The Democratic Party's Slide Into Irrelevance

If literally anyone who's been to a fast food restaurant is wasteful, saying "poor people are wasteful" isn't a very enlightening statement.

Anyone who goes to one very often is wasting their money and harming their health.

But it's true that most people do waste a lot of their money.

But by your logic poor people waste vastly less money than anyone else. You're trying to do a little poor-shaming for fun, but this argument is going to backfire.

I wasn't shaming anyone (though sorry if this applies to you and I made you feel bad). I also was specifically talking about "people who live paycheck to paycheck", regardless of how big their paycheck is. I have been very low-income for most of my life, but lived within my means.
Poor people have less money to waste, but they waste a larger percentage of their income. Money management needs to be taught in schools, as early as possible.

Several times in my life I have loaned money to people with more income than me, because otherwise they were going to be late with a bill and be charged a large late fee, which would have put them behind even further. Any of those people could have easily not been in that situation if they hadn't spent hundreds of dollars on things that weren't necessities in the past several months.

Nearly every poor person in the US has had money to burn at some point in their lives (and done so); if you want proof, just look for tattoos.

Not sure on the context of it all but fast food has absolutely morphed into the new comfort dopamine go to place like Starbucks. Mickey D's spends millions on sent and habit reinforcement and neuroscience **** to capitalize on it. It ins't budget friendly at all.

**** fast food. They are the new cigs of gen Z and fund the pharmaceuticals as a result

Carry on

Sounds like we need FDR to create the opportunity for folks to buy houses for cheap while also creating jobs that offer pensions again + a wage that allows a portion to go towards a rainy day. But we did that for the boomers and instead of mission accomplished, we blame them.

I'd imagine that the +ev move there would be to not off their heads but to create a sustainable mechanism that allows future generations the same thing without taking anything away from the kiddos. But political clout is a bitch.

It seems like my comment about fast food restaurants was misinterpreted and I'll take ownership for not making it more simple.

The comment was made in response to chillrob's claim that he had never met a poor person who wasn't poor as a result of their waste of money.

I was referring to the employees of fast food restaurants and Walmart. Not the consumers of fast food products.

How can anyone not be poor in the USA who is making the wage that a fast food restaurant pays. $15 / hr is a poverty wage in America. How can anyone work for that and not be poor unless they live rent free ?

They need to automize that entire industry. It isn't sustainable turning a cheeseburger into cocaine to push for every last penny while paying employees min wages for hard work. It's profitable, but I don't think it's sustainable.

And they're likely destroying their health as well.

Being both fat and poor I suspect is a relatively recent development in world history.

THIS!!!

Thanks for the clarification about meaning employees, but the bolded isn't exactly what I said.

I said "I've never met a poor person (or anyone who spends all their paycheck before the next one arrives) who didn't waste lots of their income."

That doesn't imply that they're poor because they waste their money. I consider "poor" to be based on income. Living paycheck to paycheck is based on spending, and can happen to people of any income.

I have been fairly poor (based on income) for nearly all of my life, but I have never lived paycheck to paycheck, because I have always lived within my means and haven't wasted money on things most people do - things that are expensive and generally make one less healthy.

Of course, here in Portland, fast food workers start at about $20/hour and average about $23 per hour. The cost of living is pretty high here, but if working full time, I could certainly make ends meet at $20/hour. I do expect that few fast food workers work 40 hours per week though. Caveat - I live with my best friend, and I hate living alone, which I would prefer not to do regardless of my income. Sharing home expenses with others definitely makes it easier to survive on a low income.

This is absolutely not true, the wealthy spend a vastly greater percentage of their income on stuff they don't need, for reasons that ought to be obvious.

Even if we're just talking fast food, it's the middle-class and upper-middle classes that are keeping McDonald's in business. Poor people can't afford convenience food as easily, poor people have to do meal prep and manage the money much more tightly for the obvious reason that they have less money.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/24/18018544/fast-food-cdc-class-rich-people

Vox

The more money you make, the more fast food you eat

You're just poor-shaming people, you want to believe they're poor because they're dumb and wasteful when all the evidence suggests otherwise.

Unfortunately a very popular attitude in America. Yet another lie the rich propagate to ensure the peasants hate each other, instead of acknowledging the oligarchy.

“Poor people deserve what they get, btw I’m totally not poor.”

All of us are a few mishaps away from financial ruin, but people like to pretend otherwise.

There is no way this is true. It should be, but it isn't. I guess next you're going to tell me that poor people never buy cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol.

As already stated, I'm not trying to shame anyone. I am a poor person. I criticized people who waste money and live paycheck to paycheck, regardless of their income. You're projecting onto me things that I didn't say, even after I already corrected you. Maybe you're the one who really thinks these things; you're the only one saying them.

Why would you think otherwise? It's kinda common sense that the wealthy buy more luxuries and poor people spend a bigger % of their money on necessities. You've just been exposed to right-wing agitprop that you haven't questioned.

When you're comfortably wealthy, you have less incentive to economize than when you're living paycheck to paycheck.

Upper-class people buy cigarettes and alcohol too? And they buy much more expensive stuff. A guy buying French champagne is wasting orders of magnitude more money and also damaging his health, but somehow it's the poor guy at MickeyD's who gets singled out for scorn. We should be criticizing the dude at a Lexis dealership.

You deliberately single out poor people when it's the wealthy who are much more wasteful. There's no way to interpret this other than you engaging in poor-shaming.

Unskilled labor has never been able to sustain an entire household on a single income, not in the U.S., nor anywhere else in the industialized world.There’s no moral or economic principle that every job must provide a full “living wage” for an independent adult household. Those jobs have always been entry-level or supplemental-income positions.

The biggest and fastest improvement in economic outcomes for any demographic in history came when women entered the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s and onward. Their improved economic security didn’t come from suddenly getting higher pay in the low-wage jobs that had previously been available to them, instead it came from removing the barriers that had prevented them from getting better-paying work in the first place. Access to higher-skilled, higher-wage jobs changed their economic futures dramatically, not wage floors and collective bargaining.

That said, I’m not opposed to the idea of establishing a wage floor that allows a two-income household to reach something close to a median standard of living. I just don’t think the way to get there is through private-sector mandates that force every low-skill job to pay that level of wage.

If we’re going to set that kind of baseline, then those workers should be employed doing work that actually benefits the public like rebuilding infrastructure, maintaining public spaces, or providing community services. In other words, if society wants to guarantee higher pay for low-skill labor, the jobs should contribute to long-term public value, not just increase the supply of consumer goods in an already over-consuming economy.

I think what people are trying to say is that in terms of 'total' money spent on waste or non essential stuff, the bottom quintile waste the least. I'd say that's true by an order of magnitude: the poor's per capita waste is dwarfed by upper middle income spending on non essentials. And sure that spending is a smaller share of those higher incomes and they can basically afford it. But thats not the problem with all that consumer spending up top.

The problem with higher incomes spending so much on 'non-essentials' is the pull on resources forces prices up on 'essential' goods for everyone below them. It can't not. And Im certain if we crunch the numbers, how much the poor are getting squeezed financially by that inflation dwarfs what they're doing to themselves going through a drive-thru.

Also true in terms of percentages.

Let me guess though you do not smoke either. Lower Income folks tend to smoke more than middle and upper I find. Now I am not sure what a pack of smokes cost in the states but here in Canada they average $15-$20 a pack . Minimum wage here is in that range as well I have no clue how anyone survives on $6.75 an hour which I do believe is your federal minimum wage though I understand man y states have a higher one

lol, there is absolutely a moral principle that people should be able to earn a reasonable living in exchange for honest labor. There's no moral principle that companies should be entitled to sub-cost labor.

Here in California, about half the price of a pack of cigarettes are various taxes on each pack.

I doubt there's much difference. Since we don't have a 'wasteful' spending category or even a good definition of what that means, we can't really say. But we track say 'food away from home' and correlate it with incomes. That falls in the 5-10%, irrespective of income. So as a sort of benchmark on spending...

Fact checked myself:

California taxes on cigarettes is about one-third of the price of an average-priced pack.*

* Not including any federal tax

I agree. That's basically the bedrock of modern society. But that doesn't mean every job in society must provide those wages. Just that low skill workers "should be able" to get one of those better paying jobs and not have to spend their entire life trying to raise a family on minimum wage. But that's a mobility issue.

What you’re doing is taking a static snapshot of low-wage employment and treating it as if that's some person’s entire life. It isn’t. Median household income is about $84K, and median two-income households are close to $130K, and where people are between entry-level pay and that median is mostly a function of work experience.

Everything is made up. We could have a society where social safety nets and job wages allow everyone to live comfortably.

We could do it, but we don’t.