Over the past five years, and maybe going back to the introduction of the German welfare program (Hartz IV)....there's been continual hype over the term 'poor' in Germany. Various statistical displays will now go and say that a minimum of one kid out of every six in Germany is in the category of 'poor'.
I noticed this morning, via ARD (public TV, Channel One), that they had a two-minute introduction piece entitled "What Does Poor Mean", and it rotates around the idea of being relative poor.
As they tell the story, depending on where you are in Germany.....with the cost of living....you might be 'mildly' poor, while living somewhere else.....you might be 'exceedingly' poor. They (ARD) put the number of poor in Germany at around 16-percent. Personally, the folks slightly above them....the working-class poor....might complain a bit because they aren't getting ahead in life.
I've sat and watched hours of reality TV here in Germany, where they feature the story of some dozen families who survive at the bottom level. Some are firmly attached to an alcohol problem. Some just aren't that bright. Some are terrible managers of money. Some screwed up on birth control and sit there with five or six kids and no way to really cover the cost.
One night, I sat there looking at some woman who was considered more or less unemployable. She had at least three-thousand Euro of tattoo art-work on her and you had to wonder how she got all that work done, and who paid for it.
The political bickering over this problem? Just about every political party in Berlin wants to resolve this issue. But just handing more money over won't correct it. In most cases, I think some folks need a life-coach assigned to them for several months, go through some boot-camp atmosphere to motivate them, and then get financial counseling assigned for a period of five years. This type of solution is basically unaffordable. So in the end....there will be some patchwork-type legislation which will just get the poor to some new lofty goal of being just relatively poor. As in the southern expression....something is better than nothing.
Anyway, the embedded site I listed has the video, two-minute piece (all in German) and a decently made news piece.
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