The rest? Spent every paycheck, griped about immigrants and how the govt takes too much, bought lottery tickets, tons of toys at Christmas. One couple even lost had his kids taken away by CPS, was told they’d get them back once they could move out of the hotel they were living in and demonstrate they could stick to a budget - they spent their tax refund on a used Mustang.
Perhaps there are plenty of people who save what they can, make smart financial decisions, and STILL struggle in poverty. That’s not the case in my experience, but I’d love to be wrong. The hardest part about escaping may just be having no clue how to, or just plain refusing to implement it.
Blaming poverty on "impulsive sex" and leaving blameless the policies of limiting birth control and freedom of choice is a pretty myopic point of view.
You'll never see anything like his pro open borders book from the right wing:
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigrati...
Simplest way to describe it is that their definition of "I can afford X" is "right now I have more money than X costs". Really!
These people will of course always be poor, regardless of income, subsidies etc.
How many they are is an empirical question, and I haven't seen any data.
One idea to handle them I like is to pay people daily, instead of monthly/biweekly. In the modern computerized world, that should be simple, and could really help some people.
Your idea of daily payouts is a very clever hack on the system and deserves a practical trial. It would be most interesting to see if it encourages inceased savings on this scale.
No, this is what poverty looks like in the strawman you've built up in your head. I guarantee you the person you describe exists, and is just as you describe - but they're also not representative of American poverty. But they're certainly the caricature of it that certain groups love to push for political reasons and have been doing so consistently for decades. In the 80s it went by the myth of the 'welfare queens'. A caricature that was demonstrably false - but that didn't stop it from becoming a commonly held perspective at the time (people have since learned the truth). And the process goes back further than that.