I'm a disabled American who is the breadwinner for myself and another disabled person. Saving would punish us: My sister would lose her health care and I would lose the financial assistance I get for my MS meds. Even if I make more money, it's all going to medical costs, so what's the point?
It is a horrific crime that the incentives are so perverse. I live in New Zealand and we have the same thing to some extent, but mostly not nearly as atrocious as the US systemic abuse.
Here’s hoping that modern medicine finally finds a solution to fix MS for you - disability is often invisible - an analogue to the author’s pervasive problems with poverty. All the best.
And yeah, I'm pulling for medicine! Pretty hopeful about it, though with my luck they'll figure it out when I'm 65-75 and I'll be able-bodied but too old to change my financial fortunes lol
Yes, unforeseen things will still arise but you’d rather have the $1k you need to deal with it than not.
I’m more partial to the argument that splurges allow people to temporarily feel like they aren’t poor
Recognizing everyone is different, the question is, how much hardship can you endure before you just give up?
If wealthy people would only spend their money wisely there wouldn't be a need for things like inheritance tax breaks and family trusts to prop up their wealth. :D
And a splurge for the impoverished isn't '$50 here and there'. My last 'splurge' was 12 dollars for a pair of fleece lined tights so I don't freeze on my way in to work (I walk to work). Or 3-4 bucks at McD's once every two weeks or so.
The $50 figure was what I was replying to. I don’t see how inexpensive clothes or $4 at McD’s is a splurge.
I'm supporting 2 people on 15/hr. Those are splurges. The 'splurge' is not being cold for 15 minutes on my way to work or having a night where I can choose what to eat for dinner.
Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem.
Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free.
During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked.
But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.