[ralusek]

But personal responsibility is actually an important concept. It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility. Any strategy that is employed to remedy this has to contend with the fact that the individuals who need to have this situation remedied for themselves are the same ones who have gotten themselves into this situation.

I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making. Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid. It's not as though the country has a non-existent social safety net. You simply can't propose that the solution can exist independently of the personal decisions made by the individuals in this position.

[headmelted]

Spoken as someone well north of the poverty line.

The reason for some people not having the money around is undoubtedly poor decision making, but for a great many others they simply have no gainful employment, no prospects of obtaining gainful employment and are often trapped in debt spirals due to past financial desperation.

I'm real happy for you that you're so far removed from their situation that none of this occured to you.

[devonkim]

The problem with being poor is that it is extremely taxing on both your time, your ability to make rational decisions, and even IQ. Being poor is, in effect, a disability that keeps one from being able to make it out of that situation itself. Depression and many other mental conditions are treated similarly in American society where we oftentimes point to people that are successful with depression and ignore the sheer massive weight that depression by and large keeps most of its sufferers from achieving success.

The whole individual agency and moral superiority complex of American culture is more and more sickening to me as I grow older and see how most people simply with a rational set of actions and existing opportunities better off not pursuing what used to be the better options due to structural problems. Endless optimism only works so far for attitudes that help with success until you’re truly at a rock bottom point and nobody wants to be near someone that’s failed so much out of social niceties alone.

[ralusek]

It wasn't my point to suggest that poverty is not a difficult position to be in, my point was to suggest that there is a serious problem with shrugging off the role of personal responsibility. I am very aware of what it means to be broke, you often don't even know where to begin. I'm not saying that they're poor because their situation at birth was necessarily fair, I'm not saying that nobody should change anything to help remedy their situation. What I am saying that in this country, at this time, the reality is that if 40% of the country does not have $400 saved for an emergency, given all of the available social services, there is a serious problem of priority and character.

There are obvious exceptions for individuals suffering from unavoidable medical circumstances and the like, and I am fully willing to criticize our existing healthcare system's failings in providing suitable mitigation against such circumstances. But we're talking about 40% of the country.

[ralusek]

Being trapped in a debt spiral due to past financial desperation is just a way of iterating forward in the loop of bad decision making. What I am saying is that to enter financial desperation in the United States is not actually possible if you utilize the available social safety net and make proper decisions.

[seorphates]

It looks like you believe stability is simply a matter of 100% good decision making and that lower middle class is just one bus fare and two transfer passes away. You're painting a picture with a brush as wide as your canvas and with only one color on your palette.

I think we are mostly products of our surroundings so, yes, good decisions can help a lot. It just seems placing that level of "blame" is counter-productive and just does not represent reality on the ground. Trapped is trapped, you used the word yourself. I'd wager you have little idea the sorts of life traps that are laid out there. Having debt is pretty easy even with a better than average stability matrix. A single hit with bad luck is simply made worse as the "socially permitted" trolls eat their prey where no "socially permitted" social safety net exists that could possibly save them.

What is that? Trickle-down blame? You got yours? I simply don't understand the economics of "it's your own damn fault" with the force of a gavel.

[internetman55]

Tbh I think we should take the people who run scam schools and just ban them for the country. Or have stricter regulation and accreditation I guess

[sjg007]

We try to regulate them but republicans keep them in.

[Retric]

The number of allowed bad decisions drops dramatically as you slide down the wealth scale. Saying you need to be correct 99.999% of the time is simply not a viable strategy. Especially when people are actively trying to get you to make bad decisions like enrolling in a for profit collage.

The vast US homeless population suggests we don't really have a safety net, so much as a safety rope you need to hold on tight and pray. Consider, if all the homeless people showed up in the same place that would instantly be in the top 10 US cities.

[selimthegrim]

And once you've enrolled in that for-profit college, surprise! You can choose to keep your student status to keep your loans in deferment but now you're not eligible for food stamps while an enrolled student unless you work a minimum of 20 hours a week/earn ~$680 a month.

[cuckcuckspruce]

Untrue. Get majorly sick or in a major accident and lose your insurance because your job finds a reason to restructure your department. Trust me, you will enter financial desperation very quickly while you wait for the social safety net to catch up, and by that time you're thousands of dollars in debt, likely already out of your house, and totally screwed.

[kaybe]

All of you couldn't do a better job to make me very very glad of the taxes and other money I pay to the state and public health insurance here in Germany. As long as we can protect this system this will never happen to me or my neighbours.

[skookumchuck]

40% of Americans are not and never were majorly sick. Unless you count drug addicts and winos.

Yes, I've lost jobs before because of corporate restructuring.

[alasdair_]

>Being trapped in a debt spiral due to past financial desperation is just a way of iterating forward in the loop of bad decision making.

Imagine you went to a crappy school where you spent most of your days trying to avoid gangs rather than learning anything. You did everything people told you to do and you applied to some for-profit bullshit college that accepted you. You signed some paperwork that you literally didn't understand the details of (because of said shitty school and parents who have never dealt with this situation before and for-profit colleges that explicitly set out to target people exactly like you). Now you have $50,000 in debt that you literally can't even declare bankruptcy on and no marketable skills. What do you now do?

To blame it all on personal responsibility degenerates into a No True Scotsman argument very quickly. It's the kind of overly simplistic thinking that makes thirteen year old kids think Ayn Rand had it all figured out and never think further than than her heroic fantasy novels.

(I admit, I actually really like Ayn Rand's philosophy if it's seen as an ideal, rather than something that is practically p[possible. Marx and Engels were also idealists and in their perfect world everyone would be happy too.)

Humans are not born with an innate understanding of optimal decision making and the power of compound interest. Our environment shapes us to a massive degree and you're discounting this.

[skookumchuck]

None of my public school classes ever mentioned compound interest.

[harikb]

If you have Netflix, watch the documentary "Dirty Money". Then come back and tell us you wouldn't have been in the same situation had some event in your past not gone your favor.

[s73v3r_]

Try it. I will bet you a million dollars that you would not be able to do it in any meaningful amount of time.

[alasdair_]

>It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult.

The problem occurs when there are MANY emergencies. You're about to get evicted, your car is broken down (so you're about to lose your job) and your kid is sick and you need a doctor but can't take the time off to get one.

>I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making.

Okay. The day your turn eighteen, your parents (who taught you very little and gave you nothing) kick you out on the street. You have no money (because they flat out stole it the day before you became an adult). Where does this magic $400 come from?

$400 is a LOT of money. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 before taxes. That's a week and a half of work without accounting for gas money to get you to the job or food to eat when you get there. After the basics (taxes, cheapest-possible rent, basic food, some kind of heating and lighting and a few other things) you're probably at the point where you have $10 or $20 left over.

Let's say you get sick, or disabled, or laid off. You are so fucked.

> Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid.

Have you any idea how long it takes to get disability? Years. And years. And it's not certain at all. What do you do in the meantime?

Even the other programs - they often fail the very people they are designed to help the most.

Child support? Again, have you any idea how many years it takes to get child support from someone who bails from their job every time the paperwork makes its way into the syste, and who never files a tax return?

[wwweston]

> That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility.

Poor decision making or lack of personal responsibility are certainly sufficient to achieve such a situation... but they're not necessary. Unless you play with the definition of "poor decision making" to include things like "capable of making mistakes."

This could be a good time for everyone to review the concept of the Fundamental Attribution Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[xena]

What about people whose life situations constantly rip money out of them and their pay is just fundamentally insufficient to cover their expenses?

[trophycase]

You're right. Some poor people have bad spending habits, and some have unfortunate life situations, and some have both.

[mlthoughts2018]

In fact, poor spending habits could be caused by a poor life situation.

[yermom]

nah, they should just work harder

[your-nanny]

Forgot your sarc tags

[empath75]

You simply have no understanding of what it’s like to be poor in this country. In a lot of ways it’s more expensive to be poor than to be middle class— you get hit with higher interest rates, more fees, more things like inspection tickets for your car that you can barely keep on the road. A single emergency room visit is enough to bankrupt some people.

I’m making well into six figures now, but in my early 20s, I was living pay check to pay check and barely had enough to eat some weeks. If I managed to scrape up an extra $400, I had a hundred things to spend it on that weren’t a rainy day fund.

[mattnewton]

Bahaha, yes, if you make perfect decisions you will have over $400. The whole point is people don’t make perfect decisions. Should they become homeless when they get hurt as a result? Does that threat help them make better decisions? Does it help society to let a small problem escalate into a larger one like that? I’d answer a resounding no on all fronts.

[rectang]

It gives the wealthy a pleasing sense of moral superiority to see the poor fail. Humans compete not only for resources but for status.

This alone is sufficient motivation to drive policies which ensure not just inequality, but humiliation of the losers.

[keithnz]

this is probablly a good pivot point for you to look at sociology. Because personal responsibility just doesn't magically happen. If you are not looking at what leads people into what you think is poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility, you become part of the problem. The reality is, the social structures play a big part in this, and more problematically, you can't change it quickly.

[jlarocco]

The funny thing about what you're saying is that there's always somebody richer saying the same thing about you, just with bigger sums of money. "He wouldn't have a mortgage if he just made better financial decisions!" ;-)

Honestly, though, you're just stating the obvious: people screw up and behave irrationally. That's common knowledge.

The goal is to minimize the impact of poor decisions and give people a way to get back on track. "F* 'em, I've got mine" doesn't help anybody.

[dv_dt]

The overhead margin of basic life costs are much higher when one is poor then one is wealthy. It's an even higher overhead when trying to access our ever shrinking safety net with its perverse incentives and a high time and hassle factor. Blaming the victim for being poor is both ridiculous and counterproductive. You should wonder instead why basic personal finance skills aren't on any National education curriculum if its such a basic needed skill. (and I agree it is!)

[pwg]

Are you referring to the Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

[dv_dt]

That as well as the Welfare Trap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

[dragonwriter]

> I will say this again.

Repetition doesn't actually make your claim any better supported, so maybe instead of repeating it, provide better support or, failing that, just stop instead of reiterating.

[dionidium]

OK, but, like, what if some people are just actually bad at making decisions? Unless you have a plan for that you’re just moralizing toward no practical end.

[rectang]

Moralizing is its own reward. It feels good to look down on people.

[ridgeguy]

I find your absolutist view remarkably blinkered, indeed unrealistic in the fundamental sense of the word.

I wonder if you suddenly incurred uninsured medical expenses of oh, let's say, 20X your net worth or annual income, whether you might see things differently.

A family of four on a $50K annual income would find a sudden $1000K obligation utterly devastating.

That's life for (IMHO) too many of us. On average, it has far more to do with luck than your proffered causal moral failure. I think we can do better.

[Florin_Andrei]

> It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult.

There's a lot of "let them eat cake instead" mentality in that statement.

[somerando]

And here I was feeling bad because I have less than $100k on hand.

[whatAmount]

What makes $400 such a special number? Why not $100, Why not $500, Why not $1,000?

What makes $400 the ideal number? Probably nothing, except the fact that it makes for the best headline, since "2 out of 5" is a quotable statistic.

Formulating advice should follow a different pattern. The ideal number for emergencies is probably closer to $5,000 since it covers more realistic emergency scenarios.

$500 might cover food, gas, a few taxi rides or train tickets and basic OTC medication like asprin for possibly a week.

$5,000 might cover a lost or stolen laptop, plane tickets, hotel stays, car repairs, emergency rooms and ambulances and out-of-pocket prescriptions, funerals, rent or convert to a month's worth of basic needs (food, gas, short-haul travel).

More is obviously always better, but emergency response is about covering the cost of capacity to react, plus supplies needed to take action, plus duration of endurance. $500 wouldn't keep you off the street for more than a weekend, but $5,000 could last a month or more.