Was the death of the blue collar class a good thing?

liberal vs conservative ideology as in
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=629030#629030

fox
Now there's a claim for which I'd like to see some empirical evidence.

I also am enamored of "facts" even when they are metaphysical or burdened with superflous drek. Has anyone seen Elvis lately?

And exactly who here has said anything about the "vast majority of people recieving welfare checks" not needing it? Don't go blaming others for things that don't exist outside of your over-active imagination.

Here is how the story goes.
George W. Bush had thousands (maybe millions- I only saw SOME)
of circulars dispersed in churches, trying to be sure every voter aged person got one- last election.
These circulars declared the acceptance of Salvation by George Bush, through Jesus Christ- him becoming a born again Christian, and a believer in Fundamental Christianity. They asked that the recipient of the circular believe along with George Bush and vote for him.

Yet:
The Christ he is serving commands to one and all alike, with NO respecter of persons... to visit the sick, imprisoned and needy, and to care for and feed the poor.
I do not recall any disclaimers, exemptions, or tag lines attached to this commandment of LOVE--- did not exempt presidents, waitresses, or even CEO's.

But Bush is a 'healthy Republican'??
A man who does not believe in giving a hand up to a person who can work?
Doesn't matter if the man can only earn enough to pay for a patched up dump, and a little food, he can't get a cent.
But "public welfare" pays ONLY enough for a bit of food and some second-third rate housing. The man STILL has to beg for rides, or walk, ( and pray someone gives him something to wear.)


"Hey, life never promised you anything and I didn't either!!"

I hear you Republican. I hear you...
Make up your mind what is right, George.

rather a telling commentary . . .

An administrative assistant working in Boston and making $20,000-$29,000 should be looking for another job. The median salary for an entry level administrative person in Boston is $31,249 according to Monster.com. The very low end of the scale dips just below your $29,000 marker. $30,000-$39,000 is the typical pay range for entry level administrative support in Boston

I am always suspicious of these so called median salaries and median prices quoted by the press and websites and wonder how they are derived. As a veteran job seeker who has applied for hundreds of admin assist posts over the past 7 years, I can tell you that the highest pay ever posted was $24,000.

setanta and tarantulas,

There are ideas that sweep through governments like spring fashions through the Hamptons. Government is fad ridden. De-institutionalization was a fad that somehow caught on.

Why, I don't know, because a great deal of the people in institutions are there because their families either could not take care of them (because their care was either too intensive or too expensive or beyond the skills of a person without training) or would not take care of them.

That established, people anxious for the bottom line then said we could save money by getting those people out of institutions. I said people because both legislators and citizens took up this chant. Support came from well meaning but ultimately ignorant people who said institutions are inhumane: put the handicapped into normal surroundings, as well as from those who had no idea what caring for a mentally handicapped person is.

Will have to log off in a few, but work this into your equation.

Much to say but need to add that I often substitute in a special needs nursery school where the town pays for speech, physical,occupational therapy for kids who are heart wrenching. These parents could never pay for these things and if the kids don't receive said therapy as preschoolers,they WILL end up institutionalized.


Also, Iwould imagine that if someof those mothers had amniocentisis, those kids would have been aborted in the second trimester.

Okay Blatham, you asked for a source re whether conservatives are more philanthropic than liberals. Here is one source. Given a bit of time, I can come up with many many more.

Sorry, I Gave at the IRS Office
by Brian O'Connell
18 December 2003

A recent study by the Catalogue for Philanthropy shows that, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth over how conservatives treat the poor, liberals are cheap


Humorist P.J. O'Rourke once said that God was a Republican and Santa Claus was a Democrat.

I can't vouch for the former but would wager that St. Nick, given his benevolent nature, would grumble over being compared to such a Grinch-like political class.

Why? Because it turns out that, despite their solidarity with the working class, and despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth over how conservatives treat the poor, liberals are cheap. You know -- the kind of people who throw nickels around like manhole covers.

Exhibit "A" in defense of that notion can be found in domestic charitable-giving trends. A recent series of annual studies by the Boston-based Catalogue for Philanthropy found that states where bedrock conservative tenets hold sway continue to top the list of charitable givers. Compiled every year, the index ranks charitable giving, state by state, by U.S. citizens and companies. In fact, the index accounts for the amount of wealth that citizens and corporations in all 50 states can give, and how much they actually do give, to charities on an annual basis.

The good news is that in 2002, the Catalogue for Philanthropy reports that charitable giving held up fairly well, despite chronic economic woes, especially among individual charitable givers.

The bad news, for Democrats at least (and for hard luck Americans who could use their help), is that affluent states like Massachusetts (44), New Jersey (48) and Virginia (37) rank at the bottom of the index, outpaced by less well-off states like Mississippi, Arkansas and South Dakota, which top the index in 2002.

It's no one-year wonder, either. From 1997 through 2001, the study showed that Bible Belt states like Utah, Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma ranked in the top-tier of the organization's "Generosity Index." But supposedly enlightened and decidedly prosperous states where liberal political attitudes flourish are nowhere near the top of the nation's most generous benefactors ­ and haven't been for years.

In fact, liberal Meccas like Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island habitually rank among the bottom of the list (it's only to fair to mention that New York City has proven to be an exception to the rule. Charitable giving has risen significantly in the area in the aftermath of September 11, 2001). Massachusetts, where left-leaning politicians cannot bring themselves to utter the "R" word without prefacing it with terms like "mean-spirited" and "hateful," finished dead last in 1999 and among the lowest every year since. Imagine Ted Kennedy's home as the stingiest state in the union.

What gives? Or, in the case of the great liberal strongholds, what doesn't give? Evidently, when it comes to feeding hungry children, caring for the disabled and providing some dignity for the weak and poor, "Christian zealots" from the Republican right walk the walk. While it's true a family with $100,000 in tax-addicted Massachusetts has less discretionary income than a comparable family in Kansas, and thus may give less per capita, the gap is disturbing. It is particularly unfortunate given the national media's disinclination to give conservatives any credit for lending a hand to the less fortunate.

Further fanning the flames is the apparent reluctance of wealthy Americans to part with their money while poorer citizens give generously. According to the Generosity Index, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Michigan rank at the bottom again last year even though they are three of the wealthiest states. States like Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi and other Bible-Belt states invariably top the list each year.

A computer analysis of recent tax returns by the Chronicle shows that contributions varied widely both by income level and by where they lived. Among returns of taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of less than $20,000, those who itemized deductions gave an average of more than 10% to charity -- although few taxpayers in that income bracket itemize. Among the wealthiest Americans -- those earning $200,000 or more -- the average charitable deduction was about 3.6% of their total income. Most of those taxpayers do itemize. The smallest percentage deductions were among those who earned $75,000 to just less than $200,000. Of those who itemized, the average deduction was 2.6% of income.

The liberal response to this issue is predictable. If you live in a traditionally high-income, high-tax state like Massachusetts or New Jersey, local governments, through higher taxes, are taking the responsibility of caring for the needy. True, there's a much broader safety net of secular institutions in affluent, left-leaning states. In less affluent states, people give more to churches than their wealthier counterparts and churches pass on those contributions to the needy.

That scenario may be true, but it also feeds into the long-lamented cry by conservatives that liberals live by a code of "do as I say, not as I do."

Why else would citizens of wealthier states not contribute more to charity? Geography, for one. The Northeast's apparent frugality might be a result of being compared to heavy religious contributions in the poorer Southern states. The Chronicle has noted that the most generous people tend to live in states with high numbers of evangelical Christians. Others say big-city dwellers like those in Chicago or Boston are constantly inundated with telemarketers looking for contributions -- and not all of them on the up-and up. Once you have been burned by an unscrupulous company purporting to represent a needy charity, it is easy to rationalize that your taxes are more than enough for society's neediest. It's also easy for critics to say such rationalization is nothing more than a cop-out.

So, faced with the new realities of charitable giving, what's a liberal to do? Most likely the usual -- deny, obfuscate and paint the enemy as "extremists." But when it comes to charitable contributions, the only thing extremist about conservatives is the higher amounts of money they give to the less fortunate.

Brian O'Connell is a Doylestown, Pennsylvania-based
freelance writer with 12 years experience covering business news and trends. He is the author of The 401(k) Millionaire and CNBC Creating Wealth. His latest book is Build Your Own Mutual Fund.

Excellent analysis, plainoldme. I have long been convinced that the disastrous policy of de-institutionalization was the result of an unholy alliance of penny-wise-pound-foolish conservatives and detached-from-reality liberal do-gooders.

A fine turn of phrase that . . .


heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .


okseeyahbye

I think far too often good intentions result in unintended bad consequences on both sides of the aisle.

For instance desegregation was a good thing and the intention was to correct inequality or possibility of inequalities. But the unintended result was the destruction of black institutions that had provided comfort and stability for people working their way up.

Urban renewal was a good thing and the intention was to improve roads, transportation, and decent housing for huges groups of people. But the unintended result was destruction of whole neighborhoods that had formerly had a vitality and 'family feel' to them and the introduction of the huge, defective, and crime ridden projects.

Welfare was a good thing and the intention was to provide the basic necessities of life for the poor. But the unintended result was the hastenened destruction of the nuclear family and consignment of an entire under class of people to perpetual poverty.

Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was a good thing and the intention was to remove the social stigma that accompanies non-violent forms of mental illness. But the unintended result was a whole new social group of the dysfunctional and homeless and a whole new industry of soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

I wonder if we stopped trying to demonize the political leanings of each other and put our heads together to formulate policies that help and don't hurt people, would we be able to come up with real solutions to real problems?

Work together. Lets see. Bush passed tax laws that helped the rich get richer and justified it by claiming that the wealth would trickle down to the poor and middle class. Wouldent it have made more since to pay down the national debt and gave everyone a break from paying hundreds of billions of dollars in interest. Oh, wait a minute. The rich own the bonds so this way they double dip. The rich get the tax breaks and the interest from the national debt. The poor and middle class get what we always have from government. We get to pay the lions share of government and get nothing in return.

"Was the death of the blue collar class a good thing?"

No.

It may have been (or be - in the sense that it's still an ongoing process) inevitable, and I dont know about economic pros and cons.

And of course, its primarily the white working class that "died". Talking about Holland, the number of workers, and the number of manual workers in particular, has dropped and dropped and dropped since the fifties as jobs were automatised or exported to low-wage countries ... but there still are some. But those that are still there, they're not Dutch.

But for what it was - I grieve for it. We all changed so much. If I look at my cousins, compare them to my uncles and aunts, look how they changed, and compare them to my grandparents, greataunt ... a whole world lost. And a home lost, too <nods>.

Cities, too. Every last workshop, small factory, warehouse is replaced by more fancy new apartments, graphic design studios, temp agencies. And the people that go with them.

And I feel that our societies have lost by it. We are ever more a country of blahblah, of networkers and delegators, motivators and coordinators. Everyone's turned so fake, so empty, so full of themselves.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my mum's family. Both with their erstwhile urban working class family culture, which I was already a stranger in (spoiled as I was by first-generation hippie parents), and with the way they then changed over time, making me stop to think about how things used to be, and were ever less so (especially when they started dying).

But whenever I am too surrounded, in this university town, in my soft-sector project-coordination work environment, by the vacuous, self-satisfied, not-a-clue-about-how-else-it-could-be, always-impersonally-friendly, sanitised blah-blah not-an-actual-practical-skill-at-hand 1990s yuppie world, I yearn for the bluntly straightforward, black-humour normalness of ... back then.

Whatever happened to us all!?

I am serious - I admit that I myself, too, prefer going to the coffeehouse to read a newspaper and have a tea and a bagel, over going to have a soggy meatball roll and a beer at the local coffeeshop and listen to talk about sports. But at the same time I miss it, and every time I see a cigarette shop, brown cafe or shoe repairshop close and make way for yet another hip, new, flashy place, I have to suppress the physical desire to return at night and firebomb the place.

I'm not kidding, either.

nimh,
I understand what you are saying completely. We haven't become more sophisticated because we have bagel shops on every corner: we jsut exchanged bagels for the other ethnic breads we once ate. Bagels must be on their way out because there are now soft bagels. Ugh! What a concept!

foxfyre,
You are so right about the law of unintended consequences. We never really know how things will work out.

To all,
I actually think that blue collar types who work their way up make better managers than college educated kids who come in at the managerial level because the blue collar types have better (in general) 'people skills' than the kids do.

revel writes:


And when confronted with an invitation to explore ways of doing things better, some take this as opportunity to further spin their trashing of the opposition with a biased, prejudiced, and largely uninformed view of things. In case you haven't read a newspaper lately, personal income in all income brackets is up, productivity is up, and we just enjoyed our best quarter of job creation in four years. But the hate mongers will ignore the facts and say only the rich benefitted.

And both the Bush bashing and my observations are entirely off topic. Sorry about that.

Perhaps you could point out to me where I posted something false. The truth isent bashing unless it is against something you believe in. Even many conseratives wanted to pay down the national debt and for the reasons I stated. By the way my name is rabel22.

I thought I did

Anyhow sorry I got the name wrong rabel22. When you hit the 'post reply' button you can't see the previous post for a bit and I'm getting old and forgetful.

exactly what're you disagreeing with him on?

paying down the debt wouldn't have been productive?

bush balloned our debt by 2 trillion dollars over 4 years, from 5 to 7.

the intrest we pay on that alone takes a huge chunk of our future budget.

money that we could've used to pass tax cuts THAT WE COULD ACTUALLY AFFORD.

But wait, that would only help the people in the future generations? why worry about our kids when we could screw them over so he can get reelected, huh Bush?