Sure, but even if the emergency strikes a year in, you have $100 to deal with it that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Unless you literally can’t afford it at all, saving for emergencies is pretty much always a good thing to do.
But the notion that “you’ll never save enough to amount to anything, so why try?” is extremely counterproductive and short-sighted. It’s like saying that if you won’t have the full $150 for a unexpected urgent care clinic visit, that it’s not worth saving up $75. Which is dumb for a variety of reasons.
At worst, you keep giving yourself a minimal cushion against unexpected emergencies that keep cropping up. At best, you end up with an actual rainy-day fund, at which point you can continue to fund it and actually have some reasonable surplus cash, or actually get luxuries without necessarily putting yourself at risk in case of a catastrophe. But spending that money like it’s on fire doesn’t help in either way, and merely leaves you vulnerable.
Good observations about religion when it is being bad!
Nice post.
And while I’m here. I’m pretty much in the “tired of the poor apologist” camp and the “well just HOW much help should they get and where do we draw the darn line?” But I’ll say letting poor people keep their cars doesn’t bother me. And I have to wonder when some folks say “take the bus” or even worse “take the subway”. In a good fraction of the US, “the bus” ranges from sucks to not even practical (or not even available). And the subway? What a laugh. Cause we all know how many subway lines dot the American landscape.
I’ll echo that. I was lucky to have decent bus service or walkable work locations when I was making shit wages. But I think I was in the minority. I a big fan of people working, and of people working hard. Even 70 hours per week if need be and if you can get the work. But I couldn’t have done that if I’d had to work two jobs with irregular schedules separated from each other and my home by 1-hour bus rides.
This sounds eerily similar to "Making people dependent on the government is not going to make them independent in anything. Attributing everything to “Bad Luck” can sap personal ambition, without which you’re not going to climb out of poverty.
Except the government is real and can act in the real world in a way that makes a difference in people’s lives. And if you think people in this thread are attributing all poverty to “bad luck” you’re not paying attention.
We removed those kids from their families because those families were making choices we disagreed with and we were certain we could inculcate better moral and civic values in the kids. The choices are different now, but basic idea is the same: those people don’t do things the way WE’D do things, so obviously the kids would be better with us.
No, I don’t need such cites, because I’m well aware of them. That’s part of my point: orphanages and foster homes are not all that different in the sense that they both involve shuffling the kids off somewhere else: out of sight, out of mind, somebody else’s problem. (And non-Catholic institutions don’t really have a record much better–I’m pretty sure the Catholic Church isn’t running Russia’s orphanages, nor did they run the Dozier School for Boys in Florida or Haut de la Garenne in Jersey.)
The cite to which you link has some pretty obvious limitations. For starters, it’s based primarily on survey responses, rather than any systemic attempt to locate all of the alumni of those orphanages, and thereby has all of the limitations associated with who self-selects to respond to the survey and who doesn’t. Also, McKenzie excluded anybody who wasn’t available to respond to the surveys, which means alumni who died young or who ended up in prison or psych ward are underrepresented (and we don’t know how the percentage of alumni who died young compares to the general population). I don’t think you can draw any definitive results from his work.
Maybe in your state; certainly not in mine. Per child, and after adjusting for inflation, yes, I think we spend less today on children in poverty than we did in the 1960s. For example, spending on children as a percentage of the federal budget fell by nearly a quarter between 1960 and 2011 (cite, see p. 6 of pdf), and the largest single items of federal expenditure are Medicaid (in line with the dramatic increase in health care costs in recent decades) and various tax credit programs, while programs such as nutrition, early childhood intervention, and youth training have not fared well over the past twenty years or so.
(Also, while high school graduation rates are hotly debated, there’s not much evidence that such rates were substantially higher in the 1960s, and the current unemployment rate is pretty close to what it was in 1960 [5.5%], although there were some years in the later 1960s when it was a bit lower.)
But if you know how the car has been maintained, you are frequently better off than buying a pig in a poke. Hondas as a group are more reliable than Mercedes; any individual car, however, can be really good or really bad regardless of brand. (If you’ll recall, in the article she was driving her husband’s Mercedes because her Honda wouldn’t start.)
The Mercedes in the article was seven or eight years old; I believe it was a C230 Kompressor. Similar 7-8 year old Mercedes routinely sell in my area in the $10-15K range, depending on precise model. Remember, that’s full retail price, so trading it in you’d probably get not much more than half that. No, you cannot buy a new Hyundai or Kia for that price. In fact, by the time you pay taxes and tags, you’re out that much for a six or eight-year-old vehicle on which the warranty is already gone. You traded a known good car for an unknown quantity, got little or no cash out of the deal, spent a good deal of time and effort, and for what?
Also: even equal or “pretty damn close” is no bargain. Trading one $8K car for another $8K car is a wash. The only way selling the Mercedes and buying another vehicle makes sense is if you can sell the Mercedes for substantially more than its replacement costs, because that’s the only way to free up money.
Yes, and if those places know you need to sell, they are going to low-ball you, and most such places make their money by paying low prices in the first place. You get the most money by selling privately at your leisure, but to do that successfully you can’t be in a hurry. If you’ve gotta sell Right Now, that’s pretty much the definition of a fire sale.
My goal is to study Statistics. Yes, I am making improvements in my life. I may very well share them with this board. But I’m somewhat wary, because I’ve had some bad experiences in the past with jerks on the internet when I shared details about my life. Even though this board is mostly filled with good people, a couple bad apples can spoil the barrel.
Mostly, I wanted to get back onto something resembling the topic instead of more talking about repairs on Mercedes. It was intended to start the conversation, not meant as a super declarative statement.
As I noted at the end of the post, religion can be a positive. That doesn’t mean it always it. If you want to argue the positive side I’m sure someone (me or someone else) will be happy to argue the opposite.
Paraphrasing what the judge said during the final appeal, if he did not have beyond a high school education she would have granted him disability because he clearly is unable to engage in physical labor but because he has a master’s level education he can work at a desk job and use a computer. Nevermind that he doesn’t have any relevant current skills and he has nerve damage in his hands, and various other problems. Then she suggested he get a job as a cashier (!) despite being unable to stand for prolonged periods and said problems with his hands.
Basically, because he got higher education he’s not disabled enough to be on disability, even though she admitted he was, in fact, disabled. I am absolutely not going to say anything else about this because I get far, far too angry about the whole thing.
IF you’re in a situation where going off whatever benefit you’re on is sustainable going forward then continuing to build up a reserve makes sense. If, however, you’re in a situation where if you go off benefits you’ll likely just be back on them in a month or two then it may not be the best course to keep funding that rainy day reserve. In which case you don’t want your assets to exceed the limit that cuts you off from the benefits you require to keep your current situation going as well as it is.
Of course, there are more or less intelligent ways to spend money in that situation. You could, for example, “invest” in canned or nonperishable foods, stock up on dry goods like toilet paper, buy a sturdy pair of shoes, or purchase something you could pawn later if necessary. Or you could buy a case of beer, a fancy nail treatment, and a new tattoo. Clearly, some of those alternatives are more forward thinking than the others. Intelligent spending can leave you with both a rainy day fund and stock of material goods to help you through future days of impaired income.
Providing government programs is not inherently making people dependent on the government.
For example, in my state you get 3 months of food stamps without strings attached, provided you meet the qualifications. After that, though, if you don’t do certain things you will be cut off. What are those things? Either
work 3/4 to full time
be looking for work 30-40 hours a week (this will be enforced)
be a full-time student (must maintain B average)
full time caretaker of a child under school age
All of which are NOT sitting on your ass all day but doing things a responsible adult should be doing. All of which have to be documented. It promotes activities that are likely to lead an improved situation and eventual NON-dependence. That’s a good government strategy, as are some of the more targeted programs aiming to get people more of the “temporary poor” category back to work. You have to be quite the anarchist/libertarian to be against such things.
Likewise, to the extent religion promotes education, hard work, clean living, social networks, and so forth it is a good thing. That doesn’t mean any religion at all is an inherent good, some groups are toxic in my opinion.
The thing is, manson1972 took it as an absolute statement when it was only intended to refer to a subset of the overall group. Which is hardly the first time **manson **has done that sort of thing.