“What is your source for stating material hardship is down by 77 percent since 1980?” Trudi Renwick, an economist at the Census Bureau, wrote in an email questioning the Trump administration’s rebuttal to the U.N.
Tag: poverty
Being poor is just a series of emergencies.
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.
Cos we’re fucking poor.
People who aren’t poor also have different ideas of what an emergency constitutes. The AC breaking in the middle of summer isn’t an emergency when it’s in the budget to just go buy a new one the same afternoon without worrying about how it’ll affect your grocery money; having to take two days off from work because you’re running a bad fever isn’t an emergency when you have paid sick leave.
So it’s no wonder the well off people of the world don’t get it when a low income person is stressed over something breaking or a minor illness. I know people for whom a crashed car – as long as no one was hurt – would just be ‘damn it I liked that car and now I gotta borrow my wife’s’ and I know people for whom it would be ‘I can’t afford to have this fixed but I can’t get to work if I don’t get it fixed and I can’t get it fixed if I don’t go to work hahhaha time to indebt myself to family members who I desperately wish I didn’t even have to interact with because they’re the only ones who can give me rides or loan me money.’
Two very different worlds.
This makes abusive situations infinitely more difficult too.
Being poor is isolating as all shit, and you have very little power to choose who you do and don’t interact with. Quite often, in the midst of all these emergencies, the only people who’ll offer a hand up are abusers or toxic friends, and their help will carry invisible conditions, or be contingent on you never speaking up or “acting out” against mistreatment. And where are there any other options, what can you afford to do about it?
Sometimes even good friendships can turn sour and toxic if there’s a major difference in wealth between two or more people. As the poorer friend needs help more and more often and options shrink under the expense of being poor, it becomes scarier and scarier to speak up on the occasions when your better-off friend who helps you out inevitably fucks up and hurts you, like friends do.
It’s a power imbalance that will almost inevitably be abused. Poverty can actively breed toxic situations between friends and partners.
By some economists’ standards – not used much today because it’s so laughable – “poverty” means having less than three months of financial safety net.
I know for a fact I’ve told this story on here before but I’ll never get over the time when I was working retail and I was cashing out some lady so I asked “cash, debit or credit how are you paying, ma’am?” And she said “that’s none of your business.” And demanded to speak to my manager about my invasive question
So when I was working as a 35-year-old cashier in 2005 (to supplement my extremely part-time job as office manager at a tech start-up in order to justify paying a babysitter) part of my training included how to be kind to people paying with food stamps. Food stamps had only just been renamed SNAP, and food stamp debit cards had just been issued.
We asked “Cash, check, or card?” And didn’t look to see what they used (the computerized register showed it only on the cashier’s side).
And just in case they had forgotten to separate SNAP-eligible food from ineligible household necessities, we had a script for that too. We would already have made sure to ring up food first, so that we didn’t have to void out the whole order and start again. For the rest of the line, we’d smile sweetly and say, “I’m so sorry, computer issue, the supervisor will open another line when she comes to fix it.”
And only the supervisor, the customer, and the cashier would ever know about the food stamps, because all the other customers would be shuffled off to another line.
So, yeah, it CAN be a privacy question.
If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What They Should Do
“The assumption that “simple advice” can dramatically change a person’s economic outlook assumes that a person’s poverty is solely the result of personal failings, rather than very real and costly systems of oppression, including legacy poverty, systemic racism, mass incarceration, punitive immigration policies, medical debt, and more.
Regardless of the personal choices a family might make to save money, there are some unavoidable costs that are baked into our financial and social systems.
Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between paychecks – ends up paying more than 300% interest on their initial amount.
These companies make billions each year by offering people a necessary service that costs them an outrageously inflated price.
…
No amount of cutting back on luxury spending or driving extra hours for Uber can change the fact that there is literally nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can support a family, that good union jobs have been in decline for decades, or that housing costs have priced people out of their homes. Cutting coupons, commuting by bike, and enjoying outdoor activities can’t really fix that.
So, instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system that’s leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people.”
I totally get where this is coming from, in that advice about how to escape poverty from someone who hasn’t been poor will necessarily overlook a lot of the problems poor people have. Because it’s not really possible to see all the hurdles that would be in someone’s way from the outside, plus everyone’s circumstance is different anyway.
However, as a poor person, encountering advice on how to save money in specific areas, or find additional sources of income, can be super useful to me. So many things that can significantly improve someone’s life are information-gated, because learning about them is hard.
For example, after some research, I recently found a restaurant where I could spend $2.50 a meal – in San Francisco of all places. I’ve also calculated which McDonalds item has the most calories per dollar (at my local one, the sausage McMuffin w/o egg). At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.
The problem with hacks like this is that they require a significant amount of mental effort to go around figuring out systematically. Finding each place in your life where you can get a little more value for money is hard, even if it’s so so necessary for a lot of people. Worse yet, if you have an unstable housing situation and have to keep moving every few weeks, suddenly half of your local knowledge is suddenly useless and you have to start over.
Which means I benefit a lot from learning from other people who’ve done some of this work for me in a given domain. And, as it happens, this is something that’s easier when you have more privilege, because you’re in a better position to think about the best sources of food when you aren’t already hungry, and you can make better choices on where to buy clothes if you aren’t already cold. And you can compile more detailed information if you actually have a house and can stay in the same place for a whole year.
The problems usually come in when someone offering advice assumes that the act of giving advice should by itself fix a poor person’s life. This is what I meant about not knowing all of the hurdles that may stand in someone’s way, and so assuming that the advice you gave is the only thing they’ll need. And, like, it might not even work in their specific circumstance! But the provision of information isn’t the problem, it’s expectations about what may result.
Giving people information resources to optimise their life is like a booster rocket. It can help them go further. But it can’t clear all the obstacles out of their way, just give them a little more help in getting around them. And, for whatever reason, someone might not take your advice. It doesn’t matter why – other people are living their own lives and making their own choices, and those won’t always line up with the ones you think they should be making.
And honestly, at that point, I think what people need is emotional distance. Poverty is a societal problem that hopefully we as a society will try to do something about. But it isn’t the responsibility of each random middle class bloke to Fix All of Poverty Forever.
Which I think is part of what leads to the impulse to offer a ‘solution’ and then think badly of anyone who doesn’t take it. But, like, your responsibility is bounded. Giving advice is doing some good, donating to charity is doing some good, but reaching into someone else’s life and forcing them to live it a different way so you can feel like you’re helping is not.
On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more. I’m a pretty big fan of getting out of poverty, and I’d like every booster I can get, even if they don’t all fit. I anticipate being in [San Francisco / Daly City / Berkeley] most of the time, so local knowledge for there is also appreciated.
(And yes, I know the obvious advice of moving to a cheaper place. I’ve tried that temporarily. It turns out that a very wide spectrum of things are much harder when living in places where I don’t already have roots, so at least for now the trade off leans in favour of staying around here.)
If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What They Should Do
Bonus level Actual Poor People Cooking Challenge: You have some potatoes! But, only the gnarly sprouting ones at the bottom of a 50 lb. sack.
Figure out some type of reasonably appetizing soup or stew to throw them in, using whatever other ingredients you can scrounge up at the end of the month. Because they sure ain’t suitable for baking anymore. Not necessarily good for soup either at this point, but that’s just part of the challenge.
What in the fuck is this?
Role playing poverty.
They wanna roleplay poverty?
They need some bulk mac n’ cheese, hotdogs, and canned fruit.
They can even buy the expensive versions if they want.
That? That’s a fucking insult, what they had. Austerity? They fucking wish the poor ate that well.
Tbf, the details of what’s cheap and readily available will vary a lot depending on where you are. The potatoes with (crappy value label) canned baked beans are roughly equivalent here to the (cheapo off brand) box mac and cheese eating plan. In another context, that part wouldn’t seem too unreasonable.
That doesn’t make the whole concept any better, of course 😱 Or a lot of the rest of the details.
(A little more context: St Paul’s Girls’ School ‘Austerity Day’ criticised.)
Also in case anyone else was wondering exactly who thought that sounded like an “austerity” menu, rather than a fairly ordinary school lunch.
“When I was doing my residency in New York, a patient came in 18 weeks pregnant and very, very sick. The only way to save her was to terminate the pregnancy. We were in a Catholic hospital … I vividly recall my director of obstetrics and the chairman arguing with the nuns. They said, “Well, the baby’s only 18 weeks, it’s going to die.” They felt very strongly that we could not do anything, but they would be okay with us transferring her to get care elsewhere. The director rode with the patient in the ambulance because he was afraid that she would have seizures. She was in her early 20s, and she already had a kid. That really got to me. How could we let this mom die and leave her child behind when we have the means to take care of her? I said to myself: “I never want my hands tied behind my back like that again.” I used to travel; these days I’m mostly in Georgia and I’m a backup physician in Alabama. In Alabama, my patients tend to be poor and young. The youngest was barely 12. She went to play with a classmate, and there were older boys over … When her guardians brought her in, I was reluctant to take care of her in an outpatient setting because we couldn’t sedate her. I went to the local hospital and said, “She’s just a baby. She’s suffered enough. Please, can we put her to sleep.” Everybody was onboard. Things have changed so much I don’t know if I would be able to get away with that now. The most frustrating thing for me, especially in the Southeast, is seeing so many women who are not empowered to take care of themselves. Especially women of color. You hear things like “I was told I’m too young for an IUD” when we know that’s not true. They need to know what their options are. I’m Haitian-American, and the part of me that is extremely cynical wants to say, Well, it’s because these are black women. But I really think it’s a matter of poverty. It just so happens that the face of poverty may be black. A few weeks ago, a woman came in for a medical abortion. As she was about to take the pill, she asked, “Do you think God hates me?” And I said, “No, he doesn’t hate you.” She said to me: “I tried so hard not to get pregnant. I told my boyfriend to use a condom, but he refused and forced himself on me.” If you overturn Roe v. Wade, what’s going to happen is we’ll go back to the way it was before. Every state for themselves. And best believe that the conservative states are going to try to outdo each other. Poor women will suffer. Poor women will die. There’s a generation of abortion providers who are more willing to be vocal about the impact of these different legislative measures. I tell my learners, “I don’t expect you to provide abortion care, but I want you to support your co-worker if they say, ‘Hey, we need a piece of legislation.’ I want you to stand behind us. But most importantly, I want you to be able to counsel and educate your patient in a way that respects her decision.” If I can train 500 providers who are compassionate and willing to respect and help their patients, I’ve done my job.”
— Anonymous, OB/GYN and a former fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, What Abortion in America Looks Like Right Now (via quigonejinn)
There’s also this larger attitude that “creativity” in any fashion is something that’s exclusively only available to ppl with disposable income, as if 1) being creative is an indulgence that the poor shouldn’t be able to afford, 2) things done with the intention of surviving/scraping by can’t also be creative works, and 3) creativity can’t exist in spaces that prioritize survival, even though its the exact skill that enables poor people to survive.
I deleted that post with the tweet talking abt how crafting is intersectional, because I figured I should read the article first before dissing it. And I’m halfway through it now, but I just want to say that it’s really interesting how things like DIY & crafting are looked at totally differently based on someone’s class and income level.
Like the article talks abt how their mother & grandmother didn’t teach them to sew or knit because they were single working parents who “didn’t have the time for such indulgences” that the author, a middle-class person, does. But it’s like…these things aren’t indulgences? They’re not luxuries? And poor people definitely know how to do all of these things because knowing how to sew is the difference between having to buy new clothes every time something wears out even a little bit and reusing something for another little while.
Like you see this attitude with a lot of things, like how thrifting suddenly became this bougie hipster pass time when even just a few years ago people would have wrinkled their nose at the idea of someone buying castoffs. Or having a garden to grow your own food, which poor people often have to do out of necessity. Or even something as simple like a poor person wearing ripped and faded jeans because they can’t afford to replace them, while Dolce & Gabanna sells them fr an upwards of $500 each.
Like people will turn their nose up and sneer when it’s low income people doing all of these things in order to survive, or they’ll flat out ignore it. But then when the middle class get their hands on it, it’s an “indulgence” or a “hobby” that only ppl with “disposable income” can do. And if they’re really annoying abt it, they’ll turn around and write a think piece abt how much money they’re saving, fixing their old clothes, and gee if only the poors would start doing this then they wouldn’t be so poor anymore. 👀🙄👀🙄👀
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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