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The poor people do not buy $20k Civics. For about half the nations labor force, that purchase could be half a year worth of income. Given housing and other co
by ddingus 8y ago
The poor people do not buy $20k Civics. For about half the nations labor force, that purchase could be half a year worth of income. Given housing and other costs, financing that purchase is difficult.
What they do is get $500 to $2000 cars. And those do break down frequently. They may or may not have resources, skill and or time to repair them.
- seibelj 8y agoA long time ago I worked at a pizza shop as a delivery boy and cook. Multiple coworkers had luxury cars, including one Cadillac sporty sedan. They just seemed to put every possible spare dollar they had towards the most expensive car possible. Made no sense, but buying too much car is a common phenomenon in America.
- H1Supreme 8y agoThat mentality is absolutely puzzling to me. A friend of mine is/was exactly that way. He would rather live at home and drive a Jaguar or a BMW, then move out and drive something more affordable.
- icedchai 8y agoBlame the banks. If it weren’t easy to get loans, people would live within their means. They wouldn’t have a choice.
- ddingus 8y agoYes they would. Banks are not the only finance means. On a more basic level, we set expectations for standard of living, and business actually depends on, expects those behaviors, while half the nation does not have income to meet those expectations, often despite full time or more labor. This idea of shitty jobs being worthless completely ignores the cost of the laborers. And those costs fall on all of us. Why subsidize business in this way? Or, if we want to do that, why so much angst over assistance?
- icedchai 8y agoI may be confused. Owning a luxury automobile has nothing to do with expectations for a standard of living. In many parts of the world, a car is required, yes... but a Cadillac, Mercedes, or BMW? No.
- chrisco255 8y agoI was one of those poor people, buying $3000 cars to get by 10 years ago, when gas was hitting $4 a gallon while the economy was absolute shit. Truth is, you can find even used Civics for like $4K (although the idiotic Cash-For-Clunkers program caused a lot of lower end inventory to disappear...hurting poor people like me at the time)...and you can still squeeze 100K miles out of them with minimal repairs.
- DanBC 8y agoAnd those cheap cars are more likely to have faults that police can write tickets for, pushing those poor people into further debt, and then into the criminal justice system because US courts are just weird.
- DanBC 8y agoI don't understand why this has been downvoted, it describes a well known phenomenon of US courts. This was one of the factors at play in Ferguson: police were told to maximise revenue, and they were doing this by issuing fines to car drivers. Those drivers then have to attend court to pay the fines - missing work and losing wages because of it, and sometimes losing their jobs. If they don't attend court to pay their fines they have arrest warrants issued against them. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31849421 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31849421 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/02/poor-for-profit-probation-prison-georgia https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/02/poor-for-profi...