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Re: How America Treats Its Own Children
Posted by Errant on 2024-December-24 07:56:06, TuesdayIn reply to How America Treats Its Own Children [link] posted by Manstuprator on 2024-December-23 21:03:39, Monday
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There are a lot of problematic comparisons in that article. Of course, she doesn't cite any specific sources on how the US compares with other countries, but such sources typically compare the US to smaller more urbanized countries which is hardly fair. Health outcomes in the US are not so much tied to income inequality so much as it's tied to the rural-urban divide and the US has a much greater rural population than other comparanda. And the US is much more diverse than other countries in other ways that also make comparisons problematic. Obviously I agree that border restrictions should be removed, but the article is too politicized to admit that despite falling short of full open borders, the US still has some of the least restrictive immigration policies in the world and other countries should really be doing more (there are other lists I've found ranking countries on being immigrant-friendly, but most of them seem geared towards wealthy American expats). The article also lists a bunch of fantastical things the author wishes the US would do regardless of the reality. For example, the author claims that investing in early childhood education is the best investment a country can make despite studies showing that the benefits of programs like Head Start actually wear off by the end of elementary school. It's easy to pretend that we could be doing more when we tell ourselves that doing more is the same as actually accomplishing more. It's not. Government ineffectiveness seems not to even exist in the author's mind. Convenient. "As many as 1.5 million families caring for three million kids live on less than $2 per person, per day, in cash income." This sentence alone should leap out at anyone looking for red flags for bullshit. Seriously? $2 dollars a day? I did a little digging and it turns out it's all just fuzzy math. In general I wouldn't put too much stock in anything coming from The Atlantic. Super misleading and unreliable.What they find is that, for the most part, Americans who reported living on $2 a day of income or less seemed to have more resources at their disposal than they let on. Correcting their earnings to match the Social Security Administration’s records alone lifts 55 percent of them above the $2 level; it lifts 38 percent of them out of deep poverty; and it lifts a quarter of them out of poverty altogether. Add in Social Security benefits, other income reflected in their tax files, housing assistance, and SNAP, and nearly 80 percent make it out of $2-a-day poverty. Shit, I should probably finish up cataloguing those greek-love.com pdfs I said I'd work on, shouldn't I? Kind of got caught up tracking down all the Acolyte Reader pdfs, but the Ms are pretty much finished minus the ISBNs.  |
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