Me and a group of friends were having a discussion about class status and the wealth of people in this country. Well a married couple in the group stated that they believe there should be no Medicaid, Food Stamps, or other kinds of aid to help the poorer people in the country. They believe that everybody should be able to pull themselves up alone with no assistance at all. Now this couple, the male's father is a heart surgeon who has bought this couple's house so they have no house payment and got his son a $45,000/year job, which is GREAT in this area, with only a high school education. I would have more respect for their position if this was not the case. I argued that it is an impossible and unrealistic idea. If there were no poor people and only middle class and above then prices, the cost of living, and everything else would skyrocket causing this middle class to in essence become the lower class who actually need aid to live in such a world. I said there is no country in history where there was not a lower class of society. I said I am not totally sure but I think even communism works this way, where there are some who have it better than others no matter what. We stopped arguing though because we felt maybe we should not mix friendship and politics. So that is why I am bringing this to the board because I am not totally sure if my position was right because we never discussed it further. What do you guys think?
I think you are right. But in the US and many developed countries, the cost of living has skyrocketed, and people get along fine. But I dont think you can ever get rid of lower classes. It's possible, but very difficult. It has less to do with economic opportunity than the culture of poverty, IMO.
impossible, there will always be social/economic classes. unless you get communist utopia, which will never happen. doesn't matter how much money people make, there will always be differences. those make more, will always be in the upper class. those that make less, will always be in the bottom.
In free societies, there will almost all the time be the 10% rule, where that %age holds most of the wealth. Plus, educated people probably don't have the patience to do menial labor. That doesn't mean helping the poor goes against nature. But some ideals are best left as dreams. As long as resources and time are limited, there will be haves and have nots. The important part is how we treat and approach the differences instead of trying to get rid of them.
Reality is that the US is and has been stratifying into one big super-rich class and one big giant underclass in relative terms.
I'm still trying to figure out how a surgeon would allow his son to only complete high school with no further education. Doctors spend like 15 years in some sort of schooling or training to become a full fledged doctor.
Part of the reason why many people look like they lead luxurious lives is because most Americans live well beyond their means. Most of these people are heavily in debt and have no actual savings. The negative savings rate in this country is a huge problem no one really likes to talk about.
there will always be a lower class because there are always going to be social disorders and rebellion against education. aka - the ghetto(be it black, white, mexican OR asian)
You can't hold your kid's hand and make him/her finish college. You can't push them unless they are willing to be pushed. And if you give them life on a silver platter, which is what has happened with Lil Pun's friend, the doctor's son, don't expect them to hand the platter back. This will, most likely, catch up with the kid someday. The parents will be dead or sick or old. The money will run out, going for their old age. They'll have to sell the big house. Unless this kid, the friend, is very lucky, and a trust fund he can't screw up is there for him, or his family has serious money, and I doubt there are that many people with serious money where Lil Pun lives (no offense meant, Lil Pun... aren't you from Arkansas? ), he'll be sitting down sometime in the future, responsibilities weighing around his neck, trying to scratch out a living, and trying to remember what it was like when he had well to do parents, and he could make such idiotic statements about the people of this country. In my opinion. Or maybe the chick's family has money and good sense, or she does. Kind of depressing, when you think of it that way. Life has a way of catching up with you. I think I mentioned that. D&D. Attempt to Keep it Civil! Impeach Bush.
Not really, because the gigantic underclass are largely still quite well off, especially when looked at from a global point of view, while the super-rich don't really negatively impact everyone else, and in most cases are very positive influences. It doesn't hurt you that Bill Gates has double digit billions. If he doubled or lost all of his money tomorrow, the effects on your life would be minimal. It isn't like prices of common goods are adjusted to his earning level. There is always going to be a lot of hemming and hawing from the Democrats about the stratification of wealth, or the two Americas, or whatever name they want to put on it, because their platform is class war. They want you to be mad at the wealthy so you will vote for the party that is going to raise taxes on the wealthy only. In the end, stratification of wealth is meaningless. The only thing that really matters is how far your paycheck goes. If you can buy the same stuff with the same job now that you could 10 years ago, then you are in no worse a position, even if some other guy has opened the gap between him and you 100 fold.
Actually the city I live in has one of the highest wealth per capita rates in the country or something like that. I wish I could find the article that showed this but the local newspapaer does not keep archives online.
I guess I just misinterpreted what you posted first. I thought you were saying the U.S. is headed toward a society where there is nothing but rich and poor people with no middle ground but it does not look like that is what you said or maybe it is. I'm confused.
I see this every day as part of my job working for the jewelry/diamond industry, in some way or another. I can think of 20 good examples to support this, just in the global diamond trade. "I'd love to help you in your class warfare, but I can't afford to quit my job." But seriously, I agree with the poster formerly known as Hydra about what constitutes a measure of an economy's health. My paycheck does buy much less than it used to, everything seems to cost more, and pay is less for new jobs than what it used to be, unless I want to move to the Central London or Dubai or something. Meanwhile, jewelers in non-affluent areas in the US are going out of business, India complains that the rupee is too high vs. the dollar to sell jewelry at any profit , while 3 carat + diamonds have an all time high demand and Tiffany's announces opening a new store like every week, and Russia is talking about bringing back the Faberge brand. There will always be poor people, but I think the middle class as we know it is eroding. Uneducated jerks who get free houses from Daddy and look down upon working people as "lazy" because they can't afford one are indeed part of the problem.
The Republican platform is most definitely class warfare. The problem is that Republicans complain about class warfare as it pertains to the protection of the wealthy via taxes instead of how it pertains to the protection of the middle and lower class through outsourcing, government privatization, and free trade agreements. There is no question that Republican policies are destroying the middle class but by all means let's continue to hear about the redistribution of wealth like nobody is paying attention to what's actually happening in this country.
This masochism is amusing but demonstrably wrong - in an empirical sense. You sound like the Chinese posters do when they argue against democracy.
Sam, I rarely make serious posts, but there's a new irony you brought to the thread. Financially unregulated democracy (i.e. no real campaign finance laws) married to unregulated capitalism will always, IMHO, devolve to the situation decried in this thread. I mean, of course the class divide is growing: that's the only possible outcome of the system we have in place. So I wonder if the not-quite-down-with-Merica Chinese posters are lurking here and giggling like school girls in the midst of a 17-yr-old video-game hero.
That is what guys like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Mike Bloomberg are telling us. Money = influence = power. "Having super rich overlords like Bill Gates is great, because they do a lot of benevolent things for society, like warn us about the danger of having super rich overlords!"
