OP: It’s awful the direction income inequality has taken in recent decades. Productivity is up, the stock market is up, the money is there, but working-class wages haven’t risen to match. Our generation is poorer than our parents, and many of us will never be able to buy homes, help our children pay for college, or retire.
Commenters: Sounds like someone needs a Personal Finance Lesson!!!! Try putting away just a few dollars at a time and you’ll be amazed how it adds up, sweaty :))))
Also: it’s frustrating how often the Personal Finance Lesson comes out to “have you tried living desperately?”
It’s understandable, if someone is in a jam or saving up for a major expense, that they might have to spend a few years living in a cramped and/or far-flung place, eating cheaply, thrifting clothes, and so forth.
It is not okay if this is the lifelong condition of people who are working full-time.
I don’t blame the personal-finance-advice people, nothing they say is technically wrong, but it’s frustrating and exhausting that this is where our society is at. Where “tighten your belt and live without any luxuries” is advice not for students or people recovering from financial catastrophe, but for adult professionals.
Sure, if all you can afford is rice and beans, then it’s helpful to get some recipes for spicing up rice and beans. But it shouldn’t fool you into thinking that spicy beans is all you deserve, that there’s nothing wrong with a world where CEOs have scientific-notation amounts of money and the working class is scolding each other not to waste money on name-brand beans.
“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or
country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man
should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He
should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”
Oscar Wilde said that.
Also, if you’re disabled no amount of saving will do you any good. The state has already decided how much you get, and that’s it. That’s the limit. You can never rise above poverty unless you miraculously get better, and they don’t want to give SSI to people who might get better to begin with.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination, fifty years ago this April, marked a blow to the struggle
for racial equality from which the nation has still not healed. In an
essay published in Esquire in April 1972, James Baldwin reflected on
attending the funeral, and how King’s death signaled the end of civility
for the civil-rights movement. At turns heartbreaking and hopeful,
Baldwin’s words are as powerful—and urgent—as ever.
There are 14,321 Dollar General stores in America. It’s a chain that many shoppers have never heard of, yet it has more stores than Starbucks. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Dollar General company is worth $22 billion—far more than the nation’s largest grocery chain, Kroger, which has five times the revenue.
Sadly, however, Dollar General is thriving because, as the Journal puts it, “rural America is struggling.” The chain builds stores where folks are down on their luck, where 20 percent of customers receive government assistance, and where even Walmart won’t bother doing business.
I phoned several Dollar General stores and learned that none sells fresh meat or produce; the grocery aisles feature mostly canned and frozen goods. Many products, such as soft drinks, come in mini-sizes to keep unit prices low. And few locations had newspapers for sale.
Maybe that’s just as well, because headlines these days report that the stock market is remarkably high and unemployment is surprisingly low. But for rural America, news like that doesn’t hit home.
Things are looking up in Donald Trump’s America, except, of course, where they are not.
The administration’s proudest accomplishment is a tax bill that benefits millionaires and billionaires. The Joint Committee on Taxation finds that the Senate version of the bill would increase taxes on all Americans making less than $75,000 a year.
As Paul Krugman summarizes in the New York Times: “Everything this president and this Congress are doing on economic policy seems designed, not just to widen the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, but to lock in plutocrats’ advantages, making it easier to ensure that their heirs remain on top and the rest stay down.”
In rural America, where about 46 million people reside, employment and economic growth have not recovered from the last recession at a pace seen elsewhere in the nation. Childhood poverty—perhaps the most critical metric in determining a population’s well-being—is considerably higher in rural areas than in urban centers.
The crisis facing rural America is rooted in the fact that peak-level employment related to natural resources, such as mining and logging, is never coming back.
Rural America is mired in a permanent recession. Its problems are difficult to correct because of a sprawling landscape, scattered government support structures and what often seems to be federal indifference.
Many among the predominantly white rural population voted for Trump in 2016—a sign, perhaps, of utter desperation rather than considered opinion. But according to recent reporting by Politico, Trump now intends to make the most sweeping changes to federal safety net programs in a generation, using legislation and executive actions to target recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and housing benefits.
When tens of millions of people–both rural and suburban–are forced to use Dollar Tree and Dollar General as grocery stores because Wal-Mart is too expensive, it’s safe to say the middle class is truly dead.
I love these “how do the poor live” type of articles because I’m a poor person who regularly buys things they need from the dollar store around the corner and it’s so funny to see people who are clearly upper middle class say things like “I phoned a number of dollar general stores to see if they sold fresh fruit”
Like, maybe get off the internet and stop writing articles and actually see how poor people live, you won’t catch something from going into a .99 cent store
The whole gist of this article is basically – can you believe there’s a place worse than wal mart to shop at and it’s like, yeah, I can believe it, I was there yesterday. Us poors can also use the internet
I do find it fitting that the guy who called up a Dollar General rather than just go find out and walk in would be named “Peter Funt.”
they always seem so shocked when they find places where poor people shop, as if they’ve discovered something that no one else knows about. i mean, of course those on a low income are gonna shop at discount stores.
I know we’ve had a good Christmas but it’s important to remember that, in the UK, doctors are now proscribing food to people and are also treating children for rickets.
Luckily I’ve not heard about any Scottish doctors having to do it, but this shows where the UK is headed.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.
The U.N. investigation aims to study the effects of systemic poverty in a prosperous nation like the United States.
90% of the poorest areas in America are in Republican Red zones.
B-b-b-b-b-b-but poverty in the Red States isn’t all that bad, right?
Right?
Errrrr
Jesus christ, and to think how many billionaires we have in the US while this is happening
How is anyone surprised by this though?
Do people not look around?
Or is this really not prevalent anywhere but the South? It’s damn near everywhere you look in the South. I had friends in the high school with houses that when you flushed the toilet it went from a pipe in the trailer out to a ravine out back. I remember burning our trash. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean I’m in my thirties and it’s not uncommon for me to meet people in my generation who are the first in their family to have indoor plumbing.
The republicans aren’t blind. They aren’t naive. They’re just greedy. You can’t amass that kind of wealth by giving it away to the less fortunate. And don’t be tricked into thinking the wealthy Democrats are any better. Politicians will say whatever it takes to get voted into a position, and then they’ll vote however they need to in order to keep the money rolling in.
So, I think there are absolutely libertarians who just think that poor people starving is less morally important than not taking money from people who earned it.
But there’s another libertarian belief which I want to articulate even though I think it’s profoundly mistaken, because I think its adherents are generally just as horrified as me by poverty, and as angry about poor people suffering, and that this is important to know if you want to convince them to stop being libertarians.
This belief goes, roughly, “for almost all of history, almost everyone was starving. Redistributing the wealth in 1200 Europe would achieve almost nothing for general prosperity, because there just wasn’t any wealth to distribute. Institutions matter a lot, and injustice matters a lot, but the main thing they matter for is making it possible in the first place to produce enough stuff that everyone doesn’t starve. Until you have that down, nothing you do about inequality will matter; and once you get that down, even if you do nothing about inequality, global poverty will go away.
And recently, we got really good at making stuff:
and this is finally, finally, driving down poverty:
Okay. Global poverty is falling, and there is reason to think it’s mostly falling because the amount of stuff we have went way, way up, not because we’ve gotten more equal about distributing stuff we have. But it would fall even faster if we also got better about distributing the stuff we have, right?
(this is where I disagree, actually; I think that it would, in fact, fall faster if we got better about redistributing stuff, and so we ought to do that.) They mostly think that the fastest way to end poverty is to keep that line pointed straight at the ceiling. And that anything we do which slows down that line, slows down the delightful, amazing, amazingly important collapse of global poverty that we’re witnessing right now. And often they feel like economies are fragile – that things we do which we think won’t affect the line much will actually affect the line a lot, and will take a while to be noticed.
So you get people who hate poverty, and want every poor person to have a phone and computer and food and shelter and safety and happiness, but who sincerely think that if we mess up our redistribution effort, we will fuck up the explosion of ability-to-produce-stuff which is currently taking giant bites out of global poverty.
If you want to argue with these people, I think it’s useful to be able to understand this view of the world. If you say to them “have you considered that a poor person having a sandwich is more important than a banker having a yacht” you won’t get anywhere, because they agree with you, they just think the giant poverty-destroying machine that is the global economy is more important than either, because it is delivering so many sandwiches to so many people and it is the only tool we have invented that does that. Instead, you want to argue either “the growth of the global economy is not actually reducing poverty, here’s why” or “we can reduce poverty in this way which I care about without reducing the growth of the global economy” or “this policy increases the growth of the global economy” or “I have another tool that is as good at sandwiches as the growth of the global economy”.
poor people on SNAP or other benefits do not need “healthy eating” rules imposed on them. restricting their food choices doesn’t make them healthier. when we limit what they can buy we limit their access to sufficient calories. “junk food” is dense with calories and provides efficient energy for the body. fruits and vegetables contribute little to meeting total energy needs and their nutritional content isn’t very beneficial when overall calorie intake is too low.
poor people don’t need food rules imposed from on high, they need ENOUGH food and they need regular access to it. i’m so done with these tepid takes (cc: pbs, npr and other liberal media) on getting poor people to eat “healthier” as though that were some kind of anti-oppressive stance… it’s not! are we willing to do what it takes to make all people food-secure, with regular access to enough food that they want and enjoy? that’s the only thing worth talking about
I wonder if one of the causes of animosity towards “entitled millennials” is that many millennials are poor people who look rich. There’s this growing class of people who wear nice clothes, have fancy new electronic gadgets, go out to eat nice food… and will never own a home or have a retirement fund or put a child through college.
It’s so easy to say “if you cut down on the avocado toast maybe you could save up”, and so hard to accept that a house these days is fifty thousand avocado toasts, and that’s why so many of us have just given up. We don’t treat ourselves because we think the world will take care of us when we get older; we treat ourselves because we know it won’t. Might as well feel and look good on the way down.
This is something I think about a lot.
American poverty is not like other kinds of poverty. We can have small luxuries and “frivolous” things but we can’t have the big, major things that we need the most. We can have fifty flavors of creamer for our coffee but not be able to pay our rent. I suspect in a lot of ways that’s uniquely Western, too?
But we’re all stuck on this outdated, almost Victorian idea of poor people, so people get all outraged when poor people have cell phones and fridges.
I actually like things like the Food Stamps challenge because, as important as numbers are in research, they’re still abstract to most people. Most people really do not understand the difference between two hundred and seven hundred dollars, or two hundred and two thousand, until they see for themselves. It’s important to give people concrete examples.
I wonder if there’s an info graph out there that demonstrates this thing?
“This amount of money can buy [presumably ‘luxury’ item]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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