Budgeting for Poverty

[Sapphire Blue]

The federal government says a family of four making $18,810 a year is living in poverty. But how far does $18,810 go in America today? How do you budget? What do you leave out? You make the hard choices...

Budgeting for Poverty

[boobooday]

1. This makes the point very effectively n/t

[Warpy]

2. Right, and they didn't mention the money that gets scraped off the top

for OASDI and Medicare, not to mention income tax withholding.

I've often told right wingnuts to do a budget based on $20K as an intellectual exercise: go through the paper and find the cheapest rental, go through the supermarket ads and buy everything on sale, look at their own utility bills to figure those out, and consider what taking the city bus 5 days a week back and forth to a job would cost them.

Most of them have given up at the "rent" stage and whined about how people making that little money should just go out and find better jobs.

That's when I send them to the "Help Wanted" pages to see what's available for marginal workers. Then they whine about education.

That's when I send them shopping for loans to cover tuition, books, and living expenses. Then I send them back to the "Help Wanted" section to find out how many jobs require that kind of education.

Then they shut up.

[Sapphire Blue]

3. "Then they shut up." Warpy, you're great!

[Just Me]

7. I'm glad you make them THINK.

I went through a three year trip through poverty.

When you struggle JUST TO MEET BASIC NEEDS, all the empty rhetoric and bullshit about the economy and opportunity becomes crystal clear. I was "advantaged". I had inner resources and an education and some support during those very difficult years.

People who turn to "talking points" or rhetoric or whatever to justify persecution of the down-trodden and oppressed have no compassion. They're bitter and angry and ugly inside,...probably because they, too, have suffered.

[Jamastiene]

4. Leave medical care out a lot of the time.

Leave steak dinners out too. And we can buy some prescriptions only every once in a while and take less than we really need, which makes them only slightly effective. It sucks being poor.

[Just Me]

5. Well, we have a corporate government, not a federal government anymore.

The objectives of a corporate government is too maximize profits (for corporacrats) and minimize expenses. Human beings (American citizens) are expenses. x(

[rhino47]

6. That is one thing I could never understand.

You break the middle class who the hell is going to be able to afford the crap these corporacrats sell?The deeper you push people into poverty or unending debt the smaller your market becomes.

[Just Me]

8. You can accumulate a helluva' lot of exploited wealth in eight years.

You can further concentrate power.

These people aren't in it for the long-term. They are in it to accumulate as much as they can as quickly as possible.

[Just Me]

9. Did you know the U.S.A. has one of highest rates of violent crimes,...

,...in the world?

No one "brainwashed" American knows that fact. No one American is compelled to grasp WHY.

I figure, this nation, my own, is pretty much so maxed on fear that, freedom is a cloud.