The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor in America
12th March 2023
It’s expensive to be poor. When you don’t have money, you’re often forced to make decisions that seem necessary in the short term. Those decisions often add to your long-term burden, adding to the high cost of being poor. That can lead to a cycle of poverty that’s difficult to break.
Nobody wants to be poor. Nobody wants to live with expenses that exceed income or to struggle to make it from paycheck to paycheck. The reality of being poor is that it imposes conditions that perpetuate poverty.
Conceding that this is true, so what? The Poor in America have access to sufficient public assistance that they can lead quite comfortable lives–if they want to. A large part of the ‘costs’ of being poor reflect sub-optimal personal choices, such as wasting money on recreational drugs like tobacco, alcohol, and controlled substances. Poor people tend to have character defects such as short time horizons and poor impulse control, which is why just giving them Free Stuff doesn’t ever solve the problem, as witness the Homeless Crisis that exists in its worst forms in precisely the places that bend every effort to alleviate their distress. No homeless person ever turned down a smoke, or a drink, or a hit: There’s the difficulty in a nutshell.
March 13th, 2023 at 23:07
We’ve been assured by the left for decades that the current minimum wage is not “a livable wage”. Well, it isn’t if you try to live a middle-class lifestyle on it. When I was a young adult I managed to save 20-25% of my take-home pay from a wage that was 15% above the minimum wage, so I was actually accumulating savings! To achieve this was simple: no drugs, no alcohol, no wife, no children, no pets, used public transit and had no car, lived in a rented basement suite with used furniture and used clothes, only ate out once a month, no clubbing. Not a really enjoyable lifestyle, but if a person wants more than they have to seek better employment. I concede that this strategy was probably much easier 50 years ago than today. Possible solutions are to acquire new skills and certifications, networking, second jobs, relocating to another part of the country.