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If you're jealous of poor people, go be poor!
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:03 am
amother [ OP ] wrote:
What a rude post. It's not my job to fix the broken system. And the middle class are not worse off than the poor. If they were, they should just go be poor. Plus, the real reason the middle class are suffering is because the billionaires aren't paying their taxes.


This.

The ability of the upper class to distract the middle class from this issue has got to be one of the most amazing propaganda successes of this century. Part of the appeal of this is probably because people in the middle class believe they will one day be in that lofty place themselves, so why push for higher taxes that they will one day need to pay? It's hard to comprehend the enormity of the gap between middle class and the top earners.

Reminds me of the story of the plague in the forest. One by one, the animals were brought before the court, but the lion's act of murder was excused because he is the king of the animal's, and the wolf's because "you were so hungry, poor thing," but the poor sheep was ripped to pieces for nibbling a piece of straw off his master's pile of hay.
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:06 am
amother [ OP ] wrote:
In the secular world it is possible to be lazy on benefits. In the frum world they do not support even the bare minimum lifestyle.


I wonder if it's true even in the secular world. A recent study showed that there is not a single city in the US where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford rent.

So putting aside section 8 and other affordable housing subsidies, have been frozen for over a decade, I believe this is way oversimplified for the secular poor, too.
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amother
Tan


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:08 am
amother [ RosePink ] wrote:
I wonder if it's true even in the secular world. A recent study showed that there is not a single city in the US where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford rent.

So putting aside section 8 and other affordable housing subsidies, have been frozen for over a decade, I believe this is way oversimplified for the secular poor, too.


I know so many people who got section 8 in the very recent years.
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:10 am
amother [ Tan ] wrote:
There is definitely an attitude in America that people are lazy and just collect benefits.
Thousands of people haven’t worked in years and live off benefits, Jews and non skews alike.
And more and more people lazy out because our government enables them so much.
The “jealousy” stems from hard working people having to support them.
It’s sad because many people do work hard and are still poor. And then when tax payers complain, they take it personal but really it isn’t about the hard working poor people.


There are very few benefits that can be received without working. The vast majority of poor people in this country (Covid aside) are the working poor.

The "deserving poor" is such an ugly attitude.

I don't believe it comes from jealousy, though. I think the upper earners have poured a lot of resources into convincing people of this fantasy of the poor using up our resources when it is they themselves (huge corporations) who benefit from poverty programs. Without it, they would never find workers for the abysmal wages they pay. Essentially, Walmart can keep their profits high because wages are being subsidized by food stamps.
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:11 am
amother [ Tan ] wrote:
I know so many people who got section 8 in the very recent years.



The NYC section 8 waiting list lottery briefly opened up for the first time in a decade. It is easier in other places, but major cities have a housing problem.
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amother
Red


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:13 am
amother [ RosePink ] wrote:
I wonder if it's true even in the secular world. A recent study showed that there is not a single city in the US where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford rent.

So putting aside section 8 and other affordable housing subsidies, have been frozen for over a decade, I believe this is way oversimplified for the secular poor, too.


I know so many ppl approved for section 8 recently.
And there are many more agencies that give rental assistance other then section 8 with federal money. (My dh manage rentals and gets checks from all over all the time)
Ppl got 25k sandy loan to buy houses
Ppl buying affordable housing with locked property taxes.

Many many programs out there to help with housing.
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:22 am
amother [ Garnet ] wrote:
You can do what others do in this positions - have the kids dropped off a babysitters house and you pick them up at the end of your working hours.

Reasonable and good paying jobs don't just come about. You have to put in the work to get to that place. Either you work a couple of years to develop your skills or you get a degree and then you have more options available to you.

Expecting to easily find a good-paying flexible job without putting in the work is of the similar mindset of arranging your life around outside assistance. It's the mindset why should I work hard when I can get it from others or have other do the hard work instead of me?

If you start your life with a goal in mind, such as being financially independent and putting in the hard work to get to that point, there is a very good chance that you will get to the point where you life is not a daily struggle and others are not paying your way. With Hashem's help of course.


BH my kids are past this stage, but no, I wish it were so simple. I spent years looking for someone willing to do this and nobody was. I ended up having to rely on family or friends, and it was never a great arrangement. And I do have a degree, btw.

The problem with "putting in the work" is that the years of childrearing and building a career often coincide. This is not an exclusively frum problem. There is a major problem in our country of women pushing off having children way past their personal preference because there is no support for mothers in the workplace and they have to wait till they've established themselves.

That's not a sustainable system for families, even those who don't have 8 or 10.

See this article below (written by a frum woman, but addressing the larger issue)


https://www.businessinsider.co.....021-7


I know firsthand that having kids while young is penalized at work. If we're worried about declining birth rates, workplaces need to start supporting young motherhood.



Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt Jul 15, 2021, 11:13 AM


The US birth rate is declining partly because women are delaying childbirth.
Discriminatory work culture plays a big part in deterring women from having kids earlier in life.
Now is the time to address the part our workplaces play in families' reproductive options.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt is a writer living in New York City.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
See more stories on Insider's business page.
I will never forget that moment: It was just a few weeks after I gave birth to my second child — I was 26 years old and on unpaid maternity leave (I had not worked the full year required to take advantage of my company's policy). I was staring at a hospital bill for childbirth, and ping! I received an email notification that my monthly student-loan payment was due. I looked around and thought: Welcome to American millennial motherhood.

For the past few years, I've been reading the latest studies on the declining American birth rate with an amused smile.

Of course my generation of American women is choosing to push off childbearing and having fewer children once they start. It's because of not only the obvious price tags of healthcare and childcare but also the less-easily quantified cost: the price of working in a culture that has little tolerance for mothers, a culture that gives women little time to have children.

We can't talk about the declining American birth rate without talking about how workplace culture — sometimes, in ostensibly progressive spaces — often deters women from choosing to have children during their most fertile stage in life, which often results in women having fewer children than they may want.

In far too many workplaces, pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing in the early chapters of one's career is a liability — and few young women are ready to take that risk, knowing they'll have little support for it. In contrast, studies show that women who have children later are more equipped to "catch up" on earnings after taking time to have children and less likely to find themselves on the dreaded (and possibly mythical) "mommy track."

In a recent New York Times report on why American women are delaying motherhood, several women said they were waiting to "establish their careers." For years, feminism has pushed the idea that freedom can be found in work, but somehow, women accept this dogma without asking: Who says careers need to be "established" before having children? Why are our offices so designed to keep mothers out?

The workplace isn't built for young mothers
I knew this challenge intimately because I was the anomaly who attempted to both have kids and work.

Throughout my 20s, it was made clear to me that having children while pursuing a career in New York City was a career risk. I disregarded it. As an Orthodox Jew, I believed family was primary.

Alas, I quickly learned that in the media industry, young mothers are hard to find. While my 20-something peers went out for drinks after work, I would dash home to relieve my babysitter. And while I constantly missed my children's pediatric checkups during their first years out of fear of stepping out of the office, I watched older colleagues who had reached a senior-enough position calmly step out for pediatric appointments without concern they were being perceived as uncommitted.

Open women's advice books — "Lean In" or "Drop the Ball," for example — and the advice is targeted to someone else, someone older and more senior with at least a decade of work under her belt. These books are written for women who have put years into climbing corporate ladders; they are for those who can afford to cover necessary childcare costs.

Many of my peers who became mothers in their 20s have had similar experiences. We exchange damning stories in a sort of whisper network. One friend, a journalist, was promptly fired from her job when she raised concerns about being discriminated against after returning from maternity leave. Another friend, at a white-shoe law firm, got pregnant at 26 with her first child and told me how she was treated like an alien — "the only other pregnant lawyer in the firm was 49," she said. Another friend entered a job pregnant and was required back at her desk two weeks after birth, the lack of recovery costing her health later on.

Many of the inequities working mothers face were particularly exposed during the pandemic, when mothers were judged against unattached peers who could work all hours. After all, why hire a parent when you can get someone who will work weekends and all their waking hours for the same price?

American women want more children than they are having
The declining birth rate shouldn't be a concern owned by pro-natalist hawks who want to keep women in the proverbial kitchen. It's also not a crisis in "family values." In fact, if we would listen closely to actual American women, we would see that this is, in fact, contrary to their desires: According to 2018 data from the General Social Survey, while the birth rate is falling, millennial women's desired fertility is rising. While American millennial women in the survey reported wanting 2.7 children on average, they will likely have 1.8 — that gap is the highest it's been in 40 years.

That may be because women simply don't have the time to bear children. They are pressured to push off childbearing for half of their adult lives' fertility windows to "establish careers" or save up money. This is, perhaps, a story of shattered family dreams for countless Americans, and it is this data that we should be paying attention to most closely.

While rising costs of living and childcare expenses require long-term policy changes at a high level, what we can change now is how we treat mothers in the workplace, particularly those who are lower in the office hierarchy and therefore have fewer resources at their disposal. To support young mothers, workplaces ought to offer flexible hours, remote-work options and paid maternity leave (even for those who enter a job while pregnant), as well as provide sensitivity training to management.

Remember, in every hostile workplace, there is a woman making painful reproductive choices because of that hostility.

Every traumatizing experience of a maternity leave denied, every nasty email questioning one's "availability," every threat of being fired, is another voice whispering into a young woman's ear: "There's no way I can have a child now, here. It'll have to wait."

And remember, for every woman enduring this, there is a group of young female interns watching from the watercooler, wide-eyed, taking note of what awaits them.

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt is a writer living in New York City. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
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miami85




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 7:32 am
[political comment removed]
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GLUE




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 8:13 am
amother [ OP ] wrote:
In the secular world it is possible to be lazy on benefits. In the frum world they do not support even the bare minimum lifestyle.


President Regan on his campaign trail spoke about a “welfare Queen” in Chicago that was making it big by being on welfare. The problem was there was no such person. There has been a lot of studies about people on welfare and guess what they are usually the poorest people in town, in fact it is all- most impossible to raise a family just on welfare without outside support.
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amother
Pumpkin


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 8:29 am
amother [ RosePink ] wrote:
This is a huge issue for so many women. Even in the most frum circles, there is little support in place for working women. Childcare is expensive, and doesn't exist at all in certain situations, like finding someone willing to take a child off a preschool bus or pick them up from a playgroup with no transportation. And how much can you earn in those hours between 10 (when the last bus is finally off) and 3 when the first bus returns?

Not to mention that such reasonably flexible jobs are hard to come by and/or don't pay well enough unless you are in a specialized field,

In Israel it's different. You have healthcare regardless, and if you take a job and are left with just 100 shekel after childcare, you've still put into your pension plan and earned social benefits, as well as put money towards your next maternity leave, not left a hole in your resume, and gained experience that can help further your career.

But that's because we have subsidized daycares, subsidized afternoon care, socialized healthcare, and employers have obligations towards their employees.
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amother
RosePink


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 8:55 am
amother [ Pumpkin ] wrote:
In Israel it's different. You have healthcare regardless, and if you take a job and are left with just 100 shekel after childcare, you've still put into your pension plan and earned social benefits, as well as put money towards your next maternity leave, not left a hole in your resume, and gained experience that can help further your career.

But that's because we have subsidized daycares, subsidized afternoon care, socialized healthcare, and employers have obligations towards their employees.


In most developed countries it's different. The American system is completely bonkers.

In America, the business interests have succeeded in assembling a coalition between middle class people hoping they'll be rich one day so please leave rich people's money alone, working class religious people, and all kinds of people convinced that socialism is the same as communism.
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amother
DarkGreen


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 9:25 pm
amother [ OP ] wrote:
People who are middle class should have planned better then. It's about financial savvy. Break out those bootstraps.

ETA: Apparently people don't get it. Oh well.


meaning how can we plan better? for instance, I'm offered a second job on top of my half day job for next year.
I took the job. I will lose in child benefits probably. hard to know though and plan. and job has some option for more potential earnings the following year...and on and on..
the thought flitted through my mind to plan but how can I say no to a good job offer that has potential because I might lose benefits (I'm not on food stamps or free rent- we pay a mortgage - but I do get child tax credits and free insurance for my kids and government insurance for me and husband)
I'm asking seriously about the planning better idea- what else can I do to plan better?
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amother
Silver


 

Post Tue, Jul 20 2021, 11:36 pm
The first elephant in the room - as others have noted - is that the US is a third world country in terms of child care.

Here's the second elephant in the room: it's almost impossible to have an upper middle class/upper class lifestyle unless both parents have college degrees and work full time. One spouse doing extremely well can support a luxury lifestyle, but that's likely to require a serious degree, very long work hours, and a nice bit of luck.

A system where couples marry young, have limited education, delay male entry to the work force, have large families, send children to private school and expect high end jewelry, wigs and whatever else, is doomed to fail.

The attitude of "why work, it's all going to taxes and tuition, but I need (fill in luxury item here)" is the ghetto mentality of buying $300 sneakers and not getting a job. It keeps you trapped.
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