Seconded. I was very poor twice in my life. First while growing up, and then for a few years after the downturn (19-23 years old) where I was making 13K-17K per year (post tax/credits, benefits included), working full time, and putting myself through school. I had no financial aid due to having no contact with my parents (a corner case that is poorly handled by the government, try getting anything except loans without a FAFSA). Until two and a half years ago I probably spent only three or four years where I wasn't poor by any standard.
Poverty is definitely something you need to live through to really understand. You can have compassion, commiserate, etc but not a true comprehension unless you've been there. Even then, I know there are levels of poverty I have no understanding of. One I personally experienced was trying to get some help at a free clinic and being denied because I wasn't quite poor enough to qualify. I believe I needed to have a dependent of some kind at my income level. Living through that is something I can't fathom.
Moving is definitely an interesting game. Most of the time I was poor as an adult I lived in a retail store front (that couldn't be rented out, leaky roof, boarded up windows) for $300/month. When I started doing well enough (making more than 20K) to consider an apartment, I went in with three friends because the cost to just get into a place in LA is typically, at minimum, $2000. The lower rent apartments want first, last and deposit, while more expensive apartments just want first and deposit. It's basically impossible to save up 1/10th of your gross yearly income, and it's not like the money is guaranteed to come back to you.
Since you're in a bad spot, and the landlord knows it - otherwise you wouldn't be one of three people in a $1400/month two bedroom apartment, they will play games with you. We had broken plumbing that went unfixed. None of us saw our deposits back. The management company literally pulled down websites as I found phone numbers for people in their offices. For a brief, albeit melodramatic, moment I felt like the protagonist in a man v.s. the oppressive company/government/world movie where I had just caught them and they were trying to pull the curtains over their wrongdoing.
Since I was still working insane hours and going to school, the couple hundred dollars weren't something I could chase after... which is really the sad thing. They knew I couldn't afford to do anything about it. Being inexperienced doesn't help. Yes I could have gone to the city, but I didn't know that back then, and when everyone around you is in the same place, you're often times short on experience. (I've since launched complaints after the fact - I'm not the first this has happened to ;). It's in the city's hands at this point)
Now that I'm doing a lot better, the Cracked articles really hit home. My personal poor habits from those articles is limiting myself to two/three pairs of pants and the paranoid bank account check habit. Even though I typically keep my expenses at half or less of my wages and I know the money is there, I won't sleep that night if I don't check my accounts every few days. When I was poor the next disaster seemed to be right around the corner. It's really hard to shake that instinct.
Being able to really live has been very interesting. I've tried to do as much traveling as I can, something I could never do before. I find myself weighing every permutation of airfare (travel dates, airlines, buying separate round trips for multi city trips), just like I used to do once upon a time when figuring out how to buy a month's worth of groceries in $60.
That said, I'm not immune to doing bad emotional math. I just got a bonus today and the same thought process ran though my head when I saw the amount deposited into my account. It's hard not to. In fact, musing about it is enjoyable. Much more than being rational about it. Money brings out all sorts of emotions.
The problem I have with it is that I like roads, police officers, and all those expensive "leach-feeding" social programs I used to be a customer of; so I quell my irrational anger pretty quickly. Without inexpensive Community College courses I wouldn't have gotten the necessary education or the connection I used to get my first paid internship ($15/hour almost double my previous job) which turned into my career.
Like the Cracked author mentions, yes there are terribly abuses of the money... but I believe the good outweighs the bad.
I don't see any problem with paying that forward. I'm certainly not suffering doing it, even if I occasionally shake my fist at those "Tax and Spend Commies in Congress" for an irrational split second. In a couple years, with some luck and hard work, I'll be making closer to the amount that poor unhappy retired couple from the WSJ graphic was making[1]... all the while dealing with my "poor kid from North Hollywood" mentality.
[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732368960457822...
There's more to life than feeling lucky we aren't in bad situations. I'd say ambition is more useful. A million dollars at 4% interest accrues $40k/yr, so in effect any millionaire is given 4x her raise every year just by doing nothing.
That's not a bad thing. It's just a fact of life. But "you should be happy with what you have" is practically a recipe for sabotaging your ambition.
Libertarians might get it done, but there's a serious bootstrapping problem in getting enough people to vote for them that they have a chance. For now, every vote for a libertarian is thrown away to idealism where it could at least be doing something.
If you look at dollars as "lifestyle points", and votes as "societal points", the same reasoning is going on right here: the scarcity of "societal points" is causing the same reasoning about how to vote as poor people have to make for spending.
Not sure what that means - only noticing that there are parallels.
I get the that the safety net helps.
My point is that civil society helps every one.
My one criticism of my fellow liberals is their messaging doesn't appeal to their audience's self interest AND their sense of fairness.
I'm saying 'keep some perspective', not 'don't try to improve your situation'.
That said, I mean, I don't know this person or their friend so it could be a flippant comment the friend made that's being overblown.
Who knows
And you're probably only paying 10% in state tax if you live in California. Most other states' income tax are around 5 or 6 percent, and some are at zero.
[1] http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240/~/so...
Wtf? That's not how taxes work, guy.
(Which seems fine to me...)
There's also the ambition to build a better society in (some of) us and part of that is paying taxes. Not all ambitions are of a material nature.
I wonder if this is related to "loss aversion" [0]. According to Kahneman's research, people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. She has a net loss in satisfaction because the hit caused by losing 30% of her salary is bigger than the win resulting from making 70%.
And so it annoys the shit out of me that when a friend in finance got a $10k raise, all she could talk about was "but I lose half of it to the government!". In some strange world where 30% equals half, she's more concerned about what she lost than the fact that her gain was almost equal to a poor person's annual income. She couldn't even frame her payrise as a positive.
I was discussing poverty with a colleague yesterday, as we were discussing the concept of Basic Income. I mentioned that when I was on welfare, it still wasn't quite enough to keep me fed and housed. His response was "then move house to where it's cheaper". My counter was "firstly, the point of 'social security' is to keep people socially secure, at least for short stints, which means not kicking them out of their homes for a handful of dollars". Secondly, of course, was the ignorance of the fact that moving house is expensive (fiscally and socially), from the hunt, to the security deposit, to the day of shifting furniture, to having utilities hooked up. Thirdly, if the point was to give me welfare in the short term until I get a job, moving house to where it's cheaper is going to make it harder to get a job.
Discussing poverty is difficult, because unless you've been close to it, you won't understand the limitations of being in it. And conversely, if you're currently in it, it's hard to view it in a 'big picture' sense.