A major factor in being poor is "culture" according to Mitt Romney.

[yellowcanine]

So the solution is to change people's culture, right? Isn't this akin to ethnic cleansing? And hasn't this been tried in brutal ways with negative results with aboriginal people all over the world? Thinking of Native Americans and Australian aborigines in particular but I am sure there are many other examples.

[Scuba]

1. Is sperm a "culture"?

[KurtNYC]

2. The Culture of greed ?

THAT culture?

[rfranklin]

3. It's code for the Calvinist dogma

From Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics:


[Writing about the early eighteen hundreds] For [evangelicals] it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.

At the center of this early evangelical doctrine was the idea of original sin: we were all born stained by corruption and fleshly desire, and the true purpose of earthly life was to redeem this. The trials of economic life-the sweat of hard labor, the fear of poverty, the self-denial involved in saving-were earthly tests of sinfulness and virtue. While evangelicals believed salvation was ultimately possible only through conversion and faith, they saw the pain of earthly life as means of atonement for original sin.

Moreover, they regarded poverty as part of a divine program. Evangelicals interpreted the mental anguish of poverty and debt, and the physical agony of hunger or cold, as natural spurs to prick the conscience of sinners. They believed that the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate. In other words, poor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger their mortal souls. It was the evangelicals who began to see the business mogul as an heroic figure, his wealth a triumph of righteous will. more
http://www.mindfully.org/Industry/2005/Evangelical-Economics1may05.htm

[yellowcanine]

5. Yes it is an up by the bootstraps argument......

Forgetting that if you don't have any boots to start with, there are no bootstraps.

[HopeHoops]

8. Fuck boots - do you even have SHOES?

[lumberjack_jeff]

4. Blind squirrel just stumbled over a nut.

The thing that keeps families poor is the culture of rich families preventing anyone entering their club.

The US has the least social mobility of any developed country.

[bemildred]

6. The main factor in being poor is money.

If you don't have much, you're poor, and if you're poor, it's hard to get much.

[HopeHoops]

7. Yeah, being born into an inner city poverty culture manufactured by Republicans DOES make you poor.

Being born into a rural area decimated by the factory farming industry that feeds the GOP money makes you poor.

Being born into the middle class and forced to work for bullshit in pay makes you poor.

Those cultures are definitely the problem, but if so, they were created and are maintained by the GOP.