Social security should remain solvent for quite some time, with only minor adjustments needed. Medicare is a bigger problem, mainly because it's nearly impossible to control costs in our current system, unlike under single-payer systems where it's much easier to negotiate lower costs. Single-payer health care is probably the only way to save Medicare (and to keep costs down so that any American can afford health care in the future), and I think once that becomes glaringly obvious, we will see change, because old people vote and they are going to do anything to keep their Medicare benefits.

Well, wait, didn't you know that Medicare was going to be the death knell for freedom? Reagan said so! And yet, I don't know ANY older people who are willing to give up Medicare, or claiming they would feel so much freer if it weren't there.

None. We started out with very little money. We've got almost nothing to downsize. We have a 750 sq. ft. apartment that will soon house two adults and three kids. We've got a 1997 station wagon that we got from family. We don't have any significant expenses, just years of low income (although we've done better the last 2 years) and tons of student loan debt. If we had the opportunity to live somewhere rent free for 3 years, we'd take it in a heartbeat. It might let us actually make a dent in some of that student loan debt. I say go for it.

I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Part of the issue is that, if your parents are poor, you have fewer resources to fall back on, making needing assistance more likely. DH and I had to get financial help from our families numerous times when we were in our 20s. We just did not make enough money to make ends meet. Our families had the ability to help us (and we used credit to fill in the gaps, which was a terrible idea), and so we used that resource. If we'd been from families that couldn't provide us with that help, of course we would have been more likely to need government assistance. I don't know how we can ignore the fact that "generational poverty" can most adequately be explained by the fact that the poor have no wealth to pass on to or share with their children. What jobs do you suggest these people get? Because, last I checked, there are tons of people out there looking for work who cannot find anything. Rather than blaming the government for providing assistance, perhaps we should blame the private sector for not creating jobs.

I had this in my last pregnancy, and it just started up again in this one, too. It is SO annoying. It's hard enough to get comfortable at night in the third trimester, and adding the restless legs on top of it makes sleep so difficult.

And you realize that, today, when the cost of living as risen quite a bit, minimum wage is $7.20/hour? Many people are working for that right now. When the ONLY jobs available in your area are minimum-wage service jobs, you CANNOT work your way out of poverty; you just can't. You can put in a 60-hour work week and still not make enough to be financially independent. You can have two people in your home both working those full-time jobs and still not have enough to provide your family with the basics. This is the reality we are living in.

I think your theory that poor economic circumstances means poor choices is a very, very flawed one. I'm going to leave aside the issue of how many people who HAVE done things "right" by your standards are still struggling. I'm going to leave aside the fact that many young people who have finished college and have good work records can't afford ANY standard of living, because if they are lucky enough to find a job at all, it doesn't pay anywhere close to what they'd need to be financially independent. The jobs that are being created in our economy are low-paying service jobs. There is obviously a need and demand for this kind of labor, so I'm not going to sit back and "tsk-tsk" somebody for making choices in life that result in them having a career in retail or working as an orderly in a nursing home. We not only need that work, but right now it's pretty much the only work that's being created, and so many overqualified people are taking those jobs out of desperation. But, even if they weren't, we do need somebody to do these things for us, yes? We need people to care for our elderly, to work at the stores and restaurants where we get the cheap food and goods we demand, and to provide the other services that sector of the economy provides for us. But, we do not insist that the people working those jobs get paid a living wage. We need and demand their labor, but allow them to be paid so little that, even working 80 hours a week, they'd have difficulty providing for a family. And then we turn around and complain when people need the help of food stamps or housing assistance to make ends meet. What we're paying in taxes to help the poor is a fraction of either what we'd be paying if those workers were provided with a living wage (and their employers kept making the profits they're making) or of what their employers would lose in profit if they provided those workers with a living wage. I think many of us have been fooled into taking "personality responsibility" (or, even worse, fooled into believing others have failed to do so) for problems that are systematic rather than personal. I heard an older person complaining in a diner the other day about a girl he saw on TV, who was in debt. She is a college graduate, and her first job pays $18K/year. She is in debt because she has been spending approximately $30K/year. His take on it was that she was simply selfish and irresponsible and wanted right now what her grandparents had after years of work. That's nothing but nonsense. In reality, $30K/year is about what it takes just to get by in many parts of the country; you can't even get by as a single person on $18K/year, especially if you have student loan debt to pay back. The cost of living has risen dramatically since the late 70s/early 80s while wages have stagnated for all but the very, very wealthiest. If she was spending $80K/year, I might agree with him, but his assessment is nothing more than the kind of anti-young-people, anti-poor-people, uncritical brainwashing that we are fed day after day by the corporate media. Now, if you think we should have young people living at home, delaying marriage, and putting off childbearing until they are in their early-to-mid-30s (at which point they might be making enough money to get by), I guess that's fine. But, previous generations in the recent past have not had to do that; they were able to get entry-level jobs that paid decent wages. The problem is NOT young people (or any people) spending too much; the problem is people being paid too little and the cost of necessities (housing, medical care, and education in particular) rising dramatically. And unless we are willing to address that on a systematic, large-scale level, we're going to resort to chalking it up to individual bad choices, and nothing will change.

Sort of like media outlets that try to convince Americans that Canadians live in a country where a free media isn't allowed? ;)

Most Western countries have mixed economies. I don't think the government has failed to educate people. I think the government does a far better job than the private sector would, and that our public education system has actually been very successful in creating educated citizens, and that people are far more widely and equitably educated than they were before we had public education (a cursory look at literacy rates will demonstrate that). That doesn't mean it's ideal, though, and if I can provide something more ideal, I will. Again, your ideas sound good in theory. But I don't see how they'd play out in reality. Human nature makes unregulated, unfettered capitalism just as unworkable in practice as communism (which is not the same as the kind of Western-style socialism we see in most of the industrialized world or as a mixed economy). We have seen, in the last 30 years, what deregulation means: it means that people's greed will dictate their decisions, and we'll see wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, not more. I don't think that's arguable. Nobody is suggesting that we move to communism, where the government owns all the means of production, just that the government has a role to play both in providing a safety net and in economic regulations to help make sure that the average worker actually does see the fruits of his or her productivity.

That's anecdotal, though. If we look at things like the amount of debt students are leaving college with, and the jobs that are available to them and what they pay, and the cost of living, they are in a tougher situation. Just as an example, when my parents left college, they got jobs making almost the same (and this isn't adjusting for inflation) as my DH and I did when we graduated college 30 years later. My father's first job paid $15K; my DH's first job paid $18K. My father went to a private college, paid for it through loans, and had about $10K in student loan debt upon graduation; my husband went to a public university and had $60K in student loan debt upon graduation. My parents' house, when they bought it, cost $30K; 35 years later, it sold for $300K. Have we always made the best economic choices? No. But, that doesn't negate the fact that we were in a much more difficult situation economically than our parents were in, even though we had nearly identical circumstances, because of how things had moved economically over the last 30 years. And that isn't unusual; in fact, things are even worse for kids coming out today. Their student loan debt is even deeper, and wages haven't risen.

In defense of young people today: they are in a REALLY tough economic situation, certainly tougher than we or our parents were in. They are coming out of college saddled with a lot of student loan debt, and there simply aren't jobs out there for them, particularly not jobs that pay enough to allow them to be financially independent. So I think we need to worry less about how to stop young people from feeling "entitled" and more about how to change things so that they have a real chance. Right now, many of them don't, and we blame them instead of the economic forces that have made things nearly impossible for them.

I don't really know. We've had many, many years of very little income (we were grad students for the first 5 years of our marriage, and then lived on very little for a few years after that), but I wouldn't have considered us "poor," because our families are middle-class and were able to help us out. We could go to them to get help with the heating bill or rent. We had places to turn. I guess I think "poor" has more to do with resources. You can have little money but a good amount of resources, as we did; our income was well below the poverty line, but we had family who could easily help us out, as well as other channels for helping make ends meet (for example, DH was able to get a housing stipend from his university a few years in a row). But, if you lack money AND resources, then that's a much more difficult situation, and I think that's what I'd consider "poor." I also think it's not very useful to compare "poor" in the U.S. to "poor" in other countries. I mean, on one level, it does help those of us with means to keep things in perspective. I sometimes feel like we lack things we need--we'll soon have three kids in a small two-bedroom apartment, we have one really old car, we make a lot less than most people we know--and remembering how much we have in comparison to most of the world is helpful. However, I don't think it's good or right to compare what the poor in this country have to what the poor in other countries have. Sure, we might think that, since people in other countries don't have clean water, cars and phones are luxuries. However, life in the U.S. is such that it is incredibly difficult in most places to get any job at all without a phone and a car. So I'm not going to say that, because somebody has a place to live and food to eat, they aren't "really" poor. If they lack the things you need to improve your situation, and lack the means to obtain those things, then I do think they are poor, even if by other standards they wouldn't be. I think it's telling that we only apply this "Well, they wouldn't be poor in another country!" standard to the poor. We don't tend to apply it to ourselves. Check out the Global Rich List. My DH and I are, income-wise, somewhere in the 30th-40th precentile of U.S. wage-earners, certainly not wealthy. But we are in the top 2% of the richest people in the world. And yet I don't see many working-, middle-, or upper-middle class Americans arguing that they aren't *really* middle-class, but are really extremely wealthy, since that's their status when compared to most of the world. I think it's very unfair that we always want to compare the poorest in our society to the poorest around the world, as a way of proving that our poor really don't have it that bad, but don't want to make that same comparison of our own status.

Can you point to a time or place when this has happened? When prosperity really was evenly spread around, with no government intervention? Any time or place in history at all would do. I'm just not sure how you can think, when we KNOW that the jobs being created right now are low-paying service jobs, and that good-paying jobs are disappearing, that "being productive" or getting a job is the answer. Americans are actually REALLY productive; the problem is that their productivity is lining the pockets of a very, very small number of people, rather than being evenly spread throughout the economy. This is why we can see companies bringing in record profits when unemployment is at record highs and the average person sees their wages stagnate or fall. What jobs do you want the poor to take? How do you think that more deregulation--doing exactly what we've been doing for the last 30 years--would make things better for them or create more jobs? Can you point to times or places where this has actually worked, and the situation of the poor IMPROVED when government safety nets weren't present and the economy went unregulated?

What? You do realize that the marginal tax rate has been dropping precipitously since the 1940s, right? That we've been deregulating since the late 1970s, which happens to coincide with wealth becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the average worker seeing less and less of our gains in productivity reflected in their earnings? (In the 1950s, tax rates were much higher, especially on the wealthiest, and productivity gains were spread relatively evenly across the board--i.e., if the economy grew by 10%, your average worker saw 10% more income. In recent years, as we've stripped away nearly all regulations and continued to reduce taxes, particularly on the most wealthy, we've seen that stop happening. Now if the economy grows by 10%, we'll see the wealthiest Americans have their income rise dramatically, while the average worker sees no increase in income at all.) What facts/statistics are you working off of, to make the claims you are making? Because they don't seem to accord with economic reality.

Why? Again, the stupidest thing my husband and I ever did, financially, was to not apply for and use government assistance when we could have. It's a number of years later, and we have yet to dig ourselves out of the hole we got into trying to "make it without using them."

Well, before we had government-sponsored welfare programs, people were watching their children starve. That's not happening here today. So, I'd say that's a good result, no? I think people are very, very naive about why we have welfare. Do you really think it's because we just love the idea of the poor not working? Or we just cater to the poor so much we don't want to upset them by making them get the jobs that are obviously out there waiting for them? That's not my reality. It seems like a lot of the most ardent proponents of capitalism are woefully misinformed about how capitalism actually works. For one thing, capitalism REQUIRES that there be a certain degree of unemployment (and that means that a certain amount of qualified, able, and seeking workers not have jobs). If there isn't a pool of surplus, qualified labor, wages would go up so much that profits would drop precipitously. In an "ideal" capitalist economy, you'd have about 3-5% unemployment. Again, that's not counting people who aren't looking for work (like SAHPs) or people who can't work (the elderly, the disabled, children). It's only counting those who want, need, and can do the work. So, for capitalism to create profits, we need 3-5% of the qualified labor force that wants/needs work unemployed at any given time. Full employment is anathema to capitalism. In fact, full employment WAS proposed in the 1930s, and was resoundingly shot down as a terrible, socialist idea. So, there will ALWAYS be unemployed people in a capitalist economy, and a quite significant number of them. That's what capitalism requires. Do we bear no responsibility for them? For another, the reason we have a social safety net in the first place isn't because the government just wants to coddle the poor; it's because the poor threatened to disrupt social stability when the situation got really dire. People who are watching their children sleep outside because they have no home, and their children starve, are desperate people. They will do things like set up tent cities outside of businesses and demand jobs and higher wages. Know who doesn't like that? The people with money. They don't want poor people to be desperate, because desperate poor people make noise and demands.

Just wanted to point out that working isn't the solution to being poor, especially now, when nearly all of the new jobs being created are very low-paying service jobs. A study recently came out showing that, not only can you not get by on a full-time minimum-wage job (which should be a no-brainer for anybody to see, given that 40 hours a week of minimum-wage work only brings in $15,080/year before anything is taken out), but that even having two full-time minimum-wage workers in a home would not be enough, in many cases, to support a family given the cost of living. http://www.freep.com/article/20110531/NEWS06/105310351/New-study-You-can-t-live-minimum-wage So "just get a job and work hard!" doesn't cut it, sorry. When jobs that pay a real living or family wage are disappearing, and being replaced with low-paying or minimum-wage service jobs, that's not going to work for many people. I think you have to be speaking from a place of enormous privilege to imagine that. If we want to benefit from the labor of poorly-paid service workers, and if companies want to profit off of the labor of these workers and keep their wages low, then we have no right at all to complain about "our" money going to make up the difference between what these workers are paid and what you actually need to get by.

Sure, it's a choice. That doesn't mean it's the best or right choice, though, and certainly not for everybody. I'll say that my husband and I were idiots for not taking advantage of aid when we could have. Instead, we struggled by, getting deeper and deeper into debt, and today are still dealing with the financial fallout. We'd be far more financially secure--and better able to help stimulate the economy through things like home ownership--if we'd sucked up our pride and applied for and taken the aid we qualified for.

:iagree: Do we want other people making decisions for us about what food our family should or shouldn't be able to eat, should we fall on hard times? I also think it's insulting to assume that poor people don't know how to eat okay. I mean, if a family was using all of their food stamp money on soda and chips, yes, that would indicate a problem. But I really don't think that a family buying a bottle of soda along with a bunch of nutrient-rich foods signals either that they are too stupid to know how to eat right or that they are doing damage to their children, or should be something that concerns any of us. Should my employer get to decide how I spend my income? After all, it's *their* money. What about my students? Their tuition pays for my income. Should they get to say what I can or can't spend it on? The whole "it's not really their money thing" just rubs me the wrong way. How about we get outraged over the increase in the number of people receiving food stamps, because the jobs being created right now pay so poorly that you can't support a family on them? That seems like it would be far more productive than getting angry because somebody dares to buy a bottle of soda using "your" tax dollars.

Neither of my kids would take a paci. DS just wanted to nurse all the time. DD sucked her fingers for a few months, and then stopped. She's 14 months now and will occasionally suck her thumb, but not very often. I'd prefer finger/thumbsuckers, just because you don't have to worry about losing them.

My son loved the Guardians of Ga'Hoole books for a while. He was getting through 2-3 a week. I think he petered out around book 11 or so (there are 14 or 15 in the series), but he got so into them. I only read part of the first one, but it seemed age-appropriate to me (he was about 6-1/2 at the time). They were somewhat violent, he told me, but only owl violence. ;)

Right. The Hangover isn't my kind of humor; I watched the first one and didn't find it funny at all. But, I used to watch Absolutely Fabulous and thought it was incredibly funny. And those women were horrible! They were selfish and mean-spirited and materialistic and vain and all sorts of awful things. That's partly why it was funny. You weren't laughing because those things are good, funny things, but because the show took them to such extremes that they became absurd, and therefore funny. The point certainly wasn't that their behavior was good or something to be replicated.

I'd probably wonder about why they had brought a child to the movie, but I'd keep my judgments to myself. Different families can make decisions for themselves about what is or is not appropriate. In general, I think maybe people give kids too much credit for understanding things. My parents really didn't censor much in movies. They'd watch whatever movies they were watching with my sister and I in the room, and they'd just fast-forward through sex scenes. I'm sure we watched a bunch of movies that were raunchy and inappropriate, but I think 90% of it or more went over our heads. It's the Golden Girls effect. I watched that show every week with my parents when I was growing up. It wasn't until I saw re-runs as an adult that I realized that every single episode was full of sexual innuendo, and that the women's sex lives were pretty much the subject of every episode. I thought it was just about funny old ladies who ate cheesecake and went on dates. All of the sexual stuff just went right over my head.

Being a minority doesn't negate white privilege. I'm a white person living in Detroit, and so a minority, racially. That doesn't negate any of the white privilege I have. Nobody gets scared when they see me walking down the street. Just putting my name on a resume isn't going to reduce my chances of getting a job, even though my name indicates my ethnic origins. It's terrible to be harassed or picked on at school, but that's just not the same thing as the kind of systematic, institutional discrimination that blacks face. All kinds of people get picked on at school, for all kinds of reasons; anything that makes you different--having light or dark skin, having curly or straight hair, being fat or thin, being smart or not-so-smart. That doesn't mean that all of those things are also the basis of systematic or institutionalized discrimination, or that there can't also be privilege that goes along with them (for example, you might get picked on for being really thin, but that doesn't negate the fact that there are privileges that go along with being thin, like being able to buy clothes in nearly all stores or having clothes modeled on bodies that look like yours, so you know what they'll look like on you). Which is just to say that while it is never okay to pick on people for any reason, and that sucks, white privilege still exists in contexts where whites are the statistical minority.

Good point about the laundry. I fold the laundry in front of my kids, too, so they know what my underwear looks like that way.