"Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return."

Please choose one of the options in the poll above. The poll is anonymous, so if you don't feel like discussing your answer, that's fine, but I'd like to see as many responses as possible. If you do want to discuss, by all means feel free.

I decided to take out shades of gray in the poll options, so if you "mostly agree" or "mostly disagree," please just pick the one closest to what you think. Shouldn't be too tough.

I DON'T DO BLACK AND WHITE

You're tempting me to derail my own thread here. With enormous self-control, I'm going to resist. Now answer the poll question, jerk!

A depressing note: the median net worth of single black women in their prime working years is $5.

I disagreed.

i agreed, but its not just limited to poor people, even those who work and try to earn a living can buck the system and get help from the govt with little to no effort

Can you clarify something for me, Cary? The statement includes the word "today", so is it supposed to imply that NOW it is EASIER for poor people than in the past when social assistance was not available?

Also, is this just the US/developed countries or the entire world?

I took the question directly from a Pew Research Center poll. I don't think the intent is a direct comparison. If it was, I think "easy" would necessarily be "easier", etc. It does indirectly cause the reader to make such a comparison, but I think the purpose is to think about the present, if not in a vacuum, then at least without a direct comparison to times when surely poor people had it even tougher.

US. I'm sure it can apply to other developed nations as well.

Not only is it not easy to be poor, it's becoming more and more difficult to escape poverty.

You're a libertarian; you're supposed to say something about "bootstraps", or some such thing.

Is this thread about Reid?

"Poor people today have it easy because they can get art from Matty without doing anything in return."

I disagreed. When do poor people ever have it easy?

Ask the 62% of Americans who agreed with that statement a couple of years ago.

Ever since 50+ percent of voting Americans re-elected Bush in 2004 I stopped really caring what my fellow countrymen thought about anything.

So there are government assistance programs out there, for people both working and non-working. But to the extent that these help people, do they go so far as to make life easy for anybody, especially the poor?

Yeah, I don't know why or how I'm still surprised by stuff like this every once in awhile. Maybe it's less surprise and more disgust.

I still buy that hard work and talent can go a loooong way to improving one's lot in life, that at the end of the day no one's lot in life is predetermined or incapable of being improved. But let's also not pretend like the real world is - or ever could be - perfectly meritocratic, or that the deck isn't stacked disproportionately against those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. It seems like the lower you go on the socioeconomic ladder, the harder it is for that rung's inhabitants to leverage whatever innate talent and work ethic he or she might have to make tomorrow better than today. Given today's realities, the "bootstraps" argument is an oversimplification and an abstraction that enables many to dismiss the plight of the poor and destitute without doing the unpleasant grunt work of actually examining and thinking about the rotten state of affairs that persist in low-income communities.

For the poor, the rat race is over. The cages won.