One of the things that touched me so much about traveling was how people who had nothing went so far out of their way to help me. It was like spending all your life believing in the immensity of office buildings only to be confronted with a great mountain of human kindness. A moment like that reaffirms the magnificence of humanity in defiance of the worldly.The problem is that people are perfectly willing to help someone they can see while being perfectly happy to vote to screw people they can't. Or implement policies that screw people they can't see. They lack imagination.
% Unemployed
15-24 25-44 45+ Years Old
No High School
White M 25.6% 17.5% 11.1%
White F 20.1% 17.5% 8.5%
High School Grad
White M 15.5% 8.9% 7.1%
White F 9.8% 7.1% 5.5%
College Grad
White M 8.4% 3.9% 4.1%
White F 6.6% 3.6% 3.7%this is my first heartburn: if you don't have the money to go to college, don't go to college. i don't really want to hear about what a hard time you're having paying off your $80k of student loans.Do you know what a Pell Grant is? Just wondering, given that you picked someone who got one to levy your "student loans" strawman attack on.
this is my first heartburn: if you don't have the money to go to college, don't go to college. i don't really want to hear about what a hard time you're having paying off your $80k of student loans.That’s an idiotic sentiment. A college education is an investment. Sometimes investments don't pay off, but a college education is just about one of the surest ones out there. Making leveraged investments is the entire basis for our capitalist society.
and there's certainly nothing to prevent poor people from holding a job to pay for an education.Except, of course, not having any jobs available.
did you even read the whole quote? or did you just jump down here to attack me after you saw 'pell grant'?*shrug* I read everything you thought was relevant to quote. (and had also read the OP) I thought was worth pointing out that a Pell Grant is not, as you implied, the same thing as your $80K of student loans strawman. If you thought the other loans were the real crime, why didn't you quote that part as the source of your rage?
After welfare reform passed in 1996, the national debate on poverty seemed simply to shut down. Most conservatives explain poverty by looking to culture and behavior: bad parenting, high out-of-wedlock birth rates, teenagers who don't know the value of an honest day's work. To most liberals, the real problems are economic: underfinanced public schools and a dearth of well-paying semiskilled jobs, which make it nearly impossible for families to pull themselves out of poverty. Canada says he believes that both assumptions are true. He agrees that the economy is stacked against poor people no matter how hard they work, but he also thinks that poor parents aren't doing a good enough job of rearing their children. What makes Canada's project unique is that it addresses both problems at once. He keeps the liberals happy by pouring money into schools and day-care centers and after-school programs, and he satisfies the conservatives by directly taking on the problems of inadequate parenting and the cultural disadvantages of a ghetto home life. It's not just that he's trying to work both sides of the ideological street. It's that Canada has concluded that neither approach has a chance of working alone. Fix the schools without fixing the families and the community, and children will fail; but they will also fail if you improve the surrounding community without fixing the schools.Rather than trying to get teens not to have children, they teach them how to be better parents. They will raise kids that learn more in school, are successful and don't have kids when they're still in high school themselves.
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posted by Avenger at 6:41 PM on November 9, 2009 [20 favorites]