This several page piece in the Post highlighting how the poor get screwed simply by being poor is pretty solid, and the depressing thing is that I doubt very few of our elites understand these very basic things. When you factor in the fact that even public transportation is not available for most of the nation’s rural poor, a lot of the time when our nation’s haves are babbling about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, they have less idea what they are talking about than normal.
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schrodinger's cat
What does one do when one doesn’t have a car in a rural area? I cannot even imagine, what it is to be poor and homeless in the middle of a cold winter in a rural state like say Maine or one of the Dakotas.
SpotWeld
It’s Vimes’ Boots is wot it is.
MikeJ
This is something libertarians pretend not to understand. They like to say that they believe that it is wrong to use physical violence to get money from others. What’s done to the poor is economic violence. Physical force is not the only force that exists, or the only force that is immoral to use.
Face
One thing that will almost certainly fix most of this is a ginormous tax cut for the wealthy and lowering the capital gains tax to 0%.
Mayken
Almost 15 years ago I had professors at UCLA (mostly Women’s Studies’ profs) who would make these claims often with pretty good evidence to back it up and still got laughed at and scoffed at by Very Serious People. I’m glad there is some MSM interest in this matter – it’s hardly a new or surprising concept.
TenguPhule
Old boots and mud.
Mayken
@Spotweld Terry Prachett FTW! Yes, that is it exactly.
Punchy
They wouldn’t be poor if they just weren’t so damn lazy. And Black.
So says
Rush LimbaughNeal Boortz, and why would he lie to me? (Edit….cant get my nutjobs correct….although Rush has probably said this, too)Michael
If you are poor:
1. You are inadequately served by public transportation, most acutely in rural, exurban and suburban regions.
2. You pay more for gasoline, as the stations in your area do not price real well.
3. your grocery options suck and the offerings are overpriced.
4. Your automobile expenses for registration and insurance take a huge chunk of your pay, and if you are late on anything, the late fees will cause you to literally have to choose between necessities and this expense.
5. Try contracting for home repairs if you’re poor, and see the prices you get quoted.
6. The lenders take advantage of you.
7. Law enforcement targets you, and your arrests for petty infractions related to your poverty (bad cheecks, no insurance, expired registration) lead to fines you can’t afford to pay.
8. What medical care?
How can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can’t afford boots?
Bubblegum Tate
With a top-bracket tax cut, of course!
Michael
The question I’d like to ask (particularly of Radley) is what value exists for the chronically impoverished to continue to support the existing status quo? If the social compact does nothing for them at all, then what consideration is being provided that binds the underclass to the compact?
JL
Since PAUL L hasn’t shown up, I’ll do my best to play the bigot. But they are all fat, plus look at the poor in Haiti they don’t even have stores to shop in. If another repub compares the USA to a third world country, I’m going to try to deck him.
Jay Andrew Allen
@1 –
What does one do when one doesn’t have a car in a rural area? I cannot even imagine, what it is to be poor and homeless in the middle of a cold winter in a rural state like say Maine or one of the Dakotas.
I grew up poor on East Port Bay Road in Wolcott, NY, a Central new York town on Lake Ontario (50 miles west of Rochester, 75 miles west of Buffalo). We lived in a converted trailer – a mobile home cemented to the ground with a voluminous basement. We didn’t have a car the entire time I lived there, which was until I was 12 yo. We couldn’t afford it. Our “house” was five miles from the center of town; the only store within a mile of us was a bait shop. For the most part, we relied on my grandparents or friends to get us places. If we had somewhere to go, but no ride…we didn’t go.
We moved into the center of town, but didn’t have a car until I was 15 and my mom began working as a home health aide. Even that was a pain in the ass. The grocery store was only about 6 blocks away, but you had to walk down and back up a large declivity to get there and back. Try hauling $100 worth of groceries that distance on a regular basis, and see what kind of mood if puts you in.
So I guess the answer is, you do what you have to do.
SpotWeld
@Michael
There’s also the general trend that if you want to take advantage of any program designed to offset that rich over poor advantage (presumibly so you can work at not being so poor anymore) you have to keep track of all the various bits of paperwork to prove you’re poor. (Tax forms, residency status, bank balances, pay stubs.)
omen
i so enjoy when wingnuts get to decide what constitutes being poor. if you have a microwave or a throwaway phone, you’re living large and have nothing to complain about.
nathaniel
Being poor sucks, but a lot of the issues that were brought up in that article can be simply solved with a little education. Set up some sort of center that helps people with these things. They could get all of the bonus card applications from the various stores and help people sign up. Put in mailboxes and sell stamps for people to pay their bills, Have computers available so people can pay bills over the internet. have the forms needed to get a new id card. Help people set up bank accounts.
That is the thing, a lot of poor people never were taught how things that many people take for granted, bank accounts for example, work. They need information, and someone to help them through it. Why didn’t that clerk sign the guy up for a bonus card then?
MattF
And heaven help you if you have a health problem or if you’ve spent time in prison. Because heaven is all the help you’ll get.
Comrade Darkness
In the spirit of the handful of congresscritters who volunteered to live on food stamps for a week, I think we should require all of them as part of their duties to spend two weeks a year living with their constituents. Two households, one week each, drawn at random.
The shit that would get fixed would make your head spin.
Laura W
I think one of the most informative things I’ve ever seen along these lines was Morgan Spurlock’s very first episode of 30 Days on FX:
I’m having all sorts of infuriating javavoid whatever issues so I can’t link directly to the episode but you can watch all of them from all four seasons for free. Just find season one, episode one, Minimum Wage.
HyperIon
OT but HAS ANYONE POSTED THIS? Cheney assassination squad?
This is incredible.
Edit: in moderation…why?
Paula
A lot of that stuff probably has some small, obscure gov’t program that can help alleviate it, but once again, if you’re homeless or part of the working poor you don’t necessarily have access to any of the pertinent information.
That shit about grocery chains in poor and/or urban areas is SO FUCKING TRUE IT MAKES ME WANT TO SPIT. Plus, even if they have cheap stuff, it’s usually the unhealthy stuff. Ditto on fast food chains; a local Los Angeles area congresswoman in ust recently worked on a bill for a moratorium on fast food joints in her district.
In any case, I always tell people to stay the fuck away from big chains unless they’re absolutely desperate. Ethnic grocery stores usually carry fresh food and produce, as well as having a third less of the cost.
HyperIon
hmmm…i’m awaiting moderation (#20) but why?
Sy Hersh on Bhutto and Cheney
Linkmeister
John Scalzi had a great post on the subject of being poor back in 2005. His commenters added more examples.
It starts this way:
As the saying goes, read the whole thing. And if you want to fix the blockquoting, that would be cool.
John Cole
My favorite wingnut meme is the one advanced by Malkin a while back in that all rural poor are living idyllic lives on the farm raising their own food and not really poor, but just not very liquid.
The reality, for anyone who has been outside Georgetown, of course, is that most rural poor, particularly in Appalachia, live in a tarshack in an old coal mining town where there simply is nothing but a lot of dirt and an equal amount of suck and they don’t own land to farm, don’t have the skills, and if they did have land or skills the land was probably not arable, mountainous, or equally likely, toxic from years of coal run-off.
People are just idiots.
Martin
Go watch the first episode of ’30 Days’ when Morgan and his fiancee walk into town with no cash, get jobs paying minimum wage, and try to live for a month. These are clever, educated people and there’s just no getting past that fact that this life simply wears people down to nothing. I’d like to see members of Congress try it out. They can do it in DC even, that is, if they’d be caught dead (and if they could stay alive) in a neighborhood that they could afford.
(Whoops, Laura beat me to it…)
omen
@HyperIon:
but this isn’t what hersh is saying.
from another source detailing an interview with hersh:
Could JSOC have been responsible?
No. Hariri, America. No. Impossible. There was no reason. JSOC’s responsibility was to go after what they call high-value targets.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/09/05/13/10313137.html
looks like somebody is putting out fake quotes saying it’s from hersh with false claims in an attempt to discredit him. this piece from “the nation” doesn’t even have an attribution.
Xecky Gilchrist
@MikeJ: This is something libertarians pretend not to understand.
In most cases, I agree. But I believe that a good fraction of them genuinely don’t understand it and refuse to find out, in that stolid, farty, muleheaded way they have.
John: welcome to 1988 or so. I would say 1980 but it took a while for the Reaganomics to really kick in.
Laura W
@John Cole: Here you go. Season 3, Episode 1:
@Martin: Whoops, I see you saw. People really should go watch that!
SpotWeld
There’s also the inherant “recovery time” that comes about from being poor.
Let’s say your front window gets broken.
If you’re doing okay you can pay to get that reglazed and maybe have to scrimp and save a few months to get back to “normal”
If you’re doing bad, you have to put it on your credit card and add it to the rest of mounting debt and interest payments.
If you’re poor you scavange the neighbor hood for some plywood and hope your cousin can come out over the weekend to tack it into place… maybe.
PeakVT
Great article and, unfortunately, pretty accurate.
If I saw a “donate” button next to that article I would be tempted to give a few bucks. Jus’ sayin’.
grimc
@Laura W:
First ep on Hulu (which means, of course, non-US viewers are SOL.)
http://www.hulu.com/watch/5287/30-days-minimum-wage
John Cole
Could it be that I actually stumped you all with a title to a post earlier?
Incertus
@Laura W: Last fall, my freshpeople had to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickeled and Dimed” as part of their first year comp classes, and while the book has some problems, it also opened them up to some harsh realities most of them hadn’t known about. What really got them, though, was the day we did the math for what they thought a decent paying job was in hourly wages. “What do you mean ten bucks an hour is not quite 21 grand a year before taxes? How can anyone live on that?” In south Florida, you can’t, at least not on your own.
omen
@HyperIon:
the assassination squad part is true. the other stuff, though, like the claim about hariri is not consistent with other interviews.
Laura W
@grimc: Thanks for that! I’ve never used Hulu so never even think about it. I was getting nowhere fast over on FX. Which is apropos for the post’s theme, I guess.
dmv
Now, with the theme of this post firmly in mind, go read Jeffrey Toobin’s piece in the New Yorker about Chief Justice Roberts.
Then, return, and join me in despairing for the Republic.
HyperIon
@omen: So I guess “The Nation” that’s being sourced here is not “The Nation” that I first assumed it to be. It does sound VERY fantastic. It was the “quoting” of Hersh that made me think it might be authentic. Thanks for reality check.
Little Dreamer
Seems to me whenever I hear Republicans talking about people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps it’s actually slang for “go to Daddy and ask for an installment on the trust fund”.
Sad thing, many people don’t have daddys with trust funds.
Martin
No, it would appear that the FX website seriously blows. Minimum wage was Season 1 Episode 1. And the coal mining show was very good too. Some of the episodes honestly suck (binge drinking, a few others), but some are just fantastic.
HyperIon
@omen: OK, did they assassinate ANYBODY?
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
SpotWeld beat me to Pratchett, and Linkmeister beat me to Scalzi, so I’ll scramble for Orwell. Also, Ehrenreich.
On preview: bugger.
Little Dreamer
@Punchy:
Uh, yeah, I seem to remember Limbaugh covering that in “The Way Things Ought To Be”.
Fulcanelli
@JL: I’ve been to Haiti as a tourist and they are so ‘effin poor they live in grass huts and burn down small trees to make charcoal to take to town to barter for meat and vegetables to survive. The annual yearly income is around $300 US. That’s annual.
My wife gave a $5 tip to a local to help her with a heavy beach chair and he just about broke into tears.
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
The Other Steve
I remember a lot of this crap from when I was back in college.
I agree, being poor costs a lot of money.
TenguPhule
I think it’s time the IRS did a full audit on Roberts.
Spiffy McBang
I can’t argue with anything in this article, but I really wish it had more data on stuff like supermarket prices. I want to empathize with the guy in the supermarket at the end who felt like the prices were too high, but I’ve worked in places where there are people bitching like that and the prices are completely normal, if not cheaper than the norm. They’re the minority, but they make everyone look bad. Those who don’t understand life under poverty will point at them and say that the article is just sympathizing with people when there may not be anything wrong, and outside of the check-cashing schemes, there aren’t any hard numbers to work with to refute that assumption.
(Yes, I saw the corner store prices. It could very easily be read as numbers made up to reflect what the author wants the reader to think. Even just prices with a date and general location where they were taken would add credibility.)
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Oh, and Jan Wong’s series on working as a cleaner in Toronto.
KG
I tend to agree with nathaniel @16: education goes a long way. unfortunately, the place most of these things would be available (junior colleges) get the shit end of the stick when budget battles get nasty.
@11: I think a decent number of libertarians understand the issue. but I also think a lot of them see the government as the thing most likely standing in the way of social mobility (or they just don’t care about the outcome for most people – which, realistically speaking, is not very smart). hear me out on this… the argument goes like this: welfare programs (generally seen as a good thing, even by libertarians, though they prefer it through private charities) require, as said in 14, costs to prove that you qualify – which makes those more likely to use it, and more likely to need it, less likely to actually use it. second, progressive income taxes actually make it harder to acquire wealth. if you’re already rich (say, a beer or hotel heiress) then a higher tax rate isn’t going to effect your overall lifestyle because you were rich to begin with. If, however, you started off in the middle class or poor, then to become rich, you likely had to accumulate a large amount of debt (arguably through overpriced educational systems), so higher income taxes, along with large amounts of debt means you aren’t really getting ahead, even if it looks like it. of course you can’t set income tax rates based on someone’s acquired wealth, equal protection and all, which is why i tend to favor a sales tax, but i know the moon will rise out of my ass before that happens. finally, and this may be my brand of libertarianism more than anything, I don’t think going from poor to rich in one generation can happen in a statistically significant portion of the population (not everyone gets to create an operating system for personal computers in their garage that completely reshape the world of business). however, going from poor to middle class should be attainable with some hard work.
Zandar
Forget living on minimum wage. I’d dare Congress to live on $15 a hour. You may have health insurance and direct deposit and a PC with an internet connection. But you’re still one $700 car repair bill/insurance co-payment/tax bill/broken whatever away from being out on your ass, much less having to try to raise a kid on that.
Dreggas
@Comrade Darkness:
We should also make a reality show out of it so they know everyone is watching.
BombIranForChrist
Frankly, I think everyone shares blame in this. We are a selfish country. If American citizens really wanted to help the poor, the politicians would fall all over themselves trying to oblige, but the sad truth is that most Americans would rather see their fellow citizens rot in a ditch than pay more in taxes. We kinda suck.
Mike G
If the social compact does nothing for them at all, then what consideration is being provided that binds the underclass to the compact?
This is where the authoritarian law ‘n’ order bully state comes in. They don’t care whether or not you subscribe to the social compact, they’ll FORCE you.
And they’ll happily pay several times more for head-cracking cops and huge prisons than they would for ‘soci@list’ social programs that might lead people toward productive lives. All while bitching about their taxes.
Old Gringo
DougJ: This is something libertarians pretend not to understand. They like to say that they believe that it is wrong to use physical violence to get money from others. What’s done to the poor is economic violence. Physical force is not the only force that exists, or the only force that is immoral to use.
Laura W
@Martin: Now that I see how many I missed I feel like watching them all. The other one that made a huge impression on me was Same Sex Parenting, Season 3, Episode 3. (The same sex couple were men.)
ironranger
All my life I’ve heard my R neighbors, family bitch about people using any kind of social program getting free rides & they still do. They just don’t want to believe that those programs help a whole lot of people who really do need it. They’d rather believe that every social aid is predominately loaded with freeloaders & scammers. They scoff when anyone points out money invested in good programs saves money in the longer run. I blame Saint Ronnie’s propaganda for the mindsets of many 40 & 50 year old people today.
I saw a video of MN House Tax Committee chair Ann Lenczewski brilliantly explaining raises for wealthy wouldn’t change their lives a bit while budget cuts fall disproportionately on the middle & poorer class among other basic budget facts. Pawlenty & MN R legislators just yawn.
Mayken
@nathaniel: While I agree some education is in order and helpful – and yes, why the clerk didn’t take time to sign him up for a card or show him how much he could save if he did is a little baffling – some of these things are amenable to correction via education alone.
Yes, if the person in question had a card and knew how to shop with it to his advantage it would help him out some. But only so long as the store remains within easy travel distance (i.e. the car doesn’t break down) or he has the time to take public transport or walk. The last two options are tough still because then you cannot buy nearly as much which is one of the ways one saves money.
Having a bank account, stamps and/or access to online banking is great for paying bills on time always supposing you have the money on time. Even online banking takes a few days to process and you still have to have the money in your account before they will pay the bill. And as the person in the article said, having stamps isn’t the issue, stamps are cheap, it’s having the money in time.
And having a place with forms ready to help you get a replacement (or first time) ID card is only helpful if a) the place can actually process the form so one doesn’t have to spend the time going to the DMV and b) the person has the money and his/her birth certificate needed to get said replacement.
Again, time and money are the obstacles, not lack of education.
That being said, I hear what you are saying. There need to be resources to help folks in these situations to be able to make better choices. But teaching them about options that aren’t readily available to them is not truly that helpful.
Bill E Pilgrim
“It’s no disgrace to be poor in this country…. but it might as well be”.
-Kin Hubbard via Kurt Vonnegut.
harlana pepper
All anybody has to do is read “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Incertus
@Fulcanelli: Some Haitians are so poor they eat dirt, and that’s not an exaggeration.
Fulcanelli
Noblesse Oblige? In America?
We need another band like the Clash and Limbaugh’s head on a pike.
JL
@Fulcanelli: I know and the flooding there is devastating. My comment is that conservatives where I live, use Haiti as an example. Since the USA is the wealthiest nation we should be compared to like countries.
Haiti and other third world examples on how trickle down economics doesn’t work.
JL
@John Cole: When I google the title, all I get is Baloon Juice. So yes I’m stumped unless you lost a lung recently and still smoke.
Laura W
@harlana pepper: See Incertus at 33. I love the “Freshpeople” term. I’ve been outta school far too long since that is new to me.
Time to go back?
BigD
John Cole@32: I remember a line like this title from an old Cheech and Chong album.
Laura W
@John Cole: If it’s not a Joni Mitchell or Bonnie Raitt lyric, yeah, you got me.
I just figured DougJ nailed it in the post right after yours?
Actually, it sounds like something Steve Martin would say.
John Cole
@BigD: Finally.
Yes, from the Wedding Album. Testimonials from Irv Zimmerman.
JL
@harlana pepper: I’m probably breaking the rule by posting so many replies, but parents complained when the local high school had “Nickel and Dimed” on the reading list. The same parents preach God and Country and I guess they would qualify as Sarah’s real americans.
Calouste
@HyperIon:
The Nation is the most influential English-language newspaper in Pakistan, but that article sounds like it is not up to their usual standards.
harlana pepper
@Laura W: I read it a few years ago. It just confirmed a lot of stuff I already suspected. Gosh, I admire her. Anyway, I lent it to a friend of mine who was really shocked and surprised, she had no clue about what it’s like for the working poor. You can’t put a price on that kind of enlightenment.
Also read “Bait and Switch” which was, ironically, reflective of that same friend’s experiences with the corporate world and the dicking over you experience in the white collar job search.
Told the friend about it and she was like, don’t wanna read it, it will just make me ill.
DougL
@omen:
Fixt.
bayville
Depressing, but very good report by DeNeen L. Brown.
She’s probably earning about 1/20th the salary as the stressed-out MoDo – who writes (borrows) about 1500 words per week.
Old Gringo
No less than Hayek, Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon were all in favor of a Basic Income Guarantee, or minimum guaranteed income for every citizen. In Friedman’s case it was termed a Negative Income Tax and we almost had it under Nixon, and it is one of the many reasons Milton considered Nixon “the most socialist of the presidents of the United States in the 20th century.”
Tell that to a glibertarian or wingnut and sit back and watch the fireworks.
Maude
Bank of America charges $12 a month fee unless you have $750 in the checking account.
Wages for a long time haven’t kept up with rents.
Food costs more.
Military spending takes away from the people and puts the money into the contractors hands.
Reagan and congress removed federal funding for a lot of training programs that get people into decent paying jobs.
OT- I was so glad that they didn’t mummify Reagan and put him on permanent public display.
The middle class is now looked down upon by “our betters”.
The financial sector has a lot to answer for and so do the greedy fools in congress.
Credit card interest rates used to set by the state that the card holder lived in. Congress changed the law so that the credit card companies could move to the states with the highest interest rates.The Supremes upheld that law.
Notice that now, Congress isn’t changing it.
Clinton pulled the rug out from under a lot of poor people.
The “end welfare as we know it” was a punitive measure.
People require capital to start businesses and a minimum wage worker can’t get credit.
There will more people joining the ranks of the poor with the awful unemployment etc.
Obama understands that the financial sector can no longer be the the giant that it has been. To shift things back to the middle class is going to be a real fight with “our betters”.
Old Gringo
Bank of America charges $12 a month fee unless you have $750 in the checking account.
Unless you have a check direct deposited, as in a Social Security check, or any pay check, then it is free checking.
chuck
@nathaniel@16:
Those are called community organizers.
Thing is, a lot of poor won’t avail themselves of community centers and associated resources, because they’ve been taught their whole lives to take their lot stoically, and that taking assistance is weakness that will forever make them a helpless rescue case. This isn’t true of everyone of course, but it does result, ironically enough, in a lot of unequal distribution of assistance.
Quicksand
@BMFIC:
I see you’re just as committed to going Galt as the ‘baggers are.
HumboldtBlue
Wow, you’ve been living in my head and world and I didn’t even know it.
I’m poor, by any definition you choose to use. I do without a lot of things, cable TV (although, to be honest it’s not that hard to do without, particularly if you love to read like I do) taking the G/F out for dinner maybe once every six months (again, it’s not as bad as it sounds when you like to cook as much as I do), the movies, local concerts (it hurts a lot when you know if you spend $75 bucks to see the Munich Philharmonic or local legend Sarah Bareilles you’ll be eating PB&J for the last four days of a pay period), but it really hurts when it comes to travel (gotta see Mom whose health is rapidly deteriorating), simple car repairs that used to make a dent in the bank account but now would wipe it out, a chance to hit the store for news running shoes and sweats without stretching out the purchases over a three-month period, recoiling in horror at the cost of razor blades, laundry soap and vacuum cleaner bags …
Now I also fund my vices, so I guess in true NRO fashion I could grow my own tobacco and brew my own beer, but what fun is that?
I am also poor of my own volition, having a job I love in an area I will never leave, but it does sharpen one’s eye for discounts and for cutting out the waste, also known as “luxuries” in some circles. It also helps that I have always been and will remain single and childless, but it still hurts when sticker prices for the basics and the luxuries are off-putting enough to send me home for a lunch of PB&J sammiches.
Cerberus
@Mayken:
Adding to that, people also forget the health costs.
When fresh food may cost too much or have “unused” portions and you’re surviving on $10 for the rest of the week for food, you tend to get the least nutritious pseudo-food you can get. This messes you up royally, in energy levels, mental health, incidence of health issues, and weakened immune system.
The health costs are often compounded by the lowest income areas also being the areas with the highest pollution and lowest safety standards (there’s been more than one case of deliberate dumping of toxic waste in poor residential neighborhoods) thus further weakening health and immune system.
When you add that to no insurance or insurance with high co-pays or potential for rejection by the insurance company, or the simple problem of not being able to afford to take the day of work to luxuriously go to the doctor’s office, you also don’t check up on anything minor to moderate, thus allowing low-grade problems to fester and be more susceptible to catastrophic medical conditions.
It is amazing on another note how minimum wage has fallen down. The point of minimum wage was that you could raise at least a three person family on that amount, but even supporting one person often requires twice the minimum wage. For those looking for part of the source of the credit crisis, this is a big piece. For the working poor, wages aren’t enough to literally survive on.
Martin
And a great many low-wage earners don’t get paid in a manner that can be direct deposit, such as the gardeners that work my neighborhood, nor do many qualify for most credit unions where they are more likely to find low-fee banking.
Though BofA is probably one of the worst banks to pick as a baseline. I’m sure that most local banks would be cheaper.
Ruemara
If you haven’t had to deal with welfare, food stamps and the insane drudgery of poverty in America, you shouldn’t be allowed to write punditry about it. Consider this. When I was destitute, living on welfare and struggling to recover from DVT brought on by my private doctor (when I was middle class and the richest I’d ever been), I had to go to the hospital 2x a week to be monitored. It was in a poor area and had 1 bus line that served it. To get there, I had to get a bus 90 minutes before an appointment, for what was a 20 minute car ride. I would sit with people who all had chronic medical issues and were often there just for basic visits. If I came on time, I would be seen an hour after my appointment due to the tremendous back log of patients. 15 to 20 minutes later, I would ride the circuitous route all the way back home.
Because I demanded better food than what was available, I found a farmer’s market that took food stamps. I would ride a bus 45 minutes with a shopping cart and cane (I had serious leg damage from dvt) and load up on vegetables and fruit-plus cheap meat from Chinatown!-and ride back. The market was about a 10 minute car ride from where I lived, but there was no direct walking route or bus route. It was a market that served a poorer area, so…bus routes were not that plentiful, but people came.
Poverty takes some serious mental toughness to just survive, much less overcome. And any fool stupid enough to yap about the easy life of the american poor, I’d slap if they were in reach.
p.s. I can walk now, chi gong ftw! & I now own a car. Someone gave me their perfectly good castoff and I show her love.
JenJen
Oh, oh, oh, how I argued with my friends last fall when we had on the ballot a bill to cap Ohio pay-day loans at 28%. The argument I always heard was “But then those places will close, and that’s what will really hurt the poor! Why don’t you care about poor people?” It was as maddening to me as arguing with them about Obama vs. McCain.
The issue capping the loan rates passed, 64% to 37%. I understand the lenders are hard at work on another ballot initiative to repeal the last one.
JL
Hey, I buy castoffs knowing that the shop that I purchase them from is run by volunteers (including myself) except for a manager. All proceeds after utilities are paid go to help those that need it most. This year a lady came by with a check for $50.00 to donate. She had lost her job last year and qualified for help to pay her rent as well as food and castoffs for her children. It was now her time to help out. This does not happen infrequently.
Comrade Darkness
@Dreggas, give em each a youtube channel. Even better.
Our reps are so utterly beholden to the smallest constituencies, all of whom have the resources to manage their own affairs just fine.
Mayken
@Cerberus: thanks for bringing up the bit about having to take time off of work to do stuff. It’s true of banking and going to the DMV etc as well.. Low wage workers generally get a 1/2 hour break (as required by law) try doing anything like banking on that when you still need to eat. (Hell, when I was working (still looking for a job dammit!) I had an hour for lunch and I still had trouble doing basic banking and still getting food.) So many of these things (medical, banking, DMV) require taking time off which working poor can generally ill afford to do.
Any center trying to be helpful for people in these situations needs to be open 24/7.
Ruemara
@Zandar:
I work for teh guv’mint. I am p/t and make less than $15 per hr for a technical job. Sometimes I daydream of making $20k in a year again, but I’ll tell you something, last decent job I had paid me $8 per hr and I had the highest performance raise ever at $.25.
I have a college degree and over 15 years experience as a graphic designer and videographer. I would love to see someone from congress do my job and also cook as much, bake as much and garden in my yard as much as I do to make ends meet.
And Spurlock’s fx series had some seriously fun episodes.
YellowJournalism
JenJen, it might comfort you to know that the lending industry is going downhill fast. Too much competition, too many people unable to pay back the payday loans (let alone take one out in the first place), and too many larger companies have gotten into the game.
I have family who own a pay day loan business, and they’re hurting BAD. They have no staff now, except themselves, and one family member is starting to look for an outside job just to make ends meet. They’re not the only ones that are going down, either. There’s also rumours of other crackdowns on pay day loans in their neck of the woods.
Of course, I never cared for their business in the first place. I always thought it took advantage of the desperate, the stupid, and the elderly.
robertdsc
That’s me.
TenguPhule
And the much better off get paid salary, which means they don’t need to do a full day’s work, just show up and out again to do something personal.
JenJen
@YellowJournalism: Totally agreed, and while I’m sorry for what members of your family are going through with their business, there are better ways to make a living than soullessly bilking the poor and the old and the sick. Pisses me off.
After writing what I did above about payday lenders here in Ohio, I thought I’d do a little research to see how they’re faring. According to several articles, they’re doing quite fine, unfortunately. To replace lost profit due to the interest rate cap, they just jacked up fees. A few people in this article say they’re paying exactly what they were paying for a payday loan a year ago, despite the law.
Damn.
Martin
There’s something to that statement that people miss. In my home, I have the following free/nearly free items:
Dining table and chairs, 2 end tables, large computer armoire (just got it this weekend, 6 months old, $3000 new at Pottery Barn), 2 dressers, 1 desk, 1 clothes armoire, 32″ TV plus the stand it sits on, side table, large walk in closet worth of shelving, dishwasher, 75% of the clothes the kids wear, and I can’t even account for all the other little bits and pieces.
Now, it sounds like we’re thrifty, and we are, but there’s no fucking way that someone not in a well-off neighborhood would have the opportunity to get this stuff. Nobody in a trailer park is being offered $3000 pieces of furniture for the cost of getting it the hell out of their house – which I have the means to do, but a lot of poorer people don’t. So here I am, not poor (not rich, but definitely not poor) with half a house full of free (or essentially free) stuff that lots of other people are more in need of than we were.
So the pundits out there that might be talking about how easy it is to get a free hand-me-down bed don’t realize that it’s easy in well-to-do areas but goddamn hard in poorer areas.
Even though we donate a shitton of things to the assistance league, as well as time and money, and serve as a conduit for even more, we routinely shake our heads at what gets offered to us for nothing – and amazing nice stuff as well. I’d say that we’ve moved a *minimum* of $100K worth of stuff through our house in the last 6 years (including several functioning cars). And we don’t even work hard to source this stuff – it’s all word of mouth. My point is that the people that would *really* benefit from this kind of charity usually aren’t close enough to the source to benefit from it.
HyperIon
@Calouste: After going back to the website and poking around (and reading the URL with a bit more care), I see that they are indeed a Pakistani journal.
Thanks for giving me an opinion of their reputation. I wonder what is behind all of this.
Xanthippas
But guys, a privileged white kid wrote a book about how he started with nothing and saved all this money to buy a truck, so obviously these people are just lazy and unmotivated. (Also, a successful old white guy got a job at Wal-Mart!)
Snark aside, I’ve been poor enough as a kid and as adult to “get” articles like this (and Scalzi’s post from ’05) and I haven’t lived through anything approaching this kind of poverty. I can’t imagine waking up each day knowing that probably my whole life would be like that, no matter how hard I worked.
fledermaus
Oh Jeebus Christ, can we retire that old Horatio Alger/Bill Gates mythology. The fact his his dad was a named partner in one of the largest law firms in the state. If Bill Gates is an example of starting from the bottom you have a curious concept of where ‘the bottom’ actually is.
Xanthippas
Also, I think it’s freakin’ ridiculous that newspapers have to publish articles to “expose” the myriad ways in which is sucks to be poor. Millions live lives like this every day. Millions more are completely clueless about it, until they read a “shocking” article on how much is sucks to poor in the Washington Post.
John Cole
@Xanthippas: My God, that kid.
blondie
@11 – Michael, what could you mean? Isn’t that what religion is for? To convince the poor, the downtrodden masses that because they can go to the church they want, they are free, fully participating members of society at large?
I wanted to write this as snark, but I just couldn’t. I feel too badly for the people being duped, even though their ignorance and anger worry me immensely.
arguingwithsignposts
@HumboldtBlue:
the entire razor industry is a beyotch.
Old Gringo
The main difference is that Horatio Alger died penniless – and he was a pedophile.
Martin
No, the entire disposable razor industry is a bitch.
You can get 100 double-edge razor blades for $15 and if you shop around you can get 100 pack with a razor for $20. That’ll last you a year, easy. I’ve got a $15 Braun AA battery powered razor that I’ve been using for the last 4 years now at least. Toss in a charger with a 4-pack of batteries and you’re set for years for $30 unless you grow a beard like sasquach, in which case go with the double-edge.
Origuy
I’m not poor, but I share my house with some friends who are. The woman is permanently disabled, with a genetic disorder that limits her mobility and gives her constant pain. Her adult son has the same genes, but the disorder (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) hadn’t caused him much problem until he injured his back at working at Target. Since she is on SSI, her medical is covered by MediCal. His is not, except for what is related to the workmans comp claim. The insurance company, of course, is fighting tooth and nail to avoid dealing with the problem.
If you’re on SSI, you can’t get food stamps in California. The value of your car is limited, so you can’t get anything reliable. No exceptions for wheelchair-adapted vehicles.
Section 8 housing vouchers are rarely available. They tried to move out once, had a house in another city that the landlord was supposed to fix up. They moved a bunch of their stuff into it, but the place was broken into and cleaned out. Crime is another hazard of being poor.
Litlebritdifrnt
I felt this personally as I grew up dirt poor. My mum could have been on welfare but she chose to work cause she would earn three pounds more per week working (my father never paid child support). On that she managed to pay the princely sum of five pounds per month for the mortgage on our home. My sister and I figured out the perfect time to visit the street market in our town on Saturday evenings, the fifteen minutes or so between the store holders packing up and going home and the trash collecting trucks arriving. We would pick through all the boxes of produce that had been left behind and fill our plastic bags with the odd orange, a couple of onions, some potatoes, bruised tomatoes, apples, you name it, one day we scored a whole basket of mushrooms! The food that we would tote home after our street market “shopping” would keep us going for a week. We also discovered (our street was at the bottom of a steep hill of other streets) that when the coal truck turned around at the top of the hill while making deliveries it would shed a whole bunch of coal onto a waste area at the end of the hill. We took our bags up there and collected every last bit of spilled coal, which kept the fire in the kitchen going and which also (thanks to a dohicky in the back of the fireplace) provided us with hot water. We used to make up a “guy” and go “penny for the guy” giving whatever money we made to Mum, and carol singing was always lucrative, again money went to Mum. My Mum would buy a pound of minced beef (ground beef) at the beginning of the week and it would start life as a shepards pie (or mince and tatties), the next day it would be a curry, the next day a stew, by the end of the week it would be a weak soup (with our free veggies) with a few bits of beef floating around in it. We got our Christmas presents from the Rotary, or whatever local charity, and I was always happy to get them. My clothes were either my sisters hand me downs (which had come from a thrift store in the first place) or my mother knitted or sewed them herself. To this day when I am flush with money (which is rare but it does happen sometimes) I buy food, which I squirrel away. Right now my cupboards are fit to bust, my freezer has no more room in it, and stuff is falling out of the fridge when I open the door. If the worst came to the worst we could quite happily exist on the food we already have in the house for at least several months. I STILL shop at thrift stores (I refuse to buy anything new, it is a waste of money), and if there is a buy one get one free sale I buy six (if it is something that I use obviously). If the economy really goes into the pits I am happy to know that having grown up poor I know how to live poor. I pity those people who have never had to struggle, cause they are going to be screwed.
Litlebritdifrnt
PS) I can also roast a good sized chicken for dinner on Sunday and then use that for several meals afterwards, with the remains eventually being boiled to a pulp and fed to the animals. All of these “skills” helped us tremendously when DH was tossed out of the USMC after 16 years thanks to Bill Clinton’s budget cuts (I will never forgive him for that) and we were rolling pennies to put gas in the car to get DH to college during the week while he worked 40 hours on the weekends, making minimum wage + the GI bill while paying $1,000 a month child support until we could afford to hire an attorney to get it reduced to reflect his new income. Like I said, the skills I learned as a child stood me in good stead.
Krista
It’s definitely a vicious aspect to our society. We depend heavily on various services (food services, sanitation, retail etc.) So in order for our society to function well, we NEED for some people to work at those jobs. However, we refuse to pay those people a wage that will allow them to have decent housing, health insurance, nutritious food, and reliable transportation.
That’s why I get so pissed off at the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” crowd. They’d be the first to wail if the entire custodial staff at their office building quit their jobs to go back to school.
Like it or not, our society is always going to have to have people who clean hotel rooms, and flip burgers and ring up groceries. So we can either pretend they don’t exist, or give them flippant, impractical advice, or we can smarten the hell up and realize that they’re performing an extremely valuable function in our society and do not deserve to be made to suffer.
hal
Nickel and Dimed is a great book that highlights how hard it is to live on minumum wage, saving for a security deposit, living too far from the job to walk, so you have to have a car if you don’t live in a city like SF or NY. It’s not a solution book, she just tells it like it is for many people.
Blue Raven
The biggest differences between me and the people in that article are (a) I have a car and (b) I live two flat blocks away from a Trader Joe’s. But two people on my salary in the SF Bay Area is a recipe for credit card bills, fear of a dead car, and delayed elective surgery. I even have insurance, but do I go to a dentist? What, and fuck up my food budget?
HumboldtBlue
No shit. A $50 co-pay aint cheap when it means food for more than a week.
BC
Churches are beginning to open their buildings to the homeless now so they have two things needed to get a job: a permanent address (the church, and it means their children can get into a school as well) and a telephone (so they can get the call that they were hired). This is a tremendous boost for the homeless.
TenguPhule
Funny thing, I first read this as “First to the wall”
And it would still be true either way.
JL
A few days ago we were chatting about some local food banks taking personal care products and such. Where I volunteer, they have a food bank, clothing store and furniture and household goods. Nice used towels are always a treat so if you have extras you might look for a resell shop near you that services those in need. As I mentioned before, our shop gives out coupons for clothing for those in need and they can then buy extra. We sell washcloths for 25 cents and towels for a dollar.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am almost demented in my anger at the ads the repubs are running right now with the British (and Canadian I think) people whining about their health care system. I can tell you with complete and utter certainty that said people (those from Britain particularly) would have a FUCKING COW if they lived in this country for a week, and the first time they went to the doctor with a sniffle they were directed to the cashiers desk! As I said DH had a heart catherization last week, one hour prior to the appointment the hospital called him on his cell phone to make sure we had the $150.00 co-pay, cause if he didn’t he wouldn’t be admitted. In other words “if you don’t have $150.00 please feel free to go away and die, thank you very much”. These people in the UK who have been solicited by the repubs for their ads would have their heads explode if they knew the reality of the situation over here. I was talking to my Mum about it this weekend, she has a heart condition (she has had it since the age of 25 when she was having me:)) Recently she was on vacation in Torbay with friends and she had chest pains, they took her into the hospital, they evaluated her, and she was immediately admitted and surgery was done to put stents in her arteries IMMEDIATELY! All this bullshit about 18 month long waiting lines is just that BULLSHIT. My mother is 75 years of age, she had her first heart attack at age 25, I think that tells you a great deal about the quality of the UK health care system. She has lasted 50 years since her first heart attack on the UK National Health Care System, and she is still going strong (she is planning a 3 month cruise for 2010). Fuck these people piss me off.
arguingwithsignposts
@Martin:
Good point. I’ve never used the double-edge blades. If I was really frugal, I’d use a straight-razor.
Litlebritdifrnt
@TenguPhule:
Ha Ha “first against the wall come the revolution”
Citizen Smith, such a great series.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075492/#comment
DougJ
It wasn’t like this when the country was still on the gold standard.
Anastasius
Can we get a thread with pet pictures or something else that doesn’t completely suck all happiness from you?
I shave my head so I go through razor blades at an alarming rate. Using disposable cartridge blades would cost me more that hiring my own personal hair stylist. If you are not overly clumsy, a safety razor and a 100 pack of blades for a few bucks will safe you ridiculous amounts of money.
TenguPhule
More useless impractical advice for the bootless coming up!
Mike in NC
The way things ought to be is Limbaugh and Cheney and Rummy and their ilk being useful members of society by incubating maggots at some “Body Farm”.
magisterludi
The HuffPo has a Geithner headline- he doesn’t want to cap exec pay.
I can’t see this going over well, since a lot of the assholes that put us here still collecting ginormous pay checks while employing the same casino-mentality on Wall Street are not going to go unnoticed by the huddled masses.
I don’t think he has an earthly clue as to what it takes to maintain any sort of civil society, he is so far up the bankers butts.
Someone explain to me what Obama sees in him? Do. Not. Get. It.
Keith G
@Michael: The fines one can’t afford to pay leads to jail time, leading to being fired and the cycle begins again.
jcricket
It’s things like this story/thread that make it clear I will never in a MILLION FUCKING YEARS become a Republican/Libertarian. The level of sophistry, outright bullshit and political masturbation regularly put out by those two groups about what it’s like to be poor (or even middle class) and how the world works if FUCKING SICKENING.
Even the ones that do make it out are the exceptions that prove the rule. Let’s make a gross generalization If you’re rich, you have a 1 in 100 chance of ever truly being poor. If you’re poor, you have a 1 in 100 chance of ever being rich (no matter how hard you try). Which odds are you going to take? What type of society/politics do you think is reasonable given those odds? One that pretends the least government is the best and the rich need low taxes + freedom? I don’t FUCKING THINK SO.
All caps intended. My wife grew up poor (as in, have to keep moving apartments because they were evicted poor) and she’s basically the only one who’s doing well now.
It’s great that Radley Balko cares about the SWATification o the police force. Would that the rest of the Libertarians pulled their heads out of Alan Greenspan’s Ayn Rand loving ass and got a fucking clue on the rest of the issues they seem to know nothing about.
jcricket
Most of the real studies of people in countries with nationalized health care find that even the most vociferous critics prefer their own system to one like America has. Yes, they are often specifically asked, “Would you prefer to replace the current system with one like America has” (in so many words), and the response is always overwhelmingly (like 9/10) “no”.
But the swift boat douche-nozzles don’t care. They’ll just find the 1/10, or fucking make him up. Republicans are willing to stop at absolutely nothing to get what they want, or even just to be sure no one gets what they want. The sooner Democrats (from Nelson to Feingold) realize that, the better.
As our blog host here said a while back, good luck finding common ground between “I like Italian” and “I like tire rims and anthrax”.
wilfred
Poor people don’t need empathy from the non-poor, nor handouts from well-meaning people determined to alleviate the worst problems that the poor suffer from as a class.
They need to get rid of the system that guarantees that someone, somewhere will always be poor. Class struggle has always been the only permanent solution available, and NOTHING determines the mindset of being poor in America more than believing there is something wrong with that.
Political consciousness begins when you realize that economic freedom and social justice cannot inhabit the same space for very long. Anybody who has endured the endless humiliations of poverty, the crushing loss of dignity, and comes away believing in any of the horseshit spewed by people like Limbaugh or these pathetic fratboy libertarians deserves what he gets.
leo
Being poor is spending your last nickle keeping your charge card current and then getting a letter saying they’re going to raise your rate from 10% to 25% (‘variable rate, determined by adding 21.65% to the Prime rate’).
.
You’d like to pay the thing off, but oh yeah, you’re poor.
TenguPhule
It is always useful to have someone you can throw off the sled to the wolves and not lose a night’s sleep over.
asiangrrlMN
I couldn’t read past the first two pages of the article. It’s sad and sickening how everything from gas to toiletries costs more in the urban areas than in the suburban areas. It should be the other way around.
The whole bootstraps thing? The fact that the same couple of examples cited over and over again shows that it’s the major exception, not the norm. Usually, too, there are other factors involved–like a mentor, for example. It’s bullshit.
pseudonymous in nc
The special that Diane Sawyer did in dirt-poor WV not long ago got big viewing figures. There was a certain amount of slum-gawping — the parents who give their kids Mountain Dew then wonder why their teeth rot out — but it did a decent job, I thought, of showing just what living with No Fucking Money is like in America.
The BBC also had a thing from Muncie, IN, which illustrated how the working poor are one crisis away from the abyss. They profiled a family that just about makes the rent. The guy has parking fines and gets pulled over and arrested. The cops check the car’s plates and VIN, find out that they don’t match, and the couple doesn’t have any proof of ownership. Turns out that the auto dealer is a shady mofo who appears to be dealing in stolen vehicles. The guy was going to pick the kids up from daycare, and if they don’t get picked up, the daycare place will call the cops.
jcricket
Don’t forget, though, it’s important the poor be thankful they get soylent green or gruel, and not healthful nutritious food, because that would be socialism.
pseudonymous in nc
Those fucking clipboards. Those mother. fucking. clipboards. I hate them with a passion. I hate every nasty penny-pinching fucking thing associate with the US healthcare system.
The NHS is the reason why I can phone my mother on weekends. I have no idea if or how the US system would have treated her.
noncarborundum
@fledermaus:
As I understand it, Gates isn’t even an example of “creat[ing] an operating system for personal computers in their garage that completely reshape [sic] the world of business.” Gates didn’t create MS-DOS, he bought it.
Persia
@Spiffy McBang: Spiffy, I don’t know what kind of area you live in, but here in rural VT all you have to do is stop in a few places and compare prices. There are a few exceptions– the local co-op gets fresh produce at good prices in summer, but they contract with local farmers, and the supermarkets have pushed up milk prices for reasons no one really understands– but generally it’s just as described in the article.
Around here even the poor generally have to have cars. State law requires car owners to have insurance, but a lot of people don’t because of the expense, so if they get in an accident they end up facing the fine for not having insurance too. (I agree with the law, but it does have a hidden cost.)
NonyNony
@noncarborundum:
This is entirely correct. As the story goes, Gates found out that IBM was looking for an OS for the personal computer that they were building. They wanted CP/M but he found out that they were having problems negotiating with the company that owned CP/M. He knew about some hobbyist that had built a CP/M clone OS and so he convinced the hobbyist to sell him the code for the OS for a song ( a few hundred or a few thousand, I don’t remember which) and then cut a deal with IBM.
The coding that Gates did was for a BASIC interpreter for the Altair hobbyist computer – that made him a good chunk of money, got him a name for being a whiz kid, and had him decide to drop out of school (Harvard) and start his own company. The very fact that the guy dropped out of fucking Harvard to start his company should destroy any idea that this was a “pulled up by his own bootstraps” story. He was a child of privilege who used his privilege to make a lot of contacts, to learn a lot of cutting-edge technology, and to bankroll his own startup.
...now I try to be amused
“It’s expensive to be poor” was one thing my flaming liberal Macroeconomics 101 prof said in 1979. I was already a liberal by then thanks to high school American history, but it made an impression on me. It’s kinda sad so many people need to read the Post article to get it.
Family money: the original welfare.
Gates’s foot in the door with IBM was his mother’s: she and IBM president John Opel both served on the board of the United Way. Family connections are a resource no poor person has.
Fun fact: The original name of MS-DOS was QDOS, which stood for “Quick and Dirty Operating System”.
Don
The unfortunate thing about that book is that the wingnuts take the entirely wrong lesson from it. Yes, it turns out that there is opportunity in the world for someone who grows up with positive role models, a good education, and is in good physical shape. Armed with that and a belief that improvement in one’s station in life really can be improved (and maybe with the sense of security and willingness to take risks that comes with knowing that rescue is just a phone call away), success is possible.
The smart lesson from Scratch Beginnings is that investments in the young poor in the form of education, support for their parent(s), and, maybe, midnight basketball will pay off for them and society in the long run.
Written Off
Okay, so I am doing the whole student/employee/Mom thing. We have a dual income household. Our kids qualify for CHIP health insurance from the state, but we are $60 over the monthly income limit because they will only calculate it using gross income. My gross income includes hundreds of dollars in employer paid insurance premiums. If I wasn’t blessed with health insurance then my kids could be. So, ½ the year my kids have no insurance-it wouldn’t be so bad if my eldest didn’t need ADHD medicine, the rest of the year they qualify because we can apply using our 1090, which doesn’t include the money from my benefits.
It won’t matter in a few months because I am moving to no employment/full time school in August and qualifying will be an understatement.
Also, they calculate child care assistance the same way-child care makes up about 10% of our combined income.
Jess
What I remember most about being poor was the constant stress and exhaustion. I wasn’t the poorest in my neighborhood (lower Haight in SF) by a longshot, and I had future prospects, but even so I was completely burned out emotionally by the time I managed to change my situation. One of the things that women have to deal with when they’re poor, often working late hours, living in a sketchy neighborhood, and dependent on public transportation and their own two feet, is constant harassment and threats to one’s safety. It’s also incredibly depressing and discouraging being poor. People treat each other like shit. I don’t mind living simply, even primitively, but the psychological toll of poverty makes it a living hell.