So true. You probably won’t have a very energy efficient house (if you own one at all) - or access to a very fuel-efficient car (if you drive one at all). Or since you can’t be driving all the requisite distances to shop well, you’ll be paying the higher prices for the quick-shop stuff that is nearby in the food desert you live in. All of the prudent choices of the rich are choices they can afford to make, but the poor will end up paying more for nearly everything, making a mockery of the rich person’s exhortation that the poor should just make better choices.
I stopped to chat with a homeless man whose shopping cart of worldly goods had toppled over. As we finished he (almost apologetically) asked if I happened to have any cigarettes. I told him I didn’t and we parted ways. But I seriously considered giving some cash (which I did have on hand) and tell him to go buy some if he wanted - given the naked honesty of our exchange. It’s my regret now that I didn’t. I have less and less patience these days with the affluent objection …“well, you know they’re just going to spend it on booze anyway.” Which - yes - is a good and serious thing to care about (if we could pretend for a moment that the rich actually cared - and weren’t just casting about for the conveniently ready excuses to walk away.) It’s great to help address very real problems like alcoholism or any other addictions. But meanwhile … how much slack do we cut ourselves and our tight circles of loved ones for our own addictions and hang-ups so long as we can feel self-righteous about the fact that life dealt us some relative wealth we can feel good about. What do the scriptures say after all, in Matthew 5:42, “Give to the one who asks of you - but first make sure he won’t spend it in any ways that don’t meet your approval?” Or wait - that isn’t quite right! I’ll leave it to you to discern which part of that is the modern scriptural distortion of affluence.
Tell him that God is using cause and effect to test him, and that the lesson is to pay attention to consequences!
I encountered a different view from a drug user: “I spend it today because I might be dead tomorrow”. I asked why not save it today because you might be alive tomorrow.
Scholars have gone 'round and 'round on it, also reaching back to the probable Aramaic behind the Greek. I had to write an essay on the difference once; as it didn’t really bother me either way I can’t remember a thing I wrote.
Ah, the verse behind one part of the Lord’s Prayer!
There is (or at least used to be) some scholarly discussion about whether “daily bread” meant just food or all personal needs.
I observed this in a family where the eldest son got to go to university but the rest couldn’t afford it – the rest of the kids saw themselves as destined to just grind out their lives.
Medicaid in the U.S. works almost like that, to the point that when my mom needed Medicaid assistance they wouldn’t do anything until she signed the house over, something that was contrary to their own rules as well as illegal (I had to hire an attorney to get them to pay attention to their own rules). People just barely into the middle class regularly face a choice between getting care for a parent or having an inheritance to benefit their own kids.
Lots of regulations serve in practice to punish the poor for being poor.
Having kids pay for athletic equipment in order to participate is foolish! Where I went to junior high and high school all necessary equipment was provided, though the reason wasn’t about making sure anyone could participate but making sure than anyone with talent could be on one of the sports teams and thus bring the school more victories.
A Lutheran school where I was in grad school required uniforms, but the uniforms were provided by the school. A new administrator had gotten tired of hearing kids bully some because their clothes weren’t nice enough, or kids being popular because they had the latest fashions, and argued the policy through the school board.
One of the wealthier families’ dad objected and said people should be free to choose; the administrator said they could choose: the kids wore a uniform, or they went to a different school.
The policy got set in stone when after two years of uniforms attendance, academic performance, and participation in extra-curricular activities had all risen significantly.
That’s one of my complaints about The Chosen: Roman taxes didn’t work that way, with everyone having to queue up and having individual accounts; that would have been too much work. Taxes tended to hit business owners and anyone traveling (unless something new has been learned since I took Roman history).
Interestingly, the stronger the welfare system the stronger the economy. The reason is simple: people with nothing to spend can’t be anyone’s customers. Of course it can be a cycle; higher benefits results in higher spending, and a stronger economy results in more tax revenue.
And much of that depends on what the voters know – like the above fact, that strong welfare systems make for a strong economy.
Interestingly I heard this is a TED talk; a billionaire argued that billionaires should be paying a 75% tax rate, and that they would end up richer if that went into such things as Social Security and health care since it would mean that people would be able to buy more goods and services. (I’ve tried to imagine what the U.S. would be like if that had been Reagan’s theme rather than the Laffer Curve [which only applies to a narrow set of parameters]).)
I was shocked to learn one of my employees who lived in a trailer house had electric bills double what we had in a modest but fairly energy efficient house one hot summer.
Voters seem to be vulnerable to getting and accepting simple populist answers to complicated problems. The simple answers are easier to listen and support than the complicated and boring analyses of real experts. That seems to happen in most countries, just the hot questions and suggested answers may vary from culture to another. Countries get such leaders they (vote and) deserve.
Giving more information may change the opinions of a few voters but sadly and surprisingly, the majority seems to be somewhat immune to information that does not support their previous opinions. When a simple claim has been repeated often enough, many voters adopt it as a fact, even if it would be easily shown to be false if someone would look at the facts. The strategy of repeating a false claim often enough has been a standard strategy in dictatorships but now it seems to be a standard strategy in the playbooks of populists everywhere. Just listen to your news…
This seems to be a general feature of humanity and can be seen in different contexts, also in churches. For example, in the interpretation of Genesis. A simple claim is repeated often enough and people adopt it, regardless of whether it is true or not. Most people do not put much time in thinking or studying what is true or not true.
Quite so. I thought the late Hans Rosling’s book ‘Factfulness’ was a good read to help drive this home. The poorest of the poor in the world (used to be over a billion people I think - but is significantly less now) had a certain set of characteristics that he used to describe them. From memory here I may not get this quite right, but I think it might have been - do they have shoes to wear? If so, they could walk a bit further to work for food or whatever they can scrap together. Even just getting shoes (so somebody could potentially walk a further distance for gardening or work) was a significant boost up toward the next tier of poverty. How far do they have to walk to get water (even dirty water) for themselves? And then another significant step was can the family afford a bicycle or perhaps a small motorized dirt bike? If so, that opens up even more work possibilities for them. Those kinds of things are the concerns of the truly impoverished of the world. Which helps me keep perspective if I feel like complaining about how old both of my vehicles are that I own - or my small fleet of bicycles that I love using because I can, and have a paved infrastructure that allows me those options. All of us know something of ‘precarity’ at our respective levels (even if it’s stress over how a stock portfolio is doing, or will my vehicle give out and leave me stranded), but Jesus would not have been impressed with most of our middle class bids to try to claim a piece of victimhood status for ourselves.
From my stint being homeless, I can say that more than any mere observer.
I read of a state or country that linked the size of civic fines – traffic, littering, etc. – to people’s income, where at the high end a fine for parking in a no-parking zone could reach thousands of dollars. And another place where fines involving automobiles were pegged to the value of the car. I have to wonder how those went; I suspect that a lot of small misbehaviors dropped as the more wealthy actually had to pay attention to the fines.
So a step from “I’m not buying stuff from them” to “I’m not buying stuff” – I like it!
A change where I live: when someone applies for a defense attorney, owning a vehicle or phone or laptop no longer count in the summation of assets. The judge who ordered that slapped down the local D.A.; the D.A. had a requirement that anyone on probation or parole must have a job or be hunting for one, and the judge sort of lost her cool and asked what fantasy world he was living in where people could find, get, or get to a job these days without those things. (She also broke his calm when she started reducing fines to $1 or $2 or $5 for the indigent; apparently the money from fines goes to the D.A.'s office!)
In part at least that’s driven by TV ads: they always involve people who are definitely middle class, which sends the message that unless you can afford all that good stuff you’re a failure.
The poor person will never manage to sift through all the tax laws to achieve better rates; the rich can pay someone else to do it for them (thus tax attorneys).
For that matter, many of the poor never earn enough to rise above the bottom tax bracket anyway – another good reason to drop the bottom rate in the U.S. to 5% while increasing the individual exemption (observation: the increase in the standard deduction was never to benefit taxpayers, it was to reduce the workload of IRS auditors by wiping out the ability to itemize deductions for a huge number of people).
I mentioned that once when I was invited to preach at a well-to-do congregation; one of the elders commented afterwards that if I wanted to avoid getting such invitations I’d just done a good job.
Or be able to take advantage of all the sales of “family size” packs of meat, canned goods, etc. because you don’t have enough storage space. Last year I estimated that I spend probably 2.5% more on food because of that. An acquaintance said, “Buy a coffin freezer”, and I just stared at him for a couple of seconds before saying, “Have you priced one of those?!”
One I heard lately is “They’re just going to buy chocolate milk”. I had to think about that one, gave up and asked a friend; turns out that chocolate milk is a favorite of the homeless because it is rich in calories and nutrients plus gives a mild boost to the immune system. My thought then was that yes, it is unhealthy, but it keeps them alive and functioning! The complaint assumes that chocolate milk is a luxury, which shows ignorance of the homeless world.
We have that kind of system in Finland. Small on-the-spot fines are often fixed amount but if the case goes to court, the fines are given as numbers of day fines, for example 50 day fines. There is a lower limit for those who do not have income (8 euros/day if I remember correctly) but otherwise, a day fine is what you earn during one day according to tax records. For an unemployed having very little income, 50 day fines would be 50x8 = 400 euros. For a rich person earning a million a year, 50 day fines would be about 137’000 euros. That is considered fair and is an attempt to make everyone respect the law, independent of their income.
Maybe it makes a rich person think before he tests the top speed of his new sports car on a public road.
One exception to the general rule that everything is more expensive for a poor.
I could cut my electric bill by 40% if I could afford to remove all the siding and put in modern insulation. My parents reduced theirs by 25% by getting cellulose (think shredded newspaper) insulation blown in – which is effective but over time the stuff settles as a house vibrates from wind and as any moisture gets in, so houses that got such blown insulation forty years ago could probably do it again up near where ceilings are.
I’ve thought of doing it room by room from the inside, even increasing the wall thickness to the current code for new construction (6" space for insulation), but that would be difficult on the ground floor. And I would like the increased width of window sills that would result!
And slogans! My favorite one to hate is the “Why should I pay for someone else’s ?” – half the time they aren’t aware that they’re already paying but the costs are hidden elsewhere (e.g. hospital bills). Then they turn around and complain that the county wants to add 3¢ per gallon to the gas tax as though someone else should pay for the roads they drive on (and the county really needs it; a third of the existing bridges should have been replaced over the last ten years, and roads with foundations built for Model T Fords need foundation that can handle modern traffic).
One of my complaints about YEC: they advocate for ignorance.
Though the interesting thing is that if you know your stuff about Genesis, and put it in story form, an amazing number of people will listen!
In the town where I attended university it was bicycles: every year there were hundreds of bicycles seized from drug dealers and other sources, and the practice had been to auction them. But a new police chief instituted a policy of only auctioning the best; the rest were provided to the homeless for a token $2 (it would have been $1 but some court had ruled that a single dollar paid for something was obviously just trying to avoid some kind of tax or whatever). The third year of that policy they ran out of homeless, so they raised the price to $5 or $10 depending on the quality of the bike. One result that the city tracked was that there were fewer jobless folks.
This makes me think of a guy who handed out in-sink water filters to people: they made the water palatable and safer, but many people couldn’t afford the replacement filters, so the benefit lasted about six months and the units got thrown away.
In the U.S. many will argue that such a scheme violates equality before the law – I would argue that it establishes equality before the law by making the law actually affect people equally – an equality not of amount, but of result.
I recall an uproar when two wealthy idiots held a race on I5 from Salem to Eugene (about 66 miles). At the posted speed limits, that trip takes an hour; they managed to almost cut that in half. The issue? They each got one ticket for speeding, which came to about $425 each, an amount they would spend on a weekend night out.
A bill was introduced in the legislature to make speeding fines increase by a factor of two for every 10mph over the speed limit; I don’t know if it passed but that change would only have added $210 to each of those tickets, still not enough to deter. My idea was to square the number and multiply the fine, thus getting a total of (base)*S^2, so 20mph over the speed limit would be four times the base fine, 30 over would be nine times, and so on, so since they were going 60mph over the posted speed it would have been thirty-six times the base amount.
note: if anyone knows what’s going wrong with the math widget, please help! It’s taking the “$” I put in front of $210 as the start of a math section!
edit: got help on the meta.discourse site – now the paragraph above is tidied up.
The court gives equal fines for equal crimes, the income of the person does not affect it, except indirectly through the skills of the lawyers that the rich can hire. The beauty of the system is in the unit, day fine. The judge does not even need to know the income of the person, that is checked afterwards based on the latest tax records. 50 day fines is 50 day fines for everybody, there is equality in that. It is your own fault if your daily income is huge
I guess there may be something similar in the U.S. for companies. If a company gets a fine, it might be related to the revenue. For example, a fine or compensation of 1% of the yearly sales.
I like it too! And there is actually an official “buy nothing day” that one can celebrate. The tradition of the day began in Canada in 1992 but is now celebrated in many countries internationally as a protest against consumerism. For more background: Buy Nothing Day - Wikipedia
Here, the speeding fines are only one part of the consequences for driving too fast. If your speed is 36 km/h (22 mph) above the speed limit, you will immediately loose your driver’s license for a period of up to six months. If the driving is considered dangerous for the other road users (felonious), the driver will also get a suspended sentence (probation). That is a combination that most drivers want to avoid.
If someone does not like the speed limits, there is a possibility to travel to Germany. Autobahns of Germany have no speed limits, although the recommendation is to drive below 130 km/h (80 mph). Unfortunately(?), that is not an option for the poor.
I have to correct my too pessimistic view about the role of the financial advisors. I read an interview where one of the advisors told with a case example how they help the poor. They seemed to have practical advice that may help the financial situation of the poor.
The case example was about a customer that had 100 euros[/USD] for monthly consumption after paying the rent, water, energy and other necessary monthly costs.
If you think that you have 100 €[/USD], the price of a hamburger or a cup of coffee does not seem to be terribly much. That is an economically dangerous way to think, therefore the advisor helped the poor to think in a more practical way. First the 100 was divided to two, one half for daily necessities and the other half for other necessities. Daily necessities include matters like food and toilet paper. Then the half (50 €/USD) was divided with the number of days, giving about 1.7 € per day for daily necessities. The price of a cup of coffee looks very different if you compare it to 100 vs. 1.7 €/USD - the cup of coffee is too expensive for the customer if he wants to eat during that day.
Another practical advice was that the poor needs to focus on the price of food per kg. An apparently cheap food may be relatively expensive if the price is transformed to €/kg. The poor needs to search the food that has the cheapest price per kg. Such food is easily one-sided and does not contain all the necessary vitamins. Therefore, some money needs to be saved for buying the necessary vitamins. These advice were targeted for people living in cities where the possibilities to grow and collect food from nature are limited.
One advice was that all prices need to be payed immediately, unless absolutely necessary. No instalment purchase. Instalments easily ruin the personal economy of the poor.
These were examples of the advice given to a poor customer, listed here to show that financial advice can help even the poor that has nothing to save.
A credit union here set up a system where they automatically took 5% - 10% out of a person’s electronic deposits and put them into a savings certificate arrangement, something usually only available to those with $1000 or more available. They earned 7% annually, and couldn’t take anything out until it had been there several years. The recommendation was to use the account to cover sudden needs such as a new washing machine.
Using installments brought a friend to the brink of bankruptcy. I hooked him up with a debt management group that had enough clout to get the balances owed slashed by up to 90%, then paid them off using a 0.5% loan, and gave a new payment plan. Debts that would have taken him twenty years to pay off if he’d stopped all discretionary spending got handled in eight months.
John Oliver had an episode about debt one where they bought up millions of dollars of debt at five to ten cents on the dollar, and paid it off. It made me think that were I a billionaire I’d be able to buy up a billion dollars worth of debt for under ten million and just forgive it.
Which makes me wonder why churches aren’t doing this!
It would be sort of like the year of Jubilee prescribed in the Torah! … speaking of biblical systems of finance that people today never seem to get around to defending! In all fairness, they failed to do it back then too.
