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How bad is america for the poors really?

https://old.reddit.com/r/poor/comments/1ai1qov/america_is_unlivable

open question to non reddit soys because I am interested, my general impression is that these people are still fat as heck and order doordash 6 times a week while paying off a 100k car on credit.

If you make like 15$/hr mcdonaldings in America are are not r-slurred how is quality of life actually.

in the UK min wage generally means probably having to house share if you live in an urban area and having to eat non brand food

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If you took the bottom 20% of poorest Americans and made them their own country, they would be wealthier on average than the average Canadian.

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The lowest GDP per capita state is higher than the highest GDP per capita Canadian province

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Strange how this supposed state of affairs isn't reflected in the median wealth. :marseyhmm:

https://i.rdrama.net/images/17070307089987543.webp

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That number is based on household consumption, which ends up counting all sources of income. Government assistance doesn't show up in self-reported measurements of wealth, but does show up in measurements of consumption.

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That's not true. Your poors are significantly more useless and lazy than Canadians. It's just your non poors are way better.

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I have been extremely poor. I can verify it sucks. Eating McDonald's, living in your truck, working 78 hours a week without benefits. You eat McDonald's because it costs a dollar and because you have nowhere to cook or store food.

You fricking smell like shit since you spend all night sweating your balls off (or freezing them off, in which case you do not smell).

The worst part of this is other homeless people. They will fricking kill you the first fricking chance they get. They will NEVER look out for you, and they hassle you. The cops were always nice to me. They never tried to kill me. Other homeless people did.

Then, when I was well off, I went to other nations and saw just how much further you can fall. So being poor in America sucks, but it's nowhere near what I saw in Africa. At least here you can claw your way back. At least in my truck I just boiled, at least I had a truck. At least I had something to eat often enough to stay alive. They don't have that. They just lay out in the open and die of starvation.

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in the UK you have to actually work pretty hard to end up on the street (actively stealing wire out the walls of the first 5 places they put you in)

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Homelessness in the US is almost entirely due to drug addiction. Those that are consistently homeless are like that because all the free housing they might get has stipulations like looking for work and being sober. If you're not that degenerate, you can use all the services available to get on your feet again.

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what I saw in Africa.

Which part of Africa did you see? Tunisia is radically different from Burundi, even "poor African country with slums" stereotypes like Nigeria are still far better than the DR Congo for example.

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DR Congo is exactly what came to mind.

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This is from 2019 but when you look at consumption people in the poorest 20% of Americans have about as much purchasing power as the average European.

https://i.rdrama.net/images/17070058672961235.webp

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The American poor have some of the highest quality of life of any poors, but are still poors, if that makes sense. They (we :marseypoor:) have access to the most of the same amenities as wealthsigmas, but much lower quality. Being poor is expensive; if you rent everything instead of owning it you don't build wealth.

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>being poor is expensive

That doesn't make sense the way you described it. Obviously you're not accumulating wealth if your income is low, that alone doesn't make being poor more expensive.

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If you can't afford a $500 repair bill, you finance it, but you have shit credit, so you end up paying it off in 24 monthly payments of $60, because that's what you can afford. So you end up paying almost $1500 for a $500 bill.

All those numbers are made up, I'm not gonna try and figure using real interest rates of people with bad credit.

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having liquid cash is expensive too due to inflation.

And I'm not entirely sure about this, but my gut feeling is that when you can afford monthly $60 payments, you can also afford to just put a monthly $60 (or $20 which would be enough based on your "math") in an emergency fund beforehand. Sounds like a skill issue to me.

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Well yeah, part of being "poor" in current year America is being shit at planning ahead.

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There's people who are legitimately poor (especially in expensive cities), and then there's people who are poor because they can't control their spending. The suburbs are full of people who live paycheck to paycheck because they got a mcmansion, luxury car lease, eat out all the time, etc.

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Is there a word for people who are poor because of bad spending? Cuz I hate those people, not legit poor people.

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This chick is a true peak poor. She has $11K in debt. Paying $100/mo in streaming services. She paid $2500 for a European vacation. Caleb would be screaming at theis point :marseycalebhammer:. From her post history, she's an unstable nanny with narcissist parents :marseyhmm:, narcissist inlaws :marseyhmmm:, and narcissist clients :marseythonk:.

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in the UK min wage generally means probably having to house share if you live in an urban area and having to eat non brand food

That's about what it is here. 0% interest rates have really fricked over the working poor and wages are still catching up to the rather ridiculous inflation there has been the past few years. But, don't ever trust someone on Reddit claiming poverty, as @BussyMerchant has shown.

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In Philadelphia the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. When I was in law school my total monthly spending averaged about $1,130, so assuming full-time work after tax I would say a living wage here for a single person is about $8 an hour. That includes renting a sizable room but with shared kitchen and bathrooms. I eat healthy food, go to restaurants only once or twice a month and have little other luxury spending. I had a full-tuition scholarship but did have to pay academic fees and textbooks. Unskilled jobs requiring no experience, like say a cashier at the grocery store I shop at, usually start at about $12-$13 an hour now.

That is a long way to say: America is incredibly generous to anyone willing and able to work. We have a large number of programs to support the poor. You'll run into problems if you can't hold down a full-time job or are disabled, but you get supported in minimal living at least.

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I think the main thing is you have to live in shittier parts of town than you did 30 years ago if you don't make a lot. In college, I was able to rent an apartment for 440/month and split it with a roommate, so I could make my rent making $6/hour part time. You can still afford a place like that now on relatively little, but you might have to live next to some drug dealers. The reddit guy is an idiot, of course:

>Government taxes the frick out of us

Poor people don't pay taxes except social security and medicare, and if you can manage to not keep yourself safe before you're 65 by eating hot pockets every day, they'll give it all back to you anyway.

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This kind of cryposting about wagecucking makes me bemoan unfettered illegal immigration just a little bit less.


Don't forget to turn off signatures in settings!

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at 15$/hr you need to split rent with someone to make living :marseyjumpscare: comfortable, but so long as you're not stupid :marseyindignantretard: or living :marseyzombie2: in new york you're good.

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as a ruralcel I think you could genuinely still live on 7.25 an hour.. 1160 a month at 40 hours

750 rent, leaves 410 for everything else :marseyhmm: this assumes you got a shitbox from your parents and no debt...

that being said no one's paying 7.25 anymore (no minimum wage law required)


$15 would be 2400 a month pretty comfortable you could be paying for a car and stuff

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Shrinkflation is unirobicslly a good thing for :marseyscooter:

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