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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (15547)	9/4/2001 9:44:03 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

In Duluth they used to call their Skid Row area "The Bowery." I wonder if other cities used that term for their bad neighborhood. I would guess the farther east, the more Bowery's, west Skid Rows. I know The Bowery was (is?) a bad part of NYC just like Skid Row used to be a bad part of Seattle.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (15547)	9/4/2001 9:52:58 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

Hi Charleymane; Thanks for the intelligent and interesting reply. There's another couple factors floating around here... One of them is that the post (world war 2) war period for the United States was one of unprecedented prosperity. The rest of the world was largely in ruins. Vast expanses were under the rule of idiotic Communists. United States manufacturing naturally made out like bandits, and a lot of that wealth drifted down to the assembly line workers and lower classes. I don't think we stole from the 3rd world, but there was definitely a couple of decades in there where things were unnaturally rosy in the US. People who grew up during that time ended up with a slightly disjoint view of the world. Yeah, we could go back to those times, but we'd have to arrange to set the rest of the world on fire to do it. No thanks. We're always blaming the President for the latest economic cough or sneeze but the fact is that they have very little effect on us. The tides of economic trends have been slowly improving life for us all and they continue to do so. Eventually the good times will return, but it will be just as a return to trend. People will undoubtedly complain about it then. I can see a time when what is now the 3rd World has wages comparable to the United States. (Don't hold your breath, LOL, I'm talking 50 to 100 years.) At that time, wages world wide will again rise. It's just not possible for the US to set up a situation where its own workers minimum wage is more than some multiple higher than the rest of the world's average wage. Nor is it moral, for that matter, I think. My biggest problem with the modern era is that we have become completely and totally bourgeois. All the writers who criticized us for being totally concentrated on the needs of the flesh (while ignoring the needs of the mind and spirit) are completely correct. But I hate to see our politics being reduced to a matter of money. I vote Republican only because they are slightly less interested in money than the Democrats. Both the right and the left define what is good and bad largely in terms of money. I miss the times when there was something about the species that was grand and good and didn't involve how much money they had. The basic fact is that the lower classes enjoy life with an intensity that equals that of the upper classes. I know this, I have plenty of contacts in both sides and all my wealthy friends are almost unbelievably unhappy. Re: "Depends how far back you go. In the days before "urban renewal" every downtown had a skidrow. For some reason skidrows have gotten a bad rap, but they were a place where a guy who was down and out could get back on his feet. Hotels only charged 7-10 bucks a night." I agree totally and completely with you here, I think. It is a travesty what we have done in this country in the name of "improving housing". Basically, what the politicians did was zone affordable housing out of existence. I believe it's a matter of the zoning laws. A case in point is the silly laws in my local area about how children are to be kept in housing. Child services can take your children if you fail to provide them with segregated sex bedrooms (after some nominal age, maybe 6). There are cultures all over 90% the planet where families live in single rooms without having incest(?) problems or whatever it is that child services is trying to fix here. The effect of the law is that if you're poor (and therefore someone who child services checks up on) you can't save money and live like your parents did (wherever they came from, which could have been US, but is more likely overseas). It's hard to save money as a poor person. Another thing that our insanely complicated tax, legal and business environment has created is the destruction of what was the traditional technique for poor people to save money and become sort of middle class. It used to be that if you saved up a few bucks you could open a store or a restaurant. Now the laws (tax, employment &c.) are so complex that it prevents most uneducated people from being able to file their own income taxes, much less deal with the complexities of running their own business. What our complex laws have done is create a situation where the less educated poor are kept poor. This is new, it is not traditional. But I don't see a solution for it. -- Carl

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (15547)	9/4/2001 11:46:08 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

I don't believe minimum wage would take care of those things today. One of the differences between then and now is that then you were only trying to support yourself on the minimum wage. No one in his right mind produced a family until he was in a position to support it, perhaps not in style, but adequately. The notion of a living wage now assumes a family. I don't know which came first. Maybe it was that people irresponsibly produce families so proponents are just accepting this reality when they set a standard for a living wage. Maybe is it because the proponents think that everyone is entitled to produce a family even if the rest of society has to pick up the tab. I think that one can survive on the minimum wage today just as you did if one only has to get by on his own. It's when we have dependents to support that there is a problem. Karen