Well, I see a shared room on Craig’s List in Flint for $80. And $80 doesn’t buy you a heck of a lot at Home Depot. I would be surprised if you could maintain a home for less than that.
Again, I understand you would rather live in a real house than a shared room. That’s fine. But it’s not different than Bill McPoverty preferring to eat a hamburger rather than a crock pot full of potatoes. Basically everyone spends money they don’t technically have to on things they think make their life better.
I totally agree with this. I’m at the age and income level where everyone expects me to be a homeowner, but I don’t wanna. And not all of my reasons are financial. For one thing, I really like where I live. Why would I uproot myself from a neighborhood I love to go to a neighborhood I feel “meh” about? “Meh” is about all I can afford on my salary. I’m a single woman approaching middle-age. “Meh” isn’t up my alley anymore. I want to love where I live. I can afford something decent in a suburb somewhere, but I’m not a suburban type of person. I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to drive unless she absolutely has to. Nor am I the type of person who wants to fix 'er up or do renovations every ten years or worry about property values.
Real estate is an investment, but it’s not the ONLY investment. There a whole lot easier ways to invest that don’t involve the headaches one experiences with homeownership.
So yeah, I’m tired of homeownership being equated with responsibility. All the people I know who are in out-of-control debt are homeowners with too much house. Prosperity isn’t what you own. It’s how easy you can sleep at night.
This reminds me of people who habitually write rubber checks, because they don’t understand that you have to have money in the bank to back them up.
I used to work with a woman who, along with her now ex-husband, bought a house when they got married. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but she’s a pharmacist and he was (and apparently still is) a high school teacher, with a combined income of about $150,000, and they took the “get a mortgage no more than twice your income” advice a bit too literally. You guessed it - at age 25 or so, with no kids, they bought a 5BR 6BA McMansion. :eek: They later had two kids (I’m pretty sure she oopsed him on the second one, too) and to nobody’s surprised got divorced a few years ago. You can’t tell me that the financial and other problems caused by that house weren’t a factor.
Back when I worked with her, she was telling people at work that she believed her husband was cheating on her with some of his students. If that’s true, he belonged in jail, and if it wasn’t true, it was a sure sign that the marriage wasn’t worth salvaging because it’s an accusation as vile as accusing him of messing around with the kids when there’s no evidence that he is. :mad:
Well that and a lot of the stuff she makes is disgusting. Kwanzaa cake, anyone?
The idea that in the US most poor people stay poor their whole lives is also wrong.
And the ability to defer gratification is a large part of what controls if you stay poor, or move up into the working or middle class (or higher).
Yes, it was more expensive. Because you are paying for all those costs for Taco Bell just as surely as if you did it yourself. That’s the point.
The idea that most poor people in the US do not have access to a kitchen is also wrong.
Regards,
Shodan
Seems to me the guy who wrote the Cracked article grew up poor in a family of entrenched poverty. He wasn’t speaking of the family that falls on hard times for a year or two then recovers, he was talking about multi-generational poverty and some of the bad “poverty culture” things attached to it that are partly a result of perverse incentives in the system and partly why some people do stay impoverished.
The idea that there are no poor people without access to kitchens is also wrong. There are different levels of poverty and “no kitchen” is one of them.
Even if you do have access to a kitchen you need to know how to use it - and if you don’t learn that growing up when will you? Some folks will pick it up at some point but I know far too many people who simply do not know how to cook beyond sticking something in a microwave and randomly hitting buttons until the food warms up. Such people are engaged in a practice that contributes to financial issues. If you have a six figure income that’s not a big deal, you can afford to eat out for every meal if you want to spend your money that way (when I met my spouse that was indeed his situation, though I will point out that he did know how to do basic cooking he simply chose not to and was making sufficient money that paying someone else to cook for him wasn’t a problem). If you’re at the poverty line, though, that may be a luxury you should do without most of the time.
Basic cooking skills is something that should be taught but apparently aren’t. Schools used to require “home ec”, but I assume that’s been cut along with wood shop and band and art. Shame, really. Learning to cook is how I learned some of my basic math and how to manipulate fractions, gosh darn, math has a use? In my day the school had us making jello and no-cook pudding in the first grade, these days I run into people who can’t seem to do something so simple as that.
That’s all I can do. Yet I eat very healthily for not much money.
Five days out of the week I eat steamed vegetables and roasted chicken for dinner. I put each in the microwave for 3.5 minutes, and then throw them in the same bowl. It’s extremely nutritious, simple, fast, and cheap.
But… if you show this to a poor person, chances are they’ll say, “that’s interesting,” and then gorge themselves with fat-laden foods. You can provide them nutritious food for free, and educate them on the health benefits for hours on end. But they’ll still reject it.
Several years ago someone in my (very poor) neighborhood got a grant to plant vegetable gardens in empty lots and hire kids to work them. The vegetables were free to whoever wanted them.
The project was abandoned after two years for lack of interest.
97.7% of poor households in the US have a stove and a refrigerator. So, the overwhelmingly huge majority of the time, the idea that the poor waste their money on fast food because they don’t have a kitchen is wrong.
Regards,
Shodan
Apologists are good at dreaming up all kinds of creative excuses as to why poor people are fat/obese. They claim healthy food is “too expensive.” They claim they don’t have “access” to healthy food. They claim they’re “ignorant.” They claim they don’t have stoves and microwaves.
The simple truth is that most poor people like to gorge themselves with fat-laden, high-calorie foods. No amount of “education” will change this. Given a choice between healthy food that’s free, and garbage/processed foods they have to pay for, the vast majority will choose the latter.
I’m wondering what the significance of “poor” can be in this assertion. Is this true only of poor people? How could that be?
Here home ec (and shop) are state requirements in middle school - unless your school fits under some exception (charter schools and very small schools don’t have to), yet the issue persists. People who want to learn how to eat nutritiously and cheaply do - people who do not like to make excuses. I’ve heard friends make the same argument being made here - people who I KNOW took the same home ec courses I did.
And yeah, lack of a kitchen really puts a cramp in things - as everyone who has done hotpot cooking in a dorm room knows - but as everyone who has done hotpot cooking in a dorm room knows (or anyone who has used a crockpot, or gone on a hiking trip), lack of kitchen does not prevent you from cooking.
Why do you say “most poor people like to gorge themselves with fat-laden, high-calorie foods”? Most people, poor or rich, like to gorge themselves with fat-laden, high-calorie foods. This is, in part, a legacy of our earlier history when we developed an evolutionary preference for fat-laden, high-calorie foods. Those who don’t prefer such foods are either rare or have trained themselves to prefer healthier foods. It’s not merely a consequence of being richer.
Of course not. But apologists want us to believe poor people are fat/obese through no fault of their own.
Because the point is that we like to dream up excuses for why poor people are fat/obese. (“It’s not their fault they’re fat, because…”) We do not make excuses for obese people who are not poor.
You are right - MOST people - and certainly the American palate - love high fat, high caloric, and sweet food. Lettuce, according to my daughter (who is not poor), tastes “like sadness.” But the cracked article is making the claim that poor people eat like that because that is all they can afford/have access to. The economist claim is that its cheaper.
The simple fact is that it takes discipline for most people to 1) eat well and 2) manage their finances. It also takes some knowledge and the desire to do so. The ability to both plan ahead (I better soak beans tonight and throw them in the crockpot tomorrow) and to delay gratification (I’m hungry now, I can run through the McDonalds drive through, or I can make it home and it will take me fifteen minutes to make polenta (grits, if you prefer) and a scrambled egg). Plus the ability (be it intelligence or street smarts) to see what these things will get you in the end. Those are issues across all income scales - it isn’t like the middle class is any better at delaying gratification - but the middle class gets more room to make mistakes - they get a safety net. The rich get a safety net and a harness - they almost need to purposely sabotage themselves to end up poor. But the poor, they work without a net. They can build themselves a net, but its a hell of a lot of work.
Probably the biggest problem with being poor is that MOST people who live in intergenerational poverty can’t see out - a few can, do, and will have the tenacity to free themselves.
Training. Discipline. Knowledge. Planning. Sounds like it is largely a matter of education.
Discipline and planning have very little to do with education. Some of the best educated people are the ones with little discipline who can’t plan. Training and knowledge, those are education, but as I said, around here at least, there are plenty of options to get that training and knowledge - from mandatory home ec coursework in middle school to state run coursework offered through extention to social workers who teach you to shop and cook (like my minister’s husband). However, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him actually listen when he is twelve years old and a home ec teacher is trying to teach him how to scramble an egg. Nor can you force the woman picking up her food stamps to read the brochure you include on how to stretch your grocery dollar in nutritious ways. The resources are there for training and education, but in order to have it work, people need time (a problem for the working poor) and - perhaps more importantly - the desire to learn.
As a poor person who regularly cooks from scratch and largely eats vegetables and whole grains I take some offense at your characterization of poor people (which would, presumably, include me) as “gorging” on fat-laden foods and typically refusing nutritious food.
Or did you think poor people were excluded from the Dope?
Biased, much?
Did I SAY the majority of the poor had no kitchen? No, I never said that.
I really wish people would read what’s in front of them instead of what they imagine they’re reading.
I said that it exists, not that it was universal. If you’re so poor as to not have a kitchen you are in truly desperate straights.
It’s the same as the notion that most poor people are poor their entire lives. THEY AREN’T. That’s minority of poor people, but in many ways that’s a population that really, really needs our help because such entrenched poverty points to something very wrong in such lives/families. It doesn’t do any good to say they’re stupid, ignorant, make bad choices… that doesn’t solve the base problem. If you don’t solve the CAUSE of their poverty you won’t solve their poverty and they’ll stay poor.
The author of the Cracked article somehow managed to escape that cycle, although one of the points of that article is that he still retains some very unhelpful habits from his childhood.
