Post in To Guy, and all those affordable housing advocates;

Jul 07 04:57 UTC

Michael Katch: "We all know that the social safety net has been eroded since
1980, but it was President Clinton, a Democrat, that tossed the welfare mothers
to the curb and began the further destruction of the low income family that has
led to the loss of morality in these communities.  (When mom is working three
jobs to feed her kids, they are being brought up by television and then gangs.)
...  We have to root out the real problems holding our brethren back from
joining the middle class and achieving the promise of a better life for their
children and themselves."

In theory, what Clinton did needed to be done and could only be done by a
Democrat. How he did it is another matter.

The observation was made in the U S Congress by Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
(served 1977-2000), that the laws congress was proposing vis-a-vis welfare,
within three generations of recipients, would create a mess that we would have
trouble untangling.

Collectively, we had decided that man-in-the-house rules destroyed families
because unemployed/unemployable men were leaving their families to cope without
a second adult. They posited with the laws they wrote that keeping families
together would allow those families to be in a better position to prosper. That
is arguable well into next month and beyond. I don't know whether that
proposition holds water or not. But, in all the written documents creating the
mess we have now, there was an undertone of expectation that the poor would
maintain a nuclear family--mommy, daddy, kiddies, dog, tv. Among the poor, that
doesn't always exist. Nor is it necessarily desirable principally because it is
an expensive lifestyle. So we continue to feed ourselves a lot of romantic
drivel which in no way matches anyone's reality and we write the laws and voice
the expectations that support the fantasy.

I do know that people should work for a living, including the wealthy. I know
also that the training to work needs to be done at home and away beginning
early in life. The job of your kid is to go to school, help with chores after
school, do homework, and be building the skills for that first entry level job.
More than that, we as a people, need to repeat often enough that it sinks in,
that we expect all of the children to work at some legitimate job when they
reach 14, baring physical complications. If we do that, how many generations
would it take to reverse our present circumstances?

How we undo the damage we have done to the expectations of the succeeding
generations of citizens is something that will take a bigger brain than mine to
untangle. I do know that it will take a considerable sea change in our
attitudes toward all our citizens to shift the paradigm off it's present
course. Regardless of who we choose (unless someone really good comes along
before the last day to declare), none of the candidates will be able to do
that. So we choose between frick and frack.

As an aside: I didn't "join" the middle class until I was 54 (bought a house,
which describes the dividing line between the strivers and the petit
bourgeoisie). I was always among the lower class strivers. I have a certain
class loyalty, despite the house.