And if all Christians did what we're supposed to do, most of the political argument would be irrelevant.

Amen.

I was thinking the other day that if we were doing what we were supposed to be doing, we wouldn't have to worry about Obamacare or welfare or horrible taxes, because people would be being taken care of.

AMDG

I believe I heard it reported that someone else said that, too. And there's this.

"When a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, she’ll do what she needs to do. And unfortunately it just adds to the stigma that women feel when they hear all of these things about heart beat, sex selection, genetic abnormality."

Re-write that from the unwanted-fatherhood point of view and see how it flies: "When a man doesn't want to be a father, he'll do what he needs to do...it just adds to the stigma when they hear all of these things about responsibility, fatherlessness..." Or "When a man doesn't want to be married..."

Well said, Maclin.

I think today's poor, in affluent countries, are quite often abandoned spouses, both male and female. I can't get over the dire straits these people are often placed in b/c of a deranged spouse continually taking them to court and a fundamentally unjust system which penalises the spouse who never wanted to end the marriage etc. I've heard some real horror stories. It's possible to be even more poor than having no money at all, when you have a crazy estranged spouse getting the whole family into terrible levels of debt that may never be able to be repaid.

Many of these people are what I think of as the "hidden poor" in that outwardly their lives seem the same, but often they are actually in severe stress financially and otherwise.

But part of the problem in helping such people is how to do it without offending their dignity.

There are all kinds of statistics showing a relationship between family intact-ness and poverty. In a situation where so many jobs don't pay enough to support a family, going from two incomes to one often means going from ok to poverty.

well I just taught my last class of the semester and I don't feel up to serving the pore.

The relationship of family intactness and poverty cuts both ways; low wage jobs are a strain on marriages, and the loss of jobs that pay a living wage discourages even attempting to make a traditional family. Oppression breeds immorality, then immorality perpetuates poverty. The truth embraces both the left critique and the right ( though I think there is a primacy to the economic cause).
But your exhortation to personal action is right on; one of the most discouraging things I have seen was when a Hispanic family was waiting in the parking lot of our former parish, begging. Way too many did not welcome them, or made comments about how they were not really poor because the children were well dressed (Latino culture places very high value on such things; I remember how the Puerto Rican children were decked out in the destitute South Bronx in the 80s).
I was ashamed...

If I'm following you, I think I'd say that starboard discourse in fact tends to be fairly blind to type 2 problems.

It seems very very clear that poverty and irresponsible behavior often have a mutually reinforcing effect. I hesitate to generalize beyond that. It's a bit like the nature-nurture problem. Some people are clearly poor through absolutely no fault of their own (e.g. born poor in a situation that offers no way out), some entirely through their own fault (e.g. had money and squandered it), and others for thoroughly mixed reasons.

If I'm following you, I think I'd say that starboard discourse in fact tends to be fairly blind to type 2 problems.

I think if you are talking to the man in the street, that can be very true, depending on the history of his family over the last generation or two. I tend to doubt that the subset of politicians and wonks who actually deal with these issues or study them are wont to confuse type 2 problems with type 3 problems. If you do not mind a self-aggrandizing self-citation, here is a discussion which (I think) illustrates someone confounding type 2 and type 3 problems.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2013/03/04/forming-a-new-republican-anti-poverty-message/

I doubt you are ever going to see a white paper from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute recommending we eliminate Medicare because in a free society you pay for your dialysis out of pocket or pass the hat in church. I think even an outfit like the Cato Institute would be loath to issue such a thing. Instead of telling the world they do not give a rip about type 2 problems, they will commission an article by Nicole Gelinas demonstrating that common provision exacerbates problems in medical service delivery (without making any reference to problems that arise in the absence of common provision).

It seems very very clear that poverty and irresponsible behavior often have a mutually reinforcing effect. I hesitate to generalize beyond that. It's a bit like the nature-nurture problem. Some people are clearly poor through absolutely no fault of their own (e.g. born poor in a situation that offers no way out), some entirely through their own fault (e.g. had money and squandered it), and others for thoroughly mixed reasons.

I think you are misconceiving things. People who 'have money' at any time of their life (much less people who come by it by inheritance) are a small social segment and the pathologies that adhere to them a sidebar.

Personal short-comings have an impact on the quantum of human capital you are carrying and on your earnings capacity generally. The thing is, any society has a division of labor, low productivity jobs abound, and some people get stuck with them even if they are not alcoholics, inclined to be shiftless, or notably impetuous. What is commonly referred to as 'poverty' is just mundane life for a quarter of the population. Quite apart from that are the more complicated problems you have in ascertaining how to deliver certain services which are not the economists' 'public goods' but for which pure market distribution does not cut it (legal services, medical care, custodial care, schooling, &c).

Re: begging. St Paul said it best. "Give to them who ask."

The relationship of family intactness and poverty cuts both ways; low wage jobs are a strain on marriages, and the loss of jobs that pay a living wage discourages even attempting to make a traditional family.

I agree, Daniel.

Daniel said: "low wage jobs are a strain on marriages, and the loss of jobs that pay a living wage discourages even attempting to make a traditional family."

This is undoubtedly true. I don't think anyone could make a remotely plausible argument otherwise, especially the first part, which ought to be self-evident. Yet I think that's only part of the story. What we've had in the past 30 years or so is sort of perfect storm of anti-marriage and anti-family forces. In addition to these economic ones, there's the whole set of cultural solvents that flooded the country in the '60s and '70s: the sexual revolution, feminism, the decline of religion, the general dissolution of all traditional constraints.

"How many working class women do you think are really interested in feminism or the sexual revolution?"

Almost none.

"or influenced by these ideas?"

Almost all, using the word "idea" rather loosely. It's a pervasive cultural climate. Though it is very hard to distinguish cause and effect in any of this. If you like, you could think of e.g. the sexual revolution as an intellectual project can be seen as just another effect of the one underlying movement toward dissolution of the old order. The "sexual revolution" worked its way down from the intellectuals, and out from the entertainment industry, not as a philosophy but as socially permitted and encouraged behavior.

But the effects of that climate were very much in evidence before the jobs began to disappear. This was all well under way in the '70s, which were certainly not economically free of stress but not nearly as bad as things were going to be. You have to wonder why the Great Depression didn't have a similarly corrosive effect on the institution of the family as such. It was very hard on families, but it didn't do as much damage to the viability of the institution itself.

Another thing that has to be considered is the extent to which the families themselves participated in this--"facilitated," to use a word I dislike. People were acquisitive. Married middle-class women began to go to work not because they had to in order to support the family but because the second income was really nice to have. That helped to drive prices up, housing prices especially, and probably also wages down. That operated pretty independently of explicit feminism. Very soon the one-income couple found itself competing against the two-income. The fact that most families had two incomes helped get employers off the hook--they could assume that what they were paying their employee was not the family's sole support.

I can't support this with numbers, but it seems to me that much of the middle class actually became more affluent--bigger houses, multiple new cars, etc etc during this period, at least until quite recently--during this period (ca 1970 on). And the two-income family was part of the reason.

I pretty much agree with that. Or do I?...what about the Catholic cultures of Latin America and Europe? Have they done any better as far as the family is concerned? Of course their Catholicism is often pretty thin, too, but we can't really blame the Protestant influence for it.

I am not a 'Kirk conservative' but I would have said that a cause of this disintegration is the third generation's loss of the connection to the land.

I would not say it is true for everyone but for Hill Billies one would think it would be dislocating to be uprooted from the land. I didn't say they were precisely farmers, I said they had a connection to farming, like castrating pigs. The grandfather and the sons hunt with dogs. Do you think the grandchildren do? No, they don't. I am talking about a bond with the land, not being a full time farmer.

And I think you're probably right, Grumpy, about the loss of connection to the land. You should read Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter.

That truly is sad about Broadway Danny Rose. And here I thought it had a timeless message.

I remember it was your selection, Marianne, and I loved it. But the kids are semipagan! They are very competitive. If it wasn't uncool to be right wing, many of them would love Ayn Rand. The one sidedness of the love/friendship in the movie is a complete turn off to them. The humour of the movie didn't take them either - I think it's over their heads on every level.

If I'm more well-read than you I can assure it wouldn't be hard to catch up.

From Art's long comment above: "When one speaks of 'low wage' employment being a strain on marriages, one does need to recall context. Real per capita income in this country in 1928 was about a quarter what it is today."

I've often thought about that. I once lived in a house that was built somewhere around 1930 in what had been at the time a new middle-class suburb. Not upper-middle-class, but I think not lower, either. The closets were miniscule by today's standards--and neither my wife or I have a lot of clothing, by today's standards. But presumably they were adequate for the expected residents at the time. The whole house would be considered way too small by most middle-middle-class families today. I think it's since been through a series of young couples who view it as a starter. Anyway, it was an interesting indication of the change. Look at the houses in George Bailey's subdivision in It's A Wonderful Life. Most Americans now would not be content with them.

But of course expectations play a big role in the stress produced by lack of money relative to those expectations, so a straight dollar-for-dollar (inflation adjusted) comparison doesn't really tell the psychological story.

Anecdote: I know a couple, about my age, who have lived their whole adult life on the ragged edge of poverty produced in great part because the husband had no very valuable skill and by mutual agreement they chose to live on his income. Most middle-class Americans would not consider their circumstances acceptable. And I know they've had a lot of stress about it. But they've done ok, and raised solid capable children who are still practicing Catholics. It can be done. But they had all the mental armor that so many people people don't against these forces I keep talking about.

That's all I have time for.

Related to separation from the land is our modern separation from nature. This is discussed in a good little book I did a brief review of several years ago in Touchstone:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-04-036-b

No argument there. We're basically saying the same thing, just with a different slant. Part my point about that couple (and actually now that I think of it I know several others) is that a solid "belief system" helps one to swim against the tide, and part of the reason that fewer people manage it is that fewer have that foundation.

The picture doesn't have to be as dramatic as the one I described for the difference to appear. My wife and I were sort of a borderline case: we chose to live on my income until the youngest child was 10 or 12, and even then she only worked part-time, and I made enough that we did ok, though we were still a lot less affluent than, say, my dual-income co-workers. Things were fairly tight, especially after I left the corporate world and took a big pay cut, tight enough to produce stress at times, although we certainly weren't poor. Without our Catholic views, we might well have had fewer children or in some other way gone further toward adjusting to the norm. For some reason I vividly remember a conversation with a co-worker in the mid-1980s or so. He was saying he and his wife would like to have more children, but it would just be too expensive, and my eyes were fixed on his natty expensive-looking clothes, which probably involved a dry-cleaning bill greater than what I spent altogether on clothing.

Most online discussions wander like that, but still, it's an excellent point.

In order to know what I really ought to do I need to have some idea of the real problem is, rather than what it seems to be. So there isn't a contradiction between a discussion about what we ought to do and a discussion of what the problem really is, which may involve a look at the genesis of the problem.

When I see a young man standing at a bus stop who is apparently in some kind of distress, what is his real problem and what can I do to help? Do I respond to the presenting problem, which may not be the real problem at all.

One of the problems with government programs is that they do not easily address the existential situation of the individual in distress. There may be two people who look like they are in the same basic bad situation, but the cluster of their problems is different. The answer that I can provide to person A's problem may not be the same as the answer I can provide for person B. It might be good for me to "give money" to A, but it might be bad for me to give money to B, etc.

" So there isn't a contradiction between a discussion about what we ought to do and a discussion of what the problem really is..."

No, there isn't, and I meant to come back and add something to the effect that there's nothing at all wrong, in fact there's a lot right, with working for whatever bigger-picture measures you think will help solve the problem. People have lots of different ideas about that. I just mean that doesn't take the place of personal action.

Your point that we must get personally involved (whether by direct action or giving money) in helping the poor among us is certainly true. I guess the question I have, though, is but don't Americans already do this in a fairly big way? And yet, we still have people in need. If this is so, doesn't that mean something more must be done and that means politics must come into play?

And about Pope Francis and his stance re political questions, there's an interesting article in The Catholic Herald (written in 2005) that touches a bit on that, here in particular:

"Where do his political sympathies lie? Certainly not on the Left. Those who know him best would consider him on the moderate Right, close to that strand of popular Peronism which is hostile to liberal capitalism. In the economic crisis of 2001-2002, when Argentina defaulted on its debt, people came out on to the streets and supermarkets were looted, Bergoglio was quick to denounce the neo-liberal banking system which had left Argentina with an unpayable debt."

No problem.

"I guess the question I have, though, is but don't Americans already do this in a fairly big way?"

Yes, but we could do more. I think there are probably a lot of areas where individuals and small groups can help, where big programs don't reach.

I'm willing to bet that the larger government programs get, the less individuals help. They think that the government is doing it, so they don't have to.

AMDG

True.

I just discovered a comment from Robert at 4:01pm that was being held by the spam catcher. It's published now but you have to go back to the previous page to see it. Sorry, Robert. I don't know why it's doing this, and letting through stuff that has a username which is the same one used on literally hundreds, if not thousands, of actual spam comments.

And that was a good comment of Robert's, too.

Stupid spam catcher must be a government plant.

AMDG