Why Poor People Make Poor Decisions (thecorrespondent.com) 197
An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] The most significant improvement was in how the money helped parents, well, to parent. Before the casino opened its doors, parents worked hard through the summer but were often jobless and stressed in the winter. The new income enabled Cherokee families to put money aside and to pay bills in advance. Parents who were lifted out of poverty now reported having more time for their children. They weren't working any less though, Costello discovered. Mothers and fathers alike were putting in just as many hours as before the casino opened.
More than anything, said tribe member Vickie L Bradley, the money helped ease the pressure on families, so the energy they'd spent worrying about money was now freed up for their children. And as Bradley put it, that "helps parents be better parents." What, then, is the cause of mental health problems among poorer people? Nature or culture? Costello's conclusion was both: the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk. But there's a more important takeaway from this study.
More than anything, said tribe member Vickie L Bradley, the money helped ease the pressure on families, so the energy they'd spent worrying about money was now freed up for their children. And as Bradley put it, that "helps parents be better parents." What, then, is the cause of mental health problems among poorer people? Nature or culture? Costello's conclusion was both: the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk. But there's a more important takeaway from this study.
not new (Score:2, Insightful)
this has been known for a long time, this is not news (allthough the neocons want to bury this)
Re:not new (Score:5, Informative)
Re:not new (Score:5, Insightful)
if you have a highly successful person, take everything from them and cast them out into the world odds are they'll build themselves up again quite quickly
This theory conveniently glosses over the contributing factors of social connections and in a lot of cases, plain luck. If you took someone like Jeff Bezos, stripped him of all assets and dropped him in BFE with no social connections, he probably won't be a billionaire any time soon.
Re: (Score:2)
contributing factors of social connections
AKA the "crab bucket"... You just need a simple bucket without a lid to keep crabs. If one crab tries to escape the other crabs grab hold of it and pull it back down. No one escapes the bucket.
Re: (Score:3)
A lot of "successful" people are on an "allowance" by your definition.
Very few highly successful people would bounce back if you took EVERYTHING from them. They need their name and reputation to bounce back (that is, they will get loans and investments that John Doe would never get). I'm not saying Bezos (for example) would forever more live a life of poverty, given his degree from Princeton and an apparent talent for engineering, he would be doing OK, but he wouldn't likely be buying any yachts.
Have a look
Re:not new (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying it is a bad approach but the fact is that if you have a highly successful person, take everything from them and cast them out into the world odds are they'll build themselves up again quite quickly. Poverty is not the root cause of people being poor. It is still in large part, a symptom of personality and culture both of which are influenced by genes.
Your thesis is easily disproven.
Consider the most universally lauded cultural super-geniuses of the Western world: ancient Greeks.
The direct descendants of those super-geniuses live in modern Greece, parts of coastal Turkey, Sicily, southern Italy, for the most part. Those areas suffered economically over the centuries. But in the last 75 years since WW2 they have not popped back up due to their proven superior genetic stock and access to the now peaceful Europe. No, they are the economic laughing stocks of Europe.
A few centuries of economic and cultural stress is not shrugged off easily.
Re: (Score:2)
Consider the most universally lauded cultural super-geniuses of the Western world: ancient Greeks.
Was that cultural or genetic?
Summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Title: Why Poor People Make Poor Decisions
Summary: [...] (Something related to money and mental health, but unrelated to making decisions) [...]
Me: ???
Re:Summary? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
According to TFA:
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on your disposition (Score:2)
It depends on how Agreeable or Disagreeable you are. People who are kinder, generous, and others-focused, (aka Agreeable), tend to panic more and be less able to concentrate during stressful situations. People who are more self-focused, (aka Disagreeable) tend to be able to focus better during stressful situations. As a result, surveys of intelligence rate
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
But there's a more important takeaway from this study.
So if I pay you, I presume you'll tell me what it is? Let me guess: Don't buy things if you don't care about them.
Conversely, don't spend Baby's Shoe Money at the craps table or roulette wheel.
Re: (Score:3)
Conversely, don't spend Baby's Shoe Money at the craps table or roulette wheel.
If you gamble once, you might never have that choice again. And you won't know if you're a person who reacts that way unless you've tried it. And even if you're not, each time you do it, you might have become forever altered in your thinking, and suffer from it the rest of your life.
A better idea might be, if your life includes an envelope marked "Baby's Shoe Money," don't gamble at all. Don't engage in risky, stupid behavior in the first place.
You can't tell poor people not to do stupid, risky stuff; they
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Summary: [...] (Something related to money and mental health, but unrelated to making decisions)
Stating the truth, that poor people are poor because of a pattern of making bad decisions, has a career-ending potential for any journalist or sociologist. This can be seen in lottery-winners, where poor lottery winners end up poor again despite benefiting from a windfall.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you think everyone starts with a million dollars and then they just have to make the right decisions to stay rich?
If someone's born poor or due to a million factors outside of their control becomes poor, they absolutely are in this cycle.
Re: (Score:2)
In some countries, people routinely raise from poor to somewhat rich, in other countries, no amount of hard work will raise their income unless they're also very lucky. You likely live in one of those countries where to be born poor is to stay poor and would like to believe otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah the slashdot summary sucks, but if you read the article it makes a hell of a lot of since.
The article makes it clear that poorer people are using so much brain activity dealing with today, they can't plan for the future and make dumb financial decisions as a result. But when those poor folks received money, their cognitive skills improved across the board.
Re:Summary? (Score:4, Insightful)
And as a corollary to that, poor people sometimes HAVE to make objectively dumb financial decisions because they simply do not have the resources to do otherwise at that moment. Payday loan companies, banks with their usurious NSF fees - and some banks strategically ordering transactions to maximize the number of NSF hits on your account for that matter - high fee and rate car loans, etc. All are examples of businesses taking advantage of poor people and their lack of options. Nobody WANTS to get a payday loan at an effective 500% APR, but when the bank NSF'd your last $30 to your name because you forgot about a $15 transaction and your bank also doesn't think you're stable enough to extend overdraft protection to, and there's no food in the pantry till payday in 6 days, and the car needs gas, you hump on down to that payday loan place and experience yet again the high cost of being poor.
Being poor also causes you to pass on ways to get ahead. One vivid story I recall was a friend of mine worked for a startup during the .com bust, and everyone at the suddenly dead .com had no last paycheck from the place, and many were just out of school and living paycheck to paycheck, including my friend. He got a hold of one of the financiers for the dead .com to see if there was something that could be done about the last check because rent was due in a week. The guy didn't have a lot of liquid cash at the moment either but said he felt really bad for my friend and offered to cut him in on another deal he was working on with another startup that was going to be doing an IPO in the next 6 months. He'd let my friend buy in to a bunch of shares that were on private offer, roughly $1000 worth, and then he could cash out when the IPO was done and the exclusion period ended. For the record, if he'd bought that $1000 worth of stock he would have been able to sell it for almost $8000 - 12 months later. But that was the rub - my friend didn't HAVE $1000 and he needed rent money next week so even if he came up with that $1000 it sure as hell wasn't going to sit on some private shares for a year. But if he DID have the money he would have made out handsomely - and while tone-deaf as hell to the immediate problem, it really *was* a generous offer that the guy didn't have to extend.
Re: Summary? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The funny thing is that you're trying to use hyperbolic irony... but a few of those disjointed and barely-intelligible statements are actually close to correct.
Its poverty that makes good people make bad decisions.
Sometimes. It's unfortunately often the case that a "good decision" is absurdly expensive compared to the amount of available money. For example, it's very cost-efficient to buy rice & beans at a store and eat for weeks on a few dollars. However, the available money doesn't cover the cost of a pot to cook in, or the utility bills for water and ru
Re: (Score:2)
The refrigeration idea is just silly. I have lived without a refrigerator for many years. I usually don't have one. This has caused me virtually no problems. The only difference is I don't have to go to the market to buy certain vegetables as often. Refrigerating tomatoes makes them last much longer for instance. A refrigerator is not like some necessity that one cannot live without. Life with a refrigerator is very slightly better, but its only a very slight difference.
It's not how much you make, it's how much you keep (Score:2)
Unfortunately, not new information. (Score:3, Insightful)
This work has been done more than a decade ago, it simply hasn't been embraced. We've known all these things for more than a decade in public education. The better thing to ask here is: Why aren't we doing anything about it still?
Re:Unfortunately, not new information. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why aren't we doing anything about it still?
Because there also exist people who no matter how much money you give them will continue to make poor life choices. No one likes having their charity abused.
People will over/under-estimate the number of such people who actually exist based on which side of the argument they happen to fall on and will try to pretend that the other side has no good points.
Re: (Score:2)
The world is filled with stupid people too.....and no amount of money or time will help.
I think it was Ron White that said it best.."...You Can't FIX Stupid..."
Re:Unfortunately, not new information. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The better thing to ask here is: Why aren't we doing anything about it still?"
I think the main reason is that people who made it across the chasm and are in good shape are too busy patting themselves on the back for what a great job they did. There's a feeling that anyone who's still poor is just not working hard enough, or they're dumb and can't make good choices because of that. This is espoused by tons of successful, type-A entrepreneurs who just can't believe everyone else isn't like them.
Not everyone is capable of doing the whole pulling-up-by-the-bootstraps thing. Your success in life depends a lot on where you start. If you are unlucky and have horrible parents, you're going to be at a huge disadvantage. Contrast that with a wealthy family's kids, who can afford to feed them right, pay for expensive private education, and pay to get them into an Ivy League school so they can get a lucrative i-banking/consulting position or become a doctor and live on Easy Street forever. Those kids just have to check all the right standardized test boxes and they're set for life compared to the rare success stories from lower classes.
It's also harder to get a foothold now than it was in the 50s/60s. Manufacturing jobs allowed the less-educated to have a very comfortable middle-class life where they were largely without dire money concerns. That's toast now...either you're a full stack developer/data scientist/doctor, or you're an Uber driver or similar minimum wage job...and it's only going to get worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Such people also seem to forget that in order to make money initially you usually have to get a job working for someone else and that requires being hireable and that requires experience and/or a degree in a relevant field and a likeable enough appearance and personality as well. Not everyone has all of those things even if they do have a very high IQ.
I know some people magically get experience when applying for their first job, but I've never been able to figure out how to do that. I think a lot of rich pe
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The Great "S" Word (Score:3)
The "s" word. Conservatives go absolutely bonkers over it (unless it's disguised as farm subsidies, corporate bailouts, or military hiring).
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it is shocking that programs designed to make it possible to survive in poverty haven't magically ended poverty.
Re: (Score:2)
This article claims we can end poverty for $175 billion. Sounds like a good deal, let's do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Subject carefully selected (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If you weren't being a racist prick at the same time the part of your argument about bullying might have been pretty good.
Money Does Buy Happiness (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Next up: you can see stars in the sky.
I just looked up, and you're wrong.
Well known and studied (Score:2)
Hans Rosling [wikipedia.org] figured this out a long time ago.
Ah, fuck, I didn't know he had died. Stupid cancer.
old old stuff.... (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:old old stuff.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...yes and just as full of shit as the author of that debunked piece of crap
https://thecollegeinvestor.com... [thecollegeinvestor.com]
Re: (Score:2)
This one's a really thorough dissection:
https://johntreed.com/blogs/jo... [johntreed.com]
It's the other way around (Score:2, Informative)
Poor decisions lead to poor people. You can be very rich (inherited or earned) or win the lottery (or casino games) and be very poor in a very short order of time. It also depends on what you consider 'rich'. Compared to Africa, making minimum wage is stinking rich!
Re: (Score:2)
The article is about a study that suggests otherwise. Do you have a better evidence?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The money given to the poor is only enough to keep them alive. Not enough to reduce their stress enough to allow them to make good enough decisions to give them and their children a good chance to not being poor.
Re: (Score:2)
stinking rich!
Stinking Kevin?
B.S. (Score:3, Informative)
The study proves exact the opposite of what you claim.
It is already well documented that work stress reduces cognitive performance and work. Burnout in Geek language. Why do you think that same impediment doesn't apply to financial stress caused by poverty?
It is a feedback loop, but you have it upside down, stress leads to poor decisions, poor decisions lead to more stress, financial in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you actually believe that?
Re: (Score:2)
Engaging in crime itself is more stressful than not being a criminal. You should try it.
Non-linear optimization (Score:2)
With a stable minimum.
Not News for Nerds (Score:2)
There isn't even a single thread of a worn rope connecting this article to technical issues.
LESS OF THIS SORT OF ARTICLE PLEASE.
Re: (Score:2)
If you see msmash or BeauHD posting something, just skip it.
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to the social sciences! I've been reading Slashdot since '99 and while part of this website's posts cover tech news this website has always included a wide range of science based posts including those pertaining to the social sciences. It has never been exclusively a tech site.
LESS OF THIS SORT OF ARTICLE PLEASE.
Not all of us have your narrow interest range. You obviously have a log-in, use your account to filter out articles like this rather than complain, It would probably take the same amount of time and you would actually get mean
Re: (Score:2)
There have always been social interest articles. They didn't used to have the current level of agenda though.
Re: (Score:2)
For starters, completely different subject than what either of us were talking about.
After that, by agenda do you mean anything that disagrees with your own personal political views?
More money often means ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure how this is news, or new news.
Re: (Score:2)
Children are expensive. Don't breed. (Score:3)
It really is that simple because I made that choice and profited financially and in terms of personal freedom. While I chose not to breed for a variety of reasons including hereditary back problems I'd never be vain enough to inflict on another person, keeping more of my money was a factor.
Children are not a necessity and most poor make them early by mistake. I've a wide variety of friends and the poor sort tend to have kids they can't afford because to put it bluntly, they fuck with zero thought to contrac
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How does that apply to the US though where Medicaid, ObamaCare and state programs pay for virtually every expense in a (truly) poor person's life?
Because they don't actually do that. For example, food stamps are not sufficient to actually feed a family.
Also, Medicaid expansion doesn't help much when your state refused to implement it....and it only helps if you get sick. If you're poor but not ill, Medicaid isn't doing anything for you.
But it is a very popular talking point among people who have no actual idea what the programs are.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The reason for that is because when you give away resources at less than their cost to produce, the economy responds by devaluing the currency to try to make the cost you're paying for those resources match what you're giving them away for. You give them away for nothing, and the economy tries to make your currency worth nothing.
Productivity must be conserved. Everything you consume must first be
Re: (Score:3)
The reason for that is because when you give away resources at less than their cost to produce, the economy responds by devaluing the currency to try to make the cost you're paying for those resources match what you're giving them away for. You give them away for nothing, and the economy tries to make your currency worth nothing.
The giant gaping hole in your theory is not that many people receive food stamps. So it isn't enough money to trigger the effects you are talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
You must never have benefited from food stamps. My parents were on food stamps regularly and I've benefited from it as well. We often traded food stamps (back when it was actually a check paying for a particular food) for cash with friends because we had TONS of food from the government and food banks.
Nowadays you just get a credit card you can use at any grocery store for virtually any item (including alcohol if you go to a non-chain corner store), Last time I got benefits (~5 years ago), we got $1200/mont
Mental Defect (Score:5, Interesting)
"so the energy they'd spent worrying about money was now freed up"
"is the cause of mental health problems among poorer people"
Poor people are no more mentally defective than not poor people.
Worrying is a Mental Defect (a mental illness). If you "worry" about anything you should see a mental health professional immediately because "worrying" about A will not change A in the slightest -- it is a useless endeavour with no rational purpose nor use -- and the sooner you are able to overcome this obsessive-compulsive disorder the better off you will be.
If you you offend yourself ("feel offended" at any time, ever) you should see a mental health professional immediately to get help with the problem of you causing offense to yourself when externalities over which you have no control cause you to have thoughts you do not like, and your inappropriate response to those thoughts.
These are the two most prevalent mental defects (illnesses) in the world today and the ones that should receive priority treatment.
The former is usually treated by self-medication without professional supervision, and the latter is, unfortunately, generally left to fester untreated in any way.
Re: (Score:3)
Worrying is a Mental Defect (a mental illness). If you "worry" about anything you should see a mental health professional immediately because "worrying" about A will not change A in the slightest -- it is a useless endeavour with no rational purpose nor use -- and the sooner you are able to overcome this obsessive-compulsive disorder the better off you will be.
I'd just like to address this -- it's not quite true. If taken to excess, you're correct, but a big part of most people's 'worrying' is, essentially, contingency planning. If something happens, what will I do to compensate/survive? Who do I know who can help me out, what can I pawn to get some extra cash, what bills can I fob off this month, etc.
Once you've exhausted the thinking you can do on that, then, yes, further worrying starts to become an illness. But before that point, it's advantageous.
Re: (Score:3)
Worrying is a Mental Defect (a mental illness). If you "worry" about anything you should see a mental health professional immediately because "worrying" about A will not change A in the slightest
You're confusing this type of worry with General Anxiety Disorder [nih.gov]. The latter is "feeling extremely worried or nervous about [...]things — even when there is little or no reason to worry about them". But in this case they probably have good reason to worry about being unable to make rent at the end of the month (for instance), and on whether skipping yet another meal would be safer (which may not be if it causes them to faint and injure themselves). Either way the consequences could be pretty dire. A
Common sense (Score:2, Funny)
This is common sense to anybody from a disadvantaged background who know that poverty puts extra stress on families; perhaps now this is backed by real evidence some conservatives might have a rethink. /probably not.
Re: Common sense (Score:3, Informative)
Chicken-egg problem (Score:2)
Very often people are poor because they make bad decisions
Re: (Score:3)
Bad decisions like popping out of the wrong vagina or being shot out of the wrong testicle.
Re: (Score:3)
Bad decisions like popping out of the wrong vagina or being shot out of the wrong testicle.
Of course. Kids are often poor because their parents make bad decisions, including the bad decision to have kids they are unprepared to raise.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I think we're talking about poverty in the US. Poverty in the rest of the world and for most of history has indeed not been a matter of choice or decisions. Since the Industrial Revolution however, even the poorest people have significantly more wealth than our ancestors did. Especially in the US, there is almost no reason to be dirt poor except either choice or severe mental problems, I'm not even sure how you can be African-poor if you have all your faculties intact.
This is true across income spectrums (Score:2)
It may come as a shock to those who have more money than they could ever spend...but money issues cause stress and that stress can lead to people not making good choices. This is true regardless of whether you're extremely poor or in OK shape but just short of money.
I make decent money in IT, and my wife does as well in another field. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a background level of money stress that prevents us from relaxing completely. Neither of us are at the point where we don't constantly w
Ignore the summary, read the article (Score:3, Interesting)
The article is an interesting read. The author makes some good points about how being poor consumes mental bandwidth, and makes it hard to focus on long-term goals. But then he proclaims:
Saying, "poverty is due to a lack of money" is like saying, "homelessness is due to a lack of homes". If poverty and homelessness could be solved by handing out more money and building more homes, we would have solved them long ago.
Oprah Winfrey learned it the hard way with her "Families for a Better Life" program 25 years ago. Even when the program provided poor families with significant resources to break the cycle of poverty, the family members keep making bad choices. As soon as the money was spent, they were right back where they started. Finally the program was abandoned after spending millions of dollars with almost zero effect.
As a friend of mine once put it, "poverty isn't a lack of money; it's a state of mind" (at least in first-world countries), a state that is created and reinforced by a multitude of factors that money alone can't fix. You can hand out every dime you have to the poor and temporarily alleviate the symptoms of poverty, but unless those factors are addressed, most of them will be "poor" again the moment the money runs out.
To some extent, this article seems to be advocating for the idea of a UBI to "fix" poverty; just give people money and eventually things will get better. If you're an advocate for universal basic income, you'll probably agree with the author's conclusions. As someone who has lived long enough to become extremely skeptical of the "throw money at it to fix it" approach, I have to respectfully disagree.
Re: (Score:2)
Saying, "poverty is due to a lack of money" is like saying, "homelessness is due to a lack of homes". If poverty and homelessness could be solved by handing out more money and building more homes, we would have solved them long ago.
Considering we never actually tried handing out money, and handing out homes has actually worked pretty well (in the form of rent-free apartments), I'm rather skeptical that we'd have "solved this long ago".
That being said, the best combo would probably be cash and a social worker.
Families for a Better Life was a bad example (Score:3)
It is fair to be skeptical of universal basic income, but you are misleading in your characterization of the failure of "Families for a Better Life".
Even when the program provided poor families with significant resources to break the cycle of poverty, the family members keep making bad choices. As soon as the money was spent, they were right back where they started. Finally the program was abandoned after spending millions of dollars with almost zero effect.
The program spent almost all the money on administration, especially screening (and arguably overscreening) candidates until it got down to a sample size of merely N=19. Many dropped out, including one due to moving out to attend college.
Other, later, UBI experiments have had much bigger sample sizes and (importantly) control groups, and more rigorous studies
All people make poor decisions sometimes. (Score:2)
If you're poor and you make a poor choice, you could end up completely screwed.
If you're not poor and you make a poor choice, it's not going to matter as much, since you have the means to correct your poor choice, and/or just say "oh well, that sucked".
Isn't that just common sense?
Re: (Score:3)
That's a big part of the feedback loop. -Every- decision can be high stakes. You can wind up fucked over by the decision, earlier in the month, to spend $15 to go to the movies, if an unexpected expense comes along. And, I think, eventually people just can't take the stress any more and stop worrying, and let the chips fall as they may.
Can I give mod points to the posting editor? (Score:2)
Rich or Poor? What does that even mean to us? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Rich or Poor? What does that even mean to us?
Excellent question. Several types of "poor" confound any such discussion. Establishment group-think recognizes at least two important types of poor; poor whites and poor everyone else. The former are poor because they engage in "poor decision making" and are, therefore, worthy of only contempt. The latter are instinctually excused for whatever poor decisions they might make and are afforded every benefit of the doubt at all times.
The truth is almost none of the "poor" are really poor. They all eat.
Don't ignore instilled discipline. (Score:2)
Imposed (ethical) discipline instills discipline. Self-mastery is power.
My Silent Generation parents are examples. My mother was so poor (they were born in 1925 and 1926) she didn't get glasses until her teens. Both grew up disadvantaged, but their parents instilled ethical discipline and it worked. They were thrifty, EFFICIENT spenders and retired comfortably.
I've a wide mix of friends and the poor stay poor because they lack self-discipline. Some refuse to make good choices even when warned in detail, lik
Re: (Score:2)
How do you know what their interests are? Do you think those "poor middle-Americans" have an interest in being talked down to by the coastal elites that have worked to implement laws that pushed manufacturing jobs oversees? Or, maybe they have an interest in being ruled over by petty tyrants that want to tax away half their income in exchange for a promise of "free stuff" of the petty tyrant's choosing. Or, maybe you're one of those that assumes that everyone in your echo chamber is obviously morally sup
Re: (Score:2)
Trash and waste in the streets... city police not stoping crime.. no new jobs, no private sector investment.
Massive city and state tax rates to spend on city/state "services" that did nothing...
Time to try the other side of politics.
Re: (Score:2)
And, that lower income comes with both a lower cost of living and room enough to piss without hitting your neighbor.
Re: (Score:2)
Poverty measures are definitely open to interpretation. If you're going to set a nation-wide minimum income and then measure how far you're off from that measure, that tells you nothing. I wouldn't want to live anywhere near SF or LA with at least 2-3x the poverty measure, move to rural PA and not only can you live there on the national poverty rate, you can probably afford a house and car if you don't waste it on smokes and alcohol.
And when you do measure adjusted poverty rates (Supplemental Poverty Measur
Re: (Score:2)
You must not be in the lower or middle class if you don't get a tax break. Approximately 80% of people under 100k got a tax cut with the middle class getting nearly 90%. In absolute value, higher earners obviously get the most money out of the tax breaks but they also pay more to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cant teach IQ.
Punctuation on the other hand ...
Re:Bad title? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to take from your comment that you were raised without enough food to eat and a parent or guardian barely living paycheck to paycheck, having to move constantly from community to community to survive, with no family or other social safety net, and yet you managed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and reach a point where you could comfortably be a dick here on Slashdot? Good for you! You beat the odds. The actual data shows that the most likely cause of poverty, even in America, is in fact starting out in poverty. Yes, there are dysfunctional poor people and there are dysfunctional rich people. Do you honestly think that if Trump's daddy hadn't given him almost half a billion dollars that he wouldn't be a janitor or yard worker? America has lots of opportunity, but it hasn't been very economically mobile for the last few decades. It's expensive to be poor! Everything costs more-- you can't take advantage of as many deals, credit is hard to come by, everything has extra fees attached to it, all purchases are on an emergency short-term basis, and the constant stress distracts you from improving things. I think you missed the entire point of the article, and, in fact, life.
Re:Bad title? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
'The lessons from that do not apply to homeless people in San Francisco.'
Why not? A person could be homeless in San Francisco and still be earning a very high income. And a person could be homeless in San Francisco and be earning no income.
The difference is, in the US it's pretty hard to be hungry. This country doesn't require participation [by those able to], to eat. The fact remains that if you have no money, no food and no roof here, you get a shot. You get fed, clothed, roofed and are offered a
Re: (Score:2)
The fact remains that if you have no money, no food and no roof here, you get a shot. You get fed, clothed, roofed and are offered and coaxed to participate.
Wait what? Who exactly is offering all of this free food and clothes and housing to anyone who wants it? Are you talking about the United States? At first I thought maybe this was all sarcasm but you are apparently serious. I don't even know what to say to all of these delusions.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait what? Who exactly is offering all of this free food and clothes and housing to anyone who wants it?
Many cities provide temporary shelter and food to anyone who needs it and is willing to follow the rules. Most homeless shelters have a box of donated clothes.
If you are homeless and you don't have a cot to sleep on or a bowl of food to eat, you are in the wrong city. Head for the coast.
Re: (Score:2)
Oceans of opportunity? Poor people are dysfunctional? What planet are you from?
Re: (Score:2)
Swapping any word for any other completely alters a meaning. Why on earth would you do that with the intention of debating, unless you were absolutely stark staring mad?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah - richsplainers most certainly are bigoted and wrong. The only difference is the target of their bigotry is based on class and not race or religion.
You're doing it right now. Richsplaining.
Bourgie shits like you are why gulags were invented. There's a lot more poor people than