The Heritage Foundation assures me that this family probably has a television, refrigerator, and mobile phones, so ipso facto they're not poor. Spoiled, ingrate woman.
The grandma does in fact have a cell phone which is roughly the size of an iphone, and I had the passing thought that Heritage types would judge her for it.
I stole my phone from the Heritage Foundation.
Daughter and boyfriend broke up and daughter moved into a hotel at $200/week. (Let's call the custodian "Grandma" and the daughter "Mother".) Grandma reminds Mother that she needs an address to register the kids for school. Last time Mother was in a hotel, kids went 6 months without being in school and Mother got in trouble. Grandma tells Mother that she can use Grandma's address. So she does.
This seems to be where things went wrong. After all, even in Texas I don't think it could possibly be illegal to live in a hotel with your children. And, since it's illegal not to send your children to school, there had to be some better way to work things out at this point. I don't know what the answer is, but contacting the local school would have been a better answer than registering with grandma's address.
All the stuff that happened afterwards seem to be predictable consequences of this first misstep. Destroyed couches and chaotic behavior are an expected conseqence of living with seven kids, so while I'm sympathetic in the sense that I'm sympathetic towards anyone who lives with kids, especially seven of them, that part of the situation doesn't strike me as unusually awful.
The workers comp thing sucks. But maybe heebie U isn't the sort of evil employer that fires people who file workers comp. claims. I hope. If they are, I guess you have to burn the campus down.
The daughter has seven kids, ages 1 - 9.
Aaargh. Is Medicaid still covering Norplant? Maybe you could hold a faculty fundraiser and pay her to get one.
Doesn't the father of the children have to pay child support?
Urple, the situation is awful. Mom is fucked in the head and Grandma knows it. Grandma is desperately trying to do something in the hope that maybe at least a couple of her grandchildren won't grow up to be felons and she's just not equipped to handle them all.
Doesn't the father of the children have to pay child support?
Shall we start a pool on how many dads there are? You know what's depressingly common? Multiple dads and Mom isn't collecting anything from any of them.
Grandma is desperately trying to do something in the hope that maybe at least a couple of her grandchildren won't grow up to be felons and she's just not equipped to handle them all.
"I had to take in my daughter and her seven kids, because she wasn't fit to raise them by herself, and I'm not just not equipped to handle them all" is indeed an awful story, but it's not really the one told in the OP. Maybe that's the subtext (probably it's at least some part of the subtext), but I'm taking the story at face value.
And also I didn't say it wasn't awful. Just that destroyed couches and chaotic behavior seem like totally ordinary awful consequences of living with seven kids, rather than any sort of unusually awful consequence of living with seven kids.
I was feeling pretty worn out and tired this morning on the way to work, but all of a sudden I think I'll just shut the fuck up about it now.
This certainly puts my own financial worries in a more proper perspective.
totally ordinary awful consequences of living with seven kids
Hell, you can achieve that with *way* fewer than seven.
7 gets it exactly right. My best friend's mother is in a very similar situation with one of her daughters, though there are only three (or maybe 4 now) grandkids. It's a total train wreck, with no hope of getting better. The only solution would have been not to start relentlessly cranking out kids at the age of 15, but the girl has no sense whatsoever, so what are you going to do?
is indeed an awful story, but it's not really the one told in the OP.
You're nice to give mom the benefit of the doubt but I'd put money on that being the story.
...so what are you going to do?
Do they have a local math professor to talk to?
15: Alas, she was a cleaner at a hospital, rather than a university. And now I think she's quit or been layed off, and is living on a meagre Navy pension from her long dead husband, so no. On the bright side, she a has a refrigerator, TV, and mobile phone.
You're nice to give mom the benefit of the doubt but I'd put money on that being the story.
Well, I'm not sure I'm giving the mom the benefit of the doubt so much as not giving the grandma as much benefit of the doubt as you are. "I took in my seven grandkids because my daughter couldn't raise them" is an awful situation but a heroic thing to do. (Maybe ordinary heroism rather than extraordinary heroism, in that most people would act similarly in the circumstances, but it still a huge self-sacrifice to help others). I didn't read the OP that way. I thought the grandmother was sort of complaining that if she'd realized on day 1 that things would end up where they are now, she'd have done something differently, because, you know, the kids are ruining her couch and shit. I thought that she'd sort of inadvertently backed into the current situation through a series of missteps.
you know, the kids are ruining her couch and shit.
I ruin couches all the time. I like to snack without bothering to get a plate.
After all, even in Texas I don't think it could possibly be illegal to live in a hotel with your children.
Maybe. Maybe it is also illegal to be homeless. The same kind of mentality drives both sets of laws.
No one leaves an apartment to move into a hotel for fun, or because they think it is financially the better option. They do it because they are forced to.
My town of origin was recently in the news because they began enforcing a law that soup kitchens could not serve more than 130 people in a day. The cruelty is mind-boggling.
The same kind of mentality drives both sets of laws.
I suppose, but it isn't totally separate from the kind of mentality that is needed to ensure kids get to school and are removed from the care of parents who cannot keep them safe/feed/warm.
21: What if they gave poor people something more filling than soup?
I was feeling pretty worn out and tired this morning on the way to work, but all of a sudden I think I'll just shut the fuck up about it now.
Yeah, suddenly I don't feel like complaining that my iPod is broken.
Soup is messy. Maybe your hometown has nice sofas and wants to keep the clean. Grilled chicken sandwiches are less of a mess.
To be fair, it might get noticed if more than 130 people went missing each day.
My town of origin was recently in the news because they began enforcing a law that soup kitchens could not serve more than 130 people in a day
How exactly do you enforce that law?
I think I've come up with the correct answer, although probably not the one this township chose.
I believe the correct way to enforce this law would be to open another soup kitchen.
29: I was a little surprised myself.
If they're messing up the couches how could they have stayed in a hotel without getting charged fees and kicked out?
law that soup kitchens could not serve more than 130 people in a day
I believe the correct way to enforce this law would be to open another soup kitchen.
The enforcement mechanism is increased aid to the indigent. It's illegal to serve more than that, because it would be cruel to let so many people in the community live in a state of impoverishment. If there are more than 130 people seeking meals, the soup kitchen has to start giving out cash grants instead. The whole thing is funded by the state. It's a nice program.
The OP is exactly the kind of situation that AFDC was supposed to help in, until Clinton, Gingrich, and DC Democratic Centrists killed it. At least the Mom and Grandma are now free to experience the dignity of work.
This seems to be where things went wrong. After all, even in Texas I don't think it could possibly be illegal to live in a hotel with your children. And, since it's illegal not to send your children to school, there had to be some better way to work things out at this point. I don't know what the answer is, but contacting the local school would have been a better answer than registering with grandma's address.
Judging by the extensive litigation over this issue in my neck of the woods, school districts seeking reasons not to enroll homeless kids is near-universal behavior.
I think it's the federal McKinney-Vento (but don't quote me on that) law that mandates that homeless children have to be allowed to go to school, and that schools can't punish their families for not having a permanent address. But it gets observed more in the breach than anything else, as far as I can tell.
I've said this many times before, but if you had asked me ten years ago whether there was a significant population of school officials who saw their mission as excluding as many students as possible from enrolling, I would not have believed you. It truly boggles the mind.
(And no, it's not always about money or even NCLB. Sometimes it's just plain spite.)
Something is wrong with this country.
Indeed, it is a bit odd to see a nation so enormously wealthy also so resolutely opposed to using that wealth to improve the lives of its citizens. Oh well.
35: At least they took that issue off the table, amirite?
36: McKinney-Vento is right (though it was amended by NCLB).
Megan said something months ago that was simultaneously wrong yet insightful. She was talking about how some public policy failure demonstrated that we were getting poorer as a nation. The national accounts data says otherwise, and that despite a big setback in 2009 we're still getting richer. But it certainly doesn't feel like we're getting richer, since the top 1% is determined to take a bigger and bigger share of the pie. So the rest of us are left to fight over what's left. You can see that in social policy, and now the Republicans are trying to introduce it in tax policy, making an issue out of the fact that the poor pay so little in taxes.
41: Is what she said true if you define "we" to exclude the top 1% (which seems reasonable: they certainly don't feel any allegiance to the rest of us)?
I think pre-2009 it wasn't literally true, and in fact above the median the gap between quantiles was spreading out. Now I don't know.
maybe heebie U isn't the sort of evil employer that fires people who file workers comp claims
Chances are, a janitor is not employed by the university, but by an outsourced cleaning services company. And they are exactly the kind of business that finds pretexts to fire people who file workers comp claims.
35 et al: The problem is human and is not caused by a lack of government of suport. The grandmother probably qualifies for workers' comp, a government-mandated insurance program, but may not be taking advantage of it. The daughter is contributing to the rent, so she either has a job or is receiving something like AFDC (yes, programs still exist). It sounds like the grandmother does, in fact, want to continue to work. It's not at all clear what hypothetical government program would help, but pre-1990's welfare wouldn't relieve any of the suffering.
I strongly suspect we are getting poorer as a nation. Looking at our annual income/output isn't a good measure of our national wealth. And our wealth is being drained away faster than it's being added to. Resources are being depleted faster than we're replenishing them (or creating alternatives to replace them). Infrastructure is breaking down faster than we're reinvesting in its maintenance. If our national accounts properly reflected these factors, I think they'd show we're slipping backwards.
Infrastructure is breaking down faster than we're reinvesting in its maintenance.
I wonder how you'd quantify that, but I have a similar suspicion. The road here are scary bad.
I guess a better question is what percent are getting poorer, rather than looking for some aggregate.
The enforcement mechanism is increased aid to the indigent. It's illegal to serve more than that, because it would be cruel to let so many people in the community live in a state of impoverishment. If there are more than 130 people seeking meals, the soup kitchen has to start giving out cash grants instead. The whole thing is funded by the state. It's a nice program.
How sad is it that this made me guffaw out loud?
Is it realistic to attribute the lack of demand to a financial sector that's become incredibly efficient at extracting money and then saving it?
The problem is human and is not caused by a lack of government of suport.
Truly, there is nothing that the government could do in this situation to help.
I wonder how you'd quantify that,
You would depreciate it, just as any business accountants do with any durable machinery or other investments. Roads have an expected useful life, as do sewage pipes, etc. The depriciation is slightly complicated by the fact that a lot of the "wear" on our public resources comes from their use by more people than they were designed to serve, so the amount that needs to be depriciated depends in part on future popoulation levels. But it's not as if we can't estimate those fairly accurately.
If the annual depriciation of your public infrastructure exceeds your annual infrastructure investment, you're slowing losing that portion of your national wealth. (It's possible you're making it up with increased investment somewhere else. Maybe we're using all that money instead to better educate the nation's children? That's a different sort of investment, but still valuable. Or maybe that's not what we're doing.)
52: Your annual depreciation method assumes no variation in the suitability of infrastructure investments over time. That is, it is entirely possible we are getting worse at matching infrastructure spending to actual needs.
Resources are being depleted faster than we're replenishing them
Don't worry! Each year we're getting a tiny bit more efficient. By my calculations, in 60 years our economy will run on perpetual motion.
Each year we're getting a tiny bit more efficient.
That's why I have to keep eating less or I get heavier.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. A perfectly stable infrastructure (reinvestment at a rate exactly matching physical breakdown) would probably become increasingly less useful with a growing population, and would become more or less useful with societal changes (e.g., increasing autocentrism would make an stable road grib less useful, even to a stable population; whereas decreasing autocentrism would do the reverse). So there's some art here. But I'm not sure it's more art than are involved in the books of any complex organization. You estimate as best you can and go from there. (Or am I misunderstanding your point?)
I was remarking to a visiting friend the other day that our roads are better than they've ever been. (Particularly US 93). Maybe that ol' Max isn't completely worthless after all.
My son's high school may have been better (in some sense) in some semi-mythical past, but I frankly doubt it.
Not to disagree about the aggregate, or that having 7 kids wouldn't knock pretty much anyone down. Just pointing out that the rate of progress of various handbaskets to hell is not uniform.
And honestly, I don't even know why I'm making this point, since I think a lot of the most important parts of our national "wealth" that are being lost are soft and unquantifiable (unlike infrastructure), so your basic point is right.
56: That was my point. I know I live somewhere atypical, but the amount of infrastructure needed per person has increased greatly because the population of the city is down by nearly 50%. So, if you spent enough to maintain that infrastructure, your aren't really staying current on your Total National Infrastructure Demand since maintaining all that stuff only meets the infrastructure needs of 300k people instead of 600k.
simultaneously wrong yet insightful
That's me!
how some public policy failure demonstrated that we were getting poorer as a nation
Probably something about how governments are centrifuging responsibility and the requirement to pay attention out to locals and individuals as fast as they can. It is a theme of mine. I've come to think of the necessity of paying attention as a primary marker of poverty.
51: Well, what? Should the government remove children whose mothers are incompetent from their extended families?
To underline 53, I suspect our recently improved roads were designed to handle a lot more loaded logging trucks than they will ever see, now that the mills are closed and dismantled.
...the most important parts of our national "wealth" that are being lost are soft and unquantifiable
That's not soft all the time and you can quantify it if you hand stretch.
65 -- let your imagination run away with you. Do we really need to have this conversation? Yes, the only plausible intervention would be to forcibly take the children away.
Our family used to say that our house cleaner, Alicia, was suffering about 80% of the misery in the world. All the other misery suffered by humanity was just the remaining 20%. My dad said he stopped asking her how she was when she said "Fine, thank you, and her sister is recovering from finding her husband's severed head in the creek behind their house."
She had awful, awful stories about the things that were happening to her sons and grandsons. We are cowards, but it was much easier not to know.
...her sister is recovering from finding her husband's severed head in the creek behind their house."
I've always wanted a house with a creek behind it.
Megan said something months ago that was simultaneously wrong yet insightful. She was talking about how some public policy failure demonstrated that we were getting poorer as a nation.
If she has seven kids between the ages of 1 and 9, and the youngest is more than a year old, then she is overdue to bang out kid number 8. Cheerful thought.
finding her husband's severed head in the creek
So would it be fair to say he had a creek in his neck?
It wouldn't be fair to me to say that, but I can't stop you.
74: People are trying to stop you. You have to go to West Virginia and burn a couch or they've won.
74: Perhaps I shouldn't have said it then. Apologies.
Heebie, I'm in the ipad and thus bad at making links properly, but here's the official page on kinship care, if it comes to that. You could maybe print off one of the pamphlets on grandparents' rights. http://www.dfps.state.tx.us/child_protection/kinship_care/ At the very least, Grandma should probably be getting a temporary guardianship order so she doesn't end up sued for having the children use her address, though I guess Mother is living with them and that probably doesn't apply. Especially if they're not white, just about anything that can be done to keep the kids out of foster care is a plus. Your state has a very bad reputation there.
Cities grow and shrink-- Boise and Seattle have both gotten smaller and then grown again.
Along with GDP per person, looking at fertility, lifespan, and infant mortality are one way to tmonitor how the country's doing. The US hasn't recovered from the recession of 2008 yet-- of course things look worse than they did 5 years ago, but it's not inevitable or likely to keep getting worse.
The other point is migration-- US visas are still in short supply. Migration from Mexico has apparently slowed very much, partly due to less unskilled work here and more there, with recent migrants being reasonably wealthy and well-educated Mexicans who prefer to run businesses in the US, at least until the beheadings back home stop.
I think that the future in the US is visibly less certain than it used to be, and the anxiety this produces causes a feeling that things are worse. But that's a false fear, the previous confidence was a mirage. Maybe CA is genuinely becoming less of a paradise, but people are free to leave there.
CA is genuinely becoming less of a paradise
This is pretty much acommon trope of all native Californians, and has been since about 1870 -- each new generation thinks that the state is in a state of fallen grace from its previous status as a paradise. Joan Didion is good on this.
A lot of the kids my mom teaches come from backgrounds similar to what heebie describes in the post.
79: and they've always been correct!
64: Probably something about how governments are centrifuging responsibility and the requirement to pay attention out to locals and individuals as fast as they can. It is a theme of mine. I've come to think of the necessity of paying attention as a primary marker of poverty.
There's something to this.
41 gets it right: it's somewhat absurd to suppose that our national ledgers (we're getting richer!) show once and for all that all of us, each and every one, is
better off. (Compared to what benchmark?)
41: But it certainly doesn't feel like we're getting richer, since the top 1% is determined to take a bigger and bigger share of the pie. So the rest of us are left to fight over what's left. You can see that in social policy, and now the Republicans are trying to introduce it in tax policy, making an issue out of the fact that the poor pay so little in taxes.
It's been driving me bananas that this this very obvious fact is being swept under the rug.
37
Something is wrong with this country
The wrong people are breeding.
The fruit from the Big O Tree is a bitter, bitter fruit.
36
I've said this many times before, but if you had asked me ten years ago whether there was a significant population of school officials who saw their mission as excluding as many students as possible from enrolling, I would not have believed you. It truly boggles the mind.
This is not at all surprising. School officials are under a lot of pressure to raise student performance. Since student performance is largely determined by who the students are, the most practical way to raise performance is to choose your students as carefully as possible. (Actually another practical way to raise student performance is to cheat, something else we not unexpectedly are seeing a lot of.)
It's going to take James a little while to work through serially commenting if he's only up to previous comments in the mid-30s.
87: People with genetic predispositions toward this or that. For sure.
Shearer is doing his part to keep the wrong people from breeding by not ever having sex.
serially commenting
Cyril Connolly?
91: I hadn't been aware of Cyril Connolly, and don't know what to make of this.
But! I see there's something about a mis-hearing or mis-rendering substituting his name in a Monty Python song. That must be it.
I've always said that a joke is improved by having it vaguely described by someone who's googled it.
But now I'm whistling that little melody at the end of the song and won't be able to get it out of my head and frankly that's better than trying to respond to a comment way upthread about AFDC (?!seriously?!).
You know, the worse things get, the more I am liable to be influenced by the insurrectionist anarchists amongst my friends. Like a friend was saying the other day, back when we were coming up in the 1990s, it did seem like there was still some small margin of hope around total ecological collapse. It doesn't seem like that anymore. If we could have saved things in 1995, we sure can't save them now, even assuming the entire economy was rebuilt along appropriate technology and energy descent lines tomorrow. Which won't happen. It's going to get much, much worse than these little hiccups like the hurricanes and heatwaves. I've said before that this period reminds me of nothing so much as immediately pre-WWI imperial Germany. I think we are going to be fast-forwarding to Germany, 1926 in no time at all. People selling their kids for one night out of the cold, occasional cannibalism, that sort of thing. The story in the OP could be told a million times over in this country. Where are the Barrow Gangs? The Dillingers and Floyds and Barkers? A few anarchists can't do it all -- they're locking us up for thoughtcrimes as we speak. The common working people have got to pick up the gun.
Natilo, I think it's going to have to get a little bit worse before people decide to pick up the gun. I don't think it's bad enough yet.
take it to standpipe's blog, parsimon.
96 to 92, obvs. and in a mellow spirit.
92- so will the move from prewar to postwar Germany involve passing through, well, a war?
Also I don't really see it. Am reading Dreadnought right now and political atmosphere was really very different back then. There is more similarity with the Third Republic.
"The Rise of Rove's Republic" 2005
Rove knows that to force the reactionary order, Bush must borrow. He must place a millstone around the necks of the next generation of government, and then make it so that to make those payments, the Republicans must be in charge. If the Democrats take the presidency by accident, the Republican Congress will merely stop doing the behind the scenes financial juggling - of budget borrowing, shuffling of money between accounts, raising the debt ceiling, passing huge unfunded mandates - that keep the economy alive. There will, in such a case, be a massive recession, and the Republicans will take power again. The government will become a massive protection racket, with the public held hostage.
That is one hell of a good prediction.
99 is indeed surprising. I haven't noticed lately where Rove stands now with respect to Rick Perry -- though in a way that doesn't matter, any Republican will do, if properly trained.
I'll say again that I don't think it's really about the Presidency in 2012: it's about a Republican nominee who's dynamic enough to pull in votes for the Senatorial and House races, in order to try to take the Senate, and secure/protect the House. In order to hamstring Obama in his second term, trash the country entirely, and ensure a win in 2016.
In grad school I often worked late. This one unfortunate developmentally-disabled custodian would often come by and talk to me. She was very sweet, but naïve and childlike.
She seemed extremely sad one day. I asked her what happened. Apparently her boyfriend had died. They had been lying in bed and she heard him cry out and start writhing. So she held him to comfort him. She held him all night long, until it was morning and his body was cold.
She told me he had died of a heart attack. Apparently she never called 911; she never thought to. She just held him, because she loved him and wanted to comfort him.
What can a person say when they hear a story like that? I went home and drank.
101: Karl Rove and Rick Perry do not like each other.