That is NOT what @austinmshauri is saying…it breaks the whole cycle. Certainly not a band aid!
I don’t think ivory tower education will destroy the culture of poverty.
Since the root of poverty often stems from poor financial choices and not understanding the benefits of long term thinking & planning, breaking that cycle is probably the best hope.
I thought #276 was sarcasm.
SNAP has SNAP-ED which is an education effort that extends into the communities served by SNAP. But it really doesn’t matter since the Food and Beverage industry has an “education” effort that can never be outdone. It’s called advertising and celebrity association. Young children are enticed by Happy Meals, Ronald McDonald mascots, in-store playgrounds and soda swilling sports figures and celebrities. Compare that to a boring class with someone droning on about what you should be eating.
I think Mayor Bloomberg tried to get a pilot program going in 2011 in NYC limiting the amount of SNAP $'s that could be spent on soda to a certain percentage. The soda lobbies in Washington DC went into overdrive and made sure it never got approved.
When you couple all the advertising that lures young people in with the extremely low cost of the food they are selling, it is easy to see why education efforts fall on deaf ears. Hey if Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake and Shakira are drinking/eating it why not us??? Of course those people don’t go near that crap in real life. Their dollars take them elsewhere. Sad situation.
Yes, probably/Maybe sarcasm, esp since middle class kids lose FA if you take it literally. But this issue requires the cycle to be broken in a meaningful way. It does not mean “college” per se, but education the poor in a meaningful way to allow them to be prepared for better jobs, to live a better life and to teach their own kids how to eat, how to dress, how to keep a schedule of successful work week. These are things learn from their family. Many here don’t.
It requires so many pieces, education is a huge part of that, and I don’t mean a class you have to attend before you get your snap card.
@HRSMom with nutrition you have medical research to look to for setting the standards. The rest of what you speak of can be very problematic – who sets the standard for “how to dress” or what constitutes a “better life?”
^how to dress is you boss, your church, etc. A better life? That is the eye of the beholder. I’m not telling people what to aim for. I just want to give them the tools tsp they can make it happen. When you start trying to tell people what is right, we get off course and nothing happens.
Hahaha, like ONLY poorer folk make bad nutritional choices?! You mean all those aisles in the supermarket filled with processed food and only poor people are buying it?!
I’ll ask again what I asked pages ago - are you all only eating quinoa, kale, and sprouts? Those sections of the supermarket are pretty small.
A lot of success comes from privilege, pure and simple, and the way it benefits in thousands of tiny ways.
Poverty doesn’t just stem from poor job availability (let’s get the private sector going again…), lack of quality education and mental health issues, though those things contribute; it’s also a function of conditions at home. Improving access to good education won’t matter much if kids are told that school doesn’t matter or if they are discouraged from succeeding; there can be oodles of open jobs but if industry and personal responsibility weren’t instilled in a person, they might not search in earnest; and a deteriorating home situation can only (well, I’m guessing a bit here…) make mental health issues worse. If you improve the home situation and get parents to teach their kids positive living ideals, to care about school, and provide a supportive emotional environment, people will grow up better equipped to take advantage of available opportunities at school and in the workplace. Mental health is harder to pin down because treatment can be evasive even if the person can find help, but the better the support system, the more likely they are to be pointed in that direction at least.
I think attitude is so important in life: you can’t control everything that happens to you, but you can control your response. Being optimistic and industrious in response to negative events/circumstances will make it easier to overcome hurdles than will an attitude of defeat/pessimism. “Realism” is pessimism dressed in sheep’s clothing, it seems.
Of COURSE it’s not just poor choices made by those in poverty, that keep them there, as someone upthread alleges. There are other reasons as well. Parents may completely support their children’s efforts in school, but the school may have teachers who make incorrect assumptions about their abilities, or that the parents DON’T care, or the teachers may be just plain bad teachers-not uncommon in the "worst"schools. Or you have someone wanting to work in a job they can do, but there are systemic race and class issues that come into play preventing them from getting those jobs. Or the job requires you to have “reliable transportation”, i.e. no public transportation users, or must be available to work any shift at any time, something parents with small children can’t always do.
It’s also hard to get out of poverty when the bulk of one’s income is going to housing in an expensive market. The waiting list for Section 8 here in Seattle is 5 years. Rent in insane. A ROOM, not an apartment but a ROOM in a neighborhood near mine is going for $900 a month. Meanwhile families on the waiting lists have to rent where they can, leaving very little to pay for basic necessities, thus extending the cycle of poverty. Forget a car.
It’s really too complex to go into in a short thread post, but it’s about far, far more than “poor choices”. But that’s a convenient way to blame ALL those in poverty for their situations. I haven’t met anyone in such circumstances yet who hasn’t wanted to change their situation, even if they don’t exactly know how.
Actually Bloombergs efforts in NYC were geared towards everybody. In addition to limiting a percentage of the SNAP $'s for soda he attempted to limit individual soda container size sales to 16 oz’s in restaurants and movie theaters. So he wanted to get rid of portions like the “big gulp” and “double big gulp” which are 32oz and 64oz in a cup with a straw. NY Court of Appeals struck it down.
I believe Bloomberg was reacting to NYC Health Department data showing obesity rates in the city on the rise.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-buery/new-york-soda-ban_b_3750419.html
I haven’t read the entire thread. But having read the first page, here is my proposal: no one should comment on what people spend money on with SNAP benefits unless they personally have used Food Stamps/sSNAP. And then they can tell you what they spent it on. And why.
@Consolation don’t you know? Only people who look down on people like me are allowed to make decisions about us.
The actual conditions on the ground be damned… they know what’s best and they know how we should be spending our time (what free time they think most poor people have is beyond me) and where we should be spending our money, regardless of whether or not there are “appropriate” places (like grocery stores) within our reach.
While this may seem like not taking a position, you still are. You are effectively saying that the current restrictions are exactly right.
If you were actually saying that there should be no restrictions, why not allow cigarettes and alcohol?
I’ll admit I am not the best long term planner but I hope to help my children be better financial planners.
This thread has reminded me of something from many years ago. I belong to a very diverse internet group of moms we had a gathering at a hotel for a weekend when they were pre-schoolers. I was taken aback when one of the moms told her then four year old that she couldn’t order milk for breakfast because it was too expensive and proceeded to order soda for her four and two year children because it had free refills! The mom wasn’t on SNAP then and had the funds to travel and stay at a hotel but didn’t want to spend the extra $.50 per kid for a glass of milk!
Well, when we were getting food stamps, I spent it on things like white and whole wheat flour, sugar, yeast (I baked all of our bread), dried beans, meats such as a whole pork loin when it was less that $1 per pound at BJs, onions, garlic, olive oil, butter, fresh vegetables (a luxury: they are very expensive), canned tomatoes, eggs, rice…you get the picture. Yes, I may have bought some diet tonic water so I could have a gin and tonic. Sue me.
But I know how to cook, including baking bread, I had transportation by car, I have access to full-service supermarkets, I had access to a full kitchen, and I had time to shop and cook and freezer capacity to buy meat in bulk, cut it into stir fry and roasts and chops and make sausage out of the trimmings. And so forth.
Just like how I could use my own washer and dryer–old but functioning not too badly–rather than spending hours and a lot of money in the laundromat.
It is very expensive to be TRULY poor. We weren’t.
Wow–when D was hospitalized st age 2 weeks, the other (older) baby in the room was being feed cheese puffs by mom and grandma (which both adults were also eating the same). Grandma also criticized mom for everything, including how she diapered baby and then they both both put a huge cloud of baby powder on the baby when changing its diaper. I was so relieved when D was discharged. I was afraid everyone in the room would have coughing fits and worse from all the powder. I also doubt the pediatrician (or anyone on this thread) would have been thrilled about baby’s diet of cheese puffs.
I admit we have purchased fruit juice and fruit drinks for our kids, as well as Gatorade. I have rarely had any beverage other than water at restaurants because I don’t consider it good value. Our kids often had the kiddie meals when we traveled–can’t remember if they came with beverages and if so what beverage. In any case the choices we offered the kids was generally milk or fruit juice (not fruit drink or colored sugar water). Whether there were refills or not, soda was not an option with us and none of us have much fondness for it other than as a rare treat, sometimes as a float.
We have made some poor nutritional choices along the way, as have our kids. Fortunately, none of us has suffered much from them in terms of health.
I wasn’t commenting on restrictions at all. I have absolutely no problem with SNAP being restricted to food. That’s what it’s for.
I was objecting to people making condescending remarks when they have never intheir lives BT/DT.
Anyone who has children or who intends to has to get used to being lectured about food. You will get advice and even mandates from every corner. Some of the worst “food fights” I have ever witnessed were between teachers/coaches and parents who disagree on food choices.
When my S was in middle school his hockey practices were in the very early morning – like 6:15. The parents used to take turns bringing in some sort of breakfast for the boys to eat after they got off the ice. The coach apparently did not like that some parents dropped off boxes of dunkin donuts or pastries. He was not particularly diplomatic in his email advising parents of his disapproval. In fact he was so direct that he insulted some parents and it started a literal war that I don’t think the team every fully recovered from. Rather than just abide by the list he supplied some parents either refused to contribute at all or just continued to bring the items he had pretty much banned from the locker room. It was an awful year.
You will also get lists of what is acceptable to bring into school for holidays and birthdays. Parents do not always agree and some will confront the teachers about their “dictatorial” approach – it can cause a lot of problems. In my children’s school the conflicts were so constant between parents and teachers that the Head of School send out a memo to parents – he basically said this is the list and it’s non -negotiable. Again, hard feelings all around.
Our local women’s shelter has a communal kitchen for the families to cook meals. All the food is donated by local grocery stores and families in the community. They even have a set list of items they will not accept and the vast majority of it is items with excessive sugar – I assume because there are usually so many young children living there. This year they actually purchased an ad in the local newspaper asking the community not to drop off the bagfuls of excess candy the day after Halloween – there are many in the community who think both of those requests are out of bounds.
So food choice is a hot button all around.
I don’t think the primary cause of poverty is bad choices. If I had to guess, I’d say the leading cause of poverty is poverty. It’s a cycle that’s very difficult to break. When we were young, education was a viable way out, but costs were low enough that people could work their way through school. I don’t think that’s much of a possibility anymore. We can legislate and tell low income people what they can and can’t buy, and try to educate them about healthy meals, but if we don’t go a step further and educate them enough to break the cycle of poverty I don’t see how the overall situation will get much better.
I don’t think poverty is caused by an imperfect or inadequate access to a BA/BS degree.
Millions and millions of people live comfortable lives with just a high school education. And, an AA degree can lead to jobs in a variety of vocations.
Of course, some people fall into poverty from simply “bad luck,” illness/injury, and/or a bad set of circumstances. For many of these people, poverty may be a short-term experience, but some may find themselves forever in poverty.
However, impulsive or “bad choices,” addictions, poor role models, and/or mental illness probably account for many, if not most, of those in long-term poverty.