Poverty seems to be more and more a result of pure and simple exploitation.
1/
When a company is profitable, but the profit margin is considered “not high enough”, so employees are laid off or given reduced hours (or as seems to be common practice, benefited, experienced employees are laid off, then replaced with part-time employees at a lower wage and no benefits) so that the stock dividends can stay high and executives get hefty bonuses (because profits are high), how is that a moral failing, or even bad luck, on the part of the worker?
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I’ve read enough Dickens to think this was also the case in his time, and well he knew it. See Ignorance and Want tucked under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
It’s amazing how much “moral failing” is the result of poverty, rather than the other way around.
3/
I do find it encouraging that from time to time I am seeing comments to the effect that poverty and the inability of the poor to access things like food, shelter and healthcare without government assistance (or at all) is more an indictment of our society as a whole, rather than of the poor themselves. When a “successful” company has full-time employees who cannot support themselves, how successful are they really?
fin
For example: The 'Unaffordable Housing Crisis' exists due to 'housing' of all types (including mobile home parks) now being purchased across the country by corporations (to add to their portfolio of 'unsustainable profits' mode of businesses).
Specific names of individuals involved in destroying the standard of living in the U.S. need to be given.
None of this is happening 'by chance'.