Maggie's Farm

But marriage is about love and commitment and sex, there has to be sex. Otherwise, it is just two people living together for certain tax and end of life planning benefits. Or to win a radio contest.

The war on poverty didn't go well so they made a lot of them paupers instead. Still poor, but now on government support.

I disagree. For one thing, the poor, like all economic groups, is transitory for most.

I for one was poor, growing up. My grandmother who raised me grew up in the very definition of poverty. Yet, although still poorish at her death she was light years from where she started. I am far from where I started.

Poor, is transitory, but can be driven by habits. Habits are also passed down from family.

I came across this post from Timothy Taylor this morning. Meditation of empathy for the poor. He has some good observations, plus a Orwell excerpt that really shows little has changed.

Bottom line is, people with money scarcity act a lot like people with time scarcity, or whatever scarcity.

That's 2 trillion in a $17 trillion dollar economy. Not a negligible amount, even by government means.

I think we need to get better with our terms. I have adopted the traditional definitions. Poor is having less than the average. Poverty is being extremely poor. Pauperism is being on government relief or public charity, i.e., welfare.

Being poor, even poverty, can occur by happenstance, such as the breadwinner dying suddenly without sufficient life insurance to support their family.

Now a bit of assistance, short term, is not terrible thing and can give a person a leg up. However, our welfare state is slow to provide aid, especially temporary, and loath to release those they take on as clients. Once the welfare "income" is rolling, to work more than a bit, is to risk losing multiples of what the work gained you...suddenly. We need a weaning path off the client rolls. A good number of the unexpected poor would leap to that path at the first opportunity to rebuild their lives.

If you get into the nitty gritty of "welfare" you find some really odd impacts. My sister just told me of a woman she knows who is on disability due to leukemia, and has significant medical expenses. She scrapes by but doesn't qualify for food stamps (the easiest program to get on) due to the disability payments.

I saw similar weird effects when my brother fell sick. I had been providing him money to live on but showing up at the ER without insurance gets you rolled over to the welfare people. Who want you to apply, even though, besides food stamps, it was deny, deny, deny. Mostly because he was an older male. BTW, he didn't live long enough to use his EBT card once. And I negotiated payment of his hospital bills. He had lost his job a few years earlier and spiraled.

As we see with the panic over Scotland, our "betters" are getting nervous that some will escape, for better or worse.

Better to starve as a free man, than be a full-bellied slave.