If we had a small percentage of our best and brightest working on getting our poorest workers access to the most basic forms of fintech, this would not have happened.
Our poorest workers wouldn't be our poorest workers if they didn't lack "access to the most basic forms of fintech". They are poor because they are exploited: by "businesspeople" who can't pay the daily maintenance costs of their own workers and rely on public subsidies to make up the difference, by banks and payday lenders who scrape fees and interest off meager paychecks, by politicians who misdirect their outrage at college graduates.
It's expensive to be poor in the US. And, unless you've been poor, it can be hard to empathize with because poor problems are largely solved by having more money.
Example: people who receive their paycheck on, effectively, a visa gift card need to pay relatively high fees in order to access that money. A solution would be to suggest a bank account, but those are also expensive when you're poor as banks often make a healthy chunk of profit from fees that hit poor people the most.
Practically every solution to this problem is some variation on, "just [have more money]." Which is why these people still face exploitation in the wealthiest country in the world.
Not literally a Visa gift card. The reason I say, "effectively, a visa gift card" is because they are functionally the same and people here understand how annoying they are to use.
And it's very common for people without bank accounts to get their paychecks on a Visa Payroll Card (or similar). It's a good way for companies to offload the cost of accounting onto the employee.
> It's expensive to be poor in the US. And, unless you've been poor, it can be hard to empathize with because poor problems are largely solved by having more money.
This is a great summary of the major issue with being poor. I know people who live in Italy and Denmark who take home about the same percentage below the poverty line there that I did when I was quite poor. They always had food on the table, always had medical care, and didn't miss rent payments. We just cut poor people loose here.
They’re exploited by voters who keep voting against taxpayer funded social safety nets.
The unemployment systems don’t work because the voters intentionally vote for politicians that don’t want them to work. Out of ire against those that receive benefits.
The media industry makes it extremely difficult to reach useful information and verify it’s integrity.
Sure, you can find a bunch of journalist blogs online through Reddit and Twitter, but which do you trust? That takes a lot of work, so most working people end up accepting the mainstream corporate news, which conveniently does not offer the information working people need.
I’m not willing to give people that benefit of the doubt. There is a very large portion of US voters that philosophically do not believe in helping others outside their tribe, and will punish politicians for any broad measure to assist the bottom rungs in any meaningful way.
They will support certain charities, support extremely means tested and convoluted benefits, but they know any real help will increase their taxes and result in wealth redistribution, so they will vote against it no matter what.
Easy proof is the complete lack of parental support, or the laughably outdated minimum wage.
The funny thing is that from what I can observe, most of the opposition to social safety net benefits comes from people who barely have any wealth that could be redistributed from them anyway. They just don’t like the idea of other tribes getting help!
... are they? The US has great upwards mobility. Yes, some people are privileged and some are disadvantaged, but the worst disadvantages are generally not enough to deter our best and brightest.
Even aside from the economic fallout which on its own keeps me up at night, I'm really terrified of the social consequences of this. The United States by and large is not a very compassionate society to begin with, and our hatred for the poor and unemployed is among the highest in the world.
It was already bad enough in normal conditions, but when our collective fury is unleashed on 20something million people, and likely more before this is all said and done, I'm afraid of what the short-term and long-term effects are going to be. I'm afraid to even speculate on this.
I think it’s important to distinguish between what the American people want and what the system produces. The majority of Americans support policies that would make a more compassionate society.[1] But these policies don’t get traction or passed due to a corrupt system that fails to represent people.
[1] E.g. the latest Medicare for All poll shows overall 69% of Americans support it, rising to 88% of Dems support it. So overall the population wants it yet it doesn’t happen. You also see similar disconnect between what people support and what we have with other policies that would make American society more compassionate one. (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/25/poll-shows-near...)
>E.g. the latest Medicare for All poll shows overall 69% of Americans support it, rising to 88% of Dems support it. So overall the population wants it yet it doesn’t happen.
It's important to note that, with the Democratic primary having wound down, most of these 88% of Dems seem to have voted for an imagined version of Joe Biden who was, at the least, not explicitly against Medicare For All.
Right. It’s pretty unbelievable and very sad that the media has been able to somehow convince so many Americans that Joe Biden is some kind of New Deal Democrat. He was a pioneer of the policies we now know as actually existing neoliberalism.
Yet again, it is even more obvious than before that the United States is an oligarchy without exception.
The suffering will continue until older cohorts age out and younger cohorts grow as a majority, supporting progressive policies, along with the passing of existing elderly incumbent politicians who aren't "on board" (neither Biden nor Pelosi support Medicare For All, but they're also 77 and 80 years old respectively).
I agree that there's a large partisan and ideological gap between the young and old, but people have been predicting the "aging in" of a new, more progressive electorate for about as long as I can remember. It never seems to actually happen.
Shifting politics takes time, a glacial pace. Lots of progress so far (LGBTQ+ rights, marijuana legalization state by state, minimum wage increases, restoring voting rights to felons), just have to keep applying pressure. Lots of work left to be done. See you on the campaign trail.
The US population is generally considered one of the most generous in the world whether you consider the amounts given to charity as a percentage of GDP or time spent volunteering to help others:
>...The United States is often considered the most generous country in the world. Why? Because Americans donate a lot of money. Its people, its foundations and its companies donated roughly $410 billion in 2017 -- or about 2.1% of its own GDP. In fact, the amount Americans donated was more than the entire GDP of all but about 40 countries in the world.
>You could argue that Americans can simply afford to be more generous. And that if people in other countries could give more, they would.
>But what if instead of looking at how much people give, we looked at how many people in a country are giving? And what if we looked at more than money -- and also counted people who volunteer their time and help strangers?
>Gallup does just that -- every year -- in more than 140 countries.
>In our latest survey, the United States isn't at the very top of this list. We find that the most generous countries by these metrics are Indonesia and Australia -- followed closely by the United States and New Zealand.
To be quite honest I wasn't expecting data like this. America is a big place, and it's entirely possible either I was wrong or I grew up in a tightwad part of the country.
As far as opinions toward the unemployed, my google-fu is too weak to find hard data, as current headlines are saturated with the millions of suddenly "not necessary" people losing their jobs, so all I got for you is anecdata. I'm from the Rust Belt, a part of the country that's largely abandoned by Capital, where 30 years ago it was much easier to find a job then than now.
Between your data and jobs now deemed essential which were previously held in contempt (gas station attendants, grocery store workers, etc.) my outlook has become slightly more rosy.
> The United States by and large is not a very compassionate society to begin with, and our hatred for the poor and unemployed is among the highest in the world.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 66.4 ms ] threadExample: people who receive their paycheck on, effectively, a visa gift card need to pay relatively high fees in order to access that money. A solution would be to suggest a bank account, but those are also expensive when you're poor as banks often make a healthy chunk of profit from fees that hit poor people the most.
Practically every solution to this problem is some variation on, "just [have more money]." Which is why these people still face exploitation in the wealthiest country in the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/as-pay-cards-rep...
And it's very common for people without bank accounts to get their paychecks on a Visa Payroll Card (or similar). It's a good way for companies to offload the cost of accounting onto the employee.
This is a great summary of the major issue with being poor. I know people who live in Italy and Denmark who take home about the same percentage below the poverty line there that I did when I was quite poor. They always had food on the table, always had medical care, and didn't miss rent payments. We just cut poor people loose here.
The unemployment systems don’t work because the voters intentionally vote for politicians that don’t want them to work. Out of ire against those that receive benefits.
Sure, you can find a bunch of journalist blogs online through Reddit and Twitter, but which do you trust? That takes a lot of work, so most working people end up accepting the mainstream corporate news, which conveniently does not offer the information working people need.
They will support certain charities, support extremely means tested and convoluted benefits, but they know any real help will increase their taxes and result in wealth redistribution, so they will vote against it no matter what.
Easy proof is the complete lack of parental support, or the laughably outdated minimum wage.
The funny thing is that from what I can observe, most of the opposition to social safety net benefits comes from people who barely have any wealth that could be redistributed from them anyway. They just don’t like the idea of other tribes getting help!
US upward mobility is certainly not the best in the world, and perception of it outweighs reality by a wide margin.
Do you honestly believe that people are poor because they are stupid?
It was already bad enough in normal conditions, but when our collective fury is unleashed on 20something million people, and likely more before this is all said and done, I'm afraid of what the short-term and long-term effects are going to be. I'm afraid to even speculate on this.
[1] E.g. the latest Medicare for All poll shows overall 69% of Americans support it, rising to 88% of Dems support it. So overall the population wants it yet it doesn’t happen. You also see similar disconnect between what people support and what we have with other policies that would make American society more compassionate one. (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/25/poll-shows-near...)
It's important to note that, with the Democratic primary having wound down, most of these 88% of Dems seem to have voted for an imagined version of Joe Biden who was, at the least, not explicitly against Medicare For All.
Yet again, it is even more obvious than before that the United States is an oligarchy without exception.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/20/a-wider-par... (A wider partisan and ideological gap between younger, older generations)
eg: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/2020-republicans-doo...
>...The United States is often considered the most generous country in the world. Why? Because Americans donate a lot of money. Its people, its foundations and its companies donated roughly $410 billion in 2017 -- or about 2.1% of its own GDP. In fact, the amount Americans donated was more than the entire GDP of all but about 40 countries in the world.
>You could argue that Americans can simply afford to be more generous. And that if people in other countries could give more, they would.
>But what if instead of looking at how much people give, we looked at how many people in a country are giving? And what if we looked at more than money -- and also counted people who volunteer their time and help strangers?
>Gallup does just that -- every year -- in more than 140 countries.
>In our latest survey, the United States isn't at the very top of this list. We find that the most generous countries by these metrics are Indonesia and Australia -- followed closely by the United States and New Zealand.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/245192/generous-count...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
As far as opinions toward the unemployed, my google-fu is too weak to find hard data, as current headlines are saturated with the millions of suddenly "not necessary" people losing their jobs, so all I got for you is anecdata. I'm from the Rust Belt, a part of the country that's largely abandoned by Capital, where 30 years ago it was much easier to find a job then than now.
Between your data and jobs now deemed essential which were previously held in contempt (gas station attendants, grocery store workers, etc.) my outlook has become slightly more rosy.
Source?