Because they're not actually acting rationally? Semantically correct logic built upon false assumptions is still fundamentally incorrect.

You seem to be caught in a circular argument... the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor!

Yeah, what do you think "poor" means? It doesn't mean "stupid" or "makes bad choices" or "deserves to struggle/be hungry/forego medical care" or any of the judgments that usually get attached to it.

It means "doesn't have much/enough money". Poor people usually make decisions that are perfectly rational given the day-to-day grind of being poor.

As a poor person myself, who grew up poor, and am still quite poor (although less poor than I used to be)....

That is exactly what it is. Poor people are poor because we are poor.

We see rich people making money on the stock market, and wish we could, but we have no excess money to do that with.

We see rich people upgrading their homes and their cars and their whatevers to be more energy efficient, but when our car breaks down and can't be repaired, we buy whatever car we can afford, not whatever car would have the lowest TCO per mile.

Or hell, anything that has a calculable TCO, usually the most efficient TCO-wise has a very large initial investment... poor people can't afford that, thus we are punished, literally, because we are poor.

Like, a few days ago, I finally ran out of my strategic supply of incandescent bulbs. I can't have CFLs in my house because they tend to give me headaches, and they make everything look like shit anyways; but for the past decade, LED lighting has been absolutely too expensive.

I basically fought with myself for 3 days over finally spending $75 to upgrade sixteen 40 watt bulbs and seven 60 watt bulbs. Power efficiency wise, trying to estimate my average usage as best as possible, it is going to take 2.7 years for for those bulbs to pay for themselves (I use the lights very little, but our power prices are very high)... sometimes I wonder if I'm going to survive the month, let alone 2.7 years.

Hell, I'm trying to grow food in my backyard just to try to get better vegetables cheaper: the farmers market around here is pretty bad, and what little local vegetables we grow are sold out of state, while most of what is on store shelves is either from California or out of the country, and often half-rotten.

The people who eat pre-packaged frozen garbage all the time, or eat at McDs and KFC all the time, and become massively overweight and generally suffer from health problems (which also punishes us because we're poor, thus making us even poorer) eat that way because at least it isn't half rotten garbage being sold as fresh vegetables.

My fellow poor people around here think I'm insane for going Paleo, such as getting rid of cheap sources of carbs (such as breads and pastas and refined sugars), and eating more fresh vegetables (organic brands tend to actually not be rotten garbage; yet another punishment for being poor), and eating more healthy fat and protein sources (such as better cuts of real meat instead of eating chicken or really bad cuts of pork, or processed shit like hot dogs or whatever)...

... and that choice of mine? Sure, I'm not going to die of being overweight now. I had pre-Diabetus, it's gone. I used to weigh 340 pounds (I'm 6'0"), now I weigh 190ish. I went from that 340 to 214 in exactly a year. I did this with diet modification alone.

I lost all that weight? Punished by being forced to buy new clothes. Punished by being shunned by fatter people who basically hate me because I chose to become skinny and make better choices about my diet because somehow I'm better than them (as if that thought process even begins to make sense). Punished by having an even larger chunk of my budget eaten up my better diet.

Now, back to the garden? Sure, if I can put a little bit of work in, and get a fresh source of vegetables, that'd be great: the soil is apparently so bad that it may take years of adding nutrients and fertilizer and other organic material back to the soil to get it to grow a good crop.

What I've already put into the soil? Cost money. What I will put into the soil in the future? Costs money. When will I see a return on that investment? Never is still a possibility, I have not ruled it out yet.

So yes, being poor is a punishment for being poor, and the punishment for being guilty of the crime of being poor is being poor. Its a never ending loop of bullshit that is very hard to climb out of.

Want to fix society? Give everyone their basic needs so they can go focus on actually being productive members of society, and THEY BECOME PRODUCTIVE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. Treat people like how you want them to behave, AND THEY BECOME THAT PERSON.

I have no clue why the hell so many people have problems with what is basically Psychology 101. None of this is new, but we keep rediscovering it every few years as if it is some magical new tablet handed down from Mount Sinai with brand new information on it.

Several years ago, I saw a replay of a news show from the 60s on which the guest was MLK Jr. The interviewer suggested that King's success, as well as that of a few other "colored" people was proof that nothing was wrong with the status quo.

Segregation and all the other ills of the day had nothing to do with the challenges faced by "colored" people. They just needed to be smarter and work harder.

Putting aside that there are various degrees of poverty, I will just congratulate you and your friends. But, studies show that economic mobility is far more difficult than in the past and more difficult in the U.S. than in many western European nations.

The severe and worsening income and wealth stratification of the past few decades is no accident. There are structural problems with our economy. That a relative few can overcome this to some degree neither disproves nor mitigates that fact.

You state two discrete events and in the next sentence talk as though they are causally related. Maybe economic mobility is harder in the US now than before. Could economic strangulation by regulation be the cause of it? Maybe the wealth transfer induced by central banking is? There are many unknown variables that could cause that. But people only cling to what fashionable prescription makes them looks good. The evidence of >500 million people lifting themselves out of poverty since liberalization of china's and India's economy proves that it is possible beyond a measure of doubt if economic freedom is increased. But that is not a fashionable opinion is it? Any flavor of marxism/socialism/redistributionism is good except what works. Funny

Well, yes, because the tens of millions of people working 3 minimum wage jobs aren't being "strangled by regulation".

It isn't a "lack of economic freedom" that makes the poor get screwed by shitty jobs and all the fees tacked onto poor-people services, it's the cottage industry that's sprung up around screwing the poor. The poor have little to no political power (and they wouldn't have time to exercise it, juggling their three part-time minimum wage jobs), so there's very few people actually looking out for them.

It's funny, when we do peel back regulations, and the poor get screwed further, these myth-of-overregulation people never reflect on that. They never stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the poor are getting screwed even further because it isn't regulations that are hurting them in the first place.

The liberalization of China's and India's economies proves beyond doubt what's possible when "economic freedom is increased", yet there are many unknown variables that could be suppressing economic mobility in the U.S.? Interesting that you find one so easy to explain, but not the other. But, then you seem to have figured it all out mid-comment! It's that dastardly regulation! Or is it? What, exactly, are you saying?

Whatever it is, you seem to suggest that the success of India and China has nothing to do with trade agrements. Nothing to do with currency manipulation. Nothing to do with technology. Nothing to do with the outsourcing of manufacturing and other jobs to these low wage countries. Just increase "economic freedom" (what does that even mean exactly) and voila!

And, why is it that even with regulation and suppressed "economic freedom", U.S. corporations realized record profits, while unemployment remained high, and wages low? Exactly whose "economic freedom" is being decreased here? How is it that we can pay CEOs so many times the average worker's salary even while that CEO is driving the company over a cliff? Meanwhile, full-time workers find themselves below the poverty line? No problems there, right? It's the workers' fault. Or perhaps it's the regulations, but which regulation(s)?

I'm just not following your argument. Are you saying there are no structural problems with our economy that cause the poor to be disenfranchised? And, what redistribution have I advocated, to which you are taking exception?

"give everyone everything they need for free" - Yes!

Exactly!

Food, shelter, access to medical care, these are the basics of human life, and no one should go without them.

> the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor!

exactly :-)

This hypothetical sounds so divorced from reality, it's kind of tough to imagine that anyone would think of it as reflective of poor people's reality.

I'm saying, if you're living on $800 a month, and you get that sweet, sweet EITC money, you're going to use it to buy a new sofa, since your brother puked all over your sofa one night and you could never really get the smell out, and get all your bills current.

You might say that the stink of puke is worth putting up with, and the hypothetical poor person should pay for two credits of an associate's degree at the community college instead, which, ok, education is great, but the real reality is that for a lot of people, it's just not possible to work harder or earn your way out of poverty.

Not because of bad choices (e.g. living high on the hog from their magic $10,000 lottery ticket), but because low-end jobs in this country are unlivable and there's a whole cottage industry built up around screwing the poor with extra fees on every transaction they face throughout the day.

The solution isn't to tell poor people to put up with the puke smell and work their way through a 20-year associate's degree two credits at a time, so they can make 30c more. The solution is to make the economy work for them, as well as it works for those of us posting here.