Liberals also say and do stupid shit

Season 3 Episode 4 of Atlanta was a really fun take on reparations.

The data, is very sad.

Black homeownership is still below where it was a decade ago, and they remain the racial group with the lowest homeownership rates (below hispanic and asian home-owners).

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Stuff like this? That really needs to change. Despite African American head of households (homeowners) having similar rates of education to white homeowners, they care significantly more student loan debt. Things like this show the generational nature of wealth disparities. It makes it really difficult to “pull yourself up by your boostraps” when you are being weighed down by generations of debt and wealth disparities.

One reason why I think the student-loan debt relief program would be so helpful is that it would significantly effect African American communities in a positive way, and would not be assailed as a “racist against whites” program, because everyone would benefit.

Recent redlining complaints against banks accused of denying loans to buyers in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods illustrate the existing barriers.

Last month, for example, New Jersey-based Lakeland Bank created a $12 million homeownership fund as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had accused it of redlining. The bank did not admit to wrongdoing, but it agreed to increase mortgage lending in communities of color in the wake of a seven-year federal investigation of its lending practices.

As the Pew trust found, part of the issue is there is still red-lining going on, where applicants attempting to purchase homes in historically non-white neighborhoods are being denied at higher rates. The system is still stacked against anyone who is not white.

Well perhaps they’re just not suing the right people?

Some guy: Look, you can’t just take stuff from some people and give it to some other people!

The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850: Hold my beer.

One of the really weird bits of anecdotal data I can provide is that back when I worked in warehouse jobs or the Army a lot of the black employees/soldiers refused to get bank accounts. Like, just straight-up would not put their money in a bank. The reasoning they offered was twofold:

  1. Banks were run by white people and you can’t trust them.
  2. They lived paycheck-to-paycheck anyway, so why bother?

They had to get paper checks issued and would go cash them at supermarkets or those awful check-cashing places. This was the case at all the warehouse jobs I held.

My son, who works part-time while in college tells me it’s still true. The black employees refuse to bank while white employees get accounts and use direct deposit.

In 2017, the FDIC even looked at this and found it was a thing.

Not having a bank account makes it a lot harder to save or buy a house. But then again, if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re not looking at owning a home anyway so the cycle continues.

Makes sense. If you got charged $400 in overdraft fees for going $10 over your balance, wouldn’t you tell everyone you know to not use banks?

Like many people have said, it is really expensive to be poor.

So sad but true. I’ve even seen it where people have overdraft “protection” - if you don’t have enough funds in one account, they’ll charge you a fee to deduct from another account and then charge you a fee when it’s not there, the payment service tries it a second or third time and you get two or four more fees, unless you pay a fee to put a stop payment on it. It’s all absurd. Then of course you get ongoing fees for being negative in both accounts.

Ok, in looking at Memeorandum, I’m seeing the usual RW sources freaking out about the paper below by a Professor. Only 1 article actually links to the paper,. So, is this Liberals saying stupid shit or just the usual RW Culture Warriors freaking out?

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Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures. In my research, influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a “nice” home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry.

Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making daily domestic work easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to maintain the perfectly organized pantry, it’s critical to ask: easier for whom?

Por que no los dos?

I feel like the idea that only white, rich people can be neat and clean is… not accurate, and kind of racist/classist.

(fyi I’m a white person who is not at all neat)

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I mean, the cleanliness thing is a classist thing entirely.

If you can afford to hire someone to clean your house for you, spending your free time to organize a pantry is something you might have time for.

I only have so much cleaning time to spend, and I ain’t using that time to hyper-organize a pantry. I got floors to scrub.

I mean, imo, this is just one of those weird sideways extensions of certain lifestyles - this one is basically “women taking on a more traditional gender role without saying so” social media trend, since 90%+ of those organizing their pantries this way are going to be part-time to stay-at-home women who either have money or time or both, but that instead of saying straightforwardly “this is a trend among stay-at-home women (probably without kids)” it’s all very indirect and evasive and hand wavy. There are many others in this vein that i’ve encountered that are clearly rationalizing being a stay-at-home / part-time woman without ever for a second recognizing the gendered part of that equation.

So the counter side immediately point to sexism/racism/classism, because that’s what they do when discussing any trend they don’t like but can’t say why, and the pro side doesn’t mention for a second the socioeconomic conditions that let people do this, because that makes you self conscious, and that’s bad too.

OTOH, it’s cool to have an organized pantry. OTOHx2, it’s too organized to use (i’d hate to mess it up by using it!) But it does make great Insta feed.

Maybe someone can explain it to me like I am 5, and French, and neoliberal. Isn’t this just giving the country to Le Pen in the next election?

You don’t have to be neoliberal to think that a working population that continually shrinks as a proportion of the overall population is unsustainable.

On the other hand the politics of it is terrible, as you say.

Is the working-age population of France declining as a proportion of overall population? I’ve looked a couple of places and it doesn’t seem like it is declining?

I suspect you want the ratio of pension-age to working age people, rather than working age to the whole population. If birth-rate is declining while the pension-age population is growing the two tend to cancel out.

From here: https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-05/fr_-_ar_2021_final_pension_fiche.pdf

I keep seeing people comparing the French retirement age, 62, to the US social security retirement age, 67.

But this is about pension plans, right? Isn’t it more accurate to compare this to the withdrawal dates for US publicly subsidized pension plans, which are 55 (401k) and 59.5 (IRAs)?

Even Social Security permits retiring with a pension at 62. It’s just a lower pension than if you wait. I don’t know enough about France’s system to know if there is any incentive to wait built into the pension calculation.

Thanks, that’s helpful.