Poverty in America gets worse everyday

I see this video, and realize that the whole country looks like this, even the very town I live in, just a huge slum filled with homeless people, and people living in severely dilapidated houses.

There are even a large number of homeless kids who live in my town, and even a couple people who live in the parking lots of grocery stores that I see everyday.

America is an empire that is rotting from the inside out.

But stocks have more value than ever and companies are sitting on record amounts of cash so it's all good, bro.

Aww dude, right? I totally forgot about the stock market!

Your average American.

We're getting new residents from other states, usually from the East Coast.

https://www.dcourier.com/news/2017/dec/25/arizona-population-growth-5th-highest-nation/

"Only Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Washington grew faster. Florida’s growth rate matched Arizona."

Yeah I am in my mid-30's and have been saving my money; it's in various places, but I did a count the other day and it's not a lot...but it is so so much more than the average people my age. I went to my 401k account website where they have all this info, like "are you on track?" and "how are you rated relative to your peers?" and no, I am not on track, but I am 257% better than people in my age group. That says a lot about my demographic; we work the hardest and longest, yet we make less than anyone yet.

And yet despite saving more, I will never be able to afford a house on my own, can't afford to travel a lot, and so forth. No wonder people my age don't save, and spend it on drugs and junk; what's the point of saving if you can't buy the big-picture shit?

I live in California, and we have some crappy spots don't get me wrong, but I fear the day that the rot of the midwest and south reaches the West Coast. And it will happen. San Francisco was expensive 10-20 years ago, but now we have people making six figures fleeing the city, buying up places outside of it, driving up prices in my area which five years ago were affordable. We're talking 600k for two bedroom homes.

The BBC generally does far more accurate reporting on what's actually going on in America than our own news organizations.

Fox, MSNBC, and CNN rarely talk about the poverty and massive inequality in this country. BBC has no horse in this race, so they will tell it how it is.

Who is in charge of the slums? I bet it is a Democrat.

Americans do not know what poverty is. Come on now.

So what is poverty to you? Instead of living in collapsing rat infested buildings they need to be living in mud huts to be considered living in poverty?

yeah didn't Trump do pretty well amongst poor people? The voted for someone who makes their life harder. And why? So other poor people they don't like get even less?

@n64dd: If you truly believe poverty doesn't exist in the US and aren't merely trolling, than you live in a bubble.

Get out there and volunteer some assistance to the poor. Help at a food kitchen or serve people living in tents in December.

Poor people in America are taught to hate and blame other poor people instead of the people who are really responsible for poverty (the rich, politicians, banks, and corporations). This is by design. If they woke up to what was really going on, there would be a revolution.

I'm baffeled this works. I thought even poor people in the Ghettos tend to have access to the Internet? How hard can it be to find out that your enemy isn't the guy who shares his 0.1% with you, but the guy who has 99.9%

Yes.

Poverty typically stems from people making poor decisions. I'm not ignorant, because I know that sometimes there are circumstances that are out of someones control. However, according to the Brookings Institute (which is a left leaning organization), you can avoid poverty by doing these three simple things:

"1. Graduating from high school.

2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.

3. Having a full-time job.

If you do all those three things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class."

The problem is that many people do not follow these rules and they end up in poverty where they blame other people for their problems. In America, single motherhood is stupidly glorified. In the African American community the single motherhood rate is over 70% which is quite ridiculous. In America, there is tons of economic mobility, but people often don't follow the rules and are not responsible enough.

lol at quoting spam from a right wing think tank. The US is one of the least upwardly mobile countries in the developed world. We have a whole system that is designed to keep people in poverty. Then we blame people because they can't get out of it.

Want to end poverty? A livable minimum wage, fairer hiring practices, free or cheap higher education, and universal healthcare would be a good start. Or we could keep blaming poor people for being poor. Because that's working so well.

Maybe if we just blame and shame them hard enough, they'll decide to stop being poor.

Maybe if people actually got jobs instead of putting out their hand, expecting the world we wouldn't be in this mess.

You really are human garbage aren't you? I pray to god that you lose your job and end up homeless. It's what you deserve. Maybe then you'd learn empathy for your fellow man. But I doubt it. I think you're just a sociopath who is broken inside on a deep level. The problem is we have too many of you in our society.

Flagged as well. I'm allowed to have an opinion, just like you're hostile opinion you have.

So what made you a sociopath? Did you get dropped on your head, or were you just born evil? Enjoy torturing animals when you were growing up? Society used to shame people like you. Now we live in a very sick country that celebrates your type.

Also lol at you crying like a baby to the mods when I point at what you are: sociopathic scum incapable of empathy

1 - There are multiple fortune 500's with deals with the federal government that state that X% of their new hires will be minorities and military vets for the next few decades. Multiple states had affirmative action until the past few years, millions of students from low income families receive grants that allow them to go to college. I know this because I'm a minority that has been positively impacted by everything I just mentioned. And on the other hand I have many white friends who are in their mid 30's and are yet to catch their break. How is that fair?

2 - Universal Healthcare WILL NOT work in a country as big as the U.S. Look at the impact the Affordable Health Care Act had on the poor. I have friends and family who had their tax returns garnished because they didn't get health care (couldn't afford it) and couldn't afford the penalty. So they had their tax return, something they rely on to live, taken away. Or they owed thousands of dollars that they didn't have... Thanks?

3 - The Affordable Care Act had a negative impact on the medical industry as well. To pay for the coverage, hospitals lost reimbursements, medical device manufacturers were faced with new taxes and regulations, hospitals were forced to purchase newly regulated equipment to meet a manufactured new standard etc. Tens of thousands of healthcare professionals lost their job the past few years. Again, like the hiring practices and education examples, I have witnessed all of this first hand.

4 - What evidence do we have that shows welfare spending or minimum wage increases have had a positive impact on anything? Every President, no matter the party, has increased welfare spending. And when the minimum wage goes up, BOOM, the cost of everything else goes up as well. The Left has you tricked into thinking they are doing you a favor, when in reality it's making things worse. Instead of addressing the problems, the left just puts bandaids on everything. I understand why that seems more appealing that what the soulless asshats on the right are trying to do, but it fixes nothing. It just punts the problem down to the next guy/gal.

People have their heads in the clouds and think the government can just snap their fingers and give things away for free. The National debt is over $20 trillion dollars. At some point this is gonna have to be addressed or the whole system will come crashing down. Think you have it bad now? Wait to see what that looks like.

You make some good points but as you have seen by a certain person in this discussion being "poor" is the fault of the rich, the politicians, banks, corporations, etc.., An individual doesn't need any of those four to tell them good choice need to be made. Applying yourself in school and wearing a rubber is common sense.

@goldenelementxl: how does the size of a country change whether universal healthcare is viable or not? And why are you using the alleged failures of something that isn't even remotely similar to universal healthcare to argue against it?

The amount of resources available is greatly impacted by the more people who need them.

I do soup kitchens twice a month in Detroit.

It was a bad and lazy argument on my part. I shouldn't have said "universal healthcare" and gone on to talk about obamacare. I wasn't totally paying attention to what I was typing in that bullet point. One day when I have time to argue the per capita population, current economic climate, tax structure and the effect it will all have on Universal Healthcare, I will. Long story short, everything will have to be restructured. ESPECIALLY defense spending.

Are you saying we shouldn't have an army?

I'm a Air Force vet so I'm not saying that at all. But the U.S. spent $618 billion on the military last year. And seeing the waste and abuse first hand while I was in, I can tell you it's completely asinine. And if this country is ever going to get serious about the deficit, the defense spending will need to be addressed. We could cut the budget in half and STILL spend nearly triple what China, the second highest defense spender does.

@n64dd: Good, then you are aware that some people in this country can't afford to feed themselves.

@Solaryellow: which is negated by the fact that America has more tax payers and resources than smaller countries.

What the hell does that have to do with not having enough doctors, emergency rooms and hospital beds.....which would collapse under an even heavier load of patients than we have now?

@Solaryellow: reduced costs of running the healthcare system means that more doctors can be hired, and a healthier population won't need to take up as much hospital time. Preventive healthcare works a lot better than waiting until it's an emergency and rushing them into surgery at the tax payers expense.

With or without insurance people will still need to go to a hospital, a universal healthcare system makes it far cheaper for everyone when they do.

Also none of what you just said had anything to do with the size of the country. A country could only have 100 people and still have a shortage of doctors.

More people will use a service when it is "free."

Not often does someone arguing against you make your point but you did. If a low populated nation has shortages, what do you think happens when that number changes to hundreds of millions? We have shortages right now.

@Solaryellow: people use hospitals when they're sick.

The shortages has nothing to do with the size of the country. It's all about proportion. The EU is far larger than the US yet every country in that has a universal healthcare system which is open to citizens of other member countries, and they function far better than America's current system.

best to ignore the trolls

That is funny and nice spin you have going there.

Poverty is not getting worse, it's just becoming more visible since jobs are moving areas.

Also interesting that BBC does not show that the unemployment rate in america is lower than in the UK.

People do use hospitals when they are ill but they also use hospitals for other reasons. Some use it as a replacement for a PCP and others go there even when they do not require medical attention. You must be aware of the abuse these places suffer, right? The logistics of making universal healthcare a viable and successful replacement is immense. What reasons do you have for believing it would work? Doctors, nurses, facilities, etc..., won't appear over night. Hypothetically, if UHC went into effect 01/01/19, do you feel it would be easier to obtain medical attention?

Yeah, but just because it's common sense, doesn't mean people follow it. Across the board, if you look at people in poverty they almost always aren't following these simple rules. Poverty is actually a very simple problem with an equally simple remedy. We should be promoting how important it is to graduate from high school, how important it is to wait until you are married to have children, and how important it is to have a full time job, but unfortunately we don't promote any of these concepts particularly well. It isn't limited to race either; no matter if you are white, black or whatever, people in poverty share similar statistics i.e. dropping out from high school, having kids before marriage (being a single parent) or not having a job. Poverty really seems to be a cultural issue and instead of playing the victim card, people in poverty need to take responsibility for their choices. It all boils down to responsibility which is why most people in poverty aren't responsible. Again, it doesn't help when social welfare promotes these kinds of bad decisions and it also doesn't help when single motherhood is glorified.

Of course people don't follow basic sense but that does not shift the blame on the banks, rich, politicians and corporations. I agree we should be promoting the importance of these philosophies rather than encouraging the continuation of such bad behavior. There is zero sense and motivation when you reward such poor lifestyle choices.

This is asinine.

The difference between poverty and wealth isn't behavioral. Rich people love narcotics way to much for this claim to be credible. The difference looks something closer to: When a rich person causes a company to fold all the industrious poor people ask their friends to help them find a job. One of their poor friend helps them out by getting them hired on at a place where poor people work. They will likely be expected to put in a lot of overtime as a new hire, but they will still be poor. Even if they have no student debt or children.

Worst case there is always some service industry job paying ~20k a year.

On the other hand when a rich person goes through the exact same process, even if they are the cause of the company's failure, they are asking their rich friends to help them find work. Thus they get hired on at a place rich people work. It doesn't really matter if they have four kids, they are the nanny's problem, who trusts their kids to company care? Maybe they have to tough it out making six figures a year for a while, but they can cut back on luxuries, like contributing to their retirement portfolio.

Worst case they have to take some shameful middle class gig for a while.

Maybe we should stop wasting money on failed anti-poverty programs. It's no surprise that poverty went up with LBJs great society failure.

actually that is good. People are in poverty mostly because of bad life decisions.

Everyone is leaving the overtaxed blue states.

Considering the economy is at it's best in decades I'll take it.

Works pretty great in Sweden and Canada. People don't go just because it's free, people go when they need to.

So then who is to blame for the poverty featured in the video?

lol

whose alt is this?

Funnily enough, he's still comes off more intelligent than Jacanuk, solaryellow, and mighty-lu-bu.