Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive – even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is – say it with me – expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
god it drives me crazy when middle class and rich people don’t get that. why do you want everyone to be miserable all the time.
i hate so much when rich people claim they could live on minimum wage
you can’t. you absolutely fucking can’t.
it’s not just about how literally impossible it can be or how the rich are so accustomed to luxury they wouldn’t be able to stomach being poor – it’s about the fact that any experience rich people have had with poverty was temporary.
“to prove that $8/hr is humane i lived on minimum wage for a month – and it was fine. you just have to spend wisely and be frugal.”
i promise any rich person who’s done (if they even have) something like that was ACHING by the end of that month. that week. they were edging out the end of that month thinking “after this i can go back to my cozy $100k a year, i just have to get this month over with”
it’s livable, right? this guy proved it. one month and he’s sure – it’s totally doable! he ate gross food and kept his lights off and his AC off and scrounged up change for gas for a month and it wasn’t THAT bad!
but man…. imagine if that was your whole life.
i’m sure they felt a little stressed after realizing how tight the budget was at the end of that month… imagine that but for years. years and years with no end in sight. you never have the relief of going back to your $100k salary and flat screen TV. it’s years upon years of pent up stress and anxiety
what if your car breaks down? what if you miss your bus? what if you have an unexpected charge on your card and overdraft? what if the kids want pizza? what if you call out sick from work? what if you can’t afford christmas presents?
and on top of the stress, you’re poor and you don’t have much free time because you take all the hours you can get to make ends meet. instead of cooking you have to eat shitty banquet and michelinas meals because delivery and takeout are too expensive. and the more tired you get, the more exhausted, the more shitty food you consume just to try to keep going.
and you probably don’t have good healthcare!
you’re stressed, you’re eating poorly, your body hurts from all the work and you’re too poor to pay for medical help, things like car repair fall by the wayside in order to provide, you’re sad, you start drinking to cope, etc
this is the cycle poor people are fucking trapped in. this is why the minimum wage is a fucking failure to all impoverished people in america.
this is the toll “just being frugal” takes on poor people after living for decades like that. adddiction, mental illness, lawbreaking – these things are associated with low class and poor people because it’s what happens to us and what we resort to when the system fails us.
Also, consider start up costs. If you are purposefully living on minimum wage to “prove a point”, you probably have things like decent pots and pans for cooking. Or pantry stuff like spices, etc. Or, laundry facilities in your home, which is a huge, huge time and money saver. Like, I can’t explain how much that makes a difference. Or an actual decent house that doesn’t need repairs in ways that make it more difficult to do day to day life (like, good functioning plumbing or screens in good repair, or light fixtures that work right). All of those things are going to make it easier to get by with minimum wage money. Plus, things like insurance are plain cheaper when you have more money, so less is coming out of a paycheck for premium payments (by percentage if mot actual cash). Or copays are less. Etc.
The point is, trying some sort of challenge to “see what it’s like to be poor” just doesn’t take into account of all the things beyond the paycheck or the food stamp budget or whatever. There are a ton of nuances and things that people don’t realize unless it’s something they have lived or have close experience with through family, etc.
You know what? I want to give a shoutout to a specific type of poor person we never hear about enough: the poor person who “isn’t poor enough.”
Shoutout to to the poor people who:
-Can’t afford to feed their families all the time but don’t qualify for food stamps
-Can’t afford college but don’t qualify for loans or discounts
-Can’t afford to pay rent but don’t qualify for low income housing
-Can’t afford hospitals or dentists but don’t qualify for most insurance policies for poor folk
-Who are always being told they aren’t “really poor” and “don’t have it that bad” because they don’t qualify for all of these things
-Who aren’t listened to because they’re experiences “don’t count” as a poor person’s experience.
-Who have nice things, proof they aren’t “really poor,” even though they aren’t that nice really and were either a gift or something they got at a garage sale or thrift store or whatever (meaning they didn’t pay much for it)
There’s more faces to being poor than people know, especially in the Western world. Poor people don’t all look like they’re starving and homeless and all of that. Sometimes poor people don’t look that poor at all to an outsider.
And those poor people need to be heard too. Those poor people need to be helped and protected too.
Because any kind of poor isn’t ok. No one should ever have to be poor in such a rich society, even if it’s only barely.
I feel really bad that so many people related to this post but I’m glad so many are standing up and saying that they will be there for anyone who related to this.
i ignore most asks i get abt that post bc theyre usually from american libertarians called ‘cody’ who think feeding children makes them ‘welfare-dependent’ or some incoherent shit like that. like i cant even be arsed lol
but this made me laugh bc u use the word ‘poorer’, when u should say ‘poorEST’. the tories’ proposals meant only the abso poorest children would get free lunches, which according the education policy institute, would mean 100,000 kids in relative poverty would have not received them, and a further 667,000 kids from ‘ordinary families’ (getting by, eating, heating but on bones of their arses otherwise) would have gone without as well. families being too skint to find the coin for their kids’ lunches aint on a scale. children being hungry, performing badly at school bc they cant concentrate, missing out on perhaps the only nutritionally balanced and substantial meal in their day aint on a scale. i been the proper scabby poor kid who gets free school meals and i been the relative poverty kid who gets free school meals, i was on free school meals my entire primary and secondary school education, my mum could no more afford to pay for my lunches when she was working than when she was on benefits- but under them tory plans so many kids whose parents are working n barely getting by would have been expected to find money from literally nowhere. more than two thirds of kids in poverty are in working households. thats a lot of ‘poorer’ kids w hungry bellies.
im a dumb shit about a lot of stuff but not this, im not ‘uninformed’ about the gravity of the tory proposals to scrap free school lunches (i say ‘proposal’- its all academic now bc they binned it cos theyre on their arses lmao). u just have no idea what constitutes ‘poverty’ or what it ‘looks like’ and ‘cant google shit’ before ‘sending me arsey messages’
A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
I just read that the maternal mortality rate for black women in the USA is 40.4 dead mothers per 100,000 births. {For white women, 12.1 : 100,00.}
In my country, Greece, the maternal mortality rate for all races is 2.2 per 100,000 births; and for the most recent year that I could find data, 2012, there were zero deaths for the entire country {also zero in 2005 and 2008}.
If a country with one of the most devastated healthcare systems, undergoing one of the worst economic disasters of the past several decades, can keep all our mothers alive, when will Americans {Republicans} stop insisting that the healthcare system there is not killing people? That no one is dying because of lack of healthcare, or that the only “improvements” that the system needs are to reduce availability of insurance and to deny coverage?
For the wealthiest country in the world to have a 40:100,000 maternal death rate among black women is a choice the US government is making.
If we really want to improve the health of Americans, we have to stop worrying about fictional “toxins” (you know, the kind you have to go on a diet to “cleanse”) and start worrying about actual toxins like lead in water, hazardous building materials, and pollution from coal factories and landfills. If we want to protect the health of children we don’t need programs like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” where we teach kids that their body size is the problem and that health is their individual responsibility, we need programs like Let’s Move You to a Habitable Neighborhood (I made that up). Or better yet, let’s move the corrupt politicians, contractors, developers, and corporations out of your neighborhood and all neighborhoods.
But let’s be honest, it’s much more comfortable to believe that poor Black, Latinx, and Native kids are just being fed too much junk food and not getting enough exercise than it is to admit that we are making them sick with environmental racism.
A thought occurred to me when I saw the BBC headline this morning of the Queen and Prince William visiting the area of the Grenfell tower fire. A fire that has left 17 people confirmed dead with 76 missing.
Buckingham Palace: Receives £370m for refurbishment.
Grenfell Tower: Doesn’t receive £300,000 for a sprinkler system.
As pointed out by numerous voices, one example being Aamer Anwar, these people died because they were poor. They continually raised awareness that fire alarms didn’t work and lifts repeatedly stopped.
People jumped.
People who were on the lower floors hurled whatever they could at windows to try and wake people up. They are at outside the incident now wondering whether they should have bothered as they think it would have been better if their neighbours had died from smoke inhalation in their sleep rather than in a panic to escape.
Aamer Anwar, human rights lawyer and current rector of Glasgow University, has said that a government inquiry is not good enough as it allows the government to set the parameters. He pointed out examples like the Hillsborough disaster and Bloody Sunday and how the government continually white washes these to make no one, especially the government, look at fault.
He wants an independent inquiry and a criminal investigation. This happened as a result of Tory austerity and cuts to both social housing and to the emergency services. That blood is on their hands.
When Boris Johnson was mayor of London he oversaw the closures of dozens of fire stations. We had Labour leader to Tony Blair, John McTernan, saying that ‘Only 2% of a fireman’s time is spent fighting fires.’ You cannot afford to cut emergency services to save a quick buck. Austerity does not work.
According to Akala, rapper and poet, rich people living nearby complained that the tower block was an eyesore and urged a refurbishment. This refurbishment results in ‘pretty panels’ being placed on the outside, according to Aamer Anwar these panels assisted the fire.
This is an absolute tragedy and it exposes the utter corruption at the heart of government and in Tory austerity policy. Like Anwar, we fucking hope it ends in criminal charges.
BBC has confirmed the death toll has risen to 30. Fire chiefs expect it to be higher.
They’ve said they don’t expect to find any survivors and there’s still over 100 people missing. Some could be outside and unaccounted for but that still leaves a lot of people.
Note that this was social housing, so a lot of the people here were disabled.
Many of which were also housed on the upper floors.
Floors that the fire brigade simply couldn’t reach. They only had equipment to get to the 11th floor. Surely the government must have known this.
Is this supposed to be comforting? I don’t know the context of this message, but homeless people deserve all of the comfort that everybody else has.
No one should have to suffer when others can do something to stop it.
I’ve been told this as a disabled person and “No one is homeless in hell” as a queer person. Like, could y’all make up your minds? Either way, I’m homeless whether good dead, bad dead, or alive (though not currently, but that’s recent) so…leave me alone to die when and as I wish.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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