I'm not sitting on the fence at all. I was simply questioning someone's claims without making claims of my own. That's not sitting on the fence. I don't feel I have enough information to make claims, so unlike some people who have no problem making broad statements without providing evidence, I'm gathering that evidence. Tia Mary is claiming that no one wants to give credence to her point of view, but she's also unwilling to provide the evidence that would allow the thoughtful observer to give her any credence.
That wasn't the point. Your point was that people could have chosen to leave. K's point was that you were incorrect, since FEMA wouldn't let people out. But you tend to do that, shift your claim once someone counters it.
Out of tens of thousands of poor that were stranded, a handful was shooting. And that was quickly squelched. I hardly think that stands for proof behind the article.
This is a common myth and was perpetuated with the article. It did its job, too, by getting quite a few here riled up about welfare cheats and bums. It's taking quite a few of us to get you welfare haters to demure.
I've "been there". That lack of the spark in your eye is caused by endless poverty and trying to claw your way out. It becomes a dark tunnel with barely a glimmer of light at the end. "Luck" can play a huge role in getting you out of that poverty.
So, no. It's not "welfare" but the miserable living conditions. The abject poverty. For welfare is poverty.
Yep. I've seen motivated, self-supporting women threatened with losing their jobs because their day care lady had a series of family crises. It's one thing to find alternate day care at 8 AM, and quite another when the day care lady calls you at 2 PM and says "come get your kid NOW". You call your mom, who's your back-up day care provider, and she's not home because she wasn't expecting to have to babysit that day. You call your grandma, who's happy to take the kid, but doesn't drive any more, so you still need to leave work to pick up the kid and deliver him to great-grandma. You call your best friend, who's off work on maternity leave, but she's just finally got the baby to sleep and doesn't want to wake him up to go pick up your kid.
Or the day care lady's kid goes in the hospital the same week your mom is on vacation, so neither your regular day care nor your back-up is available.
One of my former colleagues was fired because her kid was sickly. She didn't actually miss days from work, but she'd regularly call in late because she had to fill out hospital admission paperwork after a 3 AM ER visit. (For whatever reason, the hospital would not let her mother fill it out.) She'd make up the time by working through lunch and staying late, but got fired anyway because being late made her "unreliable".
We lived briefly in a city with 25% unemployment (and mind you, that 25% is calculated from people who are still searching for work, not those who've given up). Tossing those people off welfare is not going to magically cause the creation of 25% more jobs in that area so that they can go to work. If you have no car, no money for Greyhound, you can't move to another city with better employment prospects. And, no, state Unemployment does not offer to pay your relocation expenses so you can find work someplace with a healthier economy.
And telling *me* to get a better attitude doesn't fix the underlying problem that I have a serious, incurable health condition that prevents my working more than 2-3 hours a day. I've gotten myself into a lot of trouble because I have the attitude that I can do anything I set my mind to, but after committing to a project, my body betrays me. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Employers don't want to pay someone (even as well-qualified as Moi) who functions at 40%. That's not "related to motivation or an attitude of dependence", but to the average employer's insistence that employees have to improve the bottom line, not cost more than they produce. There may be a few charitable organizations whose mission statement is to provide jobs for those whose best efforts are not cost-effective, but those organizations rely on handouts (donations or corporate "welfare" underwriting the employment of the disbled). And those charitable organizations deal with the mentally challenged; I physically can't sweep sidewalks or haul 50-lb bags of concrete, or even sit up for 8 hours to put hardware into little bags for $2/hour.
Remember -- two sides to every story! I've spent the last 45 min or so googling to try to trace this to the source. All I've found are posts quoting this material on conservative blogspots (libertypost.org; moorewatch.com); this seems to be quoted by a pretty narrow band of people. It *appears* (though I'm not exactly positive) that the original info comes from a blogspot by Rick Moran at
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He's tracked an hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow timeline of who said what/when, based on reports in the NO Times-Picayune. Can't get to his website -- must be busy! But there's a link to the timeline on
I don't buy that for a second. I've been a researcher for years. All studies are not created equal. Yes, there are crappy studies out there, but you can figure out which ones those are. And it is not true that the decent quality studies point in all directions. There's a pretty consistent set of results if you aren't just listening to ideologues.
I have known people who were or had been on welfare, and have worked with some locally through various outreach programs, but that's not particularly where I draw my information from. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
That would not fit the bill for the folks I personally knew. I am also not aware of research findings that support this position as a general rule. There have been forms of aid that have been unsuccessful or that have had unintended negative side effects, and I am certainly not arguing that the current system is ideal by any means. I do not, however, agree that the mere receipt of aid dooms a person to a life lacking in initiative or ambition.
Ahhh, the "Ivory Tower" attack. Sorry if I seem snippy, but I just get really tired of the assertion that ideologues who spew opinions based on *nothing* are somehow better sources of information than researchers who have dedicated their lives to learning how to do research properly and who get down in the trenches to collect actual *DATA* to support their hypotheses. Yes, there are poor researchers, and there are ideologues disguised as researchers, and the world ain't perfect all around. But there's a lot of good work out there and I simply don't understand why anyone would cling to unfounded opinion when there is better information out there. Hey, if I needed medical care, I'd go to the doc who actually read the research long before I'd go to the one who just had opinions based on a few personal incidents... YMMV.
I don't agree. If they thought they had options, the majority would have been the hell out of there. The assumptions one has to make to conclude otherwise require one to believe in a degree of stupidity and insanity extremely unlikely to have characterized any but the smallest minority.
Because I don't have at hand statistics that focus specifically on the population of New Orleans, and I have no reason to believe that national statistics are unrepresentative of NO.
Have you ever looked into what happens to perfectly normal, average, middle class, working folk in similar situations?
Obviously, you're not likely to be convinced, but I don't see any evidence that the folks in the Superdome who were *NOT* on welfare made any more attempts to get out than those who were. There were plenty of people who worked hard for a living, if a meager one, in there, and there wasn't any sort of mass exodus among those folk. In fact, they were told when they entered that they would have to remain for the duration because conditions outside would be unsafe. And then they had NO further access to information.
They are there temporarily *by definition*. We stop giving them money after a while. Sadly, most who get off welfare do not get out of poverty, even though most have jobs. They just become part of the working poor. Those who get off welfare and join the ranks of the middle class are typically those who are better educated, more healthy, and manage to land jobs that pay a living wage with health care benefits. Those who can't find one of those tend to be back in hot water the first crisis that comes their way because they have no means to weather a crisis. I'm sorry I don't have specific figures to hand. Most of this information is not available online and I do not own copies of the research papers. I would have to go to the university library to get them.
While prevention helps for some situations, even that is not a panacea. Divorce is a precipitating event for many welfare recipients. 90 percent of TANF recipients are women. Of those, *72* percent were working or actively looking for work, according to the 2004 Women's Health study by HHS. In
1997, the US Census survey found that nearly half of single mothers receiving TANF have at least one disabled child or a disabled mother. We also know that having a disabled child ups the rate of divorce significantly, making it more likely that women who *were* married would be abandoned in the face of these sorts of challenges, increasing the odds that she will end up in poverty. And if you think it's tough to get childcare in order to work, try finding childcare for a special needs child for any sort of affordable rate.
Mind you, I am not saying that all welfare recipients are the "noble poor" who, even with hindsight, couldn't possibly have arranged their lives any differently. But many of these folks are people who have had serious adversity in their lives. Really, if you think about it, you see exactly what you'd expect to see--that those who are poor are significantly more likely to have experienced various sorts of adversity. It's not like adversity is evenly distributed and those who rise to the challenge do well and those who don't fall into poverty. Despite the occasional "bootstrap" story of someone heroically overcoming obstacles to escape poverty, the facts are that most people are just people like the rest of us--and those who encounter more adversity are more likely to succumb to poverty. Conversely, those of us who have done very well in life are much less likely to have suffered serious adversity (i.e., we may have had more challenging times in our lives, but we're much less likely to have had the serious stumbling blocks like disability or lack of family/community support, lack of access to education or health care, etc.). But, of course, it is human nature to attribute successes to our strength of character and thus attribute others' failures to lack of character (though of course our *own* failures are just bad luck...).
I'm also not trying to suggest that every poor person is doing everything in their power every day of the week to get out. It is true that poverty (not the dole--poverty itself) can wear people out. It's not just a coincidence that the rate of depression is sky high among the poor (it's also correlated with substance abuse). It's often an ugly situation. I'm just suggesting that it simply isn't the simple situation you describe, nor is it the explanation for the terrible conditions among refugees in NO.
We all want desperately to be able to blame *something* for this tragedy. We all want to believe that if *WE* had been in that situation, we'd have made better choices and come out okay, because the alternative is to accept that the bad things could have happened to *us*. We want to believe that it was a failure of personal choices, because the alternative is to accept that as a nation, we should have planned better to avoid these horrors--that part of this tragedy was *avoidable*, which is about the only thing more horrific than the tragedy itself. But wishing doesn't make it so.
In the US, the number of teenage pregnancies has dropped significantly over the past *several* years and is now below what it was in the 70s, IIRC. Furthermore, the average number of children among those receiving welfare (TANF) is less than
2 children. The birth rate in the US is at or just below replacement rate (the population of the US is increasing due to immigration).
They may, but unemployment benefits are even *more* limited than welfare benefits! So, it doesn't help them all that much anyway. Unemployment helps if you're temporarily out of work but still quite employable and will soon find another job. In the US, the "persistent unemployed" aren't getting financial help from the government after a relatively short period of time. The systems are quite different.
But God forbid you should do the logical thing and stop trying after a couple years of constantly being told you're not good enough for any of the available jobs, because then you get written off as a lazy lout who doesn't want to work.
I know it's hard for us middle-class white folk to understand, but there are still a number of employers (even outside the Deep South) who will not hire a black person (or any minority). I know there are excellent black legal secretaries (I've worked with several), but one firm I worked for never hired any of them. I commented on it and was told they weren't qualified. WEREN'T QUALIFIED?!? We've got a blonde bimbo in the back who considers typing 20 pages to be an impossibly tough day (some of us were doing 100 pages a day) and has the IQ of a rock; surely we could have found some black gal who was at least as qualified as she was!
Amen to that. It's been repeatedly observed that the experts who believe CFS/fibromyalgia to have a physicial basis base their opinion on research showing physical abnormalities, but the "experts" who insist it's purely psychological, just a bunch of depressed menopausal women, base their opinion entirely on "because I say so".
A recent study showed 100% of disabled CFS patients have heart problems caused by a virus in the heart muscle. That's a long way from "all in your head". And the contingent who prefer the psychological model immediately attacked the report rather than admitting they might have been wrong.
Of course not! The important point is that HE made the effort to take care of himself. From the reports of conditions at the evac centers, your friend was still better off in his car on the side of the road.
Tia Mary wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:
But that is exactly what you said in the part of my reply you snipped:
So which is it, Tia Mary, could they leave if they wanted to or couldn't they? Or is this one of your shifting claims, as Elizabeth pointed out?
Right, 'cause four days with little food or water, no bathroom, no clean clothes in the Louisiana high summer sun is a cakewalk. The people in the convention center had a roof over their heads. Perhaps they decided having chairs, carpetting, and a respite from the sun was just a little better than the blistering hot highway in the Louisiana sun. Maybe, just maybe, they took care of themselves as well as anybody could given the circumstances.
I would guess it is a self-proclaimed internet journalist. AHA! Here we go...
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"story" is a bunch of hyperbole.Dianne Lewandowski wrote:> I couldn't find a source, either. Further, it doesn't sound like it was > written by a journalist.>
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