What I meant by that was bringing home the MONEY from those paychecks. :smack: How many of them had wives and/or children who needed new clothes, dinner, heat, etc. and they “couldn’t afford” it because Daddy was drinking up his paychecks?
That MAY work, if you live in a city with public transportation. Far too many people don’t.
I can say that living in northern New England it is common practice to dump road salt on the roads in winter which contributes to rapid rusting and corrosion to exhaust pipes, brake lines, electrical wiring and the car body(basically anything exposed to the salt). These all have to be replace or repaired to pass inspection up here and is real frustrating to deal with.
Still doesn’t give you the right to flout safety inspections.
Those inspections and the annual registration is part of the total cost of ownership of a vehicle- you are required to have more scratch than merely enough to get some decrepit junkheap, dollar store oil and barely enough gas to get anywhere.
I’d agree that in general, having to drive is something that makes your cost of living higher if you’re poor- the costs beyond just gas/oil/basic maintenance (wiper blades and the like) are relatively high, and often as a poor person, you’re only able to afford relatively less gas-efficient vehicles than more well-off people. I mean, if all you can get is a 2002 Suburban, you’re liable to be paying more in gas than someone driving a 2018 Suburban, all else being equal.
But safety inspections aren’t a scam on the poor- they’re just one more component to the total cost of ownership of a car.
Oh, these reminded me of these gems:
If you get sick enough that you can’t work, you have to take the day off without pay because many minimum wage jobs don’t offer paid sick leave. Worse, if you take off two or more days in a short period of time your employer may simply fire you.
And a new thing is potential employers running credit checks and disqualifying you if you have poor credit. So you lose your job because you were sick, by the time you find a new one you’ve been living on credit cards and now have bad credit, which makes it harder to find a job, which damages your credit further, which…
Low-wage jobs will often require a doctor’s note after 2 or more days off for illness to avoid being fired. But most people wouldn’t normally go to the doctor for something minor like a cold. They typically would just rest for a few days and get better. So the person who is in a low-wage job has to spend extra money top see a doctor to get a note that they have a minor illness that will go away in a few days. Higher-wage jobs typically don’t require doctor’s notes unless the issue is very serious or long lasting.
Oddly enough, the state where I live allows renters to deduct a portion of their rent from their state taxes, which offsets some of the difference between renting and owning.
We could make the playing field more level regarding owning vs. renting, but our culture so values owning over renting I don’t expect that will happen.
One of the advantages of renting is that if something happens to the property a renter can move elsewhere more easily than an owner can unload damaged property, or fix the damaged property. That won’t be significant for everyone, but if you’re poor your more likely to be in a situation where you would not be able to come up with the capital to, say, repair a roof or replace a furnace. If you’re in that situation, renting (where you can relocate) might make more sense in some ways than attempting to own a property you can’t maintain, or getting into a situation where you lose all built up equity due to foreclosure.
What bus?
Plenty of people don’t have public transport available.
Or, even if there is a bus: it may take multiple buses, to get them where they’re going, on schedules such that taking the bus means an extra couple of hours out of the day – or means that it’s not possible, in effect, to get to the particular job; or to get to child care in time to pick the child up; or to get to the grocery and child care and work in the same day.
With a car, I can bring home a couple weeks’ worth of groceries (presuming of course that I can afford that much at once). Most people can’t do that on the bus, again even where there is a bus. So they need to make a lot more trips to the grocery – which takes more time, and more bus fare.
I agree that the solution to this isn’t to let people drive cars with bald tires and no brakes. But ‘just take the bus’ is often not at all a helpful thing to say; and it seems to me to show a pretty drastic lack of understanding of many people’s lives.
Large corporations do as well. I’ve held several Director level positions in large tech companies and all required a doctors note to return to work if out 3 days or more.
You would think that states that don’t have inspections at all with be filled with carnage. Not the case. They are filled with people that can afford their registration and insurance because they didn’t get tickets for driving to work with a failed inspection. They are filled with people that can drive to work without looking over their shoulder at every police car.
I see people in car accidents every day at work. Usually I talk about the accident with them. You know what causes those accidents? Not cracked windshields or worn tie rods. Those accidents are caused by driving too fast. By being drunk. By being distracted on their cell phones. Not because the horn didn’t work.
They are a tax on the poor and the reason is a scam.
I see that New Jersey did away with safety inspections sometime since I lived there. Is it more dangerous to drive there now? No. Are poorer people able to drive to work without having to sweat the yearly inspection? Yes.
I spent five years working weeknights in an intervention shelter. The goal was helping those near the bottom of the food chain recover from homelessness and kickstart their financial lives. Skipping a lot of detail, we worked* in pairs with groups of 20 at a time, in “classes” lasting 4 months – and as such, I got to know a lot of people at the poverty level personally.
One thing that stood out to me was the number of “for the want of a nail” disasters. Any unexpected expense could cause their lives to careen out of control. There were multiple cases of minor traffic fines cascading and multiplying until the car was seized, causing missed work, job loss and (literally) ending with homelessness.
This is difficult to explain, but the other thing I noticed among our clients was that they cannot manage risk effectively. I mean this from a financial standpoint, not intelligence. When faced with a large repair bill that equaled the value of my old car, I can afford the risk. If the poor person could even come up with the thousands to fix it, they can’t afford the risk of losing that investment to theft or accident. And as a result, will replace it and assume more payments (usually at higher interest rates than I, as well). They were paying substantially more per mile for transportation that I was.
I know this doesn’t seem like much, but overall they couldn’t afford risks like moving for a new job, or additional training and schooling, etc. Over a lifetime, I think this sand-in-the-gears drag has a large cumulative effect.
*We provided everything from job skills training, to childcare, food, legal and career advice, and even financial acumen training concluding with their own checking account with money in it when leaving the program. It was fairly effective at getting people re-started.
Back when I was in the public aid machine in my state I was informed that there were a limited pool of funds specifically to get a poor person’s car running again to either preserve a job or enable getting a job. As it was not among my needs I know no further details, but it’s an example of one of those things the better-off don’t think about that can be crucial to someone on the bottom of the scale.
NJ changed inspections to generally every two years (5 yrs for first inspection on a new car though that’s not as relevant here) for private cars, still annual for commercial vehicles. I think the reason was a general cost/benefit analysis and not specifically because it’s considered too onerous for poor people to maintain minimally safe and emissions compliant vehicles.
No safety/emission inspections on cars is a not a good idea IMO, and not justified by appealing to the situation of people who ‘can’t afford’ to keep their cars in a minimally compliant condition. The inspection itself is free at state inspection stations.
I found out one thing in my three times of poverty: Getting any government help involves getting on welfare. and/or disability. That is the government’s solution to every type of poverty. Need a job? Get on welfare. Ready, willing and able to work, but have a qualifying physical disability, or can be diagnosed with a mental disability? Get on welfare and/or disability. Worked at a job for five years but now homeless. Quit your job and get welfare to pay for a new place.
Going on welfare is totally debilitating, but the government wants to put people on welfare who don’t belong on welfare so they will soon get off welfare and make the statistics of people who welfare has “helped” look better.
I can’t afford to renew my driver’s license. 36 dollars. I don’t WANT to drive and risk getting pulled over. I’m trying my best not to drive but my son has therapies and although state insurance offers a ride program the last three times we used it they were late. The last time they didn’t show up at my house until after the therapy ended and I arranged for them to come an hour early thinking it would make them show up on time. And once you’re there you can sit until seven pm and hope they haven’t forgotten you because they will. I was told then that if we missed another appointment without calling 24 hours in advance I’d have to pay a cancellation fee before he can go to his next appointment. 75 dollars and the state insurance most definitely will not be covering it.
I’m trying to scrape up the money and I will have it in a few weeks, once I get the rent paid. So that’s a risk I’m taking, being so poor.
I know it doesn’t sound like a lot of money to some of you guys, but we’re in a situation where I just had to buy fish antibiotics (15 bucks from Walmart online) because I had no money to go to a walk-in clinic for a nasty tooth infection. I know I probably could have let it get worse and gone to an ER but even I have my standards. And that’s another issue. Dental care is far beyond my means. People say “go to the dental college!” The dental college is not free. It’s reduced and you have to get on a program where they assign you a student and that student uses you for a term. You don’t set the appointment times and your problem tooth will be the last thing they tend. My daughter paid several thousand dollars so they could do every sort of testing/x-ray/cleaning/filling when all she wanted was her wisdom teeth cut out. She finally gave up after a year as they kept assigning her new students and they never got around to what she was needing so bad. Her teeth never looked whiter though.
I work 10-14 hours a day. I’m not lazy, I’m not spending my check on lottery tickets or hair products or big screens or whatever new thing poor people are being accused of wasting money on. I am just struggling to pay the very basic bills.
Oh bullshit. Here (Texas), it’s the point where they measure your car’s emissions/check your emissions equipment, as well as the safety-related stuff, which primarily consists of making sure all your lights/signals work and are properly adjusted, you have the requisite complement of mirrors, have working seat belts, and making sure your tires aren’t totally bald.
None of it is unreasonable. And it’s a trivial fee- on the order of a tank of gas(~$30) in the most emissions-prone counties (Houston, Austin and Dallas areas), most of which is the emissions testing, not the safety inspection.
We’re talking about extreme edge cases here- if you can’t afford the $30 to keep your car square with the law, you’re not going to be able to afford your annual registration or any other sort of maintenance- even an oil change is going to cost you around $30 if you get a cheap filter and cheap oil and do it yourself.
People aren’t owed the ability to drive; as a driver, your part of the bargain is that you have to be willing and able to do a number of things to retain the privilege- obey the traffic laws, register your vehicle, and keep it maintained to a minimal standard that is safe for the other drivers and for the environment. The state/local governments provide roads, and enforce the laws, including safety laws and inspections, to enable you to get where you’re going with a reasonable expectation of safety.
I get that it sucks to be poor, but the state doesn’t owe the poor any sort of special dispensation or anything to be able to drive because they can’t hold up their end of the driving bargain. It’s a privilege, not a right.
Yeah - I’m not buying the “vehicle inspections are a scam” bullshit. If we’re gonna share the road you better not be compromising my safety.
The whole world of the rich has a lot more slack built into it than that of the poor. Not just financially, but in every capacity.
I won’t lose my job if I’m an hour late because my car wouldn’t start, or if my kid gets sick (because I have sick days). Almost all of the institutions I regularly interact with make accommodations for normal human frailty and lack of perfection. This has many cascading effects.
I wouldn’t say rich people have that slack; maybe just “not poor”. Lots of not rich people aren’t quite so under the gun for stuff like that.