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There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.
Have you actually interacted with these men at all? They are not dependable. At some point people become a negative value proposition for anyone that isn't desperate and it isn't the welfare state thats making women not desperate, its being able to work.
Yes I have. Have you?
I could tell any young woman coming of age in high school what her dating prospects should be, as far as finding a decent young man go, with a single datum. Let me see the suitors report cards and I can tell you which one probably has the better future ahead of him. You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?
Now tell me which one has more real 'value' to society?
Yes, half my family is working class or lower middle class. Some have fallen down to be underclass adjacent. I have also lived in underclass areas and worked jobs with the underclass.
Compared to what? The intermittent pizza delivery or Uber driver? The guy that has issues holding down a job as a hospice care giver? The guy occasionally cleaning subway cars at night? The part time gas station attendant? Almost all of them drug users and video game addicts? This is the underclass, not the construction workers or guys employed in the manufacturing industry. Those guys don't end up single or criminal either by the way, they're doing fine.
The football star that beats her might very well be the better option. And what's to say the other guys dont beat their spouses as well?
Neither of the groups have any value at present but one at least did something at some point in his life. There is some capacity there that might transfer to a kid.
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Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.
If you're in a poor part of the US, it seems like a complication in the trend that American welfare laws effectively pay poor women not to get married.
What?
The US welfare system is most generous for single mothers to the point of effectively incentivizing poor women to do their childbearing out of wedlock. It’s called the marriage penalty.
Yes, and it also incentivizes them to indulge in short-term mate selection. That was also my original point.
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