Simple difference between race based and economic based AA:
Being born a URM is genetic
Being poor is a choice (barring physical or metal disability, which are sometimes genetic)
Being a URM your more likely to face more challenges to overcoming poverty than a typical white poor person. Either way, either because of choices of profession, spending habits, having children before your finically ready, enjoying a job even though it does not pay well, choosing to work one job, choosing not to work and go to school, bad spending/saving habits, whatever the reason being poor is a choice. In the US today, through hard work and sacrifice, almost anyone can bring themselves out of poverty. Does that mean you may have to forgo some of life’s luxuries, yes, of course.
Yet today we have a society that thinks, even if they are poor, they deserve the same privileges of the rich. The people before them who started out poor and became, through hard work, rich, and whose children then get those benefits. Poor people think they should be able to go to college right after HS, because that’s what middle class kids do. They want AA to give them what others have, they want an advantage they are not willing to work for, or those that preceded them where not willing to work for. In my view economic AA is worse than race based AA, because we are rewarding bad choices. The American dream is not creating a new middle class through handouts, its encouraging a new middle class through hard work.
Hence I do not support economic AA, poorness is a choice, I don’t think we should hand out slots at schools or tax payer money to people who chose (for whatever, even good, reasons) to be poor. I don’t think we should reward or encourage poor people simply becuase they are poor. That’s not what our country was built on. We did not inherit a landed aristocracy, where you only other choice was to be a peasant. We are a nation of immigrants who came here with nothing and became successful through hard work, and at times, sacrificing things for themselves so their children could have a better life. The government did not hand out $ to try and make poor and rich equal, it was up to the individual to do that. If your white and poor all you got is poor holding you back. It’s a choice so change it, work harder, if that means you can’t go to the best school or right away because you can’t afford it, so be it, work harder it builds character. We should not be trying to redistribute wealth by giving poor people a preference in schools. If you work hard enough to get the stats to get in, great, if not, we should not reward you because your parents (not you) have a low income.
Life is not fair folks, and life should not, at least based on the principles of rugged individualism that America was built on, try to be made fair or equal just because by birth you did not end up in a rich family. That’s a choice, you can change that on your own, you can becomes rich, maybe not by going to Harvard, but most rich people did not either. There is no right to equality in education based on income, there is not right to higher education just because your family got handed a rough deal. You become what you make of yourself, and if your white and poor, its only the poorness you have to overcome.
If your poor and you want your kids to be able to go to the best schools, work hard and sacrifice so they can, even if that means your personal goals have to be set aside. I don’t think the country owes you anything if your poor BUT the chance to be free from discrimination and policies that try to keep you poor (like you can’t enter this profession at all because your female). You don’t, in America, deserve a trophy just for playing the game, you deserve a trophy for winning the game.
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