The reason why the rich can’t directly give money to the poor is because people live a really long time.
If I give you a sack of food that last you a day and you eat the food, what happens tomorrow?
Okay, I show up again and I give you another sack of food and you eat it, then what?
I show up a third day and give you a sack of food and you eat it again. What’s left?
Ok so let’s broaden it to $36k (the median salary of Americans (not coincidentally within a thousand dollars of where Federal tax requirements increases….but that’s another level of financial education) and that’s tax free (for some insane reason) for Year 1. You as an individual, with or without a family of a spouse and two children, spend that $36k on completely reasonable living expenses, shelter, clothing, food. By New Year’s Eve, the last dollar is spent on confetti.
The New Year dawns.
Now what?
Ok, so I repeat this for Year 2. Then I repeat it again for Year 3. And then one more time in Year 4. All of your expenses for either yourself or your family have been completely reasonable to the size of your family, one to four. Each Year end the money is spent in it’s entirety.
Year 5, You show up to the window where you get your $36k check and the office is gone, no more allotments. You and your family are ass out.
Welfare
If I support you by just covering your living expenses, you become dependent upon that system. hence why so many White people are on Social Services/Welfare, close to 60% of the total roll. They’ve become reliant on Welfare covering their basic expenses.
Though 100% use money, 70% of Americans don’t understand it and the systems around it, therefore how to use it and multiply it is outside of their reach. The reason why the first million is the hardest to make is because you have to change all of your conditioning about money to recognize how to see it, obtain it and use it in a wholly different way than you’ve been taught, your parents were taught, your grandparents were taught. Americans lack financial education as a mass, historically. I would submit that foreigners do better financially because they come from one financial system and then understand on a conscious level that they must learn into another one (American) and practice it. They then decide to practice into it with the goal of comfortability or wealth. Simple—-spend $1 on rice, meat, vegetables, spices for one serving of food, sell for $7. Save for one year, get lease, get license, the whole family based on that principle opens a Chinese restaurant and we use that engine for the next 25 years to be comfortable.
This is shift is even exampled by the already rich, exampled by Paris Hilton.
Yeah, that Paris Hilton.
She’s never touched her $200 million dollar trust fund. Her parents paid for school and prep school and Paris accidentally stumbled upon a business idea going to parties: Several of the club promoters said people loved the idea of her being at parties, partying with a socialite so they would pay her car, airfare, overnight stay, drinks to be at parties.
She contacted a friend from prep school who was at Wharton Business School and asked him to represent her in making this bigger. He did, drawing up a fee schedule, negotiating contracts, appearances and eventually she got her bestie Nicole Ritchie involved and then a TV show and sponsorships. Paris earns $7 to $10 million a year just doing these things. Over a decade later, she still hasn’t touched a dime of her trust fund from the Hilton family fortune.
Education Plan.
- Now I will side argue to my own argument that there is also an inequality within the education system—-who gets it and who gets further ability based access to more. If grandma and grandpa can’t read, it doesn’t bode well for their children who then breed with the illiterate family up the road and now we got a whole mess of people at about the same intellectual level who have moved through time but not grown/evolved. That’s an educational systems responsibility.
Employment Plan
- Ok, ok, I will also under-argue my own point to a work force that shifts routinely in epochs—-from Agrarian to Industrial to Technological to now Knowledge to soon some form of Entrepreneurial/Me/Bio-Genetic/Health mix in the next 10–20 years.
- If the above example of progressive education didn’t occur for a family generationally, grandpa had a farm, but he wasn’t just a sharecropper with imposed peon wages,he had machinery, mill understanding, science based learning of crops, cycles, hybrid breeding and such and then he sent my father to university to learn the next advanced level and Son came back to the farm with the latest in IBM understanding of sales, marketing and new machinery to expand production and distribution and then when I go to school I come back to the farm with advanced cyberspace distribution knowledge of how to sell our crops worldwide and reinvest—-sees that progressive family through the epochs?
- Most poor families do not have a Knowledge and Evolution “bank”, if you will, in their family line that allows for such progress.
Social Plan
- Let’s say we’re one of the fabulous religions that says women don’t work. So Granddaddy, an industrious, ethical man goes out 7 days a week and works and then because he’s also not a big party animal he comes home to Grandma and royally has her like a sexual pretzel for the next 20 years in every room, nook and granny cranny. While Grandma might smile a lot, she does that smiling to 10 children, who believe grandpa’s lustful ways are the right way of the Lord and screw like sanctified rabbits, begetting 100 offspring.
- Now that’s one hell of a yearly barbecue but it imposes poverty because roughly only 50% of the parents, men, are able to GO outside of the home and earn money to bring back in to all of these children. Without Employment & Education Evolution from above, they will all live in generational poverty.
One of the three Plans NOT evolving within a family system to the adult individual is why people are poor. And I haven’t even touched on systemic poverty where the country/nation itself legally subdivides people by class, race, gender to opportunities so I get a job with benefits and you get a broom.
Then here comes Aunty Oprah, and she wants to help. She really, honestly, truly does.
How though can she help you? She’s got yes, let’s say $1 billion dollars to give away this year.
- So she decides, what if she were to give away a very good living salary to say 20,000 people? She does a quick estimate and decides to pick up the cost of paper and people to distribute the checks and decides $50,000 to 20,000 people. All you have to do is show up…poor. With proof of poverty. Say your pay stubs totaling less than $18,000 after taxes as an individual and less than $36k as a family of at least 4.
- After some wrangling and administrative checking and such, with good upfront planning, Oprah’s team is able to manage, check and distribute a cashier’s check to 20,000 people in 1 week—-in what the media has dubbed—-”What the Hell, Oprah?!!! Week”.
- It’s wonderful. Banners and lights and confetti and tears and people talking about paying back rent and mortgage and light bills and getting needed medication and sainthood, they want the woman elected to sainthood, Mr. Pope! And they regularly bring candles and teddy bears and cards and flowers and leave them at the office building where they received their check at.
- It’s downright beautiful.
- New Year’s Eve, a year after he distribution week and the line has formed at this small building and promptly at midnight….nothing happens.
- There are the approved 20,000 standing in front of the building, plus 700,000 of their cousins and such right behind them.
- The doors don’t open.
- There’s a riot.
- There’s a call for the National Guard to bring this to a peaceful resolution.
Finally after several violent days, including the complete destruction of this small office building, Oprah goes on TV from her palatial estate in California and is like—-
”Ummm, I gave you $50,000. And from what I understand you spent it well and legal on nothing illicit nor foolish. But you spent it. You spent it. Money and Charity are not the same things. Money is finite, even I have a budget. Charity is finite. But I also own (pun!) companies where I employ upwards of 12,000 people a year, directly and indirectly, that rely upon the Oprah machine chugging along so that they can get their $50,000 a year in salary on average, each and every year. My machine has to earn a billion dollars each and every year to stay a workable, sustainable, movable engine to them.
I gave you 20,000 that $50,000 without any stipulations on how you were to spend it, you just had to meet poverty requirements. You could’ve gone to college, started a small business, invested in the stock market, saved it and continued working your jobs but had a cushion in the bank gaining interest. You lived off of charity. Money and charity are not infinite. Particularly mine because my money doesn’t just belong to me, it has to come from somewhere, be generated and created and then regenerated and recreated somewhere, year after year.
I can do spot massive charity giveaways but once I gave away that $1 billion, it was gone. If I give away more billions I now have to fire people, lay people off, creating more poor people, I have to shut down studios, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, pull out of contracts, stop producing TV shows and movies—-I have to stop the whole engine that generated the $1 billion in the first place and liquidate everything. So say I do that, I could probably get $4 billion in cash if done properly and the biggest sale on EBay happened of all my stuff. This time I expand the program and give 80,000 people in four corners of the country $50,000. Then what? How many of you have educational, employment and social planning abilities to maximize $50,000 in cash on Tuesday? You’ll all be back at the four buildings rioting next year.
It’s not feasible, logical not pragmatic to just give poor people money. You’ll become dependent on me. It’s better if I spread that $1 billion across the next 20 years, across scholarships, and job programs and children’s schools and intermittent charities, and hospitals for new equipment and to disaster victims. I should’ve listened to Warren Buffet on this. I have a headache. Press conference over.”
I use Oprah for this outlandish example because outlandishly she TRIED to do the exact above example after filming
There Are No Children Here in the Cabrini Projects in the early 1990s, in Chicago. She and Stedman took families out of the projects and handed them $36,000 and houses to pull people out of poverty as a initial step into doing it for more and more people.
What they found in the subsequent years of doing this was that no matter where they pulled poor people from, poor people didn’t know how to go from A to C, because they hadn’t done B yet. B being changing themselves to be able to handle C. That change being learning financial management skills and other social and emotional skills that time enforces, enhances and encourages into people.
What seemed like an elegantly simple solution turned into a clusterfuck of families who put themselves into deeper debt because they lacked time, maturity and financial education and management skills.
But when others were offered those skills, some, but not all opted in, but most were either too absorbed in the day to day struggles of poverty to participate fully or did not have the foundational education to be able to comprehend a 401K, a pension, investing, starting a legitimate business.
Knowledge is predicated on previous knowledge predicated on previous knowledge.
Pancakes.
Learning is the butter in-between each one and commitment the syrup drained all over the stack (Oprah approves of this imagery.)
Now, I answered this question because I tried much of what is implied in the question itself and discovered, through the smarts of people far more educated in the system of Poverty, and it is it’s own culture, language, habits, money beliefs, through
Ruby Payne and A Framework for Understanding Poverty—that it takes 3–5 years of teaching Poor People at A, what B is and allllllll that B entails (see chart below) for them to be able to evolve to and sustain being in C. That time frame is generally 3 to 5 years. And here’s another thing of what I found,
80% can’t, don’t, won’t do it for a variety of sane and insane reasons—-children, family, abuse, drugs maturity, lack of interest, etc.. Substantiating that only 18% of people get out of generational poverty. That pesky
80/20 Principle at work.
Poor people are holding one end of the rope, wealthier people the other and the rope is pulled taunt—-Poor People pull harder thinking if you would just bring some of that good smelling richness and cash over here we’d all be better off, rich people are pulling back saying wait, a minute, wait a minute, you don’t understand there’s a lot more to being over here, to changing your reality, to creating sustainability than just money.
Only 18% of poor people move from poverty to not poor permanently.
I can agree this number out as about 80% of the dozens of students I intensively mentored through school, work, life, didn’t shift from poor in a measurable massive way. There were incremental improvements, better awareness but only about 20% of them “changed”. And that was after 3 to 5 years of intensive interaction and then years of watching, checking up on them.
- They had children—-the nuclear bomb to remaining poor—-across the board.
- The LGBT ones became HIV+, the nuclear bomb to being young, poor and a minority, equivalent to having children.
- They didn’t complete GEDs, only did two year colleges, didn’t move in life away from their poor family members so they were vastly influenced by them
- “They don’t respect you at that job?
- Quit.
- Stay in bed.
- Let’s have sex.
- Let’s make a baby.
- Let’s do some drugs.
- You can find another job.”
I’ve actually had students tell me their parents, lovers, siblings, friends have told them this, changed their work and school lives with these statements.) impactful choices that kept them in the cycle of poverty.
Because 70% of Americans lack more than a basic Financial Management and Generation Education, 70% believe that if Aunty Oprah REALLy cared, she’d just show up with a check. They believe not just things about money but how money would affect them and what they would immediately know how to do and manage.
If you don’t believe me about what 70% of Americans believe——look in any grocery store or 7–11 in America…at the PowerBall lottery prize. It is comprised of the amount of players, not winners, who regularly buy tickets and the amount itself is a marketing inducement for more to buy. Have you ever wondered where $100 million of the PowerBall goes if for weeks on end no one won, though 500 million tickets were purchased and the winner gets $400 million before taxes and then that $250 million, always more than 50% goes BACK to the state tht only had to print up colorful pieces of paper to get cash and then pay out maybe a third of what the prize amount was promised—-is anyone else seeing an invisible tax particularly on poor people, called the lottery in this?
(Much like churches selling and marketing an invisible loving deity on Sundays to those poor people—-Black people tithing $14 million a week to Black churches—-have you ever seen a Black Church become an employment agency? An HIV center? A diabetes center? Where is THAT money going?) Another spooky statistic back to our 18% out of poverty, 80% not, 70% lacking financial education—-80% of people who win the lottery lose it all within 5 years.
Ain’t math just friggin’ spooky?
Shitty jobs teach you resilience and grit. (
How to Learn Grit.)
Doing without what makes you short term happy, delaying gratification, leads to discipline and the ability to measure.
It’s not that those of us who might have more intellectually, financially, socially don’t want to give but we understand that we can’t support a person out of poverty, we can support the rope for them to climb out. We can then send down books and instructions and knowledge on how to rope climb, and not let go of the rope. We can encourage and be there to help them but yanking someone to the mountain top, never works. It is a partnership, a symbiotic process.
They must climb as if their lives depend on it, because they do.
Much like the poster misuses socialism. Public schools in America? Socialism. The Post office, public transportation, etc. All of you need some perspective and to back off the politics crack pipe, you're misusing, misconstruing and misjudging rather than creating allies in one another.
One hundred miles from Washington D.C..
One hundred miles from Washington D.C..
If one, ten or a thousand of us votes for or supports the craziest amongst them its because, shit, even a broken clock can be right twice a day.
If one, ten or a thousand of us votes for or supports the craziest amongst them its because, shit, even a broken clock can be right twice a day.
What I think realllllllly pierces the consciousness of White LGBTQ people, confused by other ethnicities finding something in their boogeyman, is Trump does something unique ---- he doesn't just slap the rights/feelings of others ----he, flaunting his own immense wealth and power, kicks White privilege in the teeth. He has manipulated to usurp power from other White people, from power, from media and politics. He, the epitome of the American dream of moguls /capitalism rugged industrialist, has purposefully and callously trumped the privilege of women, liberals, gays, trans, etc---pointedly White people by dragging out the undercover privilege to exclude---foreigners, others, different, liberals.
