WORD! And real poverty is not in town, or the city. My mom used to be a public welfare worker in rural NC, and then Tenn. People raised gardens, mended thin clothing, some children could not go to school because they had no clothes and were deaf because of ear infections. And had bad teeth because of lack of access to a dentist. We choose the system that ends in child poverty because we don't want to pay 40% in federal income taxes like Denmark. So we pay more than the Danes for things the government runs there, so that lobbyists and bank vise presidents can make more here.
Up until 6 months ago, I fully agreed with your last paragraph. Currently, my local job market no longer supports this premise: subsistence is all you get, if you're lucky. Worst conditions I've seen in my 25 yr working career. I'm a degreed, licensed professional, with also 10 yrs experience in trades, and cannot get better than a $12/hr job currently. Not in LV, CA, or FL, but in the next tier down. This is bad and getting worse. Trade well or die
In terms of *any* quality of life metrics - life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, susceptibility to any disease you might care to name, quantity of clothes used per lifetime, calorific intake, purchasing power on education, human beings in G10 countries have simply experienced vast improvements decade after decade. There is so much to be grateful for. Poverty is a meaningless concept from an absolute standpoint. The average resident of Bed Stuy probably had a longer life expectancy, consumed more clothes, calories and education, and had better health than the average peer of the realm in England at the time of the Crusades. We will never eradicate poverty because it stems not from any objective hurdle that we can work towards jumping over, but rather it stems from the human psychology of envy and self-esteem. This will be a deeply unpopular statement, but I think poverty is a state of mind - what you think you should get, what you actually have, and what others have got. Many immigrants in NYC, fresh off the boat so to speak, live 8 to 1000 sq ft, toiling away in restaurants doing hot and sweaty work. They are definitely poor, but they don't spend their days griping about how poor they are and how they need public assistance. They are trying to build a better future. We can, and should, redistribute wealth to ensure that certain essentials like education and healthcare are available to all. But the depressing unhappy feeling of poverty, which is what manifests in the political arena and finds expression in bills and acts, many of which are asinine and unproductive, that is rooted in attitude. And attitude is something that is not easily changed or solved. Much of the world that is perceived to have been successful in "dealing" with poverty have the following in common: a homogenous society with strong cultural values.
Some of them are poor because they think luxuries are necessities. For instance...laundro-mats. They say they have to drag all their clothes to the laudro-mat and pay all that money to wash their clothes...HELLO! You gotta sink and a clothes line? Wash them by hand, dry them by air. Cost...FREE! Dont want to pay 4 bucks for old milk and fruits? Walk to the cheaper store. They just dont want to walk 5 miles to get to that store. And if they cant walk that far, take the bus...the money you save on groceries more than makes up for it. Yeah you gotta carry it a little bit, but 90% of them do not live alone. Take the whole family and kids or roommates and everyone carries something. Then they say that they gotta wait 20 minutes for the bus...Get a book on how to handle your finances from your local library and read it while you wait and while you ride the bus. Nobody said you gotta stand there daydreaming. You can do something productive.
But as a group they expect the most and want to do the least...sorry madlebrotha, but I call em' like it iz. You know as well as I do. My uncle had 2 jobs when i lived with him and I was slinging miami herald subcriptions at 10 and I had homeys in highschool who had a better home and worked nada for it and that was the norm...at least round these here parts. It was better to pop another siblin' then work at popeyes. It boils down to attitude. The ones who left the slave mentality behind and werent themselves worried about the color of their skin were the ones who I saw excel the others just want to blame their skin color for just being plain lazy. Yes i am sure color has pinned them down , that just means they need to work 4 times as hard.
I think a lot of people overstate the role of luck (I don't know about Karma - seems like you create that yourself). I was lucky that my family immigrated to the United States. But, I was extremely unlucky in many many other ways. It was way easier to not accomplish anything. Also, luck plays a much larger role in extreme success and extreme failure than it does in just being able to make a decent living. I don't think most people in this society believe it's a zero sum game. That belief is much more prevalent in socialist countries where they are brainwashed like this. "Getting mine" is merely self-interest. We are all self interested. But, to succeed in a (mostly) free market economy like this one, you have to produce something your fellow man would part with his hard earned money to buy. If this were a zero-sum game (as it is in socialist countries), our aggregate wealth would not increase over time. It's pretty easy to turn it into a zero-sum game and politicians are doing that pretty quickly.
We will never eradicate poverty because we always perceive poverty on a relative basis. You sort of allude to that in the second paragraph. It's a state of mind because it is a relative perception. You can't force people to be productive, but you can provide huge disincentives to be productive. Countries that have more "equality" of income achieve this by lowering the standard of living and providing disincentives to work and invest beyond some minimum level. in other words, equality comes at the cost of hope, individuality, liberty and prosperity. I'm okay with public education - as long as the state provides the funding but not the administration. I think the state has proven itself completely incompetent at actually providing education. You will not be able to provide healthcare as you understand healthcare. Providing for basic boo-boos is cheap. Anything else is more expensive and the fact that there is no incremental cost to the consumer in a single-payer system means that the system is subject to overuse. So, either healthcare costs become astronomical or healthcare is rationed. All socialist healthcare systems are rationed - but then you have the lack of access and denial of care issue that you're trying to solve in the first place. There is no free lunch.
The problems with healthcare are legion. But many countries have a reasonably working kludge that is regarded as satisfactory, especially given how much they spend on it. In the US of course, we spend more than anyone else and we don't generally have a system that we can be proud of. The money pit for healthcare is in end-of-life care. Something like 70 to 80% of all dollars are spent there. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars we can and do spend on everyone in their last 2 years of life to make them more comfortable. But human life is finite, and it is senseless for a society to want to devote an inordinate amount of resources for a shot at buying a year or two of hospital bound life. If it's a personal choice to spend personal funds to make your mother a little more comfortable in her last year of terminal cancer, by all means, you should do your duty. But when politician tell us we can all have unlimited treatments and tests for our dying parents for free in order to win our votes, they are preying on our selfishness, our desire to get something for nothing and our short sighted stupidity. Someone will pay for all of this, and that someone is our children. Society has limited resources, and if we want the state to write unlimited and uncapped checks to our dying, then we shouldn't be surprised if we have to sell IOUs abroad that eventually will be cashed in at our children's expense. The voting population needs to be educated on the real picture to avoid being hoodwinked by politicians trying to sell us pipe dreams. This is a slow process, but I am optimistic that over enough time, through a broken and expensive system and huge tax bills, that people will eventually see the light.
There are definately things in the USA that is disadvantage to the poor compared to the poor in other rich countries. - Long distance travels: Distance to work in the US is way above average to other countries. Poor need to travel longer, are thus more tired, and spend more time traveling. This time could better be used to work more. Reason being the spread out buildings and street planning. If you've ever been to Europe you will know what I mean. I think low gasoline prices played a role in this. - Regional funding. better neighbourhoods get more funding. In so called socialist countries worser neighbourhoods get better funding. This means the poor have it better there. The regional funding leads to ghettos which are very prevalent in the US. You'll have a situation for example where the area's where cops are needed the most have the least cops because they can't afford to hire more. -Superstore consolidations. you have these huge superstores like walmart open 24/7, and the only people that can shop there are people with a car. Then you have the small grocery store on the corner is is cheaper to get to but more expensive items. Not everybody can afford a car. If superstores didn't exist, you'd have a better spread of stores, which would compete better. -Expensive health insurance. Because of privatization this is a clear disadvantage. There is no social backup plan in the US, this leads to incredibly overcompensated malpractice suits and high costs for the medical industry. It might just be cheaper for the government to subsidize healthcare, but then the lawyers be out of work. - 30 year old banking system. The banking system in the US is hopelessly obsolete. $30 for bank wires that take 7+ days to process? In other rich countries wires are FREE and instant (electronic). But then again this is the business model for most banks. Fat margins, low quality. There doesn't seem to be any competition. All in all the poor in the US have it much worse than the poor in socialist countries. Land of dreams my ass