4 ms·

The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More

18 points by gasull 17y ago

ojbyrne 17y ago
While I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, the line "When you're poor you wait" (the very last line of the article) is bogus. Sorry, but lineups are a part of just about every class's life.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  That's so wrong it is not even funny. People with some money can easily afford to have others take care of the drudgery of life for them, which means they have more time. You don't have to line up because you send someone else to do it for you. It is only in very rare cases that you can't 'jump the line' if you have cash. (airports ? business class. shopping ? have the maid do it etc.).
  - joez 17y ago
    I was really offended when I found out about things like flash passes or fast passes (http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx) that let you either queue up for an additional price or just cut to the front of the line while poorer people have to wait. There was just something about having such a class segmentation at a public, kid-oriented park that got to me.
    - cema 17y ago
      There is a reason the American project is an ongoing experiment. There must be something in the human nature (hierarchical societal structure?) which leads some (many?) people to behaving like hogs. Egalitarianism requires constant work. If you stop, the experiment is over. (Just one point where the American experiment may break.) This whole thread is a side note, but I think it is relevant.
      - hvs 17y ago
        America wasn't founded on the concept of egalitarianism, that was an idea of the French revolution. America was founded on the idea of equality before the law (something that we are still working on).
        cema 17y ago
        Equal rights were (and are) a fundamental idea for the US, egalitarianism less so. However, the anti-aristocratic feelings were strong. Recall, for example, that the titles were easily abolished.
        hvs 17y ago
        Certainly monarchist ideas were easily eliminated and equal rights were a fundamental idea, but aristocratic thought was not uncommon among the Founding Fathers. The split between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists was often worded in aristocratic language. The people were split pretty evenly between pro, anti, and indifferent to the Revolution.
    - gaius 17y ago
      Ermm, no, class segmentation is when you show up and say "My father is Lord so-and-so and I went to Eton" and they let you skip the queue. Or alternatively, being a member of the Party, Comrade. Paying cash and getting what you want in a straight-up transaction is completely classless and 100% American.
  - gommm 17y ago
    It's true but most middle class can't afford to jump those lines (not many people I know can afford a maid..) ... so, as least, I guess only a few percentage of the richest can afford to skip the lanes...
yummyfajitas 17y ago
This article is nonsense. You [a typical poor person] don't have a car to get to a supermarket...You don't have three hours to take the bus. 80% of the poor work less than half time (20 hours/week), and therefore do have 3 hours to take the bus. Also, 3/4 of the poor do have a car. The article even describes a poor person driving her car to a big box store, something it claims the poor can't do. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. Actually, 65% of the poor do have that luxury. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors. The poor pay more money to avoid hearing people informing them of their overdue bills? ...Harrison Blakeney, 67, ... uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney's money and send the payment to the phone company...Blakeney says: "I don't have time to mail it..." What's his occupation? Blakeney [is a] a retired auto mechanic... You know those retirees, working their 80 hour weeks, don't have time to mail a letter. "You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house... Yet somehow, 45% of poor households do manage to own their own home.
- ajju 17y ago
  I was once poor (grad school) and I can attest that the first point is valid. I didn't have a car, the grocery store was 3 miles away and the bus ran once a hour on weekdays and much less frequently on weekends - making it hard. 9 out of 10 times when I ran out of groceries, I ended up buying them at the gas station nearby. I did work only 20 hours a week but gradschool easily consumed most of the remaining time (including weekends).
  - sho 17y ago
    But that was a while ago, right? Don't most supermarkets deliver these days? Seems like that one, at least, should be a solved problem. The biggest thing with groceries IMO is having the spare money to "stock up" when the prices are low (eg on sale, large sizes, etc) and then getting into the cycle of just replenishing that opportunistically, instead of constantly running out of things and buying replacements on demand. For example, if you notice your favourite brand of washing powder is half price, don't buy one, buy ten. And then a few months later when you notice it's getting low, keep your eyes open the next few times you go to the supermarket, then buy up big again when you see a good deal. This is far better than repeatedly buying small quantities at high prices because you don't have any choice and need it that day, but it does require some spare money to start.
motherwell 17y ago
Wasn't this already discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110
oldgregg 17y ago
Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycle for a reason. It's simple things like vehicle emissions testing -- if you have money you don't think about it -- but if you drive an older car you fail emissions -- and it costs way too much to get it fixed -- so you drive without registration -- and end up in court. Worrying about things like the environment or organic food is a luxury only the gilded class an afford. "Sophisticated" people love to shit on the big bad wal-mart empire as they happily truck into target to buy shit from the martha stewart collection-- as if there is any difference. The only difference is that poor people happen to really love wal-mart-- so you can take your sociology degree and shove it. The poor do get exploited, but Michael Moore style class warfare isn't the answer either. The truth is that the poor exploit each other even more than the wealthy do. Poor people are poor because they don't have the social capital to get out of poverty. Most social programs do nothing to deal with social capital so they don't create long term solutions. Those people throw indulgence money at poor people all day so they can absolve themselves of their materialism. Or they take vacations to Africa so they can post self-righteous photos on facebook that shows how socially chic they are. Is that a save darfur bumper sticker on your prius? But ask those people to spend their TIME actually building into people's lives and befriending people in a sacrificial way and you can forget it. When you're poor nobody wants to be your friend. And by those people I mean me. I was poor, so I should know better, right? But MY time is too valuable. I would rather start a website to help the poor or raise a couple hundred bucks for some suburban 5k fun run to support some inner city whatever. This has to scale damnit! But be an actual friend? Take someone to a job interview? Have them over for dinner? Let them hang out with my cool friends? Don't bet on it, because I'm the problem.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  'the devil shits on the larger pile'.
- cema 17y ago
  I mostly agree, and especially with the point about the social capital. But it's more than that. In this country, education pays (which is not true in all countries) but is expensive, and the best kind of education, self-education, requires a personal discipline and a certain type of learning-loving culture with which one should really be imbued in childhood. Poor families often lack this. This is only one point, and maybe not the most important one.
joez 17y ago
Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. . . . Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. -Sam Seaborn, West Wing
- gaius 17y ago
  Teachers themselves - specifically, teaching unions - are the biggest barrier to that happening. Incidentally, in the UK we spend GBP 30Bn/year on defence and GBP 70Bn/year on education. It is already incredibly expensive. Literacy and numeracy rates have been falling for over a decade. More money isn't the problem. In fact, the graphs show that more money is making education worse.
- oldgregg 17y ago
  It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things. -Stuff White People Like
  - cema 17y ago
    I do not understand why the above quote is marked down (-2 points when I was looking at it). We may agree or disagree with certain arguments, but if an argument is well presented, or a quote from a mainstream publication, I do not see any reason to shout it down. Now, I abhor this distinction between the white and black population, but this may be because I grew up in a European country with essentially no blacks, and have not internalized the American history of the racial relations. However, if we remove the "white" label from the above quote, the argument sounds mainstream. I do not agree with it, however, and besides, see it as illogical: the second sentence neither follows from the first sentence nor contradicts it, and how it is a "fact" is unclear to me. No studies have been mentioned, so this must be pure speculation.
- 17y ago

18 points by gasull 17y ago

While I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, the line "When you're poor you wait" (the very last line of the article) is bogus. Sorry, but lineups are a part of just about every class's life.

jacquesm 17y ago
That's so wrong it is not even funny. People with some money can easily afford to have others take care of the drudgery of life for them, which means they have more time. You don't have to line up because you send someone else to do it for you. It is only in very rare cases that you can't 'jump the line' if you have cash. (airports ? business class. shopping ? have the maid do it etc.).
- joez 17y ago
  I was really offended when I found out about things like flash passes or fast passes (http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx) that let you either queue up for an additional price or just cut to the front of the line while poorer people have to wait. There was just something about having such a class segmentation at a public, kid-oriented park that got to me.
  - cema 17y ago
    There is a reason the American project is an ongoing experiment. There must be something in the human nature (hierarchical societal structure?) which leads some (many?) people to behaving like hogs. Egalitarianism requires constant work. If you stop, the experiment is over. (Just one point where the American experiment may break.) This whole thread is a side note, but I think it is relevant.
    - hvs 17y ago
      America wasn't founded on the concept of egalitarianism, that was an idea of the French revolution. America was founded on the idea of equality before the law (something that we are still working on).
      - cema 17y ago
        Equal rights were (and are) a fundamental idea for the US, egalitarianism less so. However, the anti-aristocratic feelings were strong. Recall, for example, that the titles were easily abolished.
        hvs 17y ago
        Certainly monarchist ideas were easily eliminated and equal rights were a fundamental idea, but aristocratic thought was not uncommon among the Founding Fathers. The split between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists was often worded in aristocratic language. The people were split pretty evenly between pro, anti, and indifferent to the Revolution.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Ermm, no, class segmentation is when you show up and say "My father is Lord so-and-so and I went to Eton" and they let you skip the queue. Or alternatively, being a member of the Party, Comrade. Paying cash and getting what you want in a straight-up transaction is completely classless and 100% American.
- gommm 17y ago
  It's true but most middle class can't afford to jump those lines (not many people I know can afford a maid..) ... so, as least, I guess only a few percentage of the richest can afford to skip the lanes...

yummyfajitas 17y ago

This article is nonsense. You [a typical poor person] don't have a car to get to a supermarket...You don't have three hours to take the bus. 80% of the poor work less than half time (20 hours/week), and therefore do have 3 hours to take the bus. Also, 3/4 of the poor do have a car. The article even describes a poor person driving her car to a big box store, something it claims the poor can't do. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. Actually, 65% of the poor do have that luxury. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors. The poor pay more money to avoid hearing people informing them of their overdue bills? ...Harrison Blakeney, 67, ... uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney's money and send the payment to the phone company...Blakeney says: "I don't have time to mail it..." What's his occupation? Blakeney [is a] a retired auto mechanic... You know those retirees, working their 80 hour weeks, don't have time to mail a letter. "You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house... Yet somehow, 45% of poor households do manage to own their own home.

ajju 17y ago
I was once poor (grad school) and I can attest that the first point is valid. I didn't have a car, the grocery store was 3 miles away and the bus ran once a hour on weekdays and much less frequently on weekends - making it hard. 9 out of 10 times when I ran out of groceries, I ended up buying them at the gas station nearby. I did work only 20 hours a week but gradschool easily consumed most of the remaining time (including weekends).
- sho 17y ago
  But that was a while ago, right? Don't most supermarkets deliver these days? Seems like that one, at least, should be a solved problem. The biggest thing with groceries IMO is having the spare money to "stock up" when the prices are low (eg on sale, large sizes, etc) and then getting into the cycle of just replenishing that opportunistically, instead of constantly running out of things and buying replacements on demand. For example, if you notice your favourite brand of washing powder is half price, don't buy one, buy ten. And then a few months later when you notice it's getting low, keep your eyes open the next few times you go to the supermarket, then buy up big again when you see a good deal. This is far better than repeatedly buying small quantities at high prices because you don't have any choice and need it that day, but it does require some spare money to start.

motherwell 17y ago

Wasn't this already discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110

oldgregg 17y ago

Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycle for a reason. It's simple things like vehicle emissions testing -- if you have money you don't think about it -- but if you drive an older car you fail emissions -- and it costs way too much to get it fixed -- so you drive without registration -- and end up in court. Worrying about things like the environment or organic food is a luxury only the gilded class an afford. "Sophisticated" people love to shit on the big bad wal-mart empire as they happily truck into target to buy shit from the martha stewart collection-- as if there is any difference. The only difference is that poor people happen to really love wal-mart-- so you can take your sociology degree and shove it. The poor do get exploited, but Michael Moore style class warfare isn't the answer either. The truth is that the poor exploit each other even more than the wealthy do. Poor people are poor because they don't have the social capital to get out of poverty. Most social programs do nothing to deal with social capital so they don't create long term solutions. Those people throw indulgence money at poor people all day so they can absolve themselves of their materialism. Or they take vacations to Africa so they can post self-righteous photos on facebook that shows how socially chic they are. Is that a save darfur bumper sticker on your prius? But ask those people to spend their TIME actually building into people's lives and befriending people in a sacrificial way and you can forget it. When you're poor nobody wants to be your friend. And by those people I mean me. I was poor, so I should know better, right? But MY time is too valuable. I would rather start a website to help the poor or raise a couple hundred bucks for some suburban 5k fun run to support some inner city whatever. This has to scale damnit! But be an actual friend? Take someone to a job interview? Have them over for dinner? Let them hang out with my cool friends? Don't bet on it, because I'm the problem.

jacquesm 17y ago
'the devil shits on the larger pile'.
cema 17y ago
I mostly agree, and especially with the point about the social capital. But it's more than that. In this country, education pays (which is not true in all countries) but is expensive, and the best kind of education, self-education, requires a personal discipline and a certain type of learning-loving culture with which one should really be imbued in childhood. Poor families often lack this. This is only one point, and maybe not the most important one.

joez 17y ago

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. . . . Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. -Sam Seaborn, West Wing

gaius 17y ago
Teachers themselves - specifically, teaching unions - are the biggest barrier to that happening. Incidentally, in the UK we spend GBP 30Bn/year on defence and GBP 70Bn/year on education. It is already incredibly expensive. Literacy and numeracy rates have been falling for over a decade. More money isn't the problem. In fact, the graphs show that more money is making education worse.
oldgregg 17y ago
It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things. -Stuff White People Like
- cema 17y ago
  I do not understand why the above quote is marked down (-2 points when I was looking at it). We may agree or disagree with certain arguments, but if an argument is well presented, or a quote from a mainstream publication, I do not see any reason to shout it down. Now, I abhor this distinction between the white and black population, but this may be because I grew up in a European country with essentially no blacks, and have not internalized the American history of the racial relations. However, if we remove the "white" label from the above quote, the argument sounds mainstream. I do not agree with it, however, and besides, see it as illogical: the second sentence neither follows from the first sentence nor contradicts it, and how it is a "fact" is unclear to me. No studies have been mentioned, so this must be pure speculation.
17y ago