In popular American mythology, the rich work hard for their wealth. They’ve earned it. They deserve it. While this is often true, everyone can cite instances of people who have money due to fate and circumstance, not because of hard work and perseverance.
The same holds true for folks at the opposite end of the spectrum. Yes, there are plenty of people who are poor or in debt due to their own bad choices. But this isn’t true in all cases. GRS reader Amy wants to know how you can possibly tell when a person’s poverty is their fault and not the fault of someone (or something) else.
She writes:
I’m a newcomer to the personal finance blogosphere. I recently came across another blog that took a position that shocked me. The author thinks that all the people who live in poverty in this world are simply moaning and crying instead of getting up and doing something about their situation. As a student of international relations, I know that this is simply not true.
It’s one thing to actually be just whining and complaining about your situation, but isn’t it just as bad to completely ignore or deny systemic roots of oppression and inequality? I guess what I’m trying to ask is: When is it not your fault?
I’m all about having a ‘can-do attitude’ and not ‘settling for mediocrity’, but then again, someone has to be the mediocre to your excellence. Does that mean they deserve to live in abject poverty while slaving away day after day? I’m all about working to better yourself, but is it so horrible to just admit that sometimes things are working against you?
As an example, my best friend is from Norway. We attend university together here in the U.K. She has a less stressful time concerning money than I do for several reasons.
- Most of her student loans get turned into grants upon successful completion of her degree.
- In her summer of working at Norway’s minimum wage, she made £6000, and in my summer of working back home in the US I made about £1,600. She worked full time for two months and I worked full-time plus overtime for three-and-a-half months.
- She could go back home after graduation and work as a waitress and still have more than enough money to live on, even if she decided to have a family, while in the US this would be a difficult life.
Where do we draw the line between crying and complaining, and just plain unluckiness in life? And what can we do about it?
Poverty is complex. To simply dismiss each case as an indication of personal failure is absurd. When entire cultures and countries languish in poverty, it’s not a result of collective laziness or lack of spirit. There’s much more going on.
Closer to home, it’s still a mistake to dismiss all poverty as a product of personal choice. Fate and circumstances do play a role. (I don’t like the word “luck”, but that’s really what I’m talking about.)
Sometimes it’s tough to tell if a person is struggling due to poor choices or because the system is broken. One of the problems, of course, is nobody actually thinks, “Well, I’m bankrupt and it’s all my fault.” Each individual thinks he’s done the best he can, and the reason he’s screwed is that bad things have happened to him. This is true even when his friends and family can tell him, “No, you’ve pretty much brought this on yourself.”
In many ways, I think the question of “fault” is a wrong one. It doesn’t really matter who’s responsible for a person being in poverty. What matters is who’s responsible for getting them out of the situation. And in this case, I always come back to one of key points of the Get Rich Slowly philosophy.
Nobody cares more about your money than you do. No matter why you’re in financial dire straits, the person who’s going to be best able to help you escape the situation is you. Instead of waiting for someone or something to save you, save yourself. It’s those who decide to take matters into their own hands who have the greatest odds of finding financial freedom.
Yes, I know this is far easier said than done. That’s why I’m a fan of Muhammad Yunus and others who work to create opportunities for the poor to improve their situations. That’s why I’m an advocate of financial literacy programs. If we want folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we have to give them boots with which to do so.
What do you think? Are there clear answers to Amy’s questions? In poverty, where’s the line between chance and choice? How can you tell whether your situation is your fault or the fault of fate? Does it matter? And how do we fix the problem?
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Oops. Sorry folks. Somehow, I managed to turn comments on this post. No wonder nobody had anything to say!
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I’m looking forward to the discussion on this one.
I think that most people make financial mistakes at one point or another. But those who are poor suffer more from the mistakes they have made. An example off the top of my head–if you’re making $100K a year, a $100 speeding ticket is a minor annoyance. If you’re making $10K a year, a $100 speeding ticket is a major financial blow. And if you can’t afford to pay it right away, the cost quickly multiplies.
It might be possible to work your way out of poverty (I’m there, so I sure hope so), but it will require a greater-than-average attentiveness to your finances.
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If everybody is greater tan average that just raises the stakes.
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This. People don’t understand that there is so little room for error when you’re poor, but we all make mistakes. It’s so easy to say that people are suffering from the consequences of their own bad decisions, and it is true that they are, but we ALL have made some bad decisions. The poor just pay more (literally and figuratively) for theirs.
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I sure hope you’re right. I’m working about 60 hours a week to get my family out of poverty. “little” expenses of a hundred dollars are a huge blow to us when they happen. We spend nothing we don’t have to, are thrifty and make good choices. But life happens – and things come up. It never fails.
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This is a diffucult question to answer but I did just watch a clip of the refugees in Somalia. They are hungry and living in a dangerous country. Is this their fault? I would say no. But here in the good ole U.S. of A our options are generally more plentiful. My husband for example grew up in abject poverty, often homeless and hungry but yet has managed to put himself through college and is working on his MBA. Often times people are born into situations they cannot control. They only thing we can control is the way we respond to these circumstances. Not everyone in poverty is lazy and stupid. Some are just dealt a crappy hand of cards but I believe if you learn how to handle those cards and play the game you may come out a winner.
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Not to take anything away from your husband’s hard work but we sometimes forget that just being born in the U.S. is, in itself, a big privilege.
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From this article, it sounds like being born in Norway is an even better privilege.
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“Often times people are born into situations they cannot control. They only thing we can control is the way we respond to these circumstances.”
I find whats going on in Somalia to be a tragedy. Lot’s of those children are born into a dire situation.
Warning: Going into political territory:
With that said, what about the parents? What about these adults having 5 children when they can barely feed themselves? Do the parents not essentually “choose” for their kids in a sense that they chose to get pregnant and raise the baby in a dire situation?
The third world might get the most value and bang for the buck out of AID dollars going towards pregnancy prevention and sex ed classes, thus giving less chance for a baby growing up in a world where “they cant control their circumstances” and are destined for hunger and poverty.
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I completely agree with your statement about pregnancy prevention. But I think it’s a far more complicated issue. There’s cultural standards and norms for men and women.
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In much of the world, any kind of healthcare, much less, real birth control, is unavailable. And cultural mores and the subjugation of women in many parts of the world also contribute to the problem. Politics coming- Our own governement(US) has not allowed health care organizations to use federal funds to pay for international birth control- part of our protect the unborn, starve the children policy.
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I agree that there’s more to it than simplistic sex-ed and availability of birth control but it’s not always just subjugation of women. You must remember that in many cultures, getting married and having children is a rite of passage for everyone, men and women. If a man were to make a political stand and decide to use birth control and limit the number of children he has, his wife and his community will think of him as a “lesser” man for not growing his family. Women want to bear children because it’s what their role is in that society and it’s definitely not viewed as a negative thing.
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In fact, there is a quiet revolution in big parts of Africa: where women used to get married and have 13 children, they now stop at 6.
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People have more children because the expectation is for many of those children to die. To put US 2011 standards on countries more like US 1790 is crazy. We are no longer an agricultural nation- they are. We have health care- they do not.
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we have healthcare …IF we can afford to pay it (there are gray areas where you make too much for assistance but not enough to eat and pay insurance…or a job that pays you enough to eat but doesn’t offer insurance…)
OR if you only want to use the government advocated BigPharma medicine…you want to try a natural route…fergetaboutit….you are paying it for yourself and those naturopaths aren’t cheap because, well, they don’t get any subsidies from a government that doesn’t want them practicing…even when they are bonafide M.D.’s.
Our government doesn’t like competition and naturopaths don’t contribute to campaign funds in any significant amounts like the BigPharma lobby.
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Yes, let’s tell an African couple in their twenties to not have any children. That way when they are in their fifties and are not able to work like they used to, they won’t have anyone to take care of them. They’ll starve and die, alone.
Stop seeing children as bad or worse, a waste of money.
Go take a look at some of what’s going on in Japan, Germany and China due to population shrinkage. It’s not a pretty thing.
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Normally, I watch comments unfold, but this time I believe I have something to offer.
I used to be homeless. I used to steal food to eat and sneak into gas station bathrooms to bathe. I slept in a truck. And I did all of this while going to school and not letting anyone know. Because I knew it was a result of choices and sacrifices.
After school I chose a path of self-employment and as a result of those choices (some good some bad) I lived in serious poverty and transience for almost a decade.
What it comes down to when examining your reader’s question is indeed choices. The comparison between what her friend can do in Norway economically vs. what she could do in the US is a great example of choice. Choices made by leaders, citizens, and officials.
Without diving into politics, I truly believe all poverty and lack is a result of simple choice. Sometimes directly by the person and other times as a result of people higher up the ladder.
My past situation is a good example of ignorance and ambition getting ahead of things and me suffering consequences of choice. That’s direct.
What people don’t always realize is that every choice has a consequence, whether good or bad. One economic choice in a nation’s government can have a ripple effect that sends thousands or even millions into a downward spiral.
But then we get into even murkier waters when we look at the idea that regardless of what leaders do, there’s still a personal responsibility to never settle or exist as a part of the system.
In essence, all I’m really saying is everything in life exists as a consequence of choice. Just make sure you’re living in full awareness of the ones you’re making consciously and subconsciously. You’re financial future is truly in your hands at all times.
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Yeah, I’ve been waiting to start my morning rant! The horses are at the starting gate…
As long as we have keep having a “winner-takes-all” system we’re going to keep having poor and desperate people no matter what the individual can do.
Let’s say that everyone follows this advice and is great at personal finance and everybody is rich. Then who is going to pick up your trash, flip your burgers, grow your organic watercress, do your pedicure? The other rich?
We are always going to have inequalities, and I’m fine with that. The problem is that unlike, say, Norway, in America we have little respect for the so-called “losers” who toil away to make everybody else happy. We pay them crap, we deny them health care, and we make fun of them and their paper hats. So we make those inequalities extreme and claim they asked for it.
If we had a country of rich people only, then we’d have to import poor immigrants to do the work, and then we’d start again with the same dance.
The issue is not that there is a socioeconomic scale, as there is always going to be one, the issue is that we abuse those at the bottom because we can.
All that a blog like this does is teach you how to swim ahead of the competition, but we are all complicit on the drowning of those who stay behind. Some people throw a few life savers around, call it charity, and pat themselves on the back, but that doesn’t solve the problem of the millions who keep drowning.
What we need is not charity but justice; what we need is a decent standard of living for working people. The problem is that if you ask for justice in America people get scared and call you a commie before even considering what you’re saying. We like so many Joe the Plumbers think we’re going to be rich “some day” and neglect to address the needs of working people today.
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Wonderful commentary. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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well said!
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“what we need is a decent standard of living for working people”
I find this a totally meaningless statement. My husband was a blue collar worker and I usually only worked part time while raising children. I felt we had an excellent standard of living.
It’s about choices.
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What did you do for health insurance – was it provided by your husband’s employer? I wonder how many people would have a decent standard of living except for the issue of health insurance – when it’s not available from their employer and individual coverage is ridiculously expensive…
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It sounds from your description that you are older, and perhaps retired now.
There is a *huge* chasm between the lifestyle of blue collar workers who started 30-40 years ago and the current experience. In fact, just last night, my company awarded service awards for people celebrating 5/10/15/etc years of service. There were 3 of us getting 5 year awards (and two of us are office workers being laid off before the end of the year). There was 3 people getting 10-15 year awards. The vast majority of workers were getting 25+ awards. This is because the factory has learned that they no longer need to maintain a team of blue collar workers. They hire people as seasonal workers and lay them off when the work loads decrease. The 25+ crowd had enough seniority to survive the layoffs that took out most of the 10-15 year crowd, but hadn’t reached the “early retirement” package age. Few, if any, people are being hired to replace them–they only need a small number of managers to oversee their fluctuating temporary workforce.
I think El Nerdo’s point is very valid in this day and age. I suspect you would have a much harder time now trying to live a “comfortable” lifestyle on a blue collar salary than you would have even in the 1980′s. In fact, it’s much harder to live a stable life off of a white collar salary as well. I know few people my age or younger who have not experienced major layoffs at their jobs at some point in their career.
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Agreed. My mother-in-law raised seven kids on her husband’s teacher salary. While that *might* still be possible with extreme self-reliance, fair degrees of deprivation, no major catastrophes, and living in a low-cost-of-living area, it’s just not realistic for most people, even if they live moderate lives.
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One of the most worrisome things about the United States to me is the growing income disparity over the past twenty years. The rich have gotten exponentially richer while middle class jobs, whether blue, pink or white collar, have been shipped overseas or eliminated. For all his faults, Henry Ford got one thing right — if workers weren’t paid decently, they couldn’t afford to buy his cars.
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I worked at an elevator company for a few years. I’d just like to point out that the “blue collar workers” at that company (elevator techs of all levels of experience) had a MUCH more “decent standard of living” compared to, say, the Secretary, or the Office Manager, or the Collections Specialist, or the Dispatchers, or pretty much 80% of the entire staff that worked in the office in decidedly non-blue collar jobs.
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That’s because elevators, being attached to buildings, their repair cannot be outsourced to China, so your technician is not in a race to the bottom in order to keep his job.
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To be a fair though neither can the front desk be shipped to China either
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Elevator repair/installation is probably one of the best paid construction trades careers. There aren’t a lot of jobs and it is highly skilled. Yes there are some very good blue collar jobs out there but there are very few like this one.
Theres only about 25,000 jobs in elevator repair workers in the nation. By comparison theres over 1.3 million carpenters. Oh.. and we recently are coming off hit >20% unemployment in construction industry.
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El Nerdo didn’t actually say “blue collar” with it’s tradition definition of plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc. Those kinds of blue collar workers CAN make a nice living wage, even quite lucrative livings, especially once they have some experience in the field.
However, your typical lawncare worker, server, nanny, daycare worker, maid, fast food worker, etc can absolutely be the working poor. People who work hard every day and still can’t afford to pay all their bills in the same month (yes, even when they’re NOT buying 60″ televisions) and eat too.
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I take offense to several things you’ve said.
We don’t “deny” health care to any one in this country – citizen or not. You may not have health insurance, but you can go to any hospital ER or clinic for care without being turned away.
As for a decent standard of living, please define “decent”. The standard of living in the US is the best in the world. The poorest among us are wealth compared to most other people. Your “decent standard” is all about choices. Do you choose a 60″ television or do you choose to buy your children proper shoes? Do you choose to work to better yourself and your family or do you put your hand out and complain that you aren’t given enough?
Eveery one in our country has the opportunity to be sucessful or to fail. It is about choice and how you respond to it.
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But what happens when your choice is to buy medication needed to survive (e.g., high blood pressure meds) or buy clothing for your children? To pay for rent or to pay for heating oil? To attend college or to support your impoverished family who badly need another income? Loads of people, including many, many Americans, face these choices every single day.
There are bad choices and there are hard choices. Maybe a dividing line (a big, wide, multi-shaded gray, still-hard-to-define one) is that you might be responsible for your bad choices but not your hard ones.
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But how would you pay that ER bill? Would you lose your home, be unable to feed your family? Would you file bankruptcy and hurt your chances to get a better job because of a bad credit score?
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Yes, your country DOES deny healthcare to people who can’t afford it. Healthcare isn’t just about seeing a doctor when you break your arm or have an ear infection. A lot of it is preventative medicine and ongoing care (who goes to the ER for a physical?) To me, being denied access to a regular family doctor is pretty much being denied healthcare.
And yes, it happens in Canada too! Sure, we like to say health care is a basic right, but our doctor shortages seem to suggest otherwise.
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The ER won’t turn you away, but they will only treat the immediate emergency. They will make sure you don’t die in a place that could cause them liability and then they will sue you for the care you received and garnish your wages.
I don’t quite understand why people are comparing the US to third world countries instead of countries that are more similar to us in terms of wealth. Of course we look great compared to undeveloped and war-torn countries. We don’t stack up quite so well against other developed nations in terms of social mobility, education, or health care.
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Exactly. If you want to compare the US to the DRC then obviously we’re going to look better. That’s not a real comparison though. We need to stack ourselves up against Norway, in my opinion, because they continuously rank in first or second place in the Human Development Index (HDI). It should be a goal for US to move in that direction on the HDI. If we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world then why do 1/3 of our fellow Americans go hungry? Why is higher education not easily available for (not everyone) but those that are qualified? Why should we have to pay for healthcare if we are so rich? WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE TO PAY TO STAY ALIVE?
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@ Amy — I wouldn’t stop at higher education being for the qualified. I’d be happy to see students get some help entering the trades. College isn’t the be all and end of all. I know plenty of well-off people who have businesses in the trades — roofing, masonry, electrician, etc. We need skilled people in a lot of areas.
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“but you can go to any hospital ER or clinic for care without being turned away.”
um…don’t move to NYC with that attitude, or you just might be shocked when you ARE turned away from some hospital emergency rooms.
Heck, we’ve got public hospitals closing right and left…some which have been in business for nearly a century.
My parents live in a depressed rural area where the hospital only treats life threatening incidents…a previous diagnosis and insurance will get you transferred to a city hospital; anything else (including government assistance insurance) will not. And if you don’t have a car that will go 100 miles safely, or gas money to get there, you are SOL.
In both cases it is simply a matter of county/state budget and although it may not have come to your part of the world, it IS sweeping our country as we speak…just wait for it.
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Just so you know the actual facts. The law states that a healthcare provider is required only to provide a medical evaluation and treatment in order to stabilize a patient’s condition in a life or limb situation. They are not legally required to treat you for anything else. The law is called EMTALA for short and I know this law because I am a nurse who worked in an ER for many years. Any other “free” care that is offered is at the discretion of the healthcare provider.
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Whoa- Teaparty talking points- I knew I had heard this before now. The whole ER will give you healthcare is standard rightwing answer to the universal healthcare bill. And it is not true.
And your suggestion that people make the choice between shoes and big screen TVs is such a throwback to the “welfare queen” stories.
Your remarks are insulting and generally untrue.
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Those “welfare queen” stories you refer to aren’t generally untrue in my experience with people on welfare (I have 8 rental units and have been renting to Section 8 tenants for several years now). But in any event there are plenty of people who make financial trade-offs which seem crazy. Most of the “poor” in America have cell phones, air conditioners. cable TV, cars, and consume double calories than they need to survive. Yet they could redirect their discretionary income to things like fresh produce, a savings account, education/skills training, or moving to a better school district.
There are some things that are out of one’s control of course, like being a single mom or having an addiction or not having a high school degree. But usually those bad situations (in America at least) were the result of some poor choice at some time (having unprotected sex, dropping out of school, snorting that first line). Rich kids make those mistakes and sometimes have parents who can still support them or make them go away; but when poor kids make them they can be life defining.
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“The Standard of Living in the US is the best in the World”
LOL, as an American living in Singapore I can tell you haven’t traveled much.
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You said exactly what I was going to say. If someone is on top, then naturally there must be a bottom. And, as I tell my friends, it is an inevitable bottom. So how do we take responsible care for those in the inevitable bottom? As you said, someone has to flip burgers and pump gas and clean toilets. The least we can do is agree, as a society, that they should have health care and a living wage.
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YES!
Fortunately, some places are starting to catch on to this. The University of London schools, for example, have recently instituted a ‘living wage’ for the cleaning staff.
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Correct me if I’m wrong Amy, but wasn’t that at least partially in response to very public protest about the current wages of the cleaners?
Unfortunately I suspect that a lot of other employers who pay poorly in the UK will be harder to shame into action.
Up here in Scotland our government ostensibly pays everyone they employ a living wage, but has been embarassed by newspaper articles etc. highlighting their inability to get the companies they give contracts for outsourced services to to follow their lead!
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Amen.
I highly recommend Tom Hodgkinson’s book “The Freedom Manifesto” (or “How to Be Free” in the UK, same book, different title) on the valuing of work, freedom, and human people over time – focused on England and how the Protestant reformation changed human beings’ orientation from a life of love and spiritual contemplation (with a little bit of work thrown in to feed your family — but, you know, maybe a few days a month) to one that valued work for its own sake.
People who do some of the most important jobs — taking care of babies, taking care of vulnerable elders, cleaning hospitals, farming — are considered less valuable (if defined by their pay) than people who do absolutely useless things like manage hedge funds or oversee school testing.
I’m with you, El Nerdo, justice is what we need. A re-evaluation of our society’s values.
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“The issue is not that there is a socioeconomic scale, as there is always going to be one, the issue is that we abuse those at the bottom because we can.”
bravo! ~blows kisses~
gotta love a nerd
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Aside from more affordable healthcare, I couldn’t disagree with you more.
The U.S. has more social programs than any other country. ONLY in the U.S., can you not do ANYTHING, not have a job or contribute to society in any way and still get free money. And the MORE kids you have in this condition, the more free money you get.
I’m not saying this “free” money is enough to live on, but it’s not supposed to replace a full-time salary. Only a job can do that.
As for these burger flippers and trash collectors: first of all, trash collectors in my area make more than I do. They’re state employees with pensions and benefit packages that make mine look like a joke. Not to mention, these are mostly jobs, not careers. No one says you should work at Burger King or Sassy Nail Salon your entire life. Work there while you have no qualifications to save up for school and get a career. If we make these jobs higher paying jobs, where will High School and College kids work while they’re in school, or people who don’t yet have the proper credentials to start a career?
I think people need to be healthy to work, therefore healthcare should be more affordable. But other than that, I don’t agree with your stance at all. America stands for the ability to work to your fullest potential and excel above those who do not. There are resources available and they must be utilized, by whatever means.
Anyone could be dealt a “crappy hand” in life, but it’s all about how you play it.
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Nonsense!
In Germany a family of four receives around $2500 every month, month after month, until they die (no time limit, this is the so called existential minimum everyone is guarenteed), plus free television, free public transport, etc. The U.S. have to offer a lot, but social programs are not among this, unless you have the perspective of the person who has to pay for all of this, because social programs arn’t cheap.
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Poverty is a complex issue. As is the mindset that comes along with a lifetime or generations of being poor. Very difficult to change just by saying “you can do better.” But poor people do it all the time. Astounding stories abound about people living in horrific conditions just literally pulling themselves up by their bootstraps one agonizing inch at a time, sometimes risking their lives to do so. What I don’t understand is the blame game, most often perpetrated by people who feel that they don’t have enough who don’t have a clue what it would be like to live the lives of the very people they’re blaming. Sad. They’re the ones who need an attitude adjustment.
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I agree with Janice and Tania. The cliche “Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become” is timeless.
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This is as good a place to put this as any, though it’s not only a response to what you wrote. We call those bootstrap-tugging success stories exceptional because those people are exceptions.
There is so much wasted talent in all those average people who aren’t able to get the right leverage on their bootstraps. So many missing teachers and accountants and nurses and [insert other necessary workers here]. Just wasted by us as a society because we can’t be bothered to pay for things that have a well-documented payoff, like early childhood education.
Average people make the world work – we really do. An average human being is capable of amazing things. And every average child in a classroom with 30 kids (or up to 50, as Detroit is now making allowable) is unlikely to reach that amazing potential they have.
When individuals make choices, they’re making those choices within constraints. It’s just pointless to pretend that every individual in poverty can overcome the systemic problems that surround that poverty. Most of them can’t, and most of us, if born into the same circumstances, couldn’t do it either.
The people who have done it are exceptional and deserve tons of credit, for sure.
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Early childhood education only benefits the VERY poor. Otherwise it is an industry that was created to process more teachers into the system and permit parents to feel good about having two wage earners in the house. It is a sham—and I was there at the start 30 years ago.
Looks like that small group of people have helped the entire nation think that their kid is better off with a teacher than a parent.
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An avg. child in a class of 30/50/100 can do amazing things in life if there is desire.
When I was in grade 11th/12th, I was one of 80 students. Coming from a middle-middle class working family I knew I had no money to fallback on. I studied hard day and night to qualify for a good engineering college. Took me one extra attempt to qualify but I did and so did most of my class mates. You can find a way if there is a will.
My parents could not afford cable TV when I was in highschool, no fancy shoes, I had a hand me down bicycle but never ever I was denied to buy any books/material for my study.
Am I special? No. Are my parents special? No?
Now in US, I receive letter from a local charity to help ‘poor’. Who is ‘poor’, some one who does not have PS3/XBox/Wii!!! Thats not ‘poor’.
Parents buy fancy(pricy) shoes,cloths, phone for kids but will not buy books!! Heck here you get free books from library to read.
Time to end my rent. ‘Poor’ in US are much better then middle class in families in some countires. Education is much better here then in US.
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I totally agree that its a question of who is responsible for getting oneself out of a situation – and it is always the individual concerned. While I have known many people who have blamed financial(and other) negative situations in their life at their parents’ feet, at some point one needs to just accept past negative issues and move forward. That is how we learn personal responsibility.
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I lived in Europe and the Europeans have a much better system. In the 50′s the tax rate in America on the rich was the same as it is now in Europe. In America, the rich don’t really pay taxes anymore, see the link below, but in Europe they do. As one of my friends said,”Say Paris Hilton made $10 million last year. In America, Paris would pay $3 million in taxes at the most, but more likely she would pay much less or nothing at all. In Germany, she would pay $7 million in taxes. Do you really care whether Paris takes home $7 million or $3 million, if you have decent national health care, affordable colleges for your kids, safe cities, great mass transit,services for the elderly, and six weeks paid vacation for everyone?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/irs-incomes_n_918458.html?ref=fb&src=sp#sb=778052,b=facebook
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However if you live in Switzerland (which forgive me is in Europe) the more money you have the less taxes you pay. Countries in Europe pay up to 60% or more in taxes, but they get a lot more in return (and have MUCH smaller populations).
I’m sorry but to say that the rich in the US don’t pay taxes is completely incorrect. They pay 60% to 70% of all the taxes in the US today.
However, I did read somewhere (and its been a while and I don’t remember where) that entertainers – which sadly Paris Hilton is part of – have the ability to take more deductions than most people which comes close to allowing them to not pay taxes (no wonder they think we should raise them, funny those who don’t pay usually think we should pay more)…this might be a loop-hole we need to close.
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Respectfully, this statement “They pay 60% to 70% of all the taxes in the US today” is often bandied about without acknowledging that is is a play on semantics.
In terms of hard numbers, yes, the rich are paying 60-70% of all taxes. But what that means, in the real world, is that if someone is making 35 million a year, even if you only taxed them 15% they would still be paying “more” of the taxes than, say, a teacher making $45,000 and being taxed at 15%. But let’s get real. Who is hurt more, in real world terms, by that 15%? Obviously, it’s the teacher. Milk and gas cost what they cost per gallon, for the millionaire or the teacher.
To say that the rich are paying their fair share simply because 60-70% of the tax money taken in is paid by them is to miss the boat on the real issue.
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That, and the fact that when that the rich have 80% of the wealth, so why SHOULDN’T they be paying at least 70% of the taxes? They ought to be paying more.
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The Washington Post just did a piece on federal income taxes. About 50% of the country don’t pay any federal income taxes. Between the standard deduction, EITC, child tax credits, and the tax credits/deductions for the elderly, just under 50% of Americans have no federal income tax liability at all.
The middle class and the rich pay the rest. I’m squarely middle class (even though it doesn’t always feel like it) but I honestly think those that pay no tax should pay something before people start talking about the rich paying their “fair share.”
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I have no idea why people still trot this out. A large percentage of people may pay no Federal Income Taxes, but they still pay quite a lot in other taxes that are not subject to deductions or credits. SSI and Medicare, State and Local taxes and sales taxes, etc.
I think our Federal Income Tax code is deeply problematic and rife with unintended consequences but there is no getting around the fact that the tax system lets the rich off very, very easy.
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the statement that 50% of taxpayers pay no taxes is a flat out lie. The actual statistic reflects that they have enough withheld from their pay so that they do not have to pay anything additional when they file.
This BS statistic is about as accurate as trotting out the McDonalds coffee case everytime someone wants to talk about tort reform.
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In the last few years, nearly 50% of tax filers paid no Federal income tax. This isn’t a BS statistic. Go look it up on the Congressional Budget Office website.
This is different than saying 50% pay no taxes, many pay FICA taxes for SSI and Medicare, state taxes and other federal taxes like those on gasoline; however, for about 25% of tax filers the other federal taxes are offset by credits meaning that about one quarter of tax filers pay no federal taxes.
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I’ve heard the statement about how the wealthiest Americans pay the largest percentage of taxes a lot. Usually as evidence that our tax system unfairly targets the wealthy. (Not always, but usually) What never seems to follow that statement is that the wealthy people that are usually being referred to control an inordinate amount of the wealth of the country.
If a group of people controls more of the wealth in a country, then it seems reasonable that they should assume more of the tax burden as well. They wealthier they get, the more of their income comes from dividends – which is taxed less than income – while those with less wealth probably have less income from investments. So the wealthy generally pay a lower percentage of their own income as taxes even as they’re paying more overall.
Obviously, there are exception to every rule. But I suspect not many. Several years ago Warren Buffet bet all his billionaire friends a million dollars that their tax rate would be lower than their secretaries. To this day I don’t believe any of them have taken him up on the offer.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/05/01/taxes-warren-buffett-and-paying-my-fair-share/
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The average poor or lower middle class cannot do a long form- so they pay income tax on ALL of their money. They go on to pay local taxes on their houses, cars and food. The average 1% at the top pays 7% tax. Their things (car, house, shower curtains, prostitutes) can be written off as business expenses.
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Jen–
Those who can’t itemize do get the standard deduction, which can end up being better than itemizing anyway.
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I love how they made one sentence of the article into the headline and didn’t expand upon it at all. If I recall correctly now, that was less than 1% of the people who earned millions that year. Not really much evidence that millionaires aren’t paying taxes, is it?
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It didn’t say they weren’t paying taxes. It said their taxation was a smaller percentage of their overall wealthy than that paid by people who don’t make as much. I’ve yet to find substantial evidence to contradict that statement. The wealthiest pay more in dollars, but often less in percentage.
I just wish the people who compare the percentage of the tax bill paid by our wealthier citizens vs our less wealthy citizens ALSO looked at the percentage of income paid as taxes in those same groups. It’s unfortunate that the discussion is generally only framed around one part of the equation and ignores the other.
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To me this is a three-pronged thing.
When dealing with people in bad financial situations: don’t judge them, don’t waste a lot of time figuring out whose fault it is, don’t presume to know how they could be managing their finances better.
When dealing with yourself: you may have bad luck, it may not be your fault, but you still need to take control of the parts you can control. If your situation sucks, you know what? You’re allowed to complain, you’re allowed to whine. The situation may be terribly unfair. After you get done complaining and whining, ultimately you can accept it or you can work to change it.
And work to change what it is that’s unfair, though political participation and advocacy.
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As mentioned before, to answer this question we have to keep in mind where we are talking about. To restated from the article, poverty in the U.S. is a totally different animal than poverty in Somalia. In the U.S. most of the time poverty is a choice. However, my close family included, sometimes things get thrown at you that there is no planning for. For example large hospital bills. The case in Somalia it is easy to see that the system is broken. As a side note being in the same species class as the Somalians, it is out duty to make a effort to help when we can.
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Excellent post today! I think this is an often-overlooked facet of personal finance. There are a number of reasons that might prevent an individual from attaining the freedoms and opportunities available to the middle and upper classes, but my hunch is that the family you inherit is the strongest denominator in your lifetime wealth.
The “gene pool lottery” is the most important gamble we take. Everyone is born into a family, whether it be rich or poor. We learn many of our attitudes about the world and we form attitudes about spending and saving from our family members.
While I can never blame someone for being poor, I do think that it takes personal choice, knowledge, and exposure to a different paradigm to change the situation. This is why I strongly advocate for personal finance classes in primary school all the way through college…
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“The “gene pool lottery” is the most important gamble we take. Everyone is born into a family, whether it be rich or poor. We learn many of our attitudes about the world and we form attitudes about spending and saving from our family members.
While I can never blame someone for being poor, I do think that it takes personal choice, knowledge, and exposure to a different paradigm to change the situation. This is why I strongly advocate for personal finance classes in primary school all the way through college…”
Bingo! It is utterly incredible how many people – even among the wealthier class – NEVER link their spending habits to their financial situation on their own. They think, “I make $X, so why am I not getting ahead?” Personal finance is SO simple but every bit of media, entertainment, and common wisdom preaches that you spend more when you earn more and you live up to or above your means. Without someone demonstrating the opposite, most people (myself included!) would never see the light.
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I’m torn on this. As a recovering paycheck to paycheck person I can see both sides. I suffered some hardships. My wife had cancer, my kids had medical issues, there was layoffs and a bankruptcy thrown in the mix. Most of that was random bad luck that was not my fault. But I can also see how my bad choices had contributed to my woes. I had never saved. There was no cushion so these emergencies turned into catastrophes. When windfalls came along I blew it on fun stuff. I continued to live at or above my means. I never prepared for a rainy day.
Being prepared would not have prevented my emergencies. But it would have cushioned the blow and made things easier. How much easier is hard to answer. Certainly bad, random things happen to people that can really knock you down. It’s hard to always say where the fault lies. Surely it’s not 100% one way or the other, but where I can’t say.
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I have a lot of respect for you for seeing that. I have a little sister who we have helped numerous times (hot water heater, roof, some cash) and she just can’t see it. I’ve tried to talk to her about an emergency fund but she claims that they don’t have extra money for that. Yet, they are at the coast for their anniversary this week and eat out often (half price apps but still). Last night I told my husband that I think we are done helping her because it seems we are just keeping her off rock bottom so she doesn’t learn.
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This is not a question that’s useful to answer. If you know *for sure* that a random stranger, possibly in a different country, is really lazy, or is really trying hard, and is still poor, then what? Now you get to feel good or bad about the way you’ve judged them?
It only really matters in your own situation, and really then, only to help keep you from repeating your mistakes. I know which financial hardships I’ve faced were brought upon by myself and which I couldn’t have avoided, even if at the time I would have made excuses, I still know which ones I could have avoided.
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I think there is a huge distinction to be made between the type of poverty that North Americans might find themselves living in (either as a result of birth or choices) and the type of poverty people in much poorer countries (like Somalia, for instance) experience.
I’m not sure what better ‘choices’ those starving amid a drought in Africa could have made to improve their circumstances.
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Totally agree. I live in the US, and we have a distorted view of what poverty really is. Many people in the world would LOVE to be one of our working poor. So much so, in fact, that some risk everything to come here – legally and sometimes illegally.
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heck, just take ‘em out of New Rochelle or Alexandria, and stick ‘em in inner city Detroit, a wasteland in Arizona, or a tent city in New Jersey.
no need to send anyone to Somalia for a wake up call; we’ve got all those ranges of poverty right here in the good ‘ol USA but to talk about it–especially on the news–is not good form and better to be kept swept under the rug.
oh but I forget, anyone in inner city is a drug user who made bad choices.
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First of all, I think you have to define what is meant by “poor” and “poverty”. I live in the USA, and I believe we have a severely distorted view of what it means to be poor. There are people in this world who DIE because they don’t have enough to eat. Or they develop diseases and conditions due to malnutrition. We have people in this country that we consider “poor” who are overweight. People don’t starve to death in this country.
So while we might consider someone who works fast food or tending lawns to be “poor”, in many countries they would be considered middle class. We have to keep this in perspective.
My next point — and to address the question of the article — is that often poor people have no idea of what makes them poor. Many people have no idea of the most basic principles of personal finance – things that readers of this blog, for example, think of as common knowledge. What if you never knew that you should think about and prepare for retirement decades in advance? What if you never were taught how to live within your means? What if you never knew that it was possible to increase your income by developing marketable skills? These are just a few examples of the types of things that may hold people back that seem like common sense to you and I, but may not be common sense at all for people in poverty.
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Your second paragraph is well-put. Your first paragraph, though, is misinformed.
1) Poor people are disproportionately overweight in this country. Ergo, what? Food is not their problem? Of course it is. Their diets are *unhealthy*. It’s killing them. They can’t afford healthy food, or don’t have it in their neighborhoods, or whatever. That is a serious problem.
2) MILLIONS OF PEOPLE in this country go without food, especially children. They DO suffer from malnutrition, and occasionally even die from hunger. http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-studies/hunger-study-2010.aspx
I read a statistic once that one of the best predictors of a child’s performance at school in the US is whether they get enough food at home.
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Actually- according to a major study. The best predictor of success at school is the amount of vocabulary that I child enters school with. That gives a reason why some very poor children do very well at school (my husband for one).
The study you read is true about attention at school. The best predictor for paying attention and focus on material AT school is proper food intake (which gave rise to school breakfasts and lunches). Of course – you have to realize THAT study was done by the dairy institute who makes great profits off of the study). I agree with the premise- but disagree that we are actually FEEDING children with school breakfasts and lunches in most areas of the country.
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“People don’t starve to death in this country.”
yes, they do. We just don’t plaster the headlines with it and don’t run infomercials on the starving children of America…bad for the image.
There are 1.4 million starving households in NYC right now, not eligible for assistance and surviving on non-profit, private, soup kitchens–which are facing reduced donations as their largest contributors–the middle class-are increasingly showing up in line for assistance.
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To me, there are 3 things that can lead a person to poverty and be unable to get out of it:
1) Fate and Circumstances
2) Mental health issues (including addictions)
3) Lack of personal ambition to better themselves.
While #3 may be a very important factor, it is certainly not the “only” factor as many people believe. Circumstances will be over come if a person wants to better themselves and has no mental health issues to prevent them from it.
For #2, I think this is a very important and often over looked catalyst for perpetual poverty.
Just my take on it. If a person who is hardworking and ambitious and has no mental or physical health problems, they can get overcome most any bad circumstances that lead them to be down and out (in the Americas/Western Europe anyway).
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I would add one to your list:
4)An understanding of how to improve your financial situation.
We often don’t even understand the mistakes we are making and/or how to correct them. If you are ambitious, but have a blind spot that you don’t recognize that leads you to making the same mistakes repeatedly (such as not budgeting and tracking and therefore consistently overspending), you may not be able to advance your position. You may think this is simple and obvious, but to many people it is foreign.
And if you don’t have this knowledge yourself, you must have access to this knowledge from somewhere. In some parts of the world, this knowledge may not be as accessible as it is in others.
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Education and knowledge as other have pointed out is very important, I guess I put that in with my #3, because if you want to improve yourself you will educate yourself on how to do it as part of the process.
If someone isn’t willing to learn/research how to help themselves then they don’t have much ambition or motivation to get out of poverty, either.
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Not necessarily. The same places/neighborhoods that are so poor that they have food deserts, are the same places that will have the least access to education. If you have to decide whether to spend money on food or electricity this month, then you’re not going to pay even $2 for a bus ride to a public library to check out a personal finance book. Sometimes people don’t even know enough to even know where to start and that makes it really difficult to research even if you have easy access to the information.
On the other hand, with the increasing prevalence of smartphones and their internet capabilities this may be less of an issue in the future. As prices come down and as more people consider their cellphone a “necessity”, hopefully this will be another route for the poor, disenfranchised to have access to non-traditional education.
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some people wont’ go to the library not only because of the $5.00 (2.50 both ways) subway cost but also because walking will take them through a war zone they usually avoid.
perhaps in your small town you don’t have to worry about stray bullets, but in cities, the poor have some similarities to the “war torn” nations of poverty.
And don’t tell me about law enforcement; they are being laid off right and left due to budgetary reasons and the “real american poor” living in neighborhoods most of you–and most cops–have never seen (and better hope you don’t).
Heck, our rags-to-riches president’s poverty stricken upbringing was nuthin’ compared to many.
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I think this article says far more about politics and social systems than it does about poverty in general. The story related seems more about the difference between the US and Norway’s societies than simply one person being more fortunate or harder-working than another.
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I think Amy is convoluting poverty with inequality. Her example is that her friend had an easier time in college because of the country she came from – yet neither Amy nor her friend are/were in poverty (I assume). The point is not that every person should have an equal amount of money. The point is that those on the lowest rungs should still be able to lead a reasonable life. She says a waitress in America will have a “difficult life”, but difficult compared to what? Compared to a middle-class American, or compared to a Somalian refugee?
This is the kind of thinking I see in my extreme liberal friends – that just because someone has less than those around them they are entitled to more. We should, as a society, provide a base-level subsistence for everyone – no one should starve or freeze in America. But that doesn’t entitle all citizens to a middle-class lifestyle. We provide basic food, basic shelter, and basic healthcare (!), but it is up to the individual to take the reins if they want more than that.
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Really? “We provide basic food, basic shelter, and basic healthcare.”
I think we must be looking at different statistics on hunger, homelessness and healthcare in this country. The ones that I have seen tell a story of a country divided into haves and have-nots. Reality is that there are many people in the US who do not have enough to eat, a place to stay, or adequate healthcare. For most it is not a choice. If the basics that you claim are provided were actually provided, there would be a much more stable base from which everyone could reach their bootstraps and pull themselves further up the economic ladder.
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I would ask who the “we” is who is providing basic food, shelter and healthcare? Because there are plenty of hungry, homeless, sick people who might disagree with you.
I do, however, agree that there will always be people who have more or less and just because you have less doesn’t mean it’s unfair.
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Oh. I read Des’ comment as meaning that a wealthy society should be providing the basics, not that we are…
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I think the biggest factor is education. If a nation has healthy primary and secondary education systems, a whole lot of other factors can be evened out and it really does come down to personal initiative. If it doesn’t have good schools, nobody benefits. Western European public schools tend to be of a higher average quality than schools in many states here which does seem to help social mobility even in relatively stratified societies. They have other problems, to be sure, but they do give most kids who apply themselves an opportunity.
Currently, I live in a state with some of the worst public schools around and the problems this causes are evident. I can’t hire someone with only a high school diploma (despite that being all that’s necessary for some of the positions) because I have no guarantee that they will be literate. Anyone who can sends their children to private school which places a major burden on them and those that can’t get stuck in systemic poverty that shows no signs of letting up. It’s tragic and it won’t get better until we actually offer children the tools to better themselves.
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Another factor of good education is that educated women tend to put off having children until later in life, and when they do have children they have less of them. Education and aspiration generally lead to women taking control over their reproductive health.
Children are expensive, raising a family costs a lot of money. I see women trap themselves in a system of poverty every day because they chose to make one more mouth to feed (I work in an antenatal clinic in the UK where contraception is free and widely available, so this isn’t really a case of poor sex-ed or access to birth control).
If you’re just starting out in your career, are on your own, and have more than one child chances are there isn’t any point going to work because your wages won’t cover your child care costs, so you live off benefits instead. Then when your kids are old enough for you to leave them on their own, no one wants to hire you because you have a huge gap in your CV, no experience and no professional references.
Of course, everyone is different. Some professional women have 4 kids. Some teenage mums go off to university or become millionaire entrepreneurs. But, by and large, educated women tend to delay having children until they are more financially secure, thus providing a more stable future for their children.
If there are any women on here who had children young- THIS IS NOT A DIG AT YOU. But I see a lot of young girls every day who were raised in poverty and are now raising their own children in poverty because of lack of access to good education.
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You’re right. Delaying childbirth makes a huge difference.
I had my daughter at 19, and getting through college with child and full-time job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It made a difference in that I could qualify for more jobs but there were still child care problems, higher costs, not to mention the bonecrushing exhaustion.
Actually I think that fatigue — which I saw in most of the young working moms in the poverty-stricken neighborhood where we lived — is part of the problem. You’re so tired, you just get through the next hour, the next day. You don’t have time or energy to think clearly about your situation. You’re just trying to get by and keep your kid off the streets.
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and in some poverty stricken places, “just getting through the next hour, day…just getting by” includes not only keeping your kids off the street, but keeping them ALIVE, and WITH YOU as well.
Going to night class isn’t as attractive, in spite of potential rewards, when coming home that late ups your chances of being a victim of heinous crime now. When going means you have to leave your 4 year old alone as prey to either the neighbors or risk losing them to foster care because some CPS worker found out (and don’t even start with the “perhaps they are better off..” arguments UNLESS you WERE a foster kid–it may be so, but more often not.)
Limiting the number of your children isn’t viable when you were impregnated against your will at 15. Or, if at 14 your teenaged self had to make the choice of hooking up with a gang banger or getting gang banged–with no “assistance” in sight…unless you get pregnant and join the system. Yeah, it happens more often than you think.
Many judgmental (“this isn’t SOMALIA, people”) really really have no bloody idea exactly how bad it is in some areas of the U.S.A. (not just cities but especially citites.) They think they are outliers, or don’t really exist (used to think so too based on my middle class knowledge until I left the nest and went and found some).
People believe if you are in a city of culture, even in a poor neighborhood, you MUST have access to SOMETHING, but you really don’t. Most people here believe poor is what they see on T.V. …believe me, even in America, it gets much much much worse than that. There are degrees and ranges simply not taken into consideration in the above “3 Reasons because” blanket statement.
There are no boots, bootstraps, or government agencies…there is only life and death and you do what you can to live through tomorrow…nevermind next year.
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I just wanted to say well done for getting through college with a kid. I can never understand how hard that must have been (because I’ve never been there), but I can empathise.
Your words brought to mind the phrase “there but for the grace of god go I”. When I was 19, after a bad fallout with my parents, I was living with an older man (boyfriend) who had crippling depression, looking after him and working full time, living in a dilapidated cottage which had no hot water half the time. I ended up getting pregnant, and if nature hadn’t done her thing, I don’t know where the hell I would be now. Having a miscarriage was the wake up call I needed to get out of there and get a real future. I am now at university and have patched things up with my parents.
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I am an educated Catholic woman (very snooty undergraduate institution, plus a law degree) with 5 children. I WANT to work at a regular job, but it was made VERY clear to me when I was pregnant with #3 that there was no place for me, or any mother with more than the yuppie-approved 1 child, in the practice of law. (And when I say made very clear, here is the direct quote from a powerful partner at my now-former firm, in front of a microphone at an all-firm event in 2006: “The firm has very good reasons not to promote mothers.” Prior to that pregnancy, I had regularly earned the highest bonuses of any associate, and had billed more hours than any other associate, even during my second pregnancy, when I was on bedrest.)
After that, I scraped by for several years on a solo practice (one memorable moment was the day I had to negotiate deposition dates with opposing counsel while I was giving birth to a premature baby who ended up in the NICU), worked at a part-time “law-related” job at my alma mater that refused as a matter of policy to promote from within, and finally emigrated to France because if I’m going to be busted back down to the working class from which I came, I wanted to do it in a country where my children would have health insurance and would not have to be paying off student loans until age 36, as I did. Thank God I married a French man.
So yeah — if you want financial stability, it’s stupid and irrational to have children. But I love them! And I hope that if they try to “get above their raising,” they are more successful than I was.
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I’m trying to figure out the value of knowing whether someone is to blame for his or her situation or not.
I don’t feel qualified to judge who is deserving of help and who isn’t. I agree with ElNerdo, that we need to set up systems that are just and fair to end our complicity in other people’s suffering. Until we do that, judging who causes their own problems and who is an innocent victim is pointless.
I am not responsible for whether my neighbor is leading a worthy life. I am only responsible for leading one myself.
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I am reminded of the bible verse,”Judge not less you be judged.” Good advice whatever your religious persuasion. My grandfather was one of nine children and the most successful by far. His brother, through bad choices and bad luck, lived much of his life close to the financial edge. When my grandmother questioned why my grandfather gave his brother occasional handouts, he replied, “It’s better to be me than it is to be him.” I am so grateful that through luck and my own hard work I, too, can help others in need, however they got there.
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Well, someone like you who feels complicit because of bad systems *wouldn’t* see the value in figuring this out.
The problem is that many people assign blame in order to justify not helping the poor. “They make bad decisions, so if we give them money, they’ll just waste it” is their mentality. Or, “why I should my hard-earned money go to someone who irresponsibly screwed up their own life?”
To me, this discussion is for them – people who don’t understand (or deny) the systemic problems that make poverty so burdensome. Granted, they probably won’t change their minds anyway, but it’s fun to try.
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Let’s see: We have the assertion that a student working summers in Norway will have a return for labor about ten times that of the US minimum wage – and you expect me to swallow that?
Then there is the meme about the US rich not paying their fair share when the numbers indicate they carry a disproportionate share of the tax load?
yes, politics and ideology is on the table and have overtaken reality.
For those who like bashing and trashing the US, look for one of those rundowns on the style of living of those considered in poverty in the US and what they own.
Then one needs to carefully consider the implications of how the ‘poor’ take care of themselves and their home. Poverty starts close and one’s personal grooming and the care and maintenance of one’s living quarters clearly communicates the work ethic that tends to correlate with their economic situation.
The statistical confusion I see here is also profound. There is poverty by chance, poverty by choice, and poverty by culture among others in the distribution. Unless you clearly identify just what part of this multi-dimensional poverty you are trying to discuss and avoid over simplifying things, I don’t think you are going to learn much.
Then you can get into the idea that poverty is a state of mind more than it is a state of fiscal condition.
History is a good teacher but it does not appear that the students are taking the course when it comes to topics like this.
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@Bryan- Cortney in comment number 52 already addressed the tax issue.
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Getting people educated so that we would have lots of really smart people used to be viewed as a societal need, so tuition was kept low so lots of people could go to college. Now it is seen as a private good, because the individual benefits from the higher salary.
When I went to college (30 yrs ago) I was able to work full time plus in the summer at minimum wage, plus 10-15 hours a week in during the school year, and take out $4000 in school loans (paid back in a few years) and that paid for 4 years of tuition, books, and living expenses at the University of Minnesota. Tuition at the University of Minnesota was around $300 a quarter. The state supported education by keeping tuition low. Now, there is no way a college student could work like I did and pay their way through college. Nowadays students take out school leans that look more like the cost of a house rather than the cost of a compact car (a Ford Pinto cost about $4000 back then.) So I think it is incredibly more difficult to get started, and our society keeps putting up more and more barriers (like cutting the funding to the U of M to solve a budget deficit=higher tuition) that do not support people who are motivated to get ahead.
Meanwhile, other countries and even industries are providing massive support so they can get the educated people they need, We have a severe shortage of engineers in our country, meanwhile companies in India are training thousands of people to be engineers so they have what they need. Guess which country will have more innovation and development in the coming years.
Having said that, I am also aware that many of the barriers that keep people from successful employment are more about social skills and attitudes which make them (or keep them from) valuable employees, and there are barriers that people have, things like poor social skills, mental illnesses and emotional issues. low self-esteem, low cognitive ability, living in a culture of poverty, etc. that don’t allow them to rise to their economic potential.
I think that people who are really motivated can rise above their circuimstances and get ahead. They may encounter barriers, but their postive work ethic and attitudes will in the end, allow them to get ahead. It is just a lot harder now.
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Starting life as “Precious” and managing to rise to “Good Times” is bettering yourself…
But people would criticize “Good Times” as not having bettered themselves enough…
there are only so many years, and so much stamina in a lifetime.
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This discussion hits on a very common cultural theme: “systems” vs. “heroes.” America has had a love affair with the idea of the “self-made” person who “pulls himself up by his bootstraps” for a long time – see Horatio Alger.
Heroics definitely work for some very diligent, determined, hard-working people. But if you want the overall society to benefit, as a whole, you simply cannot rely on just heroics.
On one end you have a failed society like Somalia, exacerbated by a natural disaster (drought). On the other end you have Western European societies, which accept the idea that everyone should pay more in taxes so that everyone’s overall standard of living is higher, you don’t have to worry about health care, etc.
I think the US is in the middle – we obviously have a functional society that allows some people do to really excel (either born into it or “heroes” coming from poverty), and we also do have some safety nets, but on the whole we also have much more of an interest in not paying as much in taxes even if it would raise the overall standard of living. I personally feel that I don’t really need another flat screen TV for example, and I would rather pay more taxes so that my fellow citizens could have access to health care. I know that some of the super-rich, like Warren Buffett, feel that way too. Sadly though I think that most people (or at least most people who vote) do not agree.
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I, too, was going to mention Horatio Alger myths.
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people forget Horatio Alger was an AUTHOR of FICTIONAL ACCOUNTS (fantasies). He himself entered Harvard at 16 and became a Unitarian Minister.
At no point did he ever actually live the life of poverty of which he wrote.
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I agree with this. So many people attribute their success to this “bootstrapping” mentality, and seldom if ever acknowledge the inevitable role played by plain dumb luck. Determined, hard working people can fail, and lazy people can succeed. If more of the rich would acknowledge that, the more benevolence there would be.
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Aside from the far left/right rhetoric, I think some people are afraid to pay higher taxes to see little or no additional benefit.
I recently read a great article about taxes in Norway (thanks to a link posted by a GRS reader) where the taxes are high but the benefits are great too. However, if the people in Greece also pay high taxes and the government messes up – you’re in an even worse situation. I think the way independence and bootstrapping is glorified that people think they can ALWAYS do better than the government and so never want to contribute more. lol, but I’m no expert.
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all individual income tax pays for the interest on the deficit.
what we get for paying more taxes is more deficit.
heck of a benefit that one eh?
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It’s hard to make any sort of generalization about this topic. It’s something that could only be answered on a case-by-case basis. My brother- and sister-in-law are paycheck-to-paycheck people. They have blue collar jobs, don’t make much money, but the money they do make, they basically squander: brand-new cars every few years, premium cable packages, big screen TVs, the 16 year old has his own car so he can drive to the that’s 1/2 mile away. Yet my sister-in-law complains that she can’t pay her bills! The best part is that they make fun of my husband and me for having a budget! (They’ve had cars -that’s cars plural- repossesed but our budget is something to be mocked.
On the other hand, I graduated law school with no student loans because I studied for the LSAT and my high score enabled me to get a full scholarship. I aslo worked full-time during law school so that I didn’t have to have loans for my living expenses. We have one of our cars fully paid off and we only buy late-model used cars. We have an emergency fund and are working on paying down our remaining consumer debt. However, when I start to look down on my sister-in-law as being a complete loser, and puff myself up as being this fabulous over-achiever, I have to remember that we were raised by mothers who couldn’t be more different. I had a childhood filled with love and support, with an emphasis on education, whereas my mother-in-law was uneducated and probably suffering from undiagnosed depression. My accomplishments didn’t come out of a vacuum and I can’t take full credit for them. CHOOSE YOUR PARENTS CAREFULLY! (I love you Mom and Dad)
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My own opinion and experience is that nobody is poor simply through sheer laziness, there’s always some element of bad luck or unfortunate circumstances that beats people down until they just stop trying (or maybe they never even got started).
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or they never met anyone who had ever gotten out, therefore didn’t know it was possible.
not all poor people have TVs…and not all poor people believe everything they see on it.
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Assuming we are talking about the poor, or those living in poverty in the US and other Western countries (those who have access to GRS and other personal finance blogs), it is a very complex issue.
I cant help but to think of my circumstances: having drained all of my money in medical bills, not having been able to work in quite a while (I so hope that changes for me health wise and in the job), and living off of SSDI and a private life/accident/death insurance plan. I read GRS to get tips for daily living, but I doubt I will ever be rich, or even well-off.
I look back at my 32 years and wonder what could I have done differently. I didn’t go to a university, and wasn’t encouraged to do so by my parents (actually discouraged though words and actions), so I went to trade school. I should not have gotten married at 20 (divorced at 23) to a physically, emotionally and financially abusive man. Thankfully I don’t have kids. Instead of waiting for a magical (older) age to travel, I should have done it while I was making a decent salary in the Bay Area. With that said, I could not have prevented my medical issues. A healthy lifestyle are not a guarantee.
But who can predict their future? We can do the best we can with the information we were given as children and young adults. I’ve made a lot of bad choices, but what else did I have to go on? Fault is relative.
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where did this idea come that poor people “have access to GRS and other personal finance blogs”?
I know poverty stricken people in the city without access to any free interent or compouter? (Don’t say libraries, ours are all closing –in the poor neighborhoods–due to budgetary reasons; the affluent neighborhoods take in private donations to keep their branches open.)
I know many rural areas (family) that do not even HAVE access to cable and to have dial up, you have to be able to afford a land line–nevermind a computer.
Like I keep saying, the middle class has some distorted ideas about who is poor, and what they have, in this country. They believe the government reports but remember, according to the government, there is little to no inflation right now too….of course, they stopped counting fuel and food in those numbers when those prices started to rise…
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Just so you know, I’m not middle class. I wasn’t implying ALL people in Western nations have access to the internet, but a lot of people do. Yes, I know, not all, but many. I was going by MY “city living” experience, but I understand not all people have access (or even knowledge) to all things. Calm down.
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I have pondered this very topic many times over in the past several years. I find it interesting because being in a marriage with two completely different families shows a contrast of wealth distribution. And this is not to disparage of my family as I love all of them, but more of an objective stance.
My father, like my grandfather, and all of his siblings all went to college. My father eventually got an MBA and climbed the corporate ladder. Hes on the verge of an easy retirement and does quite well for himself and provided adequately for my family when I was growing up. No money problems.
My father in-law did not go to college and started working at a retail store when he was very young since being a teenager. He had stayed with the same retail company ever since and maintains at being a store manager. I believe at one point he turned down a higher position so he could spend more time raising his family and helped raise my wife into a wonderful person. He is also on the verge of retirement, though I hear through my wife that money is tight and he has to continue to work for years until he can safely retire.
My wife does worry about her family though. She mentions how growing up she would over hear them complaining about lack of money and it has engraved a sense of “never enough money to feel secure” type of thinking in her brave soul. She also mentions (and I don’t know how she knows these things) about how the retail company constantly shafts her Dad and gives him less and less benefits – making the company the bad guy, which is very possible.
When this happens, I can’t help but think that both my father and her father chose their paths and CONTINUE to choose their paths. I then wonder why if things really suck as described for her father, then why wouldn’t he have quit years ago for something better? Is it because he lacked the self-confidence to look for something better or to expand his skill set? He does not live in poverty, but I imagine it’s a similar mindset. It might be the feeling of it’s “too late to change anything, so might as well continue down the same path.” And I hate to say it, and even type it, but I feel as if he brought this all on himself.
Interesting subject and always up for debate.
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Obviously you know your family’s circumstances much better than any of us do here. However, since you devoted only 1 paragraph to your own father and 3 to your FIL, it did raise a question for me. What kind of privileges were your Father and FIL born into? Don’t get me wrong, choices affect EVERYTHING, but not everyone has equal opportunity to MAKE those choices…
For example, my cousin is only slightly older than I, and was born into privilege. (My Aunt married a millionaire.) And by privilege, I mean annual trips to the Cayman Islands, renting a home in Nantucket every summer, and a prep school that easily cost 15k a year. He took SAT and ACT prep courses for the first two years, attended an Ivy League (which his parents paid for). He is now successful, and makes 6 figures a year.
I came from a lower-middle class background, (my father was enlisted, and eventually became an officer and my mother worked an office job) and while we definitely didn’t suffer for want of basic things, we were not privileged by any means. Due to my father being a veteran, and my own good grades, I managed to graduate with an undergraduate degree with no debt, and am now attending graduate school for free as teaching assistant. My husband and I have outlined a budget within an inch of our lives, have almost 20k in savings, and still have virtually no discretionary cash flow. Even though, with our combined incomes, we make well above the national average, I don’t know how we could afford to have children… We stress about money all the time.
My cousin and I are both intelligent. If I had been born into the same opportunities, I know that my life would be drastically different. We both work VERY hard for what we have achieved; I am proud of my cousin for what he has, because I know that he worked for it. But I also know that I would be more successful in my own career if I had come from an equally privileged background, because money buys opportunities. If you think it doesn’t, then think about the fact that you can’t even interview for certain jobs without the right clothing (which costs money), network as much (without the cash to attend dinners and conferences), or in my particular field in the arts, attend private training courses that VASTLY improve your credentials but are ridiculously expensive.
Just some food for thought. Choices are hugely important. But opportunity is not universal, and it hugely impacts what choices you have, and in terms of your FIL, you didn’t really outline his real opportunity of choice in contrast to your Father.
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Justin, YOur grandfather went to college. Did your father in laws father also go to college? If you go to college then you’re a lot more likely to have kids go to college. Maybe the reason your FIL didn’t go to college is that his parents didn’t go to college. Maybe the reason your dad went to college is simply because his dad did and then encouraged/expected his kids to do so.
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Examining the root causes of poverty is absolutely worthwhile, and can help us craft a better society that can help those in that situation get out of it, but that’s too complex of a topic for a PF blog.
At a certain point, it becomes meaningless to try and find who’s to blame for reaching financial bottom. You may have been born poor, you may have been struck by disaster, you may have gambled away your life’s savings. When you reach the point where you have no money, can’t pay bills etc, it falls to YOU to make it better.
Blame gets you nowhere. Evaluation of the situation and recognizing the causing factors helps you define the steps to fixing the problem, but blaming does nothing.
To over-simplify the problem, look at it terms of being shot. Someone shot you. Doesn’t matter if they did it without provocation, or in self-defense, or accidentally. The fact is, you’ve been shot. What matters now is getting the wound seen to and heal. Later evaluation of how you got into the situation can help you avoid similar problems in the future.
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But what if you shot yourself?
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Well, I guess there is such a thing as willful poverty…
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yup…willfully poor right here. Working on a total cash basis and the day I can close my checking account and totally opt out of the american fiat monetary system, I will dance.
But I’m choosing to be poor and I can choose how to be poor.
I have had the privilege of being able to choose not to be privileged.
That can not be said of the truly poverty stricken…there’s a reason they are called the disenfranchised. The poor we speak of here are “franchised.”
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People refuse to admit guilt or bad decisions. I know everyone has a friend who says “I’m a good worker” and then they get fired for being constantly late for work, or they give their boss too much attitude.
I like the speeding ticket analogy, this is a great example of people being stupid. Yes, stupid. If you can’t afford a $100 ticket for doing 10 mph over the speedlimit, DON’T SPEED. And I don’t want to read a bunch of individual anecdotes about “being screwed by cops” or “you can’t drive slow or you’ll get killed”. That’s bull and you know it, you just won’t let your ego sit in the right lane and drive 0-5 mph over the speed limit. I live in Jersey where people drive like mad (thanks Pennsy and NY commuters) and even on the turnpike where speeding rules, you CAN drive a bit slower than the flow, even if everyone is doing 70-75, you can drive more or less with the SLOW pack, go right past a cop and you’re good.
EGO kills people. People don’t want to move back home, or cut their cable, or get a pay-as-you-go phone, etc. Suck it up.
The other day I bought a little collectible, it cost about $20 and I thought “if I lost my job, this would be a few gallons of gas”. I admitted “this is not the absolute smartest decision” but I did it. Because I still have comfort in my emergency funds.
The only people I know who really truly have been screwed by something not their fault are those life changing bombs like a sudden death or major accident/natural disaster. A friend of mine who IS a hard good worker lost his job last year and I saw him do nothing but lounge on unemployment during the downtime. He took no initiative because “he earned it”. I have zero sympathy for his current money problems, because he didn’t take any suggestions, he bought tech junk, and he didn’t move back home because “you can’t pick up chicks in your parents’ basement”.
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this makes having a “home” to go to necessary to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
what if there is no empty nest just waiting for the birdie to return?
let us hope you never need the understanding you are withholding now.
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I agree with some others that a certain amount of economic inequality is inevitable, and probably natural. Not everyone has the same abilities and not everyone will contribute in the same ways to society. Pretty much no-one, I think, would argue that a waiter or janitor should be compensated the same as a teacher or a doctor.
At the same time, I agree that a civil society worthy of the name does what’s necessary to ensure that citizens don’t starve, don’t freeze or asphyxiate, and don’t die by the thousands due to preventable diseases or civil wars.
And at the SAME time (!) I agree that when you supply the tools for “bootstrapping,” it’s the duty of the individual to haul on those straps and not to sit back and say “a high-school education is all I need and I should be able to buy a house with that and if I can’t there’s something wrong with the system.”
I’m kind of surprised that no one else has brought up population. To me it seems obvious that Earth with 8 billion people is going to have more inequality than Earth with 6 billion.
The relative proportions of high achievers to low achievers will be the same, but when there is a greater number of high achievers fighting over basically the same number of high-level jobs (or plots of land), their concern for the low achievers is going to dwindle to nothing.
Low achievers get further marginalized as high achievers who can’t win access to the highest-level lifestyle “settle” for middle and then lower-middle. I’ll bet we all know at least one person with a master’s degree who is working in retail or the restaurant industry!
There are only so many jobs needed to keep economies functioning – especially as industries continue to develop automation and other efficiencies – and Earth has more people than are needed to fill those jobs.
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No, waiters and teachers shouldn’t be compensated the same. Which is why my brother waiting tables makes almost 3x what I make as a teacher (in my 11th year teaching).
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“Earth has more people than are needed to fill those jobs.”
…and all those people and jobs are now in china thanks to our government providing corporations with incentives to move those jobs to lower labor cost countries.
When I was a kid, I was told to eat all my plate because there were starving children in China. In 10 years, all those chinese kids will be told to clean their plates because there are starving kids in America.
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My opinion is that it’s not so much about how hard you work… it’s how SMART you work.
If someone is born into a poor family/neighborhood/city, they can work their butt off 12 hours a day for years and still not get anywhere. If they want to do better for themselves, they have to get creative and look for a place/career path that brings in $$$.
Obviously luck has a lot to do with it, but then again I’ve always heard that “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
I think it’s a combination of luck (aka opportunity), working hard and working SMART. So I wouldn’t say poor people deserve to be poor or that they’re lazy… they need to get creative.
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The problem is they have no model for that creativity- and even less time for it. Even being able to simply read well is a benefit that opens so many doors for success, and literacy is something many poor people do not have thanks to educational inequalities.
It’s easy to say they need to work smarter, not harder. But if you’re already busting your ass 12 hours a day, when do you have the time to sit in your section 8 housing and ponder how to make your life better, when you’ve never seen success, and honestly all you want to do is go to bed because you have to wake up and do it all over again? And who will give you the business loan? And how will you ever get ahead enough to save enough money to take a risk, or change careers, or hell, even move to another state where there are more jobs?
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Cortney – I agree with you 100% on the different barriers that exist, but I don’t think that makes my point any less valid.
I wasn’t trying to insinuate it’s their fault they’re poor… just saying if they want something more, they have to think outside the box. It’s much easier said than done, like you say, but I don’t think that makes it any less true.
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With due respect, stepping outside the box means taking a risk, and when you’re poor, you just can’t do that; if you lose, you lose big time when you haven’t got much to lose. I speak from experience, raised in a family that straddled the poverty line. If you do not have resources, you CANNOT risk what you still have! To this day, I dislike trying to cook anything new because when I was very young, if dinner was burnt, you either ate it burnt or went hungry because there was nothing to replace it.
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To the other Laura:
I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I think you’re right. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
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Keep in mind that views of success and wealth in Western Culture are the product of the “Protestant Work Ethic” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism ). This socio/economic/religious view is based upon the concept that to know that you will go to “heaven” you must be prosperous in this life. Hard Work became a test of one’s religious worth and acted as a physical way to determine if someone was “predestined” to be saved. While this concept originated from a Theological notion, it has been (whether you are religious or not) a founding principal of western society and capitalism at large. With this concept in mind, the notion of wealth & poverty becomes framed in the absoluteness of “hard work;” leaving no room for concepts of luck, chance, or larger societal factors. Our society has been built upon the basic concept that “if you work hard you will be successful, and if you are not successful then you didn’t work hard enough or are lazy.” The problem is this concept only works if we all live in a bubble, sheltered from any outside forces, and given the same opportunities. The other factor that perpetuates this concept is Human Pride; in that we take full credit when things go right and blame anyone but our self when things go wrong.
Personally I think this is the biggest issue facing humanity today and only serves to increase the wealth gap. Unfortunately, those of us that believe differently are fighting against centuries of ingrained beliefs, that are the basic pillars of western society.
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What is so often missing from economic discussions is an understanding of privilege. In America, we have the “anyone can make it if they work hard enough” cultural myth. We are told, from birth, that we can be anything we want to be, if we just work hard enough and long enough. Personal responsibility is almost fetishized. We conveniently ignore things like, oh, let’s just throw out some things: blatant inequalities in school funding that lead to lifelong inequalities in education and learning, the inequalities that still persist among race and gender, the issue of winning the birth lottery and how being born to stable white educated parents is absolutely a privilege compared to being born to a 15 year old drug addict and tossed into foster care… I could go on and on.
Americans desperately want to believe that we all begin on the same START line, with the same little backpack of opportunities, and the same map for success. Of course, this puts us in the absolutely absurd situation of saying that a black girl born into poverty and tossed into foster care has just as much ability to make it as a white boy born to millionaires. However, we have to cling to our cultural love affair with personal responsibility because it oh so conveniently absolves us of any kind of moral or social obligation to address the inequalities in our system. Why should I feel empathy or compassion for the poor? They “did it to themselves” because “anyone can make it in America if they try hard enough” right? This allows those of us with money to sleep peacefully at night, under the delusion that all the poverty stricken, the sick, the uneducated, the hungry, the unemployed or working poor, and the homeless have all made their own beds in which to sleep.
It is an American fairy tale that serves the haves very well. And the have nots are just left to keep searching for those bootstraps everyone tells them they just need to pull on a little harder.
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And to put this into perspective, I could tell my story thus- I was born to a teenage mother, grew up on food stamps, government cheese, and free lunches at school, worked from the age of 14 to buy my own school supplies, studied hard in high school, got a full scholarship, and went to college full time while working full time to support myself. Graduated with honors. Then worked in Japan for a year. Then got a graduate degree, also working full time while going to school full time. Ta-da! I “pulled myself up by the bootstraps”, right? So I can strut around like a peacock and shame those who didn’t “work hard enough”? No, not at all. Because I can give you so many examples of absolutely crucial moments where someone stepped in, and totally out of luck and chance, they impacted me and set me on the right path. I can tell you right now that I owe a lot of my success to the excellent public schools I went to, with amazing teachers who mentored and advised me and kept me on the right path. Oh, and we may have been poor, but I had a great family support system. And I was lucky enough to be born intelligent, white, and with no health issues- because you can bet we didn’t have health insurance.
So many times, in the “I made it, anyone can” stories people do not turn a critical eye to the lucky breaks they received. Because again, in American, every man is an island. We work hard, we earn our just rewards, the great meritocracy gives us our prize. We don’t see our own privilege along the way that helped out. I’m not too proud to say “I worked my ass off. And thankfully I also had a lot of lucky breaks and random wonderful people drop into my life that met my hard work and helped me turn it into something valuable”. Again, I think this is an American value that anything valuable is done on one’s own, totally independently. Admitting that one’s community played a part in one’s success is seen somehow as diminishing that success. But by ignoring what really went on in the background of those “rags to riches” stories we miss the opportunity to learn about what could help others lift themselves out of poverty. We just go back to that island theme…
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Wow, you blow me away Cortney. Thank you for sharing some of your story.
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Thank you, Jaime. It just seems like most people with my story turn into very hard line, “I did it, anyone can” kind of people, who have little sympathy for others in their situation. I wish more people would say “this is how I was helped, this is how we can help others”, so that we *can* have more stories of people rising above poverty. I feel very strongly about this.
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~gives cortney a cookie~
I like you!
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I accept that internet cookie, thank you!
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Cortney, you need to run this country!
Seriously, you are spot on, especially about having gotten guidance at the right times. I got my B.A. almost 30 years after h.s., and it would have been much sooner if a caring adult had stepped in with verbal encouragement and suggestions how to find financial aid, manage my resources, etc. which I didn’t know. Instead, both my mother and my h.s. counselor told me I wasn’t bright enough to go to college (made straight A’s until senior year when I skipped too much school and no one cared). I graduated college summa cum laude, btw. 
Still “just an admin” – people assume I’m not ambitious enough to do more or I would somehow have gone further. O well.
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Congratulations on fighting for that degree, Laura! I wish that we realized how one interaction like that can so deeply impact a person. I think all too often, when we look at the reasons for X,Y,Z, we are looking for some huge, dramatic blow that we can point to and say “oh, yes, of course that did it, that’s terrible!”. But it’s those little changes in our path that can sometimes make just as big of an impact. For you, it was just that you needed one single person to stand up for you and tell you you COULD. Everyone deserves that. I’m sorry you didn’t get it, but I’m so happy that you went back and got your degree. That’s incredible
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Thanks, Cortney. I know my post sounds like a pity-party, but it’s not intended to; it’s just to illustrate the point of how essential encouragement/mentoring (if not a handout) is. I also don’t want anyone to think I’m taking the stance “if I could do it, anyone could.” I believe just the opposite, that each of us has a unique set of nature + nurture and it takes a lot of one to offset a deficiency in the other.
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Cortney- you’re my new hero
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The book “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich was an eye-opener for me.
http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897
It deals with how people survive (or not) in minimum wage situations in different parts of the US. It doesn’t claim to be an exhaustive scientific analysis – but it does provide food for thought.
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I read this book but I was not impressed with the books’ validity. It was very sensationalistic IMO. The author deliberately made awful decisions over and over, and then she’d say how she found herself “out of money” oh noes! I used to work those types of jobs myself and my co-workers were mostly not that stupid.
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I agree with KM. Thats not a very good book to make the argument. Its full of bias and does a very poor job of actually demonstrating how its hard to get by on low wages. She had a whole section when she was worried about not passing drug testing to get jobs and she complaining about how companies performed drug tests just to be mean or something and the reason she worried about not passing the test was … because… dramatic drum roll… the author had been smoking pot. She also seemingly randomly throws in some criticism of religion for no apparent reason. At one point she declared that ‘visible Christians’ are bad tippers.
Yet she never talks about high cost of healthcare, she never talks about childcare for parents, she never talks about discrimination in the workforce… many ways she totally failed to make a good argument.
The book is entertaining but thats about it.
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KM, you might like “No Shame in My Game” better. It’s about the working poor in America and the sociologists follows several young teenagers for a few years.
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I’ve read “Nickel and Dimed” and agree with some of the criticisms mentioned here. However, “The Working Poor: Invisible in America” by David K. Shipler is excellent and more objectively written. It does discuss the interrelationship of choices and circumstances. I consider it one of the most influential books I’ve ever read.
http://www.amazon.com/Working-Poor-Invisible-America/dp/0375708219/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312580140&sr=8-1
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Thanks for this recommendation! You may also like “No Shame in My Game”.
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There is a similar book about the UK, Hard Work by Polly Toynbee. It gets a bit bogged down from time to time but two messages from the book which I think are relevant here – how poverty can become an inescapable trap:
- Poor people have less mobility to change jobs so can’t take steps up the ladder. They can’t afford to take time off to go for interviews, or apply for jobs in person; and applying for jobs & going to interviews have other expenses too (travel, clothes) – almost impossible to finance if you’re living hand to mouth. And if their old job is weekly paid but the new job is monthly salaried, they’ll won’t have enough money to get by until their first paycheck.
- They can’t take advantage of a lot of the savings other people can – for example, if living paycheck to paycheck, they don’t have spare money to bulk buy food (even a big bag of beans/lentils) and without savings, can’t buy furniture etc outright (even second hand) so have to buy things on expensive credit, a constant drain on future finances.
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My favourite book on poverty is Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. It’s a true account of how the author nearly starved to death and lived with tramps.
It’s completely relevant, despite being written in 1933. It’s also a good example of someone finding poverty both through plain bad luck, and personal choices gone awry.
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Actually even on the cover it says it’s a fictionalized account (some true, some not). But great read. I like the part where he is literally starving to death in his rented room until someone notices he has something returnable for a deposit in his room.
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JD asks the real question that nobody has really responded to: What do we do about it, and whose responsibility is it?
My personal income is in the top 25% of HOUSEHOLD incomes nationwide. However, in my county, it’s below the median. (Yes, I live in one of the most wealthiest counties in the nation.) What that means it’s it’s going to take me several years to save the 20% downpayment on a $300k townhouse that is prudent. (Where I live, that’s not luxurious housing.)
Now, consider that something like 45% of the US doesn’t pay any federal income tax. The Washington Post did an article on this within the last week. So, there’s me who is clearly not wealthy, but makes a good paycheck, and then there’s half of this country who doesn’t pay any federal income tax at all.
Whenever we talk about raising income taxes, I assume they’re talking about me. And I think, “everybody should be paying something before you raise my taxes.” Why should my taxes be raised so somebody can get a nice fat check from the federal government? I want to keep as much of my paycheck as possible, because I work hard and made good choices for myself. I didn’t have kids I couldn’t afford, and I shouldn’t have to pay for those choices.
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Here’s the thing: you can’t get blood from a stone. I’m all for broadening the base, but even if we do, the meager amounts of money we can get from lower income households isn’t going to make much of a dent in the countrys finances. As long as Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a higher effective tax rate than he does, there’s a problem. I don’t see how anyone can disagree with that.
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Agreed but you can stop giving more and more tax deductions for more and more kids.
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Sure you can. Without those children our country will not have the people to support you in your old age. The decline in Europe is more about having to let immigrants come in because the wealthy do not “have children” than actual decline in income.
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I don’t really get this logic. We won’t need as many people to “support” the elderly if we have less people to begin with. Look at the baby boomers. We should just compound that population explosion by continuing it in the future so that we can keep supporting the previous gigantic generation?
If people are able to make a decent wage and save for retirement (through sacrifice, good money management skills, etc), the government and future generations will need to intercede less to support them.
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They may have the MONEY – but they need PEOPLE to take care of them. That is why immigrants were brought into Europe.
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And why some European countries have adopted policies that make it easier for mothers to stay in the workplace. My only personal experience is in France, but compared to my awful experience as a working mother in America, the combination of paid maternity leave, family benefits, excellent prenatal care (I had no health insurance in America and was seriously considering an unassisted home birth for my baby due in November) and ecole maternelle make me feel like I am living in paradise. More importantly, the existence of these policies make me feel like I CAN DO IT — like I can continuing my career and feel like a productive member of society, rather than like a loser who will never be able to find a professional job again even after my young children have reached the age of elementary school and beyond.
Don’t get me wrong. America was my home and I loved my country. But we just couldn’t see a future for our children there. And that makes me incredibly sad.
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The wealthy have been getting a giant tax break for years, GW Bush cut taxes so we’ve all been paying less taxes in the last 10 years than everyone paid in all the years since WWII.
That, and the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, are the primary reasons why we now have a huge deficit – see http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/causes%20of%20budget%20deficit%20graph.jpg
So, raising taxes is needed to pay for that and not to give money to poor people.
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Excellent point, Cathy, and one that is often overlooked. It is easier to blame welfare moms than it is to point to the billions of dollars we spend each month on war, compared to the billions of dollars less we are taking in via taxes.
We can’t have guns and butter, it’s an economic principle that’s been around a very long time. We’ve been cruising through almost a decade of two wars, on top of tax cuts. How that wasn’t so obviously a recipe for disaster I don’t know…
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problem with the war money is that something like 65% of america is either employed by the government or in a business supported by government contract…
and government’s biggest enterprise is war and its offshoots: war on drugs, DHS/TSA war on terrorism, war for oil, advanced weaponry research, AgriBiz/BigPharma biological research using food as a weapon (*see* U.N./ Kissinger).
Stop war and you put a lot of working america out of business…
but we don’t like to talk about that…
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No one is getting a nice fat check from the federal government. You have clearly never been on federal assistance if this is your belief.
My mother and my father both worked full time. We still qualified for every single federal program out there. I can assure you, even between their weekly paychecks and the food stamps, free lunches, HUD housing, and enormous tubs of government cheese/peanut butter, there WERE NO FAT CHECKS.
Further, you will be pleased to know that under welfare reform enacted during Clinton’s administration the lifetime maximum benefit of TANF is 5 years. And, on top of that, individual states are allowed to set the time limit lower- about half of the states chose to do so, so the lifetime limit in many places is only 2 years. In addition, the size of the average family on TANF is a little over 2- I believe it is 2.6- contrary to the mistaken belief that everyone on welfare/TANF is knocking out 5,6,7 kids. Lastly, I really wish people would do some research into what actually goes down in the welfare system before they spout off about how it’s so unfair.
Trust me, you would rather be in the top 25% of income earners than pulling this non-existent “big fat check” from the government. I promise. It’s not “living the high life”, by any means.
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“45% of the US doesn’t pay any federal income tax. The Washington Post did an article on this within the last week. So, there’s me who is clearly not wealthy, but makes a good paycheck, and then there’s half of this country who doesn’t pay any federal income tax at all.”
Ok, so why do those people not pay income taxes?
Half of those people who pay no taxes make under $20k a year.
The vast majority of those people who do not pay income taxes are very low income.
Many senior citizens do not pay income taxes because their income is entirely social security. Many college students and high school students do not pay income taxes because they make too little money. Many low/middle income families to not pay income taxes because of the standard deduction , exemptions and tax credits for their children. Many people do not pay income taxes because they are simply poor. A handful of higher income people do not pay income taxes because they use tax rules to avoid taxes.
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Let’s keep in mind that in the U.S., when you’re saying that 45% of the country doesn’t pay taxes, you’re talking ONLY about federal income tax. Every employee pays Social Security & Medicare taxes, and most states have an income tax. Sometimes there are additional taxes to pay, such as employee withholding for worker’s comp if it’s a state-provided insurance plan, etc. So to say 45% of the population does not pay taxes is misleading AT BEST.
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I am a single woman, no kids, no property, and most of my charity is made to non-tax deductible causes. I made 14,000 gross last year.
Out of that $14k, I paid $1600 in income tax.
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Thanks for the comments, all. Yeah, I object to spending the $ that we do on “voluntary” wars.
But it still comes down to, as my dad says, having net payers and net takers. Regardless of the size of the checks cut for entitlement programs, I still have a hard time with the notion of the “rich” needing to pay “their fair share” when so many people in this country pay nothing.
@Jim: 45% is almost *HALF* of this country. The median household income nationally is about $50k. When the median household income is that high, you can’t tell me that a vast majority are essentially poverty-level households. If you google the WaPo article I mentioned (it was written yesterday), it mentions that a couple with two children and an income of $26,400 has their federal income tax wiped out. They should have gone one step further — because they have two children, they’re entitled two child tax credits of $1000 each. The couple can make $46,400 before they pay one single cent to the federal government.
$46,400 is an ok chunk of money in most parts of this country. Ok to the point where they should be paying something. There are a lot of people not classified as “rich” who *DON’T* pay their fair share.
One further point: the same article states that 30% of households *made money* from our tax system.
The tax system is out of whack on several levels. Focusing the discussion only on the rich is a problem.
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Well the point is that MOST of those people who don’t pay taxes are not paying taxes because of low incomes. Making less than $20k is a low income by US standards.
When someone says 45% pay no taxes and ignore that many of those people are senior citizens, part time workers, unemployed, etc. then it makes it sound much worse than it actually is.
Yes many people don’t pay taxes. I don’t see that as effectively ‘broken’ but a reflection of how our standard deduction and various tax credits/deductions work.
If you think that low income peole not paying much in taxes is a problem then whats your solution? Would seem the only way to change that is to raise taxes on low/middle income people right? So you support tax hikes for low/middle income people then?
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I don’t like using terms such as “poor” and “middle-class” in this context. Why? Because there are some middle class people who pay plenty into the system. Before I got married, my federal income tax liability was somewhere around $1k per month.
I honestly believe that some of the non-payers should be paying something.
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One other thing…
That Warren Buffet pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary isn’t an indication that the system is broken, but just a reflection of how the various tax credits/deductions and non-wage income rates are structured.
Oh, and why shouldn’t college students/part-time workers/senior citizens/etc not have to pay any federal income tax at all? They still use government services.
I guess I’m a little sensitive on this topic, because if all goes to plan, I’m going to be rich some day. And I don’t want to advocate for a system that will just screw me later.
Once more non-payers start paying, then we can talk about jacking up the taxes on everybody else.
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they say nothing is sure but death and taxes…
“Oh, and why shouldn’t college students/part-time workers/senior citizens/etc not have to pay any federal income tax at all? They still use government services.”
Because it used to be thought, pre-1933, that since this country was founded on the idea of no taxation without representation, that there should be some part of a human’s life wherein they cannot be taxed.
In the case of teens, they are only 2/3rds human until age 18 and until then presumably their parents are paying tax to cover any services used. In the case of the elderly, presumably, they already spent 50 years paying taxes and will have any estate left taxed.
What you are proposing is: that to exist is to be taxed and I have a great deal of philosophical difficulty with that. What right does a government have to that much power? It makes me a slave.
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I am really sick of people saying that low workers don’t pay any federal taxes. They pay payroll taxes. Maybe that money is supposed to go toward social security, but it is really all one pot of cash.
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Such a complex topic…
There’s a lady that I work with who considers herself poor. The other day we were working together and she was scratching a lottery ticket. No surprise here but she lost. She turned to me and said “Damn, that could have been gas money for the week. My car is on empty.” She needed an applause.
On a lighter note there is some good in the world believe it or not. Around here any store or organization that hosts a charity event usually has a decent turn out. Most of the time the collection baskets are filled with items. Also a lot of the people in the neighborhoods will pitch in to help each other out. So, as dim as it may be, possibly there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I also do understand that there are people in other countries, even in America, that are in utterly dismal circumstances. Some of them are poor through no fault of their own. Which is why I agree with the posters who emphasized education.
Even if the person doesn’t want a college degree I believe a course on personal finance would be invaluable in the educational system. Not just with money it would also teach people that patience pays off.
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I live in Poland and if the girl worked at McD’s here all summer (which for college students in Poland goes until the end of Sept–starting some time in June), I doubt she’d have very much at all. I think they pay about #2-3/hour.
But needless to say, people here still wish to go the states where they can “live, work, and still have walking around money” in their pockets. We also have socialized medicine, but it’s a joke. Everyone knows if you really want to get looked at, then you need to pay for care.
Norway is unique even in Europe since they have natural gas and oil.
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About the uniqueness of Norway–I was reading recently that (thanks to those resources) Norway has the equivalent of $100,000 for every Norwegian socked away. I suppose it may be a lot like Alaska (another oil producing region) as far as being a lucrative place to work in the summer.
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I don’t know about Norway, but in Denmark, the common minimum wage (no national law, things are not so simple) is DKK 105, or USD 20.
High taxes, yes, but alls schooling up to and including university (masters degrees) is free as is health care incl. all procedures at hospital.
The USA is no longer the land of milk and honey. Neither is Denmarrk, necessarily. There are many countries and ways of doing things. Only 25% of USAians even have passports. Nowonder so many have no clue about options.
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Life isn’t fair–comparing yourself with others, complaining about it, and finding people to “blame” for your situation won’t change that.
And Horatio Alger stories are not all “myths”. I personally know several people who have pulled themselves out of poverty into the middle class, in the last generation and in this one.
There’s still a lot a person can do in the U.S. to better their situation, which is why most people in the world still want to immigrate here.
But it’s not easy. You have to work hard, try to make smart decisions, and keep your lifestyle and expectations in line with your actual net worth.
You have to also deal with seeing around you all those other people who aren’t working for it, those who just inherited their wealth or got it through some stroke of luck.
And for those with disabilities or lower inherent intelligent in the US it may be very difficult to attain the type of lifestyle they want. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’d obtain a better lifestyle anywhere else in the world.
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KM- When you say “pulled themselves”, do you mean they had absolutely no help? No lucky breaks, no mentors, no inherent privilege they were born with? Even something as simple as having a friend refer me for a job helped contribute to my own “bootstraps” story, and I would never say I did it “myself”. I worked hard, but I was also lucky in a lot of ways- even small things can have huge benefits, and so many people who have a “rags to riches” story tend to overlook all the myriad little things that helped them along the way.
But, even if you can show me an instance where someone went from poverty to success with, truly, “no help”, doing it “themselves”, it is still such an outlier that I personally don’t find it fair to use it as evidence that the poor can make it if they just work hard enough.
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It’s true that you need help to succeed, but couldn’t a resourceful person find help if they really needed/wanted it? It’s not always just dumb luck.
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Laura- A lot of poor, uneducated people do not have access to social capital. They don’t have networks across communities, they only have networks in the communities in which they were born. It’s easy to say “I would look for help”. But even the initiative to look for help can be quashed when they grow up believing that no one will be there to help them even if they looked for it. There have been several studies done on the importance of having inter-network connections so that, if your particular community does not have positive social capital, you can access the social capital of another community. Unfortunately, the poor and uneducated are often isolated, usually shunted into the same neighborhood, the same schools, and they lack access to mentors who can model success for them. I know it sounds strange, but honestly, if you’re going to a crappy, falling down school, your older brother is in prison already, your mom works 3 jobs and never sees you, and your dad isn’t in the picture, it’s not just a natural thing to think of ways to branch out of that. Especially for children. Here is a good overview of social capital, and how it impacts the poor (especially the urban poor) http://www.cpn.org/tools/dictionary/capital.html
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Cortney: great observations. Thanks for educating me
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Let’s say I have a friend who is a hard worker but has below average intelligence. I would wager that this individual’s chances of coming up with ‘creative’ solutions to escaping poverty, and all the other methods people have put forth to pull oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps, are pretty low. Does that mean that this perfectly good person, who is willing to work hard, deserves to struggle to feed him or herself, and not have access to affordable health care? Intelligence is one of the privileges people seem to overlook.
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people with intelligence who regularly access the internet tend to think that the “trolls” encountered there are the “sub intelligent” of the society.
Which is not true. Like Kristen said, there are many perfectly good –salt of the earth–people who simply do not have the IQ (for lack of a better barometer) necessary for the kind of deductive thinking needed to break out of a mold of everything you have ever known. They are the followers and doers to our intelligence and right now, we are boxing them up and writing them off instead of leading.
Actually we are more worried, like Dan, “because if all goes to plan, I’m going to be rich some day. And I don’t want to advocate for a system that will just screw me later.”
Because, really, the bottom line is whatever necessary as long as “we get ours”.
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“I walked behind this guy the other day.
A homeless guy asked him for money.
He looks right at the homeless guy and says why don’t you go get a job you bum.
People always say that to homeless guys like it is so easy.
This homeless guy was wearing his underwear outside his pants.
Outside his pants. I’m guessing his resume isn’t all up to date.
I’m predicting some problems during the interview process.
I’m pretty sure even McDonalds has a “underwear goes inside the pants” policy.
Not that they enforce it really strictly, but technically I’m sure it is on the books.”
-Underwear Goes Inside the Pants, Lazyboy
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CDUQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DG33WvuOw2cI&ei=9TY8TpfuB6TkiAKVtoD4Cw&usg=AFQjCNFdE2lMh3ukVwNN1uvi_MJhV2Tjlw
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To claim that all the poor people worldwide are only poor due to laziness is truly ignorant and just plain stupid. There are people in totally impoverished areas of dirt poor third world countries that have difficulty feeding themselves much less any opportunity to escape poverty.
If you look at just the USA then its more realistic to think that poverty is more due to lack of effort. But still in the USA there are certainly people who are in awful situations and are not totally solely responsible for their own financial misfortunes.
I don’t get the example given about the Norwegian. I’m also not really sure why the summer time earnings of Norwegian versus American college students really relates to poverty. Working full time plus overtime in the USA is not poverty for an individual even at minimum wage. Its not rich, but its not poverty.
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I think another question that Amy may be asking here is “Who deserves help?” I hope that the answer is “Everyone, but the kind of help you get will vary.”
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It’s self-defense. If everyone who is poor is lazy, then we 1-have no responsibility to help them and 2-will never be like them because we’re not lazy.
I have been teaching for the last 6 years in an inner-city elementary school. The students have taught me far more than I have taught them.
And we often fail to remember that the environment we are raised in is “normal.” It’s not appropriate to expect a 10-year-old to understand that there are other life options, that the place they call home is awful, and to make choices based on that. We can’t even get fully-formed ADULTS to realize these things.
As part of what we do on my campus, we try to get kids to see themselves not only graduating high school, but to see themselves as being alive when they’re 20 or 22. I know many kids who have watched family and friends be murdered and they just assume it’s going to happen to them, too…
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@Heather – Best post on the subject. As a friend of a inner-city school special ed teacher and myself as a CASA and someone who’s attended the very same schools as a child and adolescent, I can tell you you’re right on the money.
I remember one of the biggest accomplishment with the high school boys is not only graduating, but not being shot or doing something to be locked up. If you’re a girl and didn’t get pregnant, don’t worry, you will soon. That was the expectation from everyone around them, including and especially their own parents who came from that same background.
College, at best, was a pipe dream.
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How about telling that kid “You need to separate yourself from your family and friends because they are holding you back”? It’s tough to pull people out of their environments, especially if they have to give up on the people that they love.
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In the U.S. there are more opportunities for poor people. Free education K-12, government assistance and financial aid for post secondary education. This is less plentiful elsewhere in the world. Everyone has an opportunity to succeed. One of the reasons, poor people do not succeed is poor choices. The larger reason is no encouragement to make better choices or role models to follow.
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Unfortunately that “free K-12 education” is not even close to being equal in terms of quality. When one child gets $8,000 a year spent on him and he goes to a brand new, clean school with well trained teachers and things like computers and enough books for each child, and another child goes to a falling down, decrepit old building next to a landfill and doesn’t have running water in science class, and only gets $1,500 a year spent on him, you can’t say that there is true equality of opportunity.
If we had a truly equitable way of funding public schools, I would say that we would be far closer to giving the poor a real chance at succeeding and rising above their birth. As it stands, our public school system is so blatantly unequal that it is appalling.
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cortney, it is so blatantly unequal that to advocate otherwise is being willfully ignorant (which is constitutes as accessory to crime in the american legal system).
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I recently wrote this and it correlates to this question:
“No one becomes a success alone. It may feel lonely at times, but no one is truly alone on the path to success. Your success has a lot to do with you, yes. But, your success also has to do with others.
The opposite is also true.
No one becomes a failure alone. Your failures have a lot to do with you, yes. But your failure also has to do with others.”
I strongly dislike the attitude taken that people worked hard and that’s why they became successful. That’s not true. Working hard might have been PART of the reason, but it’s not the ONLY reason.
There is no arguing the disparity between the successful and the unsuccessful is larger in the USA than it has EVER been in its history. EVER. You cannot solely attribute this to a sudden rash of people making bad decisions. There are much larger issues at work. We need to move past the archaic thinking that all poor people must surely be lazy. I don’t think we’ll all ever be equal but gaps as large as they are currently usually indicate something is very wrong and has historically proven unsustainable.
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There has been a lot of interesting discussion above, but almost none of it has gone to answer Amy’s question.
“Where do we draw the line between crying and complaining, and just plain unluckiness in life? And what can we do about it?”
The line is drawn simply. Those things that you do or complicit in doing are your fault. Those things that are done to you, with your complete non-involvement are not your fault.
The list of things that are done to you is much shorter than the list of things that you do to yourself. Let’s take a car accident as an example. If a drunk driver runs across the median and causes the accident, and you are completely unable to avoid this accident (remember that it is still possible to observe the other driver’s actions and react in a way that will prevent it from happening – I’m saying here that you were completely unable to) then that accident is not your fault and can be complained about. The reaction to the aftermath is solely yours and any issues that occur because of the car accident must not be complained about because you are complicit in them. Carrying insufficient or no car insurance would be one example of how an event outside of your control would then cause problems because of your complicity in not preparing for their happening.
An event that cannot be planned for, and cannot be avoided is worthy of complaint. We can’t do anything about such things. Luckily, there are very few of these occurrences.
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“Those things that you do or complicit in doing are your fault.”
Which means spending our hard earned national income on illegal wars (and UN actions) all our fault and not the poor.
Which means unequal spending in our “national” school system is all our fault, and not the poor who suffer from location.
Which means unequal taxing by our government is “all our fault” by not advocating fair tax rates amongst all the nations populace.
Which means unequal healthcare opportunity is “all our fault” by not advocating reasonable care practices…
Which means elderly poverty is “all our fault” for not advocating realistic social security reform…
Which means the Now Depression is all our fault for allowing our politicians to bail out the “too big to fail” corps who don’t even pay taxes with taxpayer money…
so if the question is “who fault is it?”…
It is all our faults.
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BTW, this may be nit picky but I don’t think Norway actually has a minimum wage. I tried to look it up just out of curiosity and 2 sources say that Norway has no minimum wage.
ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
But Norway does certainly have realtively high wages. They have considerable oil wealth relative to their relatively small population and over half the nation is in a labor union.
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The minimum wages in Norway and the other nordic countries are not defined in law. The minimum wages are decided in a complicated process between unions and the employerorganisations.
The wages in Norway are really good but the cost of living is also huge. Many Swedes are for example working two weeks in a month in Norway, living in Sweden and making twice the amount of money then they would do in four weeks in Sweden, doing the same job.
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“What matters is who’s responsible for getting them out of the situation.” This is an important question.
Here’s a great article. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner/americas-not-faring-well-_b_913816.html
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There’s no way that a wealth distribution where the top 1 % own >30 % of the entire country’s wealth and the top 10 % >70 % is simply the result of hard work. You really need to think about how income streams from existing wealth (dividends, interest etc.) are generated. Mostly through somebody else’s work. Now consider the insame amount of such income for wealthy people and how much work is needed to generate it. Add the power of compounding to the equation and you may see why >90 % of you will never be rich while the other <10 % get richer every day. It's a direct consequence of our system of money and interest that only few people manage to get around. Every now and then, when the distribution becomes unbearable for the the vast majority of people, the system gets a reset and the process of wealth concentration can start again. Given the insame amounts of wealth and debt and their distribution, we may not be too far away from the next reset.
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I find many of the comments above very interesting.
Speaking only of the US, I believe your quality of living comes down to choices. If you choose the short term gain, but at the cost of the long term pain, you will not raise your quality of living. I grew up in one of the poorest areas of the poorest state in America, with a teacher and farmer as parents. We always had food and clothing, but no luxury items. My parents invested the small amount of extra money they could come up with, which over time grew. They made the tough choices to provide a better life for their three children. We each went to a local college and became an engineer, lawyer, and scientist. We learned the lessons of making smart choices and have benefited for it.
I believe the best thing we can do is offer a “life” education to our children. This is an area where public education system can make a huge impact. Personal finance should be taught from K through 12, at least than everyone has the knowledge to understand the choices in life.
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Amy mentions a blogger who talked about how poor people gripe and complain. Not to ignore the main gist of the article… but I would argue that most of who we in the U.S. and other rich nations would consider poor people, actually don’t gripe and complain… In fact, in my travels in other third world countries I’ve found that many of these people are actually quite happy. The heart of that misconception (in my opinion) may be that we in the U.S. and other wealthy nations are constantly bombarded with advertising portraying other people around the world as starving and poor.
Maybe tey’re not actually whining, they’ve got marketing and news agencies who show up with video cameras doing it for them and the charities that want your money or the countries that want the UN and US aid money. In one sense having a lot of poor people provides great income source for rulers of a lot of countries who would rather ignore governing and collect from other nations.
Just wanted to throw that out their… generally it’s not the legitimate poor who are complaining, but those either trying to raise money for them (or unfortunately themselves) or those pretending to be poor. Once again, some of the happiest people I’ve met have been primarily concerned with where their next meal is going to come from… once you’ve know wealth it’s hard to go back. But if you’re born into rural poverty like in many of these nations and know nothing else…
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I agree! I grew up with family who was well off and family who wasn’t — and it wasn’t the “poorer” side that constantly complained. The way I see it, you can go through life feeling deprived and sorry for yourself because other people have more and can do more, or you can find happiness and peace of mind with what you do have (but that doesn’t have to stop you from reaching higher.)
A lot of it has to do with attitude, not income. I think we forget that we can find happiness without expensive stuff or experiences.
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I completely agree with you. I just returned from rural Mexico to visit my girlfriend’s family and they live in what we in America would call “poverty.” They aren’t going hungry by any means but they live without many amenities that we in America take for granted, like air-conditioning (which is incredibly easy to get used to after a day or so and is actually a relief to not feel like you’re trapped inside.) The point is that they follow the old phrase, “the best things in life are free.” They have their friends and family to entertain them instead of multiple screens(phones, computers, tv’s, tablets ect…)
Ultimately I believe that people in the USA would benefit personally and spiritually from living a more simplified life. No one there has ADD or takes anxiety medicine. Those are problems caused by forcing our brains to run at a frantic pace in order to keep up.
The bottom line: Not all people who look poor, are poor.
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