[JohnMakin]

I struggle adjusting my tone when responding to comments like this, so just know any snarkiness is purely accidental and colored by many years living in an extremely high cost of living area at a joke of a minimum wage.

Living paycheck to paycheck, truly, and I mean truly in that sense where you need to wait for checks to clear before buying groceries occasionally - is extremely common. When you live like this long enough, "big" costs start adding up. That funny sound in your car that you can't afford to get fixed gets worse. Your tooth hurts super bad, but can I afford a $1000 dentist bill? I'll just hope it doesn't get worse. Maybe your kid gets really sick, forcing you to take time off you cannot afford to (not everyone is salaried or has vacation/PTO policies), adding to the strain. You go to credit cards to stretch things out, but of course that has a limit to how far it can go, especially when you're barely treading water. Eventually you will drown, something has to break. What it is varies and will probably largely determine the long-term outcome of the situation.

Anyway, all this to say, there have been many times in my life where these nagging, lingering problems that caused significant strain and hardship in my life that I simply could not afford to fix would have been solved immediately with a few thousand dollars, or whatever "trivial" amount you want to put as a value here. $2000 can actually be a lot more than that when you consider interest and paying down a credit card debt. I can think of one very specific time in my life where $500 being loaned to me was the difference between where I am now and being out on the street, and that is not an exaggeration whatsoever.

The reason you cannot wrap your mind around it, and why this bothers me, is that comments like this come from people that truly cannot imagine how massive swaths of the united states, and more broadly live day to day - it comes from a position of enormous privilege, even if you may not realize/acknowledge it. To me, I struggle to imagine how this comment I am responding to can be made at all, but I know our life experiences probably differ in a drastic way.

[JohnMakin]

As a more personal note, and without responding to some other victim-blamy comments in the larger thread that kind of irritate me, the only way I got out of my situation was a big (to me, a similar amount as being discussed in this thread) financial gambling windfall that led me to being able to purchase a cheap vehicle and expand the hours I was able to work due to having semi-reliable (it was a cheap ford piece of crap that constantly broke, but it was something) vehicle. From there I was able to enroll in community college, which luckily was free-ish for the income I was at, which is way too low of a threshold. I could not qualify for any kind of government aid whatsoever despite living in "welfare state" CA because at $15,032 a year I was well, well over the limit of what qualified you for food stamp assistance or anything like that. Pre-ACA healthcare was completely out of the question and I amassed $200,000 in medical debt that sidelined me for many years before it fell off my credit report.

I am very lucky in that things panned out (relatively, I still deal with residual issues due to living that way for as long as I did, about 15 years) and I was somehow able to finish school due to traits I believe not many people are lucky enough to have. I don't believe at all that many people in this situation are there of their own fault, and I'd die on that hill, but I can only provide my own brief story and some really basic cost of living statistics that are very easy to look up. It's bleak out there.

[vladms]

I read the original reply as "how can extra 2k change your habits or expectations", your interpretation seems to be "how can extra 2k make a difference".

Only the author can detail on what he really means, but do you think the extra 2k would significantly influence the people's behavior on the medium / long term (I do agree that for many it can have a significant impact on the short term and really help them) ?

[JohnMakin]

I don’t know what you mean “influence people’s behavior” which implies you think that people who are in this situation are there because of behavioral issues, which I fundamentally disagree with and see no evidence for. I also provided personal examples and could provide many more where this amount was life changing in the long term. To me it’s silly to call this “short term help” when short term problems can cause a massive irrecoverable collapse of a financially vulnerable person’s life in a very short amount of time.

[brailsafe]

I very much agree with your responses and can relate to them on some level, but I do also disagree with your interpretation that the other person's interpretation necessarily means that a person needs to be in whichever financially dire situation they're in because of poor financial behavior; quite a mouthful, I know.

For example, I've been at absolute zero and living in my car largely because I just couldn't find a job and literally ran out of money trying (I guess count the car and laptop as an asset, w/e, but actually in the red), and if I'd been given 2x $2k cheques, I'd have a hard time finding a way that it would change my habits for positive or negative for longer than a few months, except if I'd looked for a quick source of substance based relief, which I didn't and wouldn't but assume that's irrelevant for now. I'd probably just try to stretch as far as possible and maybe get a few more calories, or a shower, or temporary gym membership. I can sympathize with the confusion somewhat, because to influence my decision making long-term, I'd have to be set back or set forward in a more reliable way than sudden burst of cash. Like I'm not going to get a loan or a 1 year apartment lease, it would be more like a campground instead of the street for a week every month. I do think worst case scenario, back to the substance topic, is that if you're in a really bad place financially, for no fault of your own (which I absolutely agree that this applies to a majority of people in those situations), it's that you become addicted to something, but everyone's dealt a different hand from a different deck and I do believe I'm way off the mark in terms of what other people might do.

Edit: Actually, that sort of windfall might also make it feel way easier to start spending on food delivery bs, which I have to imagine is a somewhat crippling negative long-term financial habit, especially if you're already working like hell with a family and it's an obvious efficiency increase.

[vladms]

By influence people behavior I mean for example "make them thinking about spending more than they were spending before receiving the 2k, 6 months after they stopped receiving the aid". And I mean by this impulsive spending, not planning and the like. You will tell me "but they need that, it's not impulsive, etc.". But don't forget we started from the article that "defaults jump to...". This can be due to multiple causes: "people got actually poorer" (not related mainly to behavior, but more to economy) OR "people changed behavior and suddenly they do things they were not doing before" (possible).

To clarify my opinion (hopefully beyond doubt so that you can't imply things I do not think), I think that blaming people will not solve anything, people are not poor due to behavioral issues, people that are currently poor must just be aided (in multiple ways) to get out of the situation. But people do react differently to different ways of helping, and as we don't have infinite resources, we need to discuss how such interventions affect them on short/medium/long term.

If you prefer more to find points in which you disagree (points that were not clearly there or semantic points as "short term help") I don't think I can bring anything to the discussion. I remained without a formed opinion of why the jump in defaults appeared...