It's the Wack-A-Mole liberal way of thinking.

Add one more: stay out of jail.

A criminal record increases your chances of living in poverty by a factor of 10.

And if you are female and don't have children until you are 25+ and married, the probability approaches zero.

Poverty is a choice, not a fate.

I don't think I can make a blanket statement blaming the poor for being poor, but based on some of the "chronically" poor where I grew up, bad choices are to blame for remaining poor for several generations. I don't think the poor necessarily choose to be poor initially, but I think a large percentage of the poor in this day in age choose to remain poor because it's easier than working their way out of poverty.

"...and nobody in their right mind is gonna give a 20-year mortgage to a 19-year-old"

You're right. Mine was a 30-year note.

Jay, where do you come up with this stuff?

Mark,

I will wait to call you a liar until after you give details on how a 19-year-old gets approved for a mortgage.

Short of being a trustfund baby, no bank I ever worked for would EVER extend a note to a 19 y/o, unless you lived in Miami and were a drug dealer (sorry, inside joke}.

"Poverty is a choice, not a fate."

This is a minor quibble, for sure, but I think it's inaccurate to say that poverty is a choice; it could be better and more hopefully stated by simply saying "Poverty is not a fate." I don't believe any one chooses to be poor; perhaps they are born into poverty or a third world country and that is not a choice. By that same line of reasoniong, no one chooses to be rich at birth, either.

Yes, by choice, be they poor choices or laziness or whatever, people can remain poor, so I really agree with your statement in that respect, Kobeclan. And I'm pretty sure that's what you mean. I just think some people will miscontrue the larger meaning of your statement, even though it's pretty much spot on!

LOL. I think Mark was, ahem, born into riches. But not by choice, more by fate.

KC: I agree. I'd like to meet his, er, bank loan officer.

Peter F.,

Appreciate your point.

Let's narrow my statement to say that no American need live in poverty. Someone born into poverty in a country like Brazil will probably die poor through no fault of their own. Ditto countless other countries.

Millions of Americans, including myself, have proven that "The American Dream" is alive and well. In my case, my immigrant grandparents wanted their children to have a better life than they, and my parents also wanted their children (me include) to have a better life.

Its no coincidence that children with intact nuclear families have a much lower rate of poverty than children born into single parent families.

Lets add a 6th rule to avoid poverty, be born to parents who are married.

There are plenty of banks in the UK who will give a mortgage to a 19 yr old, as long as he's in FT employment & has been for more than a year. It's a win win situation for the bank, they either get paid every month, or they forclose & get a stash of cash through increased equity. Of course UK house prices have increased exponentially for decades.

I think there are different types of "poor". The non-working classes do tend to piss me off - I came from there & I got out, so I get to be completely intolerant. But the ones that work & can not "get out" of their rut for a number of good reasons make me angry with society.

Having said that, I followed all your rules scruplously & I'm still officially below the poverty line, although actually I do not class myself as poor - I know what that word really means.

Mark,

Let's play Devil's Advocate here for a moment and assume that a bank, of sound mind and reason, did give you a 30-year note before your 20's.

Do you think that's the norm or the exception?

If you believe it's the latter, then do try a little harder to debunk Jay Tea's poins as opposed to trying to strawman his argument.

Hmmmm.

1. "It's been about 2000 years since anyone just "woke up pregnant""

Actually this is incorrect. About a decade ago an Australian girl became pregnant from swimming in a pond. When she discovered she was pregnant her parents went apeshit, so she proved that she was still a virgin. *shrug* hey, it was in a newspaper. YMMV.

Otherwise, I completely agree. I came from a pretty poor immigrant background and did pretty well for myself. All it took was hard work, and working hard.

KobeC:

It's boring to be in total agreement with someone, but in this case I am.

I think the "poor" in the U.S. really need to take a long, hard look at what it truly means to be poor in other parts of the world. And while I can offer no immediate statistics or numbers to back up my statement, the U.S. "poor" would be consider extraordinarily wealthy in almost any other part of the world, with the obvious exclusions of Europe, parts of Asia and perhaps South America.

I believe in helping the poor, just not to the point to where it promotes a blithe sense of entitlement among the poor ("gimme this, gimme that") or an excuse for not helping oneself. And, sadly, that is too often the case in this country.

KobeClan, Peter F., etc.

In the late seventies, I knew many hard-working teenagers in Alaska who obtained mortgages from banks to purchase real estate. Many were like me, and none of us were "born into money." It wasn't hard back then.

I worked three jobs simultaneously in High School and amassed savings that would make me proud even today. Then, by mid-summer of my 19th year, I had worked nearly three seasons as a commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. I, and many of my friends, were earning more than $50,000 each summer during college. This was 1979. We were purchasing real estate with the leftovers from our sports car and ski boat budgets.

Those opportunities are still available to anyone who is willing to make sacrifices and work their asses off. I was able to pay for college and law school, and live comfortably throughout, by rolling up my sleeves and sweating for long hours. I wish more people understood the value of hard work.

The only issue I take is with rule #1: Graduate from High School - my concern is not with the rule really, its a great rule; however, as its used here, it seems to somehow support the contention that poverty is easily escapable. But, why then are droupout rates so high in impoverished areas vs wealthier areas? Why is there an achievement gap? Surely these disparaties are due to something more than "simple choices."
My point being: I don't think the choice a poor person makes in graduating high school is always the same as the choice a wealther student makes.
So then we should ask the questions that follow: why is it the choice to graduate high school more difficult in the imporverished areas? Is it becuase of the demands of working at a younger age? Is it family structure? Is it the prevalence of crime?
These questions would do more to help us understand why people choose not to graduate, and thus help us understand why people don't follow rule #1 - so we can look to make a change.

To simply margininalize the issue to a matter of personal choice jusitifies inaction - and in a way constitutes a moral claim about the people in question, which is most likely insupportable.

Brandon,

I'm not criticizing his point, as much as I'm hinting that his writing could be tightened up a little. A good crisp argument would not be riddled with distracting, unnecessary statements that don't hold up to scrutiny. He erodes his own credibility.

I can teach anyone how to make a million dollars a year. All I need is a willing student and about 29 million in seed money, given the current money market rate. Danged if some people don't start out with the needed seed money while others have to figure out how to make a living the hard way.

Nothing is 100% dealing with people, so all we can talk about is tendencies and probabilities, but parents teach their kids by example as much as they do by what they say, and kids learn by emulating their parents. Children generally achieve the same economic status as their parents because of the examples their parents set and because of the advantages or baggage parents give their kids.

We see from the Bible that a wealth person can no more give away their wealth than a poor person can gain wealth. It does happen, but it's the exception. In the end a poor person is no more responsible for their economic status than a middle class or wealthy person is for their economic status. That's not easy for a middle class or wealthy person to accept, but that's because of how you were raised; you simply have no excuse to fail.

No, I'm not a liberal, but just blaming the poor for being poor is myopic. Poor people not only need opportunity they need mentoring while they are young in order to instill in them values their parents don't have. We thought free public education was enough, but liberals have so weekend that institution with their short-term feel-good politics that it's no longer effective.

Why is there an achievement gap? Surely these disparaties are due to something more than "simple choices."

It's those complex choices that do supposedly poor people in. There never seems to be any shortage of money in "poor" neighborhoods for drugs, booze, cars, guns, clothes, jewelry or anything most people consider unnecessary, the shortage only pops up when it's books, groceries, medicine, education, housing and taxes. Being poor may not be the result of making personal decisions, staying poor certainly is.

Brandon, again:

Looking at the country as a whole, I accept that I was an exception. My experience was fairly common in Alaska at the time, and perhaps its difficult to shake my perception now--primarily because I lived it and it is a part of my life.

However, I must add that I attended law school in Los Angeles. During that period, I became freinds with many people who were a few years younger than me, and were prominent in USC's drama department. I also had freinds who played college and professional football. I also had freinds who were succesful musicians. Many of these personal friends made enough money through acting, music and sports that they were able to purchase real estate while still in their very early twenties, and while still attending undergraduate school.

Perhaps these people are exceptions, too. But my personal experiences through most of my life seem to be filled with those "exceptions."

Each of these "exceptions" come from lower middle-class families, by the way. The one thing they all have in common is hard work and a vision of success.

I read somewhere that the Australian girl proved she got pregnant from swimming in a pond by showing that her twat smelled like fish...

One quibble.

"Even military enlistments are only for a couple of years."

Military enlistments in the USA are for 8 years with no exceptions.

My father passed a piece of financial wisdom to me and I have passed it on to my children. It worked in my Grandfather's generation, my Father's generation and its worked in my generation.

Spend less than you earn. Simple rule, huge impact. And before you accuse me of being a trust fund baby, my Grandfather was an immigrant to this country. He became a rural pastor with 10 kids. My father was the first to go to college other than semminary school. He had to go live with an aunt to finish high school because the rural Arkansas school had taught him everything they had. I got my first job deliverying papers when I was 9 and have worked at least summers every year since then.

Of course with my family background, not having a child out of wedlock, not marrying before you are ready to earn enough to support a family, getting as much education as you could afford and staying out of jail were just family values. They were such basic ideas that you didn't even question them any more than you would question breathing.

Mark:

I think if I had the context of the time period and the situation behind your ability to buy a house, I would not have made such a flip comment. My apologies in that regard!

On the mortgage topic:
If you are old enough to enter into a contract, you can get any mortgage you qualify for. So that means 18 in most states (In TX 16 if you are married!!) It is discriminatory for lenders to do otherwise.
Plenty of people who were born in the 80s are getting mortgages these days. I just did one for a 19 yr old in CA- he is in the mortgage business.
Otherwise, good post.

Peter F.:

No Prob! But I wasn't sensible enough to purchase a house, it was a 4-plex rental property. Major headache to manage long distance from college or the Bering Sea. This, of course, tends to prove Jay's point. Although I had the means to get the loan, I was not quite disciplined or sensible enough to make the most of my situation. Shoulda woulda coulda.

Just to throw in my two cents, my youngest brother just took out a mortgage on a little house here in the UK. He's 20, and he's only been in his current employment for about 6 months. It's not hard to get a mortgage, but I still think it's a stupid idea at that age. It's an easy way of arriving at poverty by the scenic route.

devan,

Dropout rates are low in poor areas because the children's parents didn't finish high school either. The single greatest predictor for success in school is the support level of the child's parents, and to a lesser extent the child's community. Things like class size, money spent per child, etc. have very little effect. Hence the liberal solution of throwing more money at the situation is shortsighted and pretty much useless.

The real solution, then, is twofold:
1. Motivate kids to care about school anyway.
2. Motivate parents to care about and activly participate in the schooling of their kids.

Neither of these solutions is at all easy to implement and any changes are, at best, going to make only incremental average improvements per generation. The second one especially is probably only going to come about as the effects from the first are felt.

It seems to me, though, that some good techniques of helping would be:

1. Increasing standards for children starting as young as kindergarden. Instead of poor kids getting farther and farther behind the rest of the country as they get older, we need to make sure that they start out on the right track.
2. Separate the troublemakers who don't care from the rest of the kids. Any kid who expresses the slightest bit of violence needs to be taken away from the other kids until they can deal with their problems. Yeah, it might not really be nice to treat them differently from the rest just because they have more problems, but is it any nicer to try and make the rest of the kids learn in an environment of fear?
3. Raise teacher salaries while raising teaching standards. Doing one without the other won't work. If you raise the salaries while reducing the violence, more teachers are going to be willing to teach in poor areas and to live up to the standards necessary to be good at it. And while we're at it, lets expressly tie salaries to performance. Why on earth do we expect teachers to be good at their job when they get no reward at all for doing so?

Of course, the NEA fights changes like this tooth and nail, so it seems poor kids are pretty much screwed when it comes to education

4) Don't get hooked on alcohol or drugs. Again, those are active choices. Nobody wakes up an alcoholic or a junkie; it takes a bit of work and effort to develop an addiction.

What if you're Irish?

Ebonics. That's the answer. Yep.

Oh, and high schools need to teach collection techniques for them teenage ho's.

Leopold:

That was so damn funny I had to read your post to my co-workers. I really wish you could hear how hard you had all of us laughing! Thanks!

Mark:

I could have managed my way out of a paper bag at 19, let alone manage property! You've got my admiration. (Hell, I still can't balance my checkbook properly. Thank God I have a wife with greater—far greater, really—mathimatical abilities than myself!)

I teach in a Title I school and the reason my students do not perform well is due to their home situations. If your parent or guardian didn't finish school, then they probably hold no value in an education. There is no one to help the students or make them do homework, so it simply doesn't get done. No one at home cares what grades were on their report cards, so they don't even show them to their parents. No one cares so they don't care.

A few years ago when I was teaching math, I had one student tell me he wasn't going work but that he would collect a $300 a month check just like his uncle. I tried show him how little money that was, but sixth graders don't get it. And unfortunately, you just can't undo that lack of work ethic in 50 minutes a day.

Mark is the same arrogant asshole lawyer that thinks only a court of law (i.e., lawyers) can tell us peons what the U.S. Constitution means. Specifically the 2nd amendment. Because, you know, he went to law school to learn hisself some big words so he can tell us ignorant folk how stupid we are. You must be very proud of yourself Mark. I mean, being a productive member of society and all...

But I don't believe in protecting people from the consequences of their bad decisions.

This is the difference between liberals and conservatives in a nutshell. Thanks Jay, for expressing it so succinctly.

Gee, Ed, that was nice.

Ya know, I tend to trust physicians to know more about medicine than I. Engineers tend to know more about physics than I. I trust accountants to do a better job of handling my taxes. Ed, I'd probably rather trust you to dig out my septic tank instead of tackling it myself (if you're bonded). But if you think non-lawyers are as qualified to interpret constitutional law as lawyers, you're out of your fucking mind.

Joel Franklin: Military enlistments in the USA are for 8 years with no exceptions.

Must be in your fantasy military. My Air Force enlistment terms were either four or six years in length. The Army's are even shorter.

There are 19 jobs, mainly combat-arm specialties, which fall under the recently implemented Variable Enlistment Length program. Under VEL, Soldiers can enlist for three- to five-year VEL options.