The Culture of Poverty, the Culture of Cruelty: How America Fights the Poor and Not Poverty

[Derec]

I am? How?

Because you are saying that it is ok for the poor to waste their money (and perpetuate their poverty) through frivolous lifestyle purchases.

You're telling me that some poor people make what look like bad choices. I'm asking why this is an occasion for moral outrage.

The only moral outrage is the one in the OP (language like "America fights the poor") of this thread and in the WaPo article.

And a factory closure will knock out the thifty and frugal alike.

Not nearly to the same extent as it would the profligate and irresponsible.

That's the point of the analogy. In a landscape of historically low income, widespread part time working and tight credit, you reckon the real issue is that poor people in general spend too much on sofas?

It makes a difference if you manage your debt levels, build savings, get education vs. get ever deeper into debt, have no savings to speak of and sit on your high school dropout ass instead of getting a GED at least. It's not just the sofa, although it's a big chunk ($3k wasted, enough to buy an older model used car outright).

And financial hits can make good decisions irrelevant.

No they can't. You are still better off having made good decisions vs. bad.

Either way, whether you can get a full-time job is more important than what sofa you buy.

If you don't have a full time job you have no business buying expensive furniture and then complaining how broke you are to a national newspaper.

Yes you are. You are specifically and exactly complaining about them gaining new furniture, because you feel that they can't afford it, and that because they are poor they shouldn't have it.

I am complaining about them getting expensive, fancy new furniture when there are much less expensive new furniture options available. I am complaining about them doing it through an even more expensive rent-to-own deal when they should have saved to pay cash for it. They could have had new furniture and saved at least $3,000 if they'd been smarter about their money. That's my whole point. Most of their problems stem from the fact that they are just not making good financial decisions.

Poor people shouldn't have nice things. They should have poor things, to save money and reflect their status. It's not a pretty conclusion.

All people should live within their means, not beyond it. That is not exclusive to poor people, it's just that the lower your income is the lower your means are and the lower your standard of living will be. It may not be pretty, but poor people are not served well with advice to live it up, not care about their financial limitations and live beyond their means. That only ensures that they will remain poor for the long term, instead of improving their financial situation.

Sure, but we don't compromise all the time. You're taking one decision, and claiming that they should have compromised on that. Has anyone ever done that to you?

It's not one decision, although that one has a particularly high price tag ($4,150). No, the article mentions several others
- adding more rent-to-own stuff to their Buddy's bill. Including buying a new smart phone when they struggle to pay their phone bill.
- smoking. Not only expensive but bad for their health. The wife complains of psoriasis when smoking can cause and exacerbate psoriasis.
- not finishing high school. The wife complains of not being able to find a job with her 9th grade education but she makes no efforts to rectify that by getting her GED and maybe going to a community or technical college to learn some marketable skills.

Sucker. I got an office chair from staples, marked down once for being end of the line and unsold, and marked down again for being the display model. The store manager was so desperate to get rid of it they threw in free delivery. But not all my buying decisions are like that.

Good for you. I did shop office supplies stores of course but this was the best deal for the type of chair I was looking for.

Ikea is, or so I'm told, not well regarded in the South. Something about the designs being unsuited to high humidity?

I don't know about that. There is a store here in Atlanta and I got some pieces there, including a desk several years ago and have seen no issues with humidity.
But IKEA is just an example as it is a well known international brand. But there are other affordable furniture stores.

So.. you do have a problem with them being poor and having nice things.

If by nice you mean expensive then yes.

And are the problems of the rural poor in the south down to low pay, an excess of part-time contracts, little or no social safety net, poor health cover and predatory lending, or is it down to a rash of sofa-buying?

They are all interrelated and all contribute their share. Low pay is related to education. Predatory lending is the last refuge of those that have ruined their credit (solution - rebuild your credit to be offered better financing terms). Obamacare is helping with healthcare (although southern states tend to do their best to hinder it of course by for example refusing Medicare expansion or to set up state exchanges) but much of health is related to one's choices,. like smoking and diet.
Frivolous purchases that one can't afford definitely add to the problem.

I'm not convinced that's what we're looking at. We're just looking at people with very little in the way of means, and no real way out.

If they continue acting like they do they have no real way out. Which is why I am so frustrated with you defending their decisions. As you say they have little in the way of means, but they need to learn to live within them. Then there is much they can do
- set the $3,000 saved from the furniture purchase over time as savings or to pay off other debts etc.
- wife should get her GED for starters. Find a job even if part time.
- recognize that truck driving work is unsteady and set extra money earned when the business is good for living expenses when the work is slower.

Look, they could buy the sofa outright by saving money.

That's what I've been saying!

After a year or two of no sofa, which might cost the manual labourer his livelihood and damage their home,

Why would it cost him his livelihood? And why would it damage their home? Please be specific.

they could afford a crappy sofa which may or may not last a while.

Why should a $500 or $600 sofa be crappy? May not have leather or built in recliner but it should be solid enough.

Or they can get a nice sofa now, and enjoy it until they suffer from a minor disaster, can't afford the payments, and have to return it to the store.

Sounds like a solid, financially sound plan. Just like they could get a nice new car and enjoy it until it gets repo-ed.

I can see why you might feel the former is better, but the latter isn't totally irrational.

Really?

Are their lives likely to change if they refrain from sofa-renting?

Yes. To the tune of $3,000 in savings vs. buying decent furniture for cash. Actually more as they admit going to the store to pay their bill (in person? why? No internet or US Postal Service where they live?) they are tempted to add more stuff to their bill. I must admit, it's a great business model - for the store.

Or will it stay more or less the same until he gets more work?

Or less.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The confusion of individuals who are poor with the socio-economic condition known as poverty continues on.

 

[Togo]

Because you are saying that it is ok for the poor to waste their money (and perpetuate their poverty) through frivolous lifestyle purchases.

Cite please.

You're saying it's not ok for the poor to make particular purchases. I'm not seeing any particular reason to make sweeping statements about poor people.

You're telling me that some poor people make what look like bad choices. I'm asking why this is an occasion for moral outrage.

The only moral outrage is the one in the OP (language like "America fights the poor") of this thread and in the WaPo article.

Ok, so you have no moral problems whatsoever about the sofa purchase? Then what exactly is the nature of your complaint?

And a factory closure will knock out the thifty and frugal alike.

Not nearly to the same extent as it would the profligate and irresponsible.

Of course to nearly the same extent. If your income goes, and you're never going to get another job in the same industry ever again, and are thrown onto the job market with several thousand people in the same situation, the difficulty you face isn't to any useful extent about whether or not you've been buying dinner from the discount bin in the supermarket.

That's the point of the analogy. In a landscape of historically low income, widespread part time working and tight credit, you reckon the real issue is that poor people in general spend too much on sofas?

It makes a difference if you manage your debt levels, build savings, get education vs. get ever deeper into debt, have no savings to speak of and sit on your high school dropout ass instead of getting a GED at least. It's not just the sofa, although it's a big chunk ($3k wasted, enough to buy an older model used car outright).

Yes you are. You are specifically and exactly complaining about them gaining new furniture, because you feel that they can't afford it, and that because they are poor they shouldn't have it.

I am complaining about them getting expensive, fancy new furniture when there are much less expensive new furniture options available. I am complaining about them doing it through an even more expensive rent-to-own deal when they should have saved to pay cash for it. They could have had new furniture and saved at least $3,000 if they'd been smarter about their money. That's my whole point. Most of their problems stem from the fact that they are just not making good financial decisions.

And I have a lot of sympathy for your position, right up until the last sentance, which appears to have been tacked on with no evidence whatsoever. How have you measured the problems of the poor, and determined that poor financial decisions alone are responsible?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Goodness me no. That would be immoral and reprehensible.

What we should do is find a tiny handful of examples of people who may have gamed the system...

Or perhaps we could try a more pragmatic and reasonable approach wherein we investigate those situations where gaming of the system has occurred, determine how large those loopholes are, and take reasonable steps to reduce the likelihood of repeat occurrences. In that fashion we can ensure that the funds and resources intended to help aren't lost.

You seem to be implying that America's welfare system doesn't already do this as a matter of course. What makes you think that?

what exactly do you mean? That we live on a finite planet? Yes.

That the distribution of the resources of this finite planet is not so skewed that manmade scarcities in certain communites rise up over and over and over again? no.

I mean that the government collects a limited amount of funds each year in the form of revenue, and that at least some of that revenue must go toward other things like the cost of running the government itself, necessary services like fire and police, and to some extent the military. Not to mention grants for research and the arts.

The amount of monies available to support those in need is not infinite.

So this comes down to the classic guns vs. butter discussion. We CAN devote our resources to alleviating (if not eliminating) poverty and hunger in the United States, but then we might only be able to afford 6 aircraft carriers instead of the expected 10. And if we only have 6 aircraft carriers we'll be in real trouble when the Soviet Union invades the Spratly Islands on behalf of China.

We should be doing this for financiers and large corporations first.

If nothing else, it's a far more efficient use of funds. A call to investigate and regulate the money wasted by poor people is a call to spend money on trying to save money. And the amount you spend will always be greater than the amount you recoup, because the individual sums are tiny and the problem is spread out over vast numbers of people. By contrast simply inspecting tax and market irregularities of banks, corporations, financiers and the very rich is almost self-financing - one successful case pays for the team for a year or more, a very successful large case pays for it for a decade. Yet we don't spend money on that, because that makes rich people unhappy.

Same thing happened when they started drug testing welfare applicants. It turns out the cost of drug testing everyone who applies for welfare is significantly higher -- almost by an order of magnitude -- than the amount of money saved by not giving benefits to drug users.

It's worth pointing out that it is always more efficient to make a system fault-tolerant than fault-proof. It is not possible or even advisable to completely eliminate welfare cheats; it is perfectly possible, however, to reduce the amount of money that could be wasted by cheaters. This is the reason why the current welfare system has built-in restrictions on what those funds can and cannot be used for (e.g. foodstamps can only be used to purchase non-alcoholic food items from legitimate grocers; WIC can only be used for dairy and food/supplies for infants). At this point the only way to cheat the system is to apply for foodstamps without disclosing an additional source of income in order to get more benefits than you would normally qualify for. Given that most welfare systems have a benefit cap, a cheater might get himself an extra $300 a month, or $3600 a year. If one million people all did this at once, it would cost the welfare system an additional $3.6 billion every year. Even in this extreme case, it is difficult to say that all of that money would be wasted; just as not everyone who uses government assistance is cheating, not everyone who cheats spends the money frivolously (some would probably use the extra cash to pay off their debts a little bit faster).

 

[laughing dog]

And I have a lot of sympathy for your position, right up until the last sentance, which appears to have been tacked on with no evidence whatsoever. How have you measured the problems of the poor, and determined that poor financial decisions alone are responsible?

Well, if they avoided poor financial decisions, then they would not be poor. It is the simplest reasoning around,

 

[bilby]

And I have a lot of sympathy for your position, right up until the last sentance, which appears to have been tacked on with no evidence whatsoever. How have you measured the problems of the poor, and determined that poor financial decisions alone are responsible?

Well, if they avoided poor financial decisions, then they would not be poor. It is the simplest reasoning around,

And of course it is supported by the good old argument from consequences, coupled with the inherent fear in a society with an inadequate social safety net: Poverty MUST be caused by an intrinsic failing on the part of the poor, because if it were not, then I would be at risk of falling into the trap myself; and that is too terrifying to even contemplate.

 

[Emily Lake]

You seem to be implying that America's welfare system doesn't already do this as a matter of course. What makes you think that?

I'm far from an expert, so I certainly don't claim that it doesn't do at least some degree. I know that many other entitlement systems in the US do NOT do anything reasonable in terms of closing loopholes and preventing abuse. Medicare is well-known for the amount of fraud in the system, and has only very recently begun the most basic of fraud prevention steps. I assume that the apathy embedded in so many of our other federal systems exists in the various needs-based welfare systems also.

So this comes down to the classic guns vs. butter discussion. We CAN devote our resources to alleviating (if not eliminating) poverty and hunger in the United States, but then we might only be able to afford 6 aircraft carriers instead of the expected 10. And if we only have 6 aircraft carriers we'll be in real trouble when the Soviet Union invades the Spratly Islands on behalf of China.

Even if you eliminate the entirety of the military budget and divert it all to needs-based welfare systems... there is still a limit to those funds, is there not? At the end of the day, there exists some limit, and a continual answer of "more money" is not a good answer. We must first acknowledge that there is a limited pot of funds available, even if that pot is large. Then we must make rational decisions about how best to allocate those funds.