1667

Who cares what they think. People who remark about someone’s state like that is just a bunch of snobs. Portland didn’t blow up like it did because everyone who lives there came from somewhere else in Oregon. Besides, you could get flack for showing up down here and saying you’re from Portland!

1668

It’d be interesting to figure out where the break even point is, where the federal addition is combining with the state unemployment benefits to match the wages you were getting before. I’m sure that since States are worse than PA in those regard.

1669

LOL. Fair. I’m (mostly?) just kidding. When it comes to small-talk type stuff, I tend to be pretty conflict averse. Lull folks into a false sense of security so when they ask whether I prefer tabs vs. spaces, or heaven forbid vi(1) vs emacs(1), I can pounce on them unawares with the full fury of Unix nerdery unleashed.

1670

If you’re moving to Portland it seems you should concentrate on what micro brew you like best, how much crap you want in your coffee and which weird donut is your favorite. I kid. I kid. Or do I?

1671

Oh, now we’re talking. If we’re nerding out about beer and coffee, I am so there.

Speaking of which, I’m not sure I’ve posted in the coffee thread since we got our espresso machine… I should prolly do that.

1672

You completely missed Dave’s point that $800/mo is on the cheap side of things because he’s (and you’re) in a LCOL area. Plus, you know, rent/mortgage isn’t the only expense a household has. And on top of that, a family that has their income suddenly and unexpectedly cut down is going to struggle.

Some more good data slices in there about who is least likely to be able to cover an emergency expense (or coming at it from the other side, a decrease in income). Spoiler: It’s who most of us would think - minorities, younger workers, lower income workers.

1673

Just hope you like IPAs. As a brown and porter fan it can be rough here. There are some, but even when you find a good red it tends to still be quite hoppy.

Pelican has a fantastic milk stout though.

1674

Or even something like this:

One traffic ticket spiraled in to decades of hardship.

“My youngest son was 2 years old and he is 28 years today and I still haven’t gotten my license back.”

I mean yes, you could avoid the ticket but one of the biggest difference between the lower class, middle class and upper class is the ability to recover from mistakes, and of course actually being held accountable for them in the first place.

1675

But then I went on to explain that the federal unemployment check isn’t all the money you are getting.

I feel like some of you guys don’t realize that.

1676

I used to not be a big IPA fan, but living in the bay area has gotten me more used to it. Belgian style grande cru is my go-to.

1677

There was a story recently, maybe linked here, about how being poor is very expensive.

Here’s one story about it, but the anecdote I remember is that if you’re poor, you can only afford cheap work boots, but they wear out after two years. People with means can afford to spend much more on a pair of boots, but they last much longer, so over time the poor person ends up spending more on boots.

1678

Yes, everybody else is wrong is exactly the problem here.

Rich men can’t resist telling poor people that they have enough money. It’s in the handbook or something.

1679

Yeah some version of the shoe comparison has been going around for years. It also shows up in basic things like home repair, doing the cheapest and easiest instead of long-term. Every once in awhile we get one of those articles about a 70/80 year old living in a house that’s about to be condemned which is another symptom of those without really paying more in the long run and getting less in return.

1680

I was furloughed for 4 months last year. I’m well aware. At the additional $600/wk they gave through the end of July I was ok (and luckily, I got called back to work at the beginning of August) - but this is in a LCOL area similar to yours where I was only paying $650/mo for rent. If I had to support others, had a major medical expense, or any of a million other things that would have made my expenses higher I would have been… less ok.

1681

The more basic problem is late fees. Poor people constantly juggle bills to keep from triggering collection, so they pay things late, which means late fees, which means higher bills, and the cycle escalates until something blows up. They get evicted, or the junk car gets repossessed, or someone gets a judgment against them.

Anyone who has ever been poor knows that if your income suddenly drops, it is a catastrophe.

1682

A famous version I see posted a lot is the Terry Pratchett Sam Vimes version.

From Men at Arms

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

1683

LOL that’s the anecdote I was referring to!

1684

Also: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

I had credit card debt for a long time when I was younger and I don’t think very much of what I paid each month went to reducing the balance. I had a lot of issues like that with fees, and the situation is worse for folks today.

Pay day loans are pretty brutal too. Pawn shops, etc. Lotto is called the “poor people tax”.

1685

Yep that’s the one.

There are a lot of people who have convinced themselves that the poor are only poor due to poor choices, do to not working and being lazy, due to having too many children. There is just a laundry list of excuses why they think poor people can just do without or with less without actually digging into the lives of these individuals. Yes, sometimes mistakes are made. One mistake like a late fee or a ticket should not lead to 30 years of digging an even deeper hole.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I know the USA can afford to float the population trying to stay afloat for the duration of this pandemic. It shouldn’t even be a question of doing that.

1686

But at some point, your just talking about general, long-term issues with poverty, rather than anything related to Covid.

Like, consider the actual numbers…

Let’s say someone is already poor, pulling in only $400 a week, under normal situations.

Here in PA, that person would get $200 a week from the state, plus $400 from the feds, so they’re actually making more money than they did normally. Plus, they would be benefited even more by not paying payroll taxes. Even if we are to think that’s still “poor”, they are objectively LESS poor than they were under normal circumstances.

So then what if someone normally makes $800 a week (around 41k a year)? At that point, the state is paying half, and the feds are covering the other half, so their wages are essentially the same. But again, there are no payroll taxes, so that’s gonna to be a few thousand dollars extra that they get beyond what they normally would have had.

Entirely separate from the subjective assessment of whether you think this is “poor” or whatever, or whether this is “enough”, you can say that from an objective perspectives, they’re probably pulling in a similar amount of money to what they are before. There are likely some things which complicate this a bit, such as losing employer provided healthcare if they had it, but i suspect this is only going to be a fairly narrow band of people.

It’s not until you get to around 50k a year, that you start to have the unemployment failing to cover the wages.

But at that point, you are already well above the median income in the US. By a LOT. By like $20k.

Also, i realize that perhaps some states haven’t extended their unemployment benefits, so in those states, it would be worse.