(Cite?)
Because, without the judgmental aspect or saying they deserve to be poor, it’s just not very relevant to any of the things we progressives talk about. The only reason why poor people with luxury goods is ever brought up is as a way to shame us.
Personally, I would just argue that less poor people don’t usually do any better. Some level of “bad financial decisions” is normal, because no one is perfect.
I also will point out that “high status goods” like sneakers are ones where the more expensive ones have greater utility. I got Nikes growing up because they were a better investment, as they lasted much longer, and didn’t give me blisters and such like other shoes.
Now I don’t buy them, but I’m not nearly as active–and cheaper shoes have gotten better, IMO.
Sneakers: Don’t assume poor folks are paying full-price for name brand sneakers. My gym collects lightly-used shoes to distribute to the underprivileged, and there are some fancy-ass shoes in there. I’ve gotten some great buys on name brand clothing at thrift shops. Also, cheap, no-name shoes wear out faster. Ask me how I know. 
Grad school: teaching assistantships are not as easy to get as they once were. Graduate assistantship positions are not available in every graduate program and at every college. Only 5.6% of all grad students get a TA-ship.
Starbucks: Noting a bunch of people you’re sure are poor at a Starbucks doesn’t mean most poor people go there. Same with sneakers.
If you want to look at something people buy they can’t afford, take a look at healthcare. The average person spends well over $300,000 on healthcare over the course of a lifetime. That’s a helluva lot of lattes.
I grew up rising buses in New York, but more recently I’ve ridden a lot of buses in San Francisco. There is an app which accurately reports where the bus is and when it is showing up, and the riders are not all poor. I don’t particularly care about whether it is on time, but you get delayed in a car also - more than a bus. Not to mention parking problems. Buses have their own lanes and are thus a lot faster than cars in the city. Light rail and BART are even better.
Riding buses. It’s late.
The average car today lasts 11.4 years. I can’t find a statistic for cars built in the '50s and '60s, but I’ve owned cars from the '60s and '70s, and it would be a miracle if they lasted 10 years. I have a Prius which is 10 years old and which is more mechanically sound than my Fords from the mid to late '60s at 3 years old. Since my family didn’t have that much money we bought cars from people who traded them in every 2 years - much more common a thing than today.
If people finance more now - do they? - it might be because they’ve fallen behind due to income inequality and have no other choice.
New smartphones cost too much - but there has been pushback about paying those prices. I’d like to see some data saying that the buyers of those phones are poor. There will be examples of course, but keeping up with the Joneses is not a concept invented in the past 20 years.
If employers want to dole out jobs without benefits and calling their victims contractors it is a lot easier to blame the poor and lower middle class for their spending habits than themselves for their pay habits. And then blame the unions.
I talked to a fair number of students in the NYU graduate film program when my daughter was acting (for free) in their films. Nobody was getting assistantships there.
If you are going to grad school for a PhD in a STEM field, then you should get money. Not if you are going for a Masters only.
I didn’t pay for grad school. Neither did my wife or older daughter. My younger daughter got her masters in business in Germany. I paid for that - but tuition was like $800 a term, so trivial it was worth it.
And you are not considering how large college debt works against a graduate being able to take a risk to start a business or otherwise innovate. Or delay starting a family.
Guess what. The law in California is that cities cannot zone against relatively tall housing within a mile of transit hubs. Including in San Francisco. But the demand is so great that this hasn’t made a dent yet, despite requirements for what passes as affordable houses near here. Source is one of our City Councilmen (not in San Francisco, or close) who basically said that cities know to not even try to limit relatively tall housing.
The real problem is someplace like Apple which hires like crazy, buys up land, but which won’t do anything to improve the housing stock. I think they might have finally been shamed into it. Google and Facebook are doing a bit better.
There is an app for the buses in my city. It’s great when it is working, but it is often inaccurate. Like, sometimes it will tell you the the next bus is more than 30 minutes away when really it is right around the corner. An app that is that inaccurate is worse than no app at all.
Not all the bus riders in my city are poor either. I’m not poor and I ride the bus (usually when the weather is too bad for walking). But the thing is that the crappier routes (the ones that run less frequently and have bus stops that are spread out) tend to be concentrated in the poor neighborhoods. The folks who sing the praises of the transit system tend to be the folks who live near the main corridor, which is served by a bus with a dedicated lane every 15 minutes. Or they are folks like me who have options besides taking the bus. We also just happen to be the folks who tend to work salaried jobs at the university or downtown–jobs where showing up too early or too late is no big deal because we can always leave early or stay late. The folks who are always about to lose their minds when they get on the bus when it’s running late are the folks dressed in fast food uniforms and the like. The app probably makes their lives a bit easier, but it’s really not enough to make up for the fact they have to walk a mile or more to even get to a stop and then transfer to another bus that may not arrive for another hour.
The city invested so much in increasing white middle-class ridership. And I totally get why this needs to happen. But I really hope the extra profits go towards improving the routes for the poor neighborhoods who are truly dependent on public transit. That’s what we were promised would eventually happen, but I’m not holding my breath.
Somebody still has to pay back the $80,000.
Regards,
Shodan
You’re right, but I think what you missed was the fact that the cost of college is outrageously inflated. There’s really no reason for most college degrees at most colleges (leaving out the Ivy League) to cost that much. I graduated from a state university in 1989 with a bachelor degree in computer science - paid for with a part-time job in fast food and no loans or grants. I was too poor to eat, and it took seven years, but I managed. That’s impossible these days because of the cost inflation. If we correct that, then the taxpayers aren’t paying THAT much per student.
I doubt Shodan did miss that. One arguable reason college costs have increased so rapidly is public subsidies as they stand now, in form of preferential loan rates and terms compared to strictly market ones. The greater willingness to use borrowed money to pay tuition surely doesn’t put market pressure on universities to limit their tuition increases to keep the classrooms full.
Now extend that to making tuition ‘free(er)’ at the margin with even more generous loan cancellation etc policies. Whatever the benefits of that arguably be, they would not include putting downward pressure on college costs.
If the whole university system were nationally collectivized and subjected to rigorous price controls…well that would be a completely different system and not what politicians are talking about in stump speeches now, which is or implies simply that the public will pay instead of the student under otherwise more or less the same university system. That certainly wouldn’t improve the cost situation: Econ 101 both theoretical and real world. Whereas a complete nationalization would have its own resource misallocation issues like any collectivization does, and an actual focus on saving taxpayer money under such a system is very much theoretical, highly subject to not panning out in the real world. ‘Free college’ in reality would probably mean removing some of the remainder of the albeit weak market discipline on college costs that exists now. I believe anyone proposing it has to accept that, and argue that other benefits outweigh that. Arguing for ‘free college’, in the form commonly proposed now, as a solution to the college cost problem is not realistic.
Of course some poor people make terrible financial choices. So do some middle class people and some rich people.
The problem is that many people – not necessarily you – seem to assume that the poor people are poor only because they make those choices, and that they’d be financially much better off if they just bought cheaper shoes; and that those choices reflect on poor people in general, but that terrible financial choices made by middle class or rich people reflect only on those specific individuals – or, often, not even on those individuals, as long as they manage to keep presenting as well-off.
When people see parents and children wearing expensive shoes at the opera, or at the golf course club house, or at the museum, or getting into a fancy car on the rich side of town: how often do most people wonder whether those parents can really afford those shoes or that car or that house, and suspect that they don’t know a damn thing about saving money and are into high-end consumer goods because they make them feel good?
Do you know whether the employee in question had a working stove and a working refrigerator in a functional kitchen?
Maybe she was just a fool. Some people are. But maybe she was trying to cope with things you haven’t thought of.
The US worships the gods of free market capitalism, and individual freedom. Attempts to direct industry to providing for the “public good” (however you define that), are decried as an infringement on personal liberties and business interests. Many aspects of our laws/regs enable producers, advertisers to directly appeal to the consumer, paying more attention to short term financial gains while imposing externalities on others. And a many aspects of our modern lives are quite complex, while I have it on good information that half of our population is below average intelligence.
We’ve taken a number of steps to create a consumption driven economy, with no concern whether it is scalable worldwide. Folk have mentioned phones, cars, and coffee. Undeniable instances of people WANTING the latest/biggest/fastest. And how about housing? Big homes, with zoned heating/AC, in remote communities which encourage additional driving?
I think Americans tend to be greedy, selfish and short-sighted, with limited interest in “the common good.” Not sure how we compare to other people. I imagine many/most people would be just as greedy and selfish as we are in the right environment. And advertising/PR is EXTREMELY effective in influencing consumers wants and perceptions.
I think it incorrect to say business is neutral. I do think industry - and our overall economy - supports bad decisions. There is a HUGE disparity in knowledge and resources between the large organizations and the individual consumer. The large organizations are better able to protect themselves against undesirable developments. And, our culture allows both organizations and individuals to absolve themselves of the results of poor choices, through reorganization, bankruptcy, refinancing, etc. Heck, as soon as a group of people make the same poor choices, a for-profit organization pops up to profit off of them!
What is the alternative? For the US to intentionally pursue an agenda of lowering lifestyle expectations, with the goal of sustainability and attainability by all? Sounds good to me, but not sure I could imagine it happening.
Well, yes, and somebody has to pay for teachers’ salaries too. And the salaries of police officers, highway workers, and garbage men. We also pay for schools and bridges and libraries and sewers and aircraft carriers.
These are public services. They’re not intended to make a profit. Their purpose is to make the community livable.
So the question should be “Is it a good idea for the government to spend money educating people?” not “Will the government make a profit off of educating people?”
To your last paragraph, I can’t a US government actively and explicitly encouraging lowered lifestyle expectations. But I can imagine a government that makes it easier to live a simpler lifestyle.
There are few options for the person who doesn’t want to be or can’t hack it in the rat race, but doesn’t want to live in abject poverty. There are some options–get married to a rat racer, live with parents or roommates, try to claim disability, etc. But they are not ideal. What would be ideal is if everyone was guaranteed a basic lifestyle. A entire suite of niches would be opened up for people who would love to stay home and raise kids and bake bread instead of stressing out in front of a computer all day. Or people who would prefer working on art and other creative endeavors instead of selling cars and smart phones. I think a lot of the mindless consumption people engage in is retail therapy–a way to cope with the rat race and the status-anxiety it causes. People go to Starbucks because it helps them face the shit load of work waiting for them. People go on expensive vacations because they need some kind of reward for putting up with the daily grind everyday.
We live in a society where the simple modest life is associated with “losers” who screwed up somehow. If it became easier for all kinds of people to opt in for a simple modest life, maybe that attitude would change.
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Definitely no problems is the first regard. And as to the second she would not be qualified for the job if she was a fool in general. Mrs. FtG talked her a lot about this issue on many occasions. There was no secret “excuse” for the waste of money. She just preferred to eat out and was oblivious to the accumulated costs that meant.
Somebody still has to pay back the 80 grand.
Governments don’t make a profit, so the second of your questions doesn’t need even to be asked. The first question does, and it is a real question and does not get automatically answered Yes.
Maybe teachers are real important and the intangible benefits of [del]free[/del] taxpayer-funded college are worth the cost. But that is not the proposal of Warren and Sanders. They want [del]free[/del] taxpayer-funded college for everybody - not just teachers, but for everybody. The plan assumes that any education, whether it pays for itself in increased taxes later or not, is worth the net cost to taxpayers. Even in majors where employers do not find that the graduate with a degree in underwater basket-weaving or film studies or psychology is worth paying more for, compared to everyone else. So employers as a group have decided that paying, indirectly, for college for those they hire with those kinds of degrees isn’t worth it to them.
What Sanders and Warren are assuming is that it is worth it for society in general. Again, not a question that can be answered Yes, without a good bit of analysis.
I can dig up the cite if necessary, but I believe Warren’s plan is expected to cost somewhere around $125B a year, and will result eventually in increased tax revenues of - best case scenario - about $109B a year. She is assuming, IOW, that the intangible benefits are worth a net cost of at least $16B a year.
I would very much like to see a breakdown that said “this much will go to improved teachers and it will improve education in this way and here is how we will know it actually did improve education and this much will go to business majors and they will therefore be able to create X more businesses and this much will go to Third World Lesbian Poetry majors and they will enhance our lives in X ways and this is how we will measure the amount that X has gone up”.
Education is good. So is motherhood and apple pie. If we decide on a plan of [del]free[/del] taxpayer-funded apple pie for every mother in the US, I would like to know how good it is, and how we know how good it is.
Regards,
Shodan
Is it? Is it really?
The $5 latte is an oft cited example, but first - I don’t know anyone who actually buys a latte every day (and I live and work in an area of the US where people take specialty coffee very, very seriously), especially not as people move down the economic ladder. And second - if someone does actually spend $5/day on coffee and cuts that out for a year; in 20 years, they won’t have retirement money. They’ll have a little over a month of a $30k/year salary. That is better than nothing, but it isn’t giant scads of money - especially if your expected retirement is more than a month.
The decision to buy a latte every day may be a poor choice, but it probably isn’t a life changing choice.
Yes - better phrased than by me.
Truly a conundrum, because the gov’t relies upon high employment/production, and resulting tax revenue. If people assumed simpler, lower-paying and lower-consuming lifestyles, the gov’t would have to significantly rein in expenditures. Maybe scale back the ability to exercise influence internationally…
I am not an economic, and am sure many would suggest adverse implications, but philosophically I support such measures as increased consumption taxes. Maybe track peoples’ fuel consumption (cars, home heating, electricity, etc.) and charge higher taxes for large consumers - or give rebate to lower users. Or increase sales taxes on “luxury” goods.
The flip side would be subsidies for sustainable living. Subsidize multi-family housing near public transportation.
Many people claim they do not want a “nanny state” making their decisions for them. But you don’t have to look further than our diets/obesity to question individuals’ ability to make good choices. Of course, the question remains whether we will have an intelligent and benevolent government making those choices. Instead, all to frequently, our government seems to be for sale to the highest bidder.