First-World Standards of Living

[Sylvia727]

In the first world, there should be a basic standard of living. This addresses relative poverty, not absolute poverty. Few of the poor in the USA are in immediate danger of death (although not having healthcare takes an average of seven years off your life expectancy). There is a basic standard a first world government should be providing for their citizens if they cannot provide for themselves. Presumably, second and third world countries will eventually want to provide this too, but right now are working just to keep their populations alive. Anyway, here it is.

• Food. Healthy, balanced food, and enough of it.
  
• Shelter. A roof over your head, working heat and A/C, working toilets, showers, and stove. This should pass a health inspection for things like lead paint and insect infestations. Should not be overcrowded. Includes emergency temporary housing for the homeless, battered spouses, runaway teenagers, etc.
  
• Clothing. Appropriate to the climate and season. Children shouldn’t be going to school with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders because they can’t afford a coat.
  
• Hygiene products. Soap, toilet paper, tampons, laundry detergent, shaving cream.
  
• Healthcare. Treatment that is necessary to survival as well as treatment that improves the quality of life. Including regular checkups with general physician, dentist, eye doctor, whoever. The mentally impaired, including ADHD and other “minor” disorders, should be able to meet with a psychologist, the obese should be able to meet with a nutritionist, etc. Also includes glasses, hearing aids, wheelchairs, seeing-eye dogs, and whatever else is required to compensate as much as we can for people’s handicaps.
  
• Education. Schoolchildren should be able to attend an accredited school with enough qualified teachers and enough resources for textbooks, computers, lab equipment, and whatever else. Schoolchildren should not have to pay fees in a public school. Should also include classes for adults such as how to manage finances, how to cook, how to parent. Also includes free public libraries.
  
• Transportation. People should be able to easily get to and from their jobs, their schools, the local stores, the doctor’s office, the library, and so on. In urban areas, this is as simple as enough well-maintained sidewalks and adequate bus lines. Coverage would have to be scarcer in rural areas, but if there’s a need for a bus line it should be provided.

Any thoughts?

[crazylegs]

The only thing I would disagree with for the UK is A/C, in our climate it most certainly is no neccesitiy, and very few homes indeed have it at all.

[Seshat]

"any necessary climate control"

In some cases, neither heat nor A/C are necessary if the house is properly designed and insulated. So that phrase covers it.


I totally agree with the spirit of the list, although with my usual caveats regarding welfare provision. (See almost any welfare discussion in which I've commented for my opinions there.)

[Sylvia727]

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger controversy. I expected someone to say that the government shouldn't provide some of this, especially the healthcare and some of the education.

[Sableonblonde]

What I don't understand is, why the government is so worried about providing for people who can't, or won't, provide for themselves. As far as I can tell, the government already provides most of those things to the poor, at least where I am from.

It's one thing if you have an actual serious physical or mental disability that you didn't bring on yourself. But in my experience - and I've ironically ended up in a lot of positions dealing with the poor and disadvantaged despite my total lack of compassion and sympathy - a lot of the truly disadvantaged and poor are also really shitty people.

Life is supposed to be about survival of the fittest. I think it makes perfect sense that the harder you work, the more you have, and the better your lifestyle is. And this is coming from someone who doesn't even like to work hard. I'm lazy as hell. And I've got an eating disorder and substance abuse problem that take up a lot of my energy. But I still work a full-time job. I don't have EVERYthing I want in life, such as an apartment on the ResidenSEA, but I keep myself entertained. If I wanted more out of life, then I would work harder. And I could certainly work a lot harder than I do, but I'm content. If someone doesn't want to work hard at all, then OH WELL. Why should they be handed anything?

People who have no motivation or interest in having a nice life just drag down other people who try to help them. And the people who try to help are stupid for doing so. I actually work for a government agency that provides assistance, programs and aid to shitty, useless people with no motivation. I see the people I work with getting stressed out everyday trying to help these people who have no appreciation for anything, and never will. They try so hard to help, and the shitty people remain shitty and always will. Meanwhile, having figured this out already, I'm way ahead of everyone else, kicked back, surfing the internet and eating my Pop-Tart and humming a tune.

If someone can't provide for themselves, then maybe they better figure out how to do that. I don't see why that should be the government's or anyone else's problem.

[McDreidel09]

Sable, what about the people who are using government assistance, but working as hard as they can, but are having bad luck? My mother is getting unemployment and both my sister and myself are getting free breakfast and lunch at school. At one point, we were on food stamps. My mother is getting assistance, but is also working her butt off to get a job. She doesn't have the education to get the jobs that are in high demand, but the jobs she is qualified for, are not hiring.

I understand you work in that environment and you see shitty people, but don't use a blanket statement. Some people are working as hard as they can, but it's not enough sometimes.

And yes, I am helping out,alot. I gave up Track to work more. The checks aren't much, but I help out as much as I can. It's still not enough.

[Seshat]

Sable,

I live disadvantage. My best friend/mutual-carer and I are both severely disabled, my husband is partially disabled but works as hard as he can while still caring for us.

Because of the nature of my best friend's disability, I have seen mental illness. From the inside (I have episodes of it), and from the outside.

Because of the poverty I deal with, I have seen the kind of despair and hopelessness poverty - especially generational poverty - can engender.

I don't believe there is such a thing as a person who is 'lazy' or 'useless' or 'malingering' for no reason. I believe those are symptoms of deeper problems. Sometimes mental illness. Sometimes physical illness. Sometimes a kind of cultural training.

I believe those with illness need help - and yes, I see that you seem to believe that as well. Unfortunately, some illnesses make people difficult to deal with. Paranoiacs are REALLY hard to treat!

The cultural training is possibly even harder to treat. It can be difficult to understand if you haven't experienced it, even when you've seen it firsthand.

In essence, it amounts to a belief that there is no way to make life better. It comes from seeing people failing around you, all day, every day. It comes from trying 'job entry' and 'job readiness' programs over and over, and discovering they make no difference.

It comes from working shitty minimum wage job after job, and every time you think you're going to get somewhere, you get sick or the hot water blows or some other event takes the money you'd painfully built up over a year or two to try to make an opportunity for yourself.

It comes from being condescended to, and learning that noone who claims to be helping you really actually cares what your situation is. You give reasons, and they see excuses. You ask for what you need, and they give you what they decide you should have.

It generates a kind of depression. Which doesn't make things any easier! And if you seek help for the depression, the doctor (who you got to see for no more than ten minutes) gives you a script and dismisses the problems that caused the depression as not anything he can help you with.

"no motivation or interest in having a nice life" is a common symptom of depression, by the way.


Anyway... I always believe there are reasons. And reasons mean there may be a solution. It may not be a solution that these people can use themselves - they may need external help. (Heck, the ones who have medical issues definitely need external help.)

I think it's hopeful to see this as reasons, not excuses, and not inherent laziness or malingering or whatever. It's a hope for a solution.

[Sylvia727]

According to the 2003 census of the USA, 46% of those living below the poverty line are either under 18 or over 64. Nearly half of the poor have little or no work expectations. And the sad thing about the impoverished children is that their parents have lived their entire lives in poverty, as did their grandparents, as did their great-grandparents, as did the families of everyone else in their neighborhoods and schools. If you get a chance, borrow Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol from your library (government-sponsored education!). He interviewed children from low-class schools about how much chance they had to get ahead in life. Children as young as six or seven knew that they were going nowhere. There is a culture of poverty, and those born into it know that it will never change for them.

Sable, you say you work for a government agency providing aid to shitty, useless people. If I want to apply for help, and the agent assumes that I am a shitty, useless person, how on earth am I supposed to get motivated to improve my situation? Now I'm living in substandard conditions and I know that no one cares about my plight. Now I'm doubly screwed. There's no love for your fellow human beings. Even if someone has truly ruined their entire life through their own fault and no one else's, it's never too late to turn that around.

[Yfandes]

Sable, one could argue that substance abuse and eating disorders are rarely seen among worlds truly poor - ie those that stand a good chance of dying of malnutrition or diseases that are easily cured in the first world. There are those that make the argument that eating disorders are a first-world problem.

A quote I once read from a very poor person in India said something like "America's poor are something we would aspire to achieve". To me, there's a world of difference between living without A/C, TV, wearing 2nd hand clothes, being on food stamps etc VS facing the real possibility of starving to death and/or having your children die of diarrhea.

My take is that in the first world it is easier to provide maintenance - food, shelter, health care, than to pay for these issues when they reach disastrous proportions due to their lack. For example providing free vaccinations rather than deal with an epidemic, or WIC rather than the effects of malnourishment on growing children.

[Rapscallion]

Define poor.

Back when I saw some TV, I saw a breakfast programme where the interviewer was talking to someone from a charity dealing with poverty. "What are the criteria for poverty?" he asked.

"The bottom ten percent of income," he was told.

"Then we'll never be rid of poverty?"

Rapscallion

[Sylvia727]

That's why I mentioned absolute poverty vs. relative poverty. Those living in absolute poverty are in danger of dying. Those living in relative poverty are not. At least not immediately, my feelings on healthcare aside. One definition of relative poverty that I like is anyone making less than 50% of the median income for that household structure. Using that definition, it would be entirely possible to get everyone up above the poverty threshhold.