Poor is working a full time job for less income than the cost of necessities. The trick is defining necessities and THAT is all over the park.
Case in point: If I’m living 1 block from my work, a car isn’t a necessity. But if the only work I can find is twenty miles from where I live, then a reliable vehicle or bus service is a necessity. Renting an apartment? Cost depends where you live. So poor depends on the cost of that apartment. And on and on for anything defined as a necessity.
What I am saying is that, assuming we are talking about americans, this is, on its face, a woefully inadequate analysis. Take a retired couple who own their house outright. They have a few bucks in the bank, in a savings account. They each have retirement incomes, which they earned, of $30,000. Are they poor? Defining poverty by income alone doesn’t work.
But also, someone who makes 31k per year in Mississippi is probably not poor by your definition, but in San Francisco? Same could be said for someone making $50,000.
The reason that this is important is not to deny that there are too many poor people but to be able to get past political rhetoric and look for answers. People are poor for many, many reasons. Forcing factories to pay everyone $32,000 per year (even if they are paying more) is not the answer. “It’s a vast liberal conspiracy” is the rhetoric of identity politics, which doesn’t seem to work very well, especially for conservatives.
There are poor people and we can do better in a wealthy nation.
How many times must I state a full-time working person…a full-time working person…a full-time working person? I have said that retired folks, the baby boomers, make more retired (living on portions of their once earned incomes) than full-time workers who have the same jobs today.
I’m still waiting for you to give me some income figures and if you’d like to go by states and their regions better yet.
Well, if you live in an area where you can get a nice little house for $125,000, you could get a mortgage payments of around $600. So $25,000 per year makes you a homeowner. There are many such areas in the country. In other areas, you’d need twice that income. In some, three times that. But you can just look up real estate online for specific examples. Start with Mississippi. No heat to speak of in the winter. Low overall cost of living.
Thanks for making me laugh in horror at brainlessness.
A friend of mine who earns about $32,000 got 4.5% interest on a $36,000 (30 year fixed mortgage) little home in a white trash neighborhood and he pays $560 on the mortgage per mo (which includes home owners ins/taxes). How would a person who earns $25,000 get financing for any homes over $40,000 without a huge downpayment and where would they get a huge down payment? Most can’t come up with the $1000-$2000 on cheap $30,000 junk homes that is needed in earnest money, nor can they afford to have the home safety inspected, let alone appraised.
You are clueless and it pains me terribly. A $125,000 X 1.5 (low interest if you’re lucky usually its X 2.5 particularly without excellent credit and a huge downpayment) ends up being $560 a month but that doesn’t include home owners ins. or property tax. A $125,000 house is going to have some property tax that is definitely not going to be $300 a year. Poor people couldn’t even maintain that house, I already gave you the budget for $15,000 and that was all take home, no medicare/ss# or taxes taken out. $500+ rent or mortgage is not in the budget of someone with a gross income of $25,000.
Enjoy your travels in lala land.
My friend has two cars (OMG. He’s rich!) a 1989 Explorer and a 2002 Taurus that he got for $500 from a car auction. With his know-how he fixed the Taurus to be his main car. He did thousands of dollars of repairs to it with junkyard parts, most poor people don’t have his mechanical savvy so they couldn’t keep junkers running like he can.
You do not take home $2000 a month. Poor people do not have credit cards, well not ones that they can pay back. Poor people use credit cards to survive when their take home pay does not equal $2000 a month.
But they do have good assistance, some wic, some section 8, some disability, some social security income, some medicaid, and access to all kinds of other charities. So they get a lot of stuff for free or really cheap.
So you think they could just pickup and relocate to a reasonable job anywhere they choose?
It’s easy to see who has been living in “the American dream land”.
In 1990 if a citizen had $200k expendable assets, they were a “free American”, capable of pursuing life (rather than running from death). Anyone with less was a prisoner. By 1998 it was over $250k. No telling how high it is now.
Sure, their new low income job is going to pay for their relocation with premium movers, a company house, and $5000 relocation finance monies. Faust is funny.
I’ve seen plenty of people with nothing to lose gather up a few hundred bucks, hop on a bus and go to a new town, rent a weekly motel for cheap and track down enough work to stay there and get on their feet. If you got nothing to lose you got nothing to lose. I know one guy who slept outside in Brooklyn for a month until he got a break and found a job and a roommate. He took a his there from Ft Lauderdale and has been in Brooklyn ever since.
With $200 or $300, you cannot buy a bi-state bus ticket, a weekly sleeping room, food, transportation, and phone service for the three weeks until you get your first paycheck assuming you got hired the first day you applied. You or your friends are full of shit.
A few hundred, two hundred…you’re splitting hairs. If you’re telling me that there is no condition under which you could get a bus ticket and a few hundred bucks to get a cheap room and find a job then I don’t know what to tell you. Are you just not worth anything to anyone?
I’m saying that those finances would not cut the wait until you got hired then paid, dumdum. If you hitchhike and stay at a shelter and use the switchboard at a church to receive your callbacks, the few hundred bucks might last for three weeks.
You are just used to bullshitting people when it comes to most things and I get tired of reading it. No one other than me takes you serious anyways, so I’ll drop it. A crank is a crank. I should say that they don’t care enough to bother with you.
You’re just too comfortable with failure. You start going to restaurants and saying you’ll wash dishes 50 hours, you’ll make it in a cheap ass weekly motel. Gotta emancipate yourself from mental slavery.
James, its not that someone says, “I’m making a choice to be poor and homeless”. Its that they don’t make other choices which could prevent it. Certainly there are some poor homeless people who very well could take care of themselves better, or at least who could have in the time leading up to thier circumstances.
Can you stop being a kooky, cryptic radical for a moment and discuss a practical issue in practical terms?
For instance, Wendy has a dog. So she’s feeding a dog. That must be part of her budget. So when she has a budget shortfall and can’t get ahead and buy a bus ticket or book an air bnb, it makes sense to say that she’d rather feed and maintain a pet. Whatever it costs to feed the dog for a week multiplied by x number of weeks equals the money she’d need to get closer to being ahead. Right?
Like a guy who smokes cigarettes and complains about how there will be no social security when he’s old. I say shit man, 5 bucks a day, 30 days in a month? Started smoking at 17?? If someone put that much money into the bank and earned no interest at all, the contribution alone would be enough to secure some housing as an adult. So it’s not impossible, and there is a choice.
Everything people do can’t be dismissed as being due to programming.
Bitches smoking 72k in cigarettes, spending 35k on dog food over 40 years and complaining that the government or the illuminati is preventing them from having financial freedom have to answer to that truth.
