Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
They were.
Basic psychology: once government stated that helping the poor was the government's job, a lot of people took them at their word.
THE ECONOMIST has done several reports over the years tracking charitable giving and there is an inverse correlation between depth of government social services and the populace's charitable contributions. And not just in money; the biggest effect is in time commitments.
The same applies to other issues like wages and benefits; people see "minimum wage" and think it is exactly that, the minimum acceptable. A starting point for entry level jobs. And originally it was exactly that and only the young and bottom-rung workers got the minimum. But as the government kept raising the minimum companies didn't raise salaries for the upper tiers and more and more people got lumped in with the young and unskilled and perception hasn't changed. Now it is the wage for people that companies feel they can replace at a moment's notice and thus see no reason to pay any more than forced by law. Raises in those jobs are now negotiated in the political arena instead of in the job market.
Law of unintended consequences at work.
Sad and bad but not unexpected.
|
Heh, do you believe the lot of the average worker was better before the creation of social safety nets, when the poor were obliged to rely on charity? The country with the 5th highest rate of charitable giving, The United States, also has the highest level of economic inequality of OECD countries after... Chile, Mexico, and Turkey.
On the contrary, the shift away from charity as a means of income redistribution has had exactly the intended consequence. A million people giving change to panhandlers and soup kitchens is wasteful and inefficient compared to pooling resources to enable access to shelter, food, education, medical care, and a guaranteed income at a national or state level.
The pseudo-psychologizing about minimum wage is unsubstantiated twaddle. There is no blind spot in the perception of acceptable wages on the part of companies; incomes have been quite deliberately uncoupled from productivity for decades as a result of union-busting, offshoring, and lobbying to convince lawmakers that increasing the costs of doing business would hurt productivity and increase unemployment, i.e. debunked theories of trickle-down economics.
Helen, I will reply to your post when I'm no longer on my phone.