Time Horizons and Poverty

Acting White has an interesting post up, Do Black People Avoid Costco? He thinks that black folks just need to learn to stretch their time horizons and learn to budget better.

I can't speak for black people, but I can speak for the entrenched poor. Poverty, by definition, is not having enough resources to live on. It's not a matter of better budgeting. Lemme give you an example.

A poor person smokes cigarettes. They cost (depending on where you live) $8 a pack. Poor person wants to quit smoking. Smoking cessation aids (nicotine gum, patches, medication) all cost money, slightly more money than cigarettes but over the long run the savings will be substantial. To get started you need to lay out more money than you would to just buy a pack of smokes to get you through right now. You can manage to scrounge up the $8 on a fairly regular basis, but saving up the $60 to get started on the gum is impossible. If you could just quit smoking for the week or so it would take you to save your cigarette money for smoking cessation aids, then you wouldn't need the smoking cessation aids. So you keep buying smokes, a pack at a time.

Now for Costco, you need to save up the $60 for the membership fee. If you could save that much buying groceries at a regular store, then you wouldn't need to spend the $60 on a membership fee. (And we won't even get into the costs of transportation with giant bulk items of food. Think you can do your monthly Costco run on a city bus with a kid or two in tow. Ha!) It is, like everything else in the world, much more expensive to be poor because you don't have the little bits of money that grant you the ability to make life easier or cheaper. It's the difference between payday loans and credit card interest, check cashing fees and bank fees, etc, etc.

I do have a theory as to why this seems to be less of an issue with "working-class Latinos, Asians, Whites, and everybody else", and that would be the hopelessness factor. There is a difference between new poverty or short-term poverty (working class whites, who until recent generations fared all right), the poverty of new or recent generations of immigrants, and the generational, perpetual, entrenched poverty. The first two kinds still have some kind of hope. They haven't seen, over and over, the sacrificing of the bottom 20 percent to the lions. They could get out of this with the right job, or if they educate their kids right. At least it's better than where they came from. There's a million things they can tell themselves that make the idea of saving for a rainy day a hopeful act. But when you've seen generation after generation go through all the things they are supposed to do to better themselves only to be shot down over and over and over again, you realize that you can't save for a rainy day if it never stops raining. If you come from that kind of desperation, the hard work and sacrifice required to perform middle class home economics isn't rational. It will all be for naught. Better to hunker down, do your best, and find what little bits of joy you can, even if it's in the form of a deadly cancer stick that makes pretty smoke rings.

I would bet that communities that have been here longer (Native Americans, African Americans) have higher levels of hopelessness than newer immigrant communities. Not to erase the Latin@ Americans and Asian Americans who have been in this country for centuries, but the longer a group has been at the bottom of the resource pyramid, the less benefit they are going to see from acting middle class.

Martin Luther King Day

It is at this time of year that I like to remind people that Dr. King was killed when he started advocating for economic justice. He was killed before the Poor People's Campaign was brought to fruition.

It's 43 years later, and we need that campaign more than ever. This quote from Dr. King is just as true now as it was then.

“We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty”

(though I'd throw sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc, etc. into that last quote).

public airwaves

so how many of you all don't have cable? if you don't, then you are
aware of the stunningly craptacular digital signals. so now instead of
a bent coat hanger to get fuzzy network broadcasts you have to buy a
fancy antenna to get much clearer (except for when the wind blows or a
fly flaps it's wings) to watch mindless tv. oh sweet, 10 channels of
blinking in and out, stuttering entertainment. well that's a stretch,
actually. at least 6 of those channels are 24/7 bible channels. theres
the messianic jews, the all cartoon biblical shaming for kids, the
evangelical spanish channel and the all apocalypse all the time
channel. of course these don't include the local networks that sell
air time to various other godbags in the wee hours and before sunday
sports. if you are to poor to pay for cable in this country, obviously
you don't have enough of the imaginary sky fairy in your life. if we
somehow managed to bring back the fairness doctrine, would we at least
get a little variety in the godbagging?

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Dear Gwyneth:

I noticed you recently posted about a day in your life. It's been getting a lot of snarky attention around the interwebs, because of your complete lack of self-awareness perhaps.

I'm not going to tell you how abysmally privileged and condescending your aspirational little newsletter is. That's been done. Instead, I'm going to tell you what I would do if I lived your life for just one week.

First thing's first. I'd give everyone the week off. No housekeepers, no nannies, no personal trainers, no drivers, no stylists, no hair dressers, no makeup artists. No grocery deliveries, and actually the family is going on a strict budget for that week. They'll eat what regular people eat for a week and I'm pretty sure they won't die. No shopping for anything non-food unless it's toilet paper or toothpaste. (Though I am fairly sure that someone as exquisite as you never ever shits or has plaque).

And with the money I'd save, I'd feed and house and clothe the kid and I for an entire fucking year.

That is why people can't stand you, btw.

proof of the depth of the great recession

i am told that costco, the liberal middle class warehouse shopping
experience for those who disdain the people of walmart and can afford
the membership fee, now accepts food stamps. (i haven't confirmed this
yet, btw)
what does it say when the symbols of middle class consumption need to
refocus on poverty economics?
(i actually like costco. they start employees at a living wage, or
used to, and promote from within. and i've been wishing they took food
stamps for years)

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

There's an old addage that

the hyper-jealous spouse is the one that's actually cheating.

I was reading this post on declining union membership at Sociological Images. I was struck by how rich people talk about working class people.

Let's see, shall we, by taking some standard tropes about the poor.


1.They have numerous babies with multiple partners


A picture of Donald Trump making an angry face while standing next to his current wife. Mr. Trump has 5 children by 3 different women.

2. They use fraud to milk the system for money that doesn't belong to them.

A picture of Bernie Ebbers, whose fraud cost MCI about 11 billion dollars and the jobs of about 20,000 people.

3. They're hypersexed and lazy

Hugh Hefner in the ubiquitous robe. For the lazy part, you have to go google the stories about the baby oil anal sex for yourself. I feel gross just typing it.

I could go on, but the more I google the more skeeved I get.

The point is, what we believe are truths about the awful stereotypes of poor people are really deflections made by skeezy rich white dudes to draw attention away from themselves.

Transportation is a class issue

So I've heard a lot of middle/upper middle white people in Seattle talk about what an awesome public transportation system we have (cough, sputter, cough). I could pull out my pretentious traveler card and point out that most of Europe has cheaper, faster, cleaner transport. But fuck that.

Tomorrow I have to take a minimum of 3 buses and 1 hour 45 minutes to go to a housing interview (with Seattle Public Housing, who I've fought with in the past, and my stomach is turning at the thought, but that's another story). Metro's online trip planner is giving me a range of between $7 and $9 EACH way for bus fare. For just me. The Kid is another $3.75 each way. It would be slightly cheaper if I had a prepaid or bank funded Orca card, but the cards themselves cost $5.

It used to be that I could pay for our bus fare by scraping the loose change from my purse. Now you get super shitty treatment from the bus driver and passengers behind you if you use actual money. The price for riding the bus has so far outpaced inflation as to be comparable in increases to health care and higher education.

For the last 9 years, I have been a reasonably happy public transit rider. I gave up my car when we lived in the city because the cost was too high compared to the bus. But I lived walking distance to work, and for most of my employment I got discounted bus passes and everything I wanted to go to was within city limits, so I got the low one zone fares. The $20 I am spending tomorrow is way more than I would have spent in gas, insurance, etc, to drive a whole 15 miles and back. Not to mention the extra 2 hours of transit time that I would save.

Of course, if you work for somewhere like Microsoft (a big company that subsides bus passes and offers privately paid connector shuttles to eliminate the patchwork of city & county buses) then yes, the Metro system is a peach. If you are a poor person trying to get to poor places that are poorly served by public transit because poor people live there, then you're fucked.

If I had to make this trip everyday, for work, it would kill me both financially and timewise. A 9 hour day (8 hours plus lunch) plus nearly 4 hours of commuting, plus 14 fucking dollars a day. At minimum wage, the first 2 hours of work I put in every day would go straight to bus fare. What a waste of fucking time.