners makes $10,000 or less that has twice the "Social Mobility" than a country where the top 5% of earners makes $135,000 or more and the bottom 5% of earners makes $20,000 or less, in which country are the poor people worse off?

If you have a country where the debt to gdp ratio is growing by 2% per year which has a higher social mobility than a country where the debt to gdb ratio is shrinking by 2% per year, in which country are the citizens worse off?

There are no easy answers to this, but I wanted you to consider that a couple of years ago Iceland was one of the great examples of a social democracy.