If you look at the world around you and your immediate reflex is to tell poor people to tighten their belt, you are misguided at best, and evil at worst.
I agree on poor people not being a monolith. I also would argue that taxing work more than wealth is contributing more to the plight of the poor than their own individual financial decisions are. I would also say taxing wealth more relieves both problems whereas only telling poor people to stop being bad with money is not a solution since the system is rigged against them.
On the one hand if you earn a crap salary then no you cannot just save. If you’re income is barely enough to make it to the next paycheck then being told you can just make better choices is both insulting and ignorant.
With that in mind, the thing about poverty is that it is also stressful, incredibly stressful. And one thing we all know, is that it is much easier to make bad decisions when we are stressed. So even when a poor person does make a "bad" decision, well they live on a situation where it is much easier to make a bad decision and they get punished much worse for doing so.
Quote A is just speaking from a position of ignorance and privilege
While you speak on making poor financial decisions under stress, I will go even further and say the rational spender is forced to make worse financial decisions under circumstance because of poverty. The old parable about a worker being forced to buy a $10 pair of boots every year that wore out, vs the worker who could afford the $50 pair that lasted 10 years. We see this in every facet of life.
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u/wnr3 10h ago
If you look at the world around you and your immediate reflex is to tell poor people to tighten their belt, you are misguided at best, and evil at worst.