Jay Tea examines Poor Liberal Thinking and comments on George Will’s three four rules to keep out of poverty.
1) Graduate from high school. School attendance is mandatory until the age of 16, and free. Further, the law encourages kids to stay in school — our labor laws are designed to encourage kids to stay in school and out of the work force until they are 18.
2) Don’t have a baby out of wedlock. Again, this is one you gotta work at to violate. It’s been about 2000 years since anyone just "woke up pregnant" — it’s pretty well established what sorts of things lead to pregnancy, and the vast majority of pregnant women did those things willingly. Yes, there are exceptions, but those are very rare exceptions.
3) Don’t get married as a teenager. This is an expansion of the above one. But it also reminds people that marriage is supposed to be forever, and that’s a hell of a commitment to make before one is 20 years old. Even military enlistments are only for a couple of years, and nobody in their right mind is gonna give a 20-year mortgage to a 19-year-old. Take a couple of years as an adult to establish yourself, find out just who and what you are, before making a lifetime commitment.
4) Don’t get hooked on alcohol or drugs. Again, those are active choices. Nobody wakes up an alcoholic or a junkie; it takes a bit of work and effort to develop an addiction. In fact, teenagers have to violate the law to even get their hands on it, let alone regularly enough to develop a dependency.
As my father noted, no one ever starting drinking and doing drugs saying, "Boy, I can’t wait to get hooked on this stuff." All addicts started out as "someone who can handle it."
So adding my rule to those above:
5) Don’t get in debt. Or stated another way: If you can’t afford it now, you can’t afford it later. Most people who haven’t violated the four rules above get into trouble by purchasing "stuff" that they can’t afford. Whereas society discourages the violation of the previous three laws (well, depends upon what segment of society you are talking about), you don’t find many champions of the fifth rule.
Although our family is not poor, the fifth rule still gives us fits. As it probably does for most Americans.
That fifth rule is what ruins it for a lot of people, I suspect. Everyone I know who followed all the other rules and is still poor is poor because of #5. It’s a very important rule.
From my post, the Other America, at the Practical Progressive:
In reality though, I’ll bet African Americans know a hell of a lot more about what it’s like to be white in America than whites know what it’s like to be black in America. George Will needs to get out of his social cocoon and talk to folks in the ghettos of DC instead of those sitting with him in box seats at baseball games. If that’s tooo scary for him, he could at least read Johnathan Alter’s piece in Newsweek.