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In reply to the discussion: Why Poor People Stay Poor [View all]davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)Last year, towards the end of winter, the transmission in my car gave out. I had bought it the summer before, from a local dealership who assured me that it was in great shape...
I took it to a repair shop - and asked about the price of getting a new one. For a brand new transmission, labor, and so on - it would've been nearly three thousand dollars. I also didn't have that kind of money, also had no way of getting it quickly. They demanded the whole payment up front, before they went to work. Fortunately my Father is somewhat richer than I am, and managed to convince the business owner to settle for 700 up front, and the rest over the next two months.
It was still pretty tough for me to pay for it. I made 250 a week or so after taxes, had savings that were pretty much nonexistent - and still had to make car payments and student loan payments. If not for my family letting me stay with them well into adulthood, I'd have been SOL so many times...
It's kind of strange for me. I'm poor, but my parents are working middle class, and other family members (two in particular) are just short of being very upper class. I actually make less money now than I did then, moved on to a job I didn't hate as much, that wasn't as far from home - and took a cut of about forty bucks a week.
There is, for me, an issue with feelings of shame, as if I am not worth as much as they are. I don't have the same education, the same resources or training. Even a sister of mine who earns 45 grand a year or so is earning nearly five times what I do - and that's considered to be basically a working class income, I think. Every time I even think about asking for help with something, it's like a little bit of pride just falls out and dies.
My employers aren't much richer than I am, they have a business that on most months barely breaks even. It's a damned rough economy in Northern Maine - and our current government makes it a hell of a lot harder.
Why do we really stay poor? I think that, in large part, it's because the wealthy and ultra wealthy intend to remain so, because our government is currently engaging in austerity measures and budget cuts. I think it has a lot to do with us giving tax cuts to the ultra wealthy and eliminating basically good ideas - like the earned income tax credit. It doesn't help that we have a predatory federal government earning billions and billions of dollars from nearly every student who has aspirations of one day graduating and embarking upon a professional career.
Everything has become too expensive - and compensation, wages, our safety net, our educational system... none of these are up to the challenge - because we keep electing assholes intent on destroying them and further enriching themselves, their little experiment in capitalism gone wild.
If every one of us just remembered some of the very basic life lessons we learned in our first year of elementary school... I think we would have a much happier, much healthier, much wealthier Nation. The simplest lesson of all, really, is to share.
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