Smasharoo wrote:
Do you honestly disagree that children raised in households dependent on welfare are more likely to end out on welfare themselves when they grow up?
Of course they are. There is virtually no class mobility in the US.
There is plenty of class mobility in the US. Just very little of it occurs within the poorest neighborhoods. If you're born in a working class neighborhood with not a lot of wealth around, but most people having jobs that provide a modest living, your odds of improving your situation is significantly higher than if you're born in a poor neighborhood with a high percentage of unemployed people living on government assistance.
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The idea that welfare is the cause of that is absolutely moronic.
No. It's not. Welfare creates a virtual class wall around the areas where it it most applied. Once a community reaches a critical mass of welfare recipients within it, the odds of the community recovering are more or less zero, and the odds of anyone born into that community escaping it aren't much better.
Meanwhile, everyone else lives in a sea of opportunity where you absolutely can change your life (for better or worse) based on your own actions and abilities.
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What's the cause of wealthy children ending up wealthy? Hard work and talent, right?
They are more likely to work hard and become talented, if for no other reason that they see all around them the fruits of hard work and talent. When you live in a ghetto where everyone is out of work, everyone subsists on government assistance, and no one is a success story, it's kinda hard to develop a "I can accomplish whatever I want" attitude.
Being born to a wealthy family by no means guarantees success either btw. Just as being born to a poor family does not guarantee poverty later in life. But there are marked outcome differences between them, and I think that what's moronic is the assumption that the children of wealthy families succeed purely because of the money they possess. It's vastly more likely to be about the environment their kids grow up in than the number of dollars in the bank account.
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Black unemployment and poverty can really only be caused by one of two things: Institutional racism on a national scale or a genetic predisposition towards criminality and laziness.
I disagree that those are the only two possibilities. I think that some have tried really really hard to frame the problem in this way so as to avoid examining the negative effects of their own pet social projects, but at what point do we stop casting about for some mysterious "institutionalized racism" and start looking at what's right in front of us.
I guess I just don't get why some people have such a knee jerk and emotional response to the idea that by providing assistance to people we ****** their ability to provide for themselves. And when we do that on a large enough scale in concentrated areas (or even intentionally concentrate the recipients of that assistance in those areas), we create a massive generational poverty problem. And guess what? If the color of the skin of the people we've done that to just happen to be black more often than white, why are we surprised that this shows up in social statistics comparing black versus white outcomes?