Being poor is a state of mind that you never out grow, but being broke is just a temporary condition

[jtuck004]

Like a lot of Negro kids, we never would have made it without our Momma. When there was no fatback to go with the beans, no socks to go with the shoes, no hope to go with tomorrow. She’d smile and say we aint poor, we’re just broke. Being poor is a state of mind that you never out grow, but being broke is just a temporary condition-----

DICK GREGORY (from his Autobiography called, Nigger)

The people around you with no money aren't "poor people". They are broke people. Mostly because of forces beyond their control, as opposed to the popular myths, but they are our neighbors.

It's odd, but pushing yourself to think that, instead of adopting the greedy capitalist meme that they are "poor people", or parroting what is said out there, can be educational.

Just a public service announcement.

[cheapdate]

1. Absolutely.

[daleanime]

2. Hell yes....

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. I have acquaintances co-living with three generations of "broke" family.

and they've never experienced anything other than "broke".

If broke is a temporary condition, the fixes are as well.

I don't think that solutions to chronic problems should treat only acute symptoms.

[Adrahil]

6. I used to think that...

... and I guess I still do, for the most part. But my sister and I grew up in identical circumstances. I'm no longer broke. She is. I see her make TERRIBLE money decisions all the time. I've tried to help her learn how to overcome being broke, but she seems immune to my rants after all these years.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. If your sister's only problem is being broke, an extra $20 ought to do the trick.

If the actual problem is poverty, especially inter-generational poverty, the problem isn't so superficial.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

[whatthehey]

9. But such dirge is as bullshit as Alger glurge

There are plenty of ways being disciplined and saving for large purchases can affect your long term financial status, and it's absolute crap that once poor = always poor. It sure as hell reduces your chances of being rich, but there are the other quintiles to consider, and mobility below the rarefied heights of the top bracket is much greater than above them.



Saving for even a crappy used car, or hell scooter if weather permits, opens up employment opportunities not covered by bus routes and timetables.

Saving, and studying, for even a modest educational upgrade opens up employment opportunities closed to those who don't have that piece of paper.

Saving before having kids, or the obverse of saving by NOT having kids, which in many case counts as not making a poor financial decision, will lessen the economic impact of childrearing, limited employment opportunities because of school/daycare schedules and obstacles to geographic mobility.

Saving to start even a tiny business like a vending machine or income investment like bonds or CDs means you get the benefit of that steady income stream.

[lumberjack_jeff]

10. It's not as simple as that.

Here's one.

A young man becomes a father. He's making okay blue-collar money. He and girlfriend break up. To relieve the loneliness and boredom, he probably drinks more than he should. He gets a DUI and loses his license. Because his area doesn't offer bus schedules consistent with his work schedule, he loses his job... but not the child support obligation.

So he gets behind on his child support. A few years pass, working sporadically, and now his DUI is off his record. Happily, he applies to renew his drivers license - not so fast - his child support arrears now prevent him from getting a license.

It's a catch-22. The solution in this case is not as simple as "saving for a scooter".

I think that creating and supporting solutions to poverty is as important as recognizing it for what it is... it's not simply "being broke".

[whatthehey]

12. And if he acts as in the post I responded to, he will stay poor

I am not sure I suggested it was simple, only that avoiding splurging and saving instead can make long term differences in economic outlook. In your example that would be paying his arrears first.

[mythology]

14. Doing stupid shit has consequences

In your scenario he made at least 2 stupid choices.

One having a kid while not married. It significantly raises odds of poverty.

Two driving drunk.

There are people who are genuinely stuck in poverty, but even then you can make choices that optimize chances for success. Obviously poor people have a lower margin of error, but choices have consequences.

[Adrahil]

19. I can just tell you my experience.

I picked a career and went for it. She could never find a job she liked. 30 years later, she works at a Wendy's. When she got a $500 bonus, she bought a big HDTV, instead of paying off a credit card. Although I now probably make at least 3 times what she does, I didn't get an HD TV for 3 years after she did. Just this summer she visited me and spent half the time talking about how broke her family is. Two weeks after she got home, she and her husband bought a used Harley and, yup, put it on a credit card.

I want to emphasize, we started in the same place. Neither has any money to go to college, or otherwise get a start. We BOTH got scholarships. I got a degree. She dropped out because she never had enough time or money to hang out with her friends at the bar.

I'm not saying we don't have structural economic problems. We most certainly do. And they are getting worse. But we also have a cultural problem, at least for some people.

[jtuck004]

24. Over the course of my lifetime I have yet to see an attempt at a "solution". Much was

nothing more than trying to curry favor or quiet dissent, while benefits went to someone else. Many "improvements" aren't. Most of the efforts were undertaken with the best of intentions, but never with the idea of actually helping restore power to the workers.

In that quote she was just noting that broke is something that can be fixed. But the person offering to "fix" it might be wanting to fix something else. Cheaper than actually addressing the cause, and they still get credit for trying.

Prior to 1925 or so there was work at real solutions, by people who thought working folk needed to control the assets. That has never been more true, but they were beaten, tortured, jailed, murdered. Because they really were a threat to capitalists/bank$ters/rentiers, their anti-war and pro-labor stance was used against them and they were they were painted with the socialism/communist label (even though there is documentation that they had no interest in communism, and a letter from a communist recruiter stating that the IWW couldn't be worked with. lol. That was kind of the point.

But people got tired, some were co-opted, and the ones who were left quit fighting. Their teaching and that point of view was written out of our history, and such training as they did is now considered at least subversive, if not terrorism. By comparison what we are taught now is nearer servitude than freedom, and we have let the business world define it as such. A lie of omission.

People need opportunity, they want to work because work is an expression of what we do. FDR stood up and said it, and given the choice, nearly any human being will. But we let work get re-defined as making money for some $wine (no offense to pigs) instead of doing the things that need to be done, that MEAN something to us. (For example, saving the freaking planet comes to mind, which no employer is, perhaps, ever gonna do, as stupid as that sounds. Would make a dilly of a government training and employment program, however. We need an investment of tens of trillions of dollars just to figure out a new way forward. Anything less will just be busy work).

It might be that we have let things go so far now that the best one can do is band together with neighbors and help themselves. There have been several times when this country could have gone down a different path, but here we are. Along the path we are traveling I see nothing in the way of a future where we have 2.3 million people applying for 368 jobs doing security or serving coffee. Wouldn't be the first time.

[AuntPatsy]

4. .

[snagglepuss]

5. Very Pollyanna. Perhaps if one had a Momma like Gregory's such a philosophy

would get one through whole but the imo would be rare. I speak as one who grew up with similar philosophy (we're not poor we just don't have money), and speaking from experience, it in many ways made being deprived worse. This is not to say there not some benefits in not describing oneself as poor but they few.

The concept behind this philosophy is to avoid the public shame attendant on being poor. The problem is that it accepts the premise that not having money/poverty is shameful.

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. John Steinbeck said it best

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

[snagglepuss]

13. omg that is bang on.

[jwirr]

11. My entire family considered themselves to lucky to have

been poor. Because we learned to survive. Because we learned to find ways to overcome the poverty. Because we had the knowledge that we were survivors and did not have to fear losing our "billion" dollars.

But the most important reason we considered ourselves not poor is because we had a fantastic extended family that stuck together and were there when we needed them. We are still trying to keep our family working at the same way.

For us over the years it has not been so much what kept us for succeeding but what kept us from ever forgetting where we came from. One of the reasons every single one of us in three generations is still an FDR Democrat.

[puzzledeagle]

15. Real poverty is not having any family

Wouldn't trade my family away for all the money in the world, family is important

[REP]

16. Naw. Real poverty is going to your job washing dishes after Jr high classes to help pay the mortgage

Real poverty is not having any money. I grew up poor, as in No Money.

[jwirr]

18. I was ten years old when I started cleaning a house for a

disabled man. Two years later I was the summer housekeeper for a couple and their two sons. In the winter I worked in the school kitchen to provide my younger brother and I with hot lunches - that was before we had free lunches at schools.

My parents were small farmers going broke under the Eisenhower farm plan. We ate eggs from our chickens for every meal we had for months because there was no food stamps.

I am not unfamiliar with what you went through. And yes it can be horrible. I cannot imagine what it most have been like for my father who could not provide for his family. I remember seeing him cry. And my mother had a nervous breakdown. So it was not all good but the end result for my family was to be stronger.

[REP]

21. My mother ate a lot of roof rabbit during her childhood

She was on the road playing in a supper club band when she was 12. Her brother had their mother sign papers so he could join the Army Air Force at 16 during WWII. My grandfather, who'd been gassed in WWI, didn't do too great holding down a job and refused to take a WPA one because it was "charity." So compared to that, my childhood was mildly poor. And no, it did my family no favors.

[jwirr]

23. I guess it is all in the outlook. I would have gotten out of

poverty in the 70s with the LBJ War on Poverty except I needed to take care of my disabled daughter. At that point the decision to remain in poverty was mine for her sake.

And many of our family managed to use those years to get out so maybe that is the difference. We look back on it as a struggle toward where most of us are now and do not see it as that bad.

If none of us had escaped I think my outlook would be much worse. Plus back then what I want through was not so uncommon. Unfortunately all too many people have forgotten the bad parts. That is why we have so many people voting against themselves.

[jwirr]

17. Exactly. We have two young people in our family who are

adopted. Both of then did experience the worst kind of poverty. Not anymore.

[PowerToThePeople]

22. The game is rigged.

I am poor with dignity.