Below a certain limit there is no way to do that without loosing more money like getting rid of your car.

And it's not only the obvious things. An acquaintance of mine was a single mother (ex-husband in prison) and had to decide whether she could afford to allow her children to take a bath in the bathtub.

People underestimate how much such forced decisions can damage mental health and the ability to work.

Many wealthy-but-broke people still have assets (like significant equity in a house) that give them runway (sometimes years) to sort things out and make life impacting decisions (such as moving far away to reduce expenses or contacting a friend from before to find you job).

Exactly. I grew up poor and my teen employment was bust-your-ass jobs like factory and restaurant work. I was once on a contract for a large company, and throughout the day I'd watch the office employees enjoy quiet, pleasant days with plenty of chatting with coworkers. The most strenuous thing they'd do was occasionally rush from one meeting to another.

They'd all be gone by 5 and I'd stay working. Then I'd see the cleaning contractors come in and zoom through the office, working hard and never taking breaks. It always made me a little mad that most people there never even saw the hardest workers in the building, let alone appreciated them.

It took me a while to understand that work is not paid based on difficulty, but on labor supply and demand.

The reason why many very hard jobs pay so low is because there’s lots of people who will do them.

There’s an axiom about smart work > hard work but I think that oversimplifies too much.

I did manual labor for a few summers and it didn’t pay very well. I just didn’t understand why my work was so hard and paid so little and it frustrated me.

But understanding how wages work at the macro level gave me some mental peace.

There's a hell of a lot more to it than that. From hiring bias, to school bias, to class bias, to name bias, to area bias - from sheer propaganda to straight up coercion. From lobbying, to perverse subsidies, to externalization of costs, etc, etc, ad nauseaum.

"Understanding how wages work at the macro level gave me some mental peace."

Are you quite sure that said mental peace isn't blissful ignorance... Because ignorance is only blisfful to the ignorant. America's wages at the macro level are deeply, catastrophically, even systematically unjust, in horrifically short-sighted ways.

Of course there are micro instances with particulars to a situation, but the main driver for wages is supply and demand.

The reason the janitorial service only gets $12/hour is not a result of all the biases you mentioned, even though it’s hard work- unpleasant, time constrained, shift work hours. The wage is low because many, many people are capable of doing the job.

I’m not sure why you would think America’s wages are unjust. But that can exist at the same time as supply and demand issues. Perhaps it is unjust that people make too little, but the reason isn’t that the universe is an asshole. The reason is that lots of people are capable of doing jobs that are hard, so it’s easy to pay less.

So the injustice is because people need more skills and are only capable of taking jobs that lots of other people can do, and few demand.

But again, wages aren’t set based on difficulty, or value, or the intrinsic need for human dignity of the people performing them. Wages are set by supply and demand.

Tons of these decisions are non-factors for those who have enough to just have their kid take a bath without worrying about it.

Another example are those who can fill up a gas tank when they stop, because they’d rather minimize the number of stops at gas stations and don’t need to worry about whether they will over draw or be able to eat if they fill up their tank).

And if the situation was some people cannot escape this hardship, and there aren't spare resources allocated to other people, then we could say OK, our basic premise must be wrong, it's just inevitable that some people will suffer this hardship.

I think it's plausible this was sometimes true in a middle ages farming community during famine. If we re-allocate food from the "wealthy" with plenty to eat to those with none, some might starve anyway, there just isn't enough food.

But in our society that's not the case, we have tremendously wealthy people and these people in hardship, therefore I argue the fact you discovered is a failure of policy and it is worthwhile to contemplate whether politicians you consider supporting are addressing this failure, or whether they instead believe (or pretend to believe) the myth or perhaps in fact they consider hardship for others a desirable outcome, ie they are despicable people.

Actually you don't, of course. I had a 10-speed bike (remember those?) and a minimum wage job at a restaurant. I rented a room for $100/mo. from a young woman (maybe I was helping cover her rent?). I was able to swing tuition at a local community college.

Man, I still remember riding the 10-speed in the midwest snow to the community college in the morning as cars threw up sleet speeding past.

It was a delicate balancing act to "bootstrap". And this was in the 80's. I don't think today's rent or college costs would make it repeatable today.

each case was a frustrating puzzle

What puzzled you? The necessities should never be a puzzle. If the rent, the food, the utilities, the insurance, and the day care add up to less than the income, then everything else could be saved if you dispense with luxuries. If the necessities are more than the income, you either have to cut back on something important or work a second job. That's not fun, but it's also no puzzle.

Then you come in and argue that their experience can’t be true because you read something on Reddit. What an absurd and rude display of privilege.

And a lot of people literally do not know any better. They've never had someone teach them how to manage money and potentially had bad role models growing up. So its easy for you to say, with the knowledge it seems like you have, this is what you need to do. It's much harder to put into practice.

Especially when you consider there are many folks that do manage their money well, don't splurge on non-essentials, work multiple jobs and still cannot make ends meet.

This. If you don't know how money works, most people who offer advice are just trying to scam you. But not taking any advice is also not helpful.

If I knew how to invest in index funds 20 years ago, who knows, I might have already been halfway to retirement. Before I had kids, I was able to save a large part of my salary. But everything I did with the money -- following the advice of people pretending to be experts -- only made the money disappear.

If someone has a friendly person who spends a day or two helping them set up the system, so that all they need to do later is send extra money to a specific account once in a while, it can change their future dramatically. But many people do not have such friend.

Where does "psychology of decision making when poor and struggling" stop and personal responsibility begin? Can every suboptimal decision be excused because of "psychology of decision making when poor and struggling"?

That's why we need a UBI - to give the poor people leverage. We saw it a bit with the unemployment bonuses - companies are having to raise their wages finally and are complaining about it, and we might finally see inflation. Every keeps treating it like a bad thing, but in reality, the late 70s with high inflation were the most "equal" times historically, since inflation with wage indexation is actually more akin to a wealth tax on the rich, which I totally support.

What gave you that impression? In my initial comment I acknowledged the concept of excusing suboptimal decision making due to "psychology of decision making when poor and struggling". How is that different than what you're saying?

>3. (transitive) To provide an excuse for; to explain, with the aim of alleviating guilt or negative judgement.

Earlier in the thread there was definitely a tone of negative judgement. ie. "people show up all the time with a litany of complaints and a litany of awful, awful budget mistakes they have no interest in fixing"

(It's actually amazing this is almost a Nobel-prize worthy observation in economics. This is psychology 101.)

If you ask why or what kinds of mistakes they make, now that is where the books go deep. Suffice to say those mistakes are not unpredictable and people can be nudged to make a better (dare I say correct) choice.

Right, but I'm not the person giving the negative judgement. I specifically recognize the possibility of "excusing" them (ie. not negatively judging them) in some cases, and ask whether they should be excused in some cases or all cases. After this long conversation it appears you believe in the latter. Is this correct?

I'm not accusing you of this, but in my experience, the people who preach "personal responsibility" often do not take the time to understand the issues preventing people from making good decisions, and so aren't even working on the right problem in many cases. And in saying that, please be aware that I do feel there is a place for personal responsibility and it's an important factor in anyone improving their situation. Just not the only factor needed.

For the most part we have rent (mortgage), food, utilities, insurance, and day care (have you looked into the cost of this?) all locked up and well-budgeted, but sometimes someone leaves the door open or the hose on too long and we have an unexpectedly high utility bill. One time my wife left an entire bag of groceries behind the car and accidentally backed over it. When COVID hit and my dad was simultaneously suffering from a suppressed immune system we had to stop leaving the kids with my parents and up our daycare expenditures quite a bit. These sorts of problems aren't really problems for us, we can just cover the added expense out of our "emergency savings" bucket, but if two emergencies happen back-to-back sometimes that bucket gets depleted and we have to draw from "vacation savings" instead. Fortunately we're able to fill these buckets with hundreds of excess dollars a month, so they are usually adequate. I could see it being problematic if the buckets filled at a much slower rate.

Is it fair to say that low income earners in New York and San Francisco should move somewhere else to have kids? Will we only have McDonald's in Ohio?

If it is a necessity, by definition it cannot be cut back, unless you want to starve to death or live under a bridge.

>McDonald’s was among the top five employers of Medicaid enrollees in five of six states and SNAP recipients in eight of nine states.

>Other notable companies with a large number of employees on federal aid include Amazon, Kroger, Dollar General, and other food service and retail giants.

>About 70% of the 21 million federal aid beneficiaries worked full time, the report found.

" It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." - FDR

TLDR: Minimum wage was never intended to be less than a living wage. If you're working full time and can't afford food, why should the company get away with forcing taxpayers to make up the difference?

Your oversimplification of the issue glosses (intentionally?) over the real issue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-...

>Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report.

>In fact, the average minimum wage worker in the U.S. would need to work almost 97 hours per week to afford a fair market rate two-bedroom and 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom, NLIHC calculates. That’s well over two full-time jobs just to be able to afford a two-bedroom rental.

But yes, go on about how thse people need to 'dispense with luxuries' and 'work a second job.'

What do they do then? Starve?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

About 70% of those receiving federal aid were already working full time.