>40 million Americans live in poverty, while 50 million Mexicans do
The Mexican poverty rate is $157/month and less in rural areas whereas US is over $1000/month.
Even with that, the US poverty rate is 12.7% below the national poverty line whereas Mexico's is 42%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Mexico
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#R...
Mexico also isn't anywhere near the bottom compared to other countries. Only 2% of Mexican citizens live below the international poverty line.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blu...
"You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs."
I think this sentiment explains why so many poor whites are against programs that would ultimately help them. To them, minorities are the competition in a zero sum game.
On the other hand, the motherjones paragraph quoted by parent portrays the people in question as basically being forced to pit their desire to help people against their desire to see proportional rewards for proportional work, the classic "personal responsibility mantra" (ignoring of course the situations those 'line-cutters' were in before they got helped. Two different kinds of "fairness" being pitted against one-another).
The jump that TFA makes between "America has a lot of poverty" and "Therefore, that's the only reason people could choose Trump (a.k.a nazi germany)" doesn't really make any sense. The author just says "people sought comfort in myths". That's pretty weak.
Not really sure what the point of this article was, was it group signaling? Was it trying to convince people of something? Does the author care to hear from people who don't view conservatism as a pathology?
I don't think poor whites think purely with their wallet in Homo-Economicus terms. I think they just have a different set of values, one of which might be worded as "getting what you deserve/earn", which ironically, the author does touch on, but he writes this as a broad-swaths American thing: "You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. A form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive." He writes it as if brutal social-darwinists designed our economy, but really I think it's less malevolent than that. Self-reliance is a strong tenet of american culture, but it has some predictable outcomes when pushed as the solution to everything.
They'll get easily surpassed in raw income by India, China and few developing countries in one generation.
Or faster. When world decides to ditch the dollar as reserve currency it's house of cards.
Ain't gonna happen. Do the math of GDP per capita please.
Also predictions are accurate only if nothing unpredictable happens. I don't think anyone made 30 year accurate prediction of British economy in 1920.
The result feels hystrionic to me. Claiming that America has no social contract, that there is a proto-fascist movement arising, all this and more, feels like it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual facts and statistics.
The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.
I stopped treating this article seriously here. I can confirm you this happens everyday in a third world country and the international English-speaking media don't give a damn about it.
Quickly skimming through the article I can see the author was filled with rage and drowned in a sense of entitlement. True, human existence is suffering, but it is not just the US. You can never eliminate poverty completely.
I'll tell a Soviet joke. - What is the best way to eliminate poverty in a communist country? - Eliminate the people who are in poverty.
That is where the author's blind spot is. The author fails to see the foundations that lead to the rapid expansion of wealth in the past three hundred years: limited government, individual liberty, free market, and capitalism. Before the industrial revolution, everywhere on the planet people live in "poverty" if judged by today's standard. You can rant all day long about your rage against poverty. But you are not providing any better solution than the existing solutions the system has.
