My dad isn't a doctor but he came up from 3rd world poverty and illiterate parents too. That's neither here nor there. You don't deserve any props for what your pios did.
I didn't ask for any
Yet strangely there are plenty of people whose parents taught them the value of education who never make it out of environment. The most important things your parents did for you is provide you resources from their 6 figure salary and send you to a good private school so you would be set up for success homie. If you think otherwise, you're oblivious.
I went to that school basically tuition free... there were a lot of kids at my high school who came from much poorer backgrounds than me who also went on scholarships
And my college was completely tuition free for everyone who got in... plus I paid for my other college shyt by working
I was paraphrasing something you said on sohh. You said something about how there's no excuse for anybody to be poor in the same thread where you said your dad was a doctor. I remember reading it like
One,
, two, whyd you wait till now to talk about it???
Your "good advice" is irrelevant. No one's listening to you and a lot of it doesn't even apply to anyone's situation. We're talking about controlling the national debt and you started talking about Americans eating x number of calories over the recommended intake.
Like Ms. Jones who just finished busting her ass for 10 hours, lives in a food desert and has to come home to kids is gonna be like "Lemme not pick up this fast good because I may place a burden om future healthcare costs.
Dude I work too. I was doing 12 hour shifts for months on end. And I lived in "food deserts". Even there you can still get frozen veggies.
And if the foods she is feeding her kids are making them obese and giving them shyt like diabetes, dealing with those sicknesses affects her current bottom line. So the idea that the benefits of healthy living are abstract is ridiculous.
The problem with your paternalistic brow-beatings demanding "personal responsibility" is who is AGAINST personal responsibility? Nobody's arguing that dropping out school and selling drugs is a good look. But people are generally conditioned by their environment to be who they are at a very young age for one, and there are structural hindrances that can't always be surmounted by "personal responsibility." It's a bit of a contradiction because you guys are always talking about there being a problem of bad culture that amplifies poverty and bad living habits and I definitely agree with a lot of that. But if we accept that, then we also have to accept that people are acculturated to those norms when raised within it.
Which I don't disagree with, mostly. But again, people still make it out of those conditions. People within those conditions still have some level of choice + control. So while they have a cultural setback that shouldn't be a free pass to fukk up and have everyone else cover for you.
Read a sociology book and study some psychology. The description Frantz Fanon gave of the underclasses all over the world in his travels back in the 60's is a strikingly accurate depiction of poor people in America today. Either poor people are just lazy, immoral and shiftless by nature or it's more complex than that.
You are assigning points + ideas to me that I never presented. I have NEVER said poverty is a result of nothing more than laziness or immorality.
Upward mobility in the U. S. today is worse than it is in Europe. It's harder than almost ever in this country to move into a higher social standing. To many people whether it be innercity Detroit, rural Kentucky, or some almost 3rd world status small town in Illinois these Horatio Alger pep talks just don't connect because people are getting hours cut, working for substandard wages, stressed, chronically sick or in need of access to mental health, going to shytty schools, surrounded by criminality and just trying to survive.
I am not + have never knocked people for being victims of systematic failures bruh... to try and paint my views or paint the US problems so simplistically is dishonest
Perhaps we need to focus on solutions for quality healthcare access, decent jobs and job training improving education, fixing a justice system that is based around warehousing people in prisons for private profits instead of giving fatherly lectures to least advantaged among us.
I don't disagree with any of this, I am pretty sure in this very thread I suggested that the govt + upper class need to invest more into the middle class... not by redistributing property... but by helping the middle class to be competitive and self sufficient again
I would bet everything in my bank account and my left testical that my wife's tragedy to triumph story trumps your wife's by a country mile. She could write a book about her life, but she's too humble to do do.
You said a lot of the shyt I "preach" would not be applicable to me had I not been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I presented
two examples of people born to less than ideal situations who made it, now you move the goalposts and say those stories don't have enough struggle for you.
But that's not relevant nor are any of these anecdotal stories that only serve to display hubris and try to prove superiority to these.
Then why bring it up at all?????
And why is that. Are poor Americans just inherently lazy bums?
No, and thats not even close to what I said there.
Ask what? Your pops was a doctor! It doesn't matter if your friends were from the hood. Even if he made bad financial moves at the end of the day he brought home a doctor's salary and you went to a good private school and were well taken care of. My only point was you never had poor people problems, and if your came up in a less privileged background, say a single mother, no father and bunch of uncles and cousins who were in and out of jail in the projects your outcome probably would've been a lot different. I know mine probably would and I was middle class and parents combined didn't make near what your father alone mafe.
By this goofy ass logic, since you grew up middle class you have no authority to speak on the poor either, despite your wife's untellable story and the authority you claim on the subject of poverty...
See how that works?????????
Like I said countless times before, the govt is fukking up and shortchanging people. To a much lesser degree so are companies. But there are a lot of choices many Americans- including poor ones- are making that don't help. There is
no reason for us to have an obesity epidemic... especially an epidemic that grows in intensity as you go down the socioeconomic ladder
. If you don't think that directly impacts people's pockets I don't know what to tell you. There is
no reason for the average American home to grow in size and price, considering household sizes have been shrinking and median household incomes have been stagnant for decades. If you don't think a bigger house, with higher purchasing and operating costs doesn't impact people's pockets, I don't know what to tell you.
Not to mention, you keep jumping back and forth between the middle class and the poor. I'm talking about the whole country, which includes the middle class. There will always be poor people, and we have to do what we have to to help them, but the real danger is in the decline of the middle class
Ive gone over this a thousand times so I will just quote myself
if we are going to talk about this... we have to talk about all of it honestly... I don't deny there is an income gap problem and that there are some systematic failures... but that is far from all there is to it.
Americans have changed their habits in ways that work against our wealth and health
But corporations have also worked to siphon growth and income increases to the top
People who don't want to look at both sides or dive into the nuances and intricacies have their minds made up and want to convince everyone to think like them... not have an exchange of ideas
Nobody is forcing consumers to take on the debt. Yes higher housing + healthcare + higher education costs are
a part of it. But there is still an element of bad decision making in all those realms and generally with consumer spending. If you don't think people's spending habits have an effect on their saving rates
Etc etc
People only want to talk about the angles of the problem that appeal to their biases and anger
Thats the biggest roadblock in American political discourse. You can't solve a whole problem by only addressing a piece of it... which is exactly what you are doing to try to paint me as some privileged apathetic plutocrat. You don't want to talk about the points I bring up so you just want to take me out of the discussion
some 
