Voters Are Are So Expert At Making Screwed Up Votes Like Welfare Clients I Used To Work With.

[TheMastersNemesis]

I used to work with welfare clients with a welfare to work program. Granted many of them were victims economically or socially. And many had ended up in disadvantaged and desperate situations. Having said that one of the most difficult things to work with was their ability to make bad choices and bad decisions for the most absurd reasons.

Their life experiences had somehow damaged their ability to make good decisions about how they operated and what they chose. Voters have the same problem the way I look at it. Voters have become so expert at making fucked up voting decisions for all the wrong reasons. That fact is the ONLY way that we could have ended up with someone like Trump and all the other assholes who are in office.

[flotsam]

1. As to your clients

I ask you read this (and perhaps you already have) because it is just killer as to why the poor make "bad" decisions...

"I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to."

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html

[TheMastersNemesis]

2. I Am Aware Of The Bleak Circumstances & Impossible Decisions.

I was referring to the number of times our program was offering a real life line to some of these clients. And I can remember how many times our plans just crashed because our client made a bad decision. And I know we are in the kind of economy where a person is not able to make it. So I was not generalizing about people in poverty in general.

I was just referring to my experience in our program where we had individuals where we could create real opportunity for them using federal dollars and training. Before TANF the WIN program had a lot of resources. And we had a lot of training dollars and economic support for individuals who were in our program.

[flotsam]

3. I get that

I had seen the piece I linked to a year back though and it explained the mindset very well. I thought if you hadn't seen it you might find it worthwhile.

[TheMastersNemesis]

4. Yes I Certainly Did. Clients We Worked With Had "Learned Helplessness" .

Poverty and catastrophic circumstances on over a long period of time rewires the brain in some ways. Just to give a perspective on what I learned while at DOL. I worked with the Boulder Homeless shelter for 4 years running a day labor operation to help people get some day money for day jobs. The shelter only fed two meals a day and did not allow day stays. I had supervised a country employee doing that operation until I had to do it myself. I was quite rewarding and very interesting.

That population is unique in that you have to have multiple support systems to really help them if you can. Of course we have very few adequate support systems nationally. Also a large portion of that population were veterans. Also the mentally ill were a significant proportion of that population.

We had a support group from Yonkers, New York give a mini seminar. I often trained with shelter staff even though I was a state employee. Anyway the counselors in this group made one really revealing bit of information about homelessness. What they said was that 'EVEN A TOTALLY MENTALLY HEALTHY PERSON WOULD DEVELOP A SYNDROME IF THEY WERE HOMELESS FOR 6 MONTHS. So if one becomes homeless, the situation is so devastating and traumatic they would develop a kind of mental illness after 6 month even is they were totally ok and adjusted originally.

I spent 24 years working with vulnerable populations. Even though I had a BFA in Theater I have to learn to be a sociologist and psychologist as an employment program specialist

In retrospect at the age of 74 I wish I had the insight then that I have now. I would have understood and operated in some very different ways.

[TheMastersNemesis]

5. ADDENDUM _ BTW That Article Describes What We Found Perfectly.

That article is so familiar to what I experienced. I failed to mention that. Our program was meant to bridge some of those gaps so these people could get back into a work situation. Sadly the GOP with the help of Clinton destroyed help. Now we punish these people and whip them mentally. It is cruel, hateful and immoral. And even deadly.

[lostnfound]

6. Prolonged stress can also decision-making

I’ve seen a “deer in the headlights” reaction to a decision that should have been easy.

I’ve personally experienced the effects of stress.

It doesn’t help that they are inundated with faulty reasoning on the airwaves.

[TheSmarterDog]

7. A lot of the time poor economic decisions are the result of poor economic circumstances.

Since 1970 the real US GDP per capita has increased by 11 times, while the median income has decreased by 10%. Where has all that increase gone to?

America is not a poor country. It's just that the wealthy elites have worked to keep the majority of Americans poor.