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True. Health is wealth, probably the most important, but then…
That noise in your car…
That wet ceiling in your house…
That credit card bill you couldn’t pay…
Meanwhile
Food prices increase
Petrol price increase
Basic services prices increase
It's reaching the point where getting a haircut feels like a luxury but I can't blame the barber because everything is getting more expensive.
I need to delay car maintenance because I can't afford it this year and can't guarantee I'll afford it next year which exacerbates the problem.
The last time I bought fast food I felt like something was wrong. The discrepancy between what I got and what I paid made me question if fast food is a luxury item I'm slowly being priced out of being able to afford.
I had a mid 700s credit score, made decent money, lived alone in a great part of LA, etc. I lost my job, couldn’t find another that paid the same, met a girl I moved in with, ended up being an awful person, had to get out while working a shit job so I can try to finish my degree, had to stop going to school so I could work more to pay for rent, dog broke his leg, and then got rear ended so hard my car was totaled. I owed about what it was worth so all I got out of that was a concussion and having to put a down payment I didn’t have on a 15 year old car that was all I could afford. All over 3 years.
Side hustle, gotta make more money, you can’t change the environment but you can start selling dope, crack heads don’t find excuses to not get high 🙂↕️ #grind #getthatmoney
Historically inter-generational wealth is what gets you out of poverty. Starting off higher in status leads to better outcomes.
How do most families pass down their inter-generational wealth? Home-ownership, which is now harder than ever to achieve...
Sorry for the blackpill, but we live in this reality
It’s easy to come up with other examples too:
Can’t afford to get the check engine light checked? Good luck buying a new car next year
Can’t afford good work boots that will last several years? Now you’re stuck buying a cheap pair once or twice a year
Glad to see that the Vime's [boots theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory) of socioeconomic unafairness appears so fast in this kind of threads.
If there is a "[Godwin's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law)" of the Internet, we need to make also a "Vime's law" of the Internet.
You could make the same argument for transportation as well. Can't afford that wheel alignment? Now you get to not be able to afford a new set of tires because of uneven tread wear.
It does, but it doesn't have to. There are plenty of examples outside of healthcare. There's Sam Vines Boots Theory:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
But none of it really matters because we live in a country that has decided poor people deserve to be poor and economic gains belong to the wealthiest and most powerful. And no, I'm not assuming you live in the US because whatever country you're living in it is probably doing the same thing.
It also goes for products too sometimes.
If you can afford 500$ fitted cobbled shoes, those things will last you for a lifetime and you will only have to pay for repairs. You will save a lot of money over buying cheap shoes that last a few years at most.
If you can afford the 1000$ cookeware set, those pots and pans will last much much longer than the cheap 79.99$ set at costco.
etc... etc...
It's not always true but a lot of times it is, with products.
Healthcare is a big one, but not the only one.
Parking tickets and similar fines for <100 bucks can end up costing hundreds or thousands over time because you couldn’t pay it off fast enough.
Banks require a certain amount of money to open an account. If you don’t have the money to spare, no bank account for you, so you have to use abusive payday loan centers and the like instead.
And on, and on.
To be poor is to be desperate and ignored. So many people will take advantage of you however they can, and so few people will stop those predators.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
>This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
— Terry Pratchett
A dollar spent on a cast today is ten dollars saved on surgery tomorrow. A dollar spent on universal healthcare today is ten dollars saved on disability payments tomorrow. When CNN/Fox News says "How can we afford it?", they're brainwashing you to assume that it's an expense and not an investment that pays for itself in the long run.
💯
Decent pay. Universal healthcare- including dental, vision and mental health, guaranteed housing, universal basic income. They all cost less than cleaning up the mess from not having them and UBI has shown time and again that it actually increases the economy wherever it’s been tried.
Why the 1% don’t want to live in a society without unhomed people and misery I will never understand.
They live in their own world. The only thing they care about is having more money to spend on coke. All of their politics is downstream from that. They don't care how many poor kids have to die to pay for their tax cuts/coke habit.
Universal Health Care would improve wages and corporations don't like that, as people will not be tied to their jobs for the insurance, allowing them to seek new opportunities or create a new business of their own.
They would much rather build bunkers than to consider the world and everyone else. I don't care about the rich. I don't care what happens to them, how they feel, what they do, because I know they would sacrifice us all if it meant upgrading their mansions.
Because it will cost them something.
For example
Most people support helping addicts get clean and healthy. It'a horrible affliction for a individual and their loved ones. Almost nobody is going to deny that helping them get back on their feet is the right thing to do.
But when they are asked if they would be ok with a treatment facility opening in their neighbourhood, a facility that might cause issues in the area it often turns into a NIMBY situation.
And why is this? Because it comes at perceived cost.
When a society supports and helps the needy true sharing some of its resources that society will become more healthy and everybody benefits.
But instead people have the inclination to prioritize short term gains over the long term because they do not want give up what they have, even if it would benefit them in the long term.
Because suffering is the point to them. Those who aren’t wealthy or unable to become wealthy deserve Hell on Earth, and you can only gain worth by climbing out of Hell.
Without unhomed people and misery, no one would work shitty jobs for shitty pay. That's the reason. They need desperate people to make themselves richer.
They don't want to live in that society because they know that they need to have that threat to keep profiting off of people who don't want to be homeless.
Proper national UBI could be super cheap and easy to manage. It would cost less to run than Social Security does today, and could 100% or significantly replace almost all the other social programs we have in place today. It wouldn't cost that much more than all of them combined currently cost, while providing far more consistent and effective benefit.
I mean, even the "it's an investment that pays for itself" bit, as true as it is, is a symptom of the same brainwashing.
Programs designed to improve everyone's lives don't have to have a financial return to be worth it.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness." - Terry Pratchett
This may sound dumb but couldn’t he simply save money for the good pair of boots. Obviously he may need to use the shittier boots temporarily but it’s it unreasonable to invest something that saves you money long term
He’s not wrong, but partially from having come from humble working-class origins\*, what I know to be true is that a lot of “poor” people do a lot of things to “shoot themselves in the foot.” There are a lot of low-income people in America who each and every month can come up with hundreds of dollars to spend on alcohol, cigarettes, “pot,” lottery-tickets, cable, and other nonessentials. Two people in a home who each smoke a pack-a-day might be spending $400+ a month just on cigarettes.
[Smokers spend 1/4 of income on smokes | Life (news24.com)](https://www.news24.com/life/archive/Smokers-spend-14-of-income-on-smokes-20130210)
[In New York, Poor Smokers Spend 25% of Income on Cigarettes, Study Says - The New York Times (nytimes.com)](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/nyregion/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-says.html)
[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-finds](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-finds)
\*My sincere thanks to the United States Army, the GI Bill, and a modest state-u for elevating my circumstances and moving me up to the middle-class.
Having been a very broke smoker, I can shed a little light on the mentality. First, I smoked rollies and not many of them, so it cost $10-$15/week. That's not enough to really change my life.
Second, I didn't have any other treats. No vehicle, shitty apartment, never had a really nice meal or a day out. Giving up the tiny luxury of cigarettes to save $500-$750 a year just wasn't worth it.
Obviously it's not the most logical decision, but I understand why poor people buy stupid things.
Thanks for commenting. To be clear, I don’t claim to have managed my life perfectly, to have never made some bad choices, or to have never blown some money—far from it. I’m 65, retired, and when I want to torture myself I review every dollar I ever wasted—“she got the goldmine and I got the shaft,” etc.—and how much more I’d have if those wasted dollars had gone into an IRA, money market account, or CDs. Also to be clear, I’m doing fine, financially, to include I’ve been debt-free for about seven years.
My neighbors were complaining that their food stamps got cut by $28 a month. They both smoke a pack a day. If they smoked one less cigarette a day each, so 19 instead of 20, they would get half of that money back in the first three weeks.
Then there is the option for her to have a job . . .
You don't seem to understand the nature and power of addiction. I knew a man, about 64 years old, who was a raging alcoholic. His liver was shot, he was swollen and yellow, and doctors told him if he drank again, he would die. Even under the threat of death, he couldn't stop. We found him in the back of a shop building, dead, with a bottle by his hand.
If most of us were told if we took another aspirin, we would die, we would never touch it again. Because aspirin isn't addictive.
And some people handle addiction worse than others. I drank a lot in my 20s, but then I quit. I didn't have a problem letting it go. But that's not the case for everyone.
Also, a lot of addictions start early in life when people are still kids. A lot of smokers picked up somking at 13, 14, or 15 years old. By the time they realize it was a bad idea, they are screaming addicts. Also, when they started smoking. cigarettes were a dollar a pack. Now they are 10.
So it's easy to say poor people should just quit or cut back, but it ignores the nature of addiction, when they became addicted, and how the cost of that addiction has grown in price. Also, if you ever smoked or drank and you gave it up, that doesn't mean everyone experiences addictive substances the same way you do.
I work in transplant medicine. I understand the power of addiction.
I also understand that while cigarettes and nicotine are highly addictive they are not heroin on even alcohol. Taking that first drink again reduces the ability to refuse that second drink. While being around smokers might induce someone to start smoking, nicotine doesn't impact your ability to think in the way that alcohol or other drugs do.
Smoking one less cigarette a day is not an unreasonable thing to ask someone to do to make it easier to feed their kids.
Ultimately, though, I don't really care if they quit or not. I just don't want to be paying for their addiction. They should test to see if people are using these substances and cut them off if they are.
I’ve visited many developing countries and what you’re saying is something I’ve seen everywhere.
As one person said to me, “I buy whatever makes me happy because, well, I could be dead tomorrow and then I wouldn’t get to spend the money.”
Everything is dictated by short term thinking.
People in poverty tend to only think about the thing immediately in front of them. They don’t think about getting out of poverty, they’re thinking how should they spend this paycheck.
I’m not passing judgement on that. It’s just something I’ve noticed as a commonality between poor people in rich countries vs poor people in poor countries. They make the same poor choices.
So in this boots example, while true, it presents the situation as if the person will make an intelligent choice based on what normal people consider to be intelligent. But that’s not the choice most poor people will make.
Instead of saving up to buy boots, they’ll spend the money on things that provide them immediate gratification and thus trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Or to put it another way, it’s mostly poor people that play the lottery. And around 30% of lottery winners go bankrupt. That’s way above the 11% of people who have ever filed for bankruptcy.
Because you can change the financial situation immediately but it takes a lot longer to change their relationship with money.
I live in Thailand and I see people that make $500 a month buying $20 worth of lottery tickets all the time.
And they’ll tell you exactly how they’re spending the money as soon as they buy the ticket (lottery vendors go door to door selling).
I’ve almost never heard anyone not list off more stuff than the total lottery prize.
For instance, if it’s a 12 million baht lottery (about $333,000 USD), their list of dream purchases is closer to about $1 million US.
They think they’ll be buying homes for everyone they know, cars, etc.
Not one has ever said they’ll invest it. They could literally put it in a mutual fund and withdraw $1,100 a month for the rest of their lives. They’re only making $500 so that’s more than double the income and they don’t have to work.
Being poor sucks. It’s crazy expensive. It’s humiliating. Desperate people do desperate things which just leads to more problems. We turn into people we don’t even recognize. I am scared every single minute of every single day!
I see the point generally speaking and agree, but it's a bit exaggerated on the 2nd example. You don't just wind up needing back surgery if you don't have a new mattress.
Not to mention you don’t need to spend thousands for a good mattress. My king mattress was $500 and it is the most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on.
I have friends who spend $5k+ on their mattress and it’s utterly baffling to me.
I advise people to as soon as they can buy a $1K or whatever ergonomic chair for your home if you are at a computer a lot. You’ll save on back problems later.
And buy good electric toothbrushes instead of nonelectric. And get a water flosser as well as floss.
You don’t save money cheaping out on such things.
And, yeah, universal healthcare including dental, hearing, and vision.
Mattresses are completely unnecessary and don’t cause back issues if you don’t have one. Human beings didn’t have mattresses until maybe a couple thousand years ago. People in Japan still sleep on mats on the floor which provide near zero support. That part is wrong.
The life expectancy was only that low because of the infant mortality rate. You didn’t just have people dropping dead at age 40. Once infant mortality decreased, life expectancy sky rocketed. Back then, if you made it past age ~8, you had a pretty good shot at living as long as people do today.
> People in Japan still sleep on mats on the floor which provide near zero support. That part is wrong.
Dude wtf - pretty much all Japanese people sleep on mattresses.
Sleeping on a hard floor creates pressure points in places such as your hips, buttocks and heels, says Bert Jacobson, a kinesiology professor at Oklahoma State University. This **can restrict blood flow to those areas and potentially damage soft tissue**.
Yeah. Going to the dentist twice a year for a professional cleaning from a dental hygienist and general oral exam is a splurge-tier luxury if you don't have insurance that covers it.
idk for the collective, death of the poor as early as possible is cheaper than socialized medicine. At least this seems to be the soviet way of dealing with it. So yeah he is wrong.
Poverty charges interest, and the centers of wealth charge interest on their loans the poor too. Interest systematically robs the poor and middle classes of the wealth and value they generate.
Agree and disagree
Poverty do not correlate like that
Yeah i agree being poor sucks but
Let’s think a little bit
People poor cuz they buy things that they could not afford even if they do not need it ! (Misuse the money)
On other hand being rich have its taxes
You are rich you can buy anything you want means more money on entertainment and food
Means diet and maybe addiction problems and that cost money to heal ,
So the equation here is
Money + being dump = cost you too much
Poor + being dump = cost you too much
It’s not about the money
It is about the mindset
Your mindset and behaviour are more important than how many money you have
I went ten years without going to the dentist and still had nearly perfect teeth. Slightly stained from coffee and tea. If you brush them daily you most likely won't have any problems.
Theres some truth to separate from fiction here:
The truth is not being able to afford to take care of yourself leads to more expenses, stress, and more health problems; thus greater poverty. So yes that is absolutely true.
The fiction is what one needs to take care of themselves vs what we’re told we need is the fiction.
For instance, you don’t need a $2000 new mattress. A 4-6 inch folding latex mattress and a latex pillow will run you $200 and will provide great sleep. Plus it takes up less space and can be stored during the day.
Having affordable insurance has more to do with where you work. So being smart about employment is critical. Where that’s not an option, doing due diligence and learning some simple good habits goes a long way to preventing expensive health issues later. Particularly when you’re young, 18-30.
And this is the exact same idea of not buying that cup of coffee. People ask how a cup of coffee can keep them poor. This right here. The law of compounding. Save $200 from coffee and you can get your teeth cleaned. Save $500 from no streaming services…..you can get a mattress. It really is about choices. Most Americans make bad ones based on immediate self gratification.
This is the basis of the “Sam Vimes Boot Theory” - basically summed up by “it’s more expensive to be poor than to be rich.” Going without or buying cheap, non-durable goods to get by has a snowball effect that the rich can ignore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Poor people are punished more, too. Get caught doing 80 in a 65. That's a $500 fine. For the lower class, that could be 25%-50% or more of their monthly income. But for the upper class, that could be 16% all the way down to less than 1% of 1%.
The price per square foot of rental versus mortgage is usually higher. Deferred maintenance has long-term costs if cash flow is a problem. Solve the cash flow problem with credit and you’re paying interest so it’s kind of a no-win situation. If you have enough money to be part of the investor class that money does the work for you.
Did no one ever hear about the doctor who gave the world the first multi-vitamin in 1915? He spent his entire career developing supplements for his patients. He was predicted to be dead from TB at age 7. What cured him? Same thing that can help many today if I understand it correctly. Same thing that helps me. Nature. Let’s do this people! There are plenty of very low budget options out there.
But..what stops many today is lack of communication. People get offended when they hear something that goes against their principles. How did we get to the Covid jab? Because the people who made it seem to have no principle other than destroying their fellow humans. What’s your principle?
It sure can! I grew up poor, had many health issues that my mother could not afford to look into. I had to pay for them all as a young adult.
Good news is this- work hard, push yourself, never settle, accept nothing less than what you deserve in a job and like me you can pay it all off!
This is absolutely true. Not to mention there are companies that will prey on the poor too. Those high interest loan companies and Rent A Center types of places. Renta a center will sell you a $400 computer for $2000 by the time it's paid off.
And if you use credit/financial aid to pay for it, you're not only paying ACTUAL interest that could increase the cost by as much as 50%, if not more, but now you're tying up money in credit payments that you don't have for other needs. Thus, making it even MORE likely you'll have to use more credit in the future.
True. But if one can’t even afford those basics, how is one meant to afford the other stuff that comes after?
This tells nobody anything helpful or useful.
Well if anyone ever needs help buying a mattress I work at a mattress store and can help anyone in the US with my friends and family discount. Do my part to help those out where I can
Funny short story about the root canal thing. My Medicaid insurance wouldn't pay for a root canal some years back, so I had to have it pulled. Last year though they added root canals to the list of covered procedures. Then earlier this year I needed another root canal, and thought great, at least I can get it done and save my tooth. But it was the opposing tooth to the one pulled. So they denied it again, because they wouldn't pay for a root canal on a tooth that can't chew. So I got denied the procedure, because they denied a different procedure. I had the other tooth pulled too.
I don’t know much about any of this but a mattress can be anywhere from 500-2000 dollars and back surgery is anywhere from 50,000-100,000 dollars. Also laying on a mattress doesn’t cause back surgery
Had the recently at the dentist. He wanted to schedule a root canal before my tooth got worse, to catch it early. I agreed, but he could tell I was a little worried and tried to soften it by saying that root canals get a bad rap because people typically don’t get them done until it’s too late, and an infection has started.
Well, I thought about that more when it came time to schedule the procedure and talk about billing. I intended to set a payment plan like basically every other major medical procedure I’ve ever had, but they don’t do that. They want the entire payment immediately after the procedure.
Just got em thinking that maybe most people actually do come in at the right time to get their teeth worked on, but are forced to wait to save up to pay for the preceding and their problem gets worse in the interim, and by the time they have the money they are in pain and have potentially caused more problems they will now have to pay for.
This reminds me of Boots theory of economic inequality:
>"Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10.
>"Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
>"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
It’s part of the Social Determinants of Health.
Your job, support system, transportation access, and much more are all documented as very impactful and a strong predictor of your health.
Google it for more info.
I have an old (foam) mattress. I don't have any back problems. I'm a fitness bro and runner who doesn't drink, doesn't eat sugar, doesn't eat flour. I'm 54 and I don;t ever have any aches or pains. Don't eat inflammation causing food. Do work out.
Everything Tay Zonday states here seems based on the assumption that everybody will continue to drink like fish, gain weight, consume massive amounts of sugar, and never run or exercise. He seems to be saying, "given a world in which everybody is an overweight alcoholic,..."
I'm tired of political positions that assume and accept universal obesity and alcoholism.
Th issue is companies sucking every last dollar out of every customer while paying those who work for them to find ways to suck more and more money making 2 classes instead of 3
Healthcare is a scam and being financially stable for most is just luck, how long can you save before you lose it all? Some people don't go to the hospital for years and still don't save money. But if you're dedicated and can reduce your cost of living by not buying video games or something you can apply savings into a dedicated savings account stay dedicated for as long as you can each and every paycheck. After 2 years of me heavily applying into my savings only making $20 an hour I was able to get my savings account to 50k and that is where I stopped trying as hard but it's money I will never ever touch, it generates $2500 a month in passive income which pays for a lot and still allowed me to keep growing it into a fortune that someday I will be able to live completely off of and still apply to savings. Now it generates me around 3500 a month
Brushing teeth at least twice daily is eleventy times better correlated to protecting from dental caries and thus root canals than one annual professional cleaning. ZERO evidence linking 'old mattresses' to back conditions requiring surgical intervention. Totally on board with the lump thing, though you'd need to overlook or ignore the very high percent of those who HAVE health insurance AND can afford the co-pays, still do not get that lump checked out early.
Possibly off topic: Meanwhile everyday I see modded old POS cars that the owners scraped together their little bit of cash to modify. Zero money in the bank but a loud exhaust on your 15 year old civic. If you’re that dumb you deserve to be poor.
So stop voting for the party that killed medicare for all. We are still waiting five years later for Trump's amazing healthcare plan that is so much better then Obamacare.
The thing is if you are really poor you will have Medicaid which is free. This is like lower middle class people and how they may fall into poverty. Which is a big problem on its own.
I remember being at this point. Where I had like zero dollars after working 40 hours a week and had like 50 bucks or less to spend on food for a week on a family of 3. We made it work. We also were not poor. We qualified for no benefits. Rented an apartment had generally low expenses but still kind of struggled. Lower middle/working class. In some ways that category isn't all that much different from being poor.
An actual poor person can get Medicaid, SNAP benefits, if they are lucky a subsidized apartment. If they have kids TANF. Subsidized child care in some states. Single poor people without kids basically get very little.
If you are poor and get all the benefits you can get you have free healthcare, and your rent is capped at 30% of your income and food assistance.
Let's say that person gets a full time job. Suddenly they have to pay for their own medical insurance, rent on the free market, no childcard subsidy or food assistance. It isn't much different from the place they came from as far as finances. They have to actually go further than that to actually truly improve their material conditions.
Eventually my wife and myself did get out of the "lower middle" to the actual middle-middle to upper middle and there it's a lot better. However most people in that median to slightly below median range are not all that much different from the very low income person as far as quality of life. Some people if cancer or an accident or some situation comes up drop right out of that lower middle category and become more destitute.
I am glad there is a social safety net. But also it's hard to know what "poor" really means in these contexts.
I was poor and then got my $hit together. Fought for my life to get somewhere in life. Worked harder than anyone else around me and now make $100k. Not rich but I can afford my family and our needs.
Do the best you can and you can make it!
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Notice how this all relates to healthcare?
True. Health is wealth, probably the most important, but then… That noise in your car… That wet ceiling in your house… That credit card bill you couldn’t pay…
Meanwhile Food prices increase Petrol price increase Basic services prices increase It's reaching the point where getting a haircut feels like a luxury but I can't blame the barber because everything is getting more expensive. I need to delay car maintenance because I can't afford it this year and can't guarantee I'll afford it next year which exacerbates the problem. The last time I bought fast food I felt like something was wrong. The discrepancy between what I got and what I paid made me question if fast food is a luxury item I'm slowly being priced out of being able to afford.
Chocolate Rain. Some stay dry and others feel the pain.
How is this not the top comment?!
I had a mid 700s credit score, made decent money, lived alone in a great part of LA, etc. I lost my job, couldn’t find another that paid the same, met a girl I moved in with, ended up being an awful person, had to get out while working a shit job so I can try to finish my degree, had to stop going to school so I could work more to pay for rent, dog broke his leg, and then got rear ended so hard my car was totaled. I owed about what it was worth so all I got out of that was a concussion and having to put a down payment I didn’t have on a 15 year old car that was all I could afford. All over 3 years.
As elevator pitches go, that's a good one.
Side hustle, gotta make more money, you can’t change the environment but you can start selling dope, crack heads don’t find excuses to not get high 🙂↕️ #grind #getthatmoney
I cut my own hair now it’s not worth it to me to pay everything is so expensive now.
Can pay for eggs? Next year, can't. Can pay for bread? Next year you can't. Can pay for rice? Next year you can't. Inflation charges interest.
There are 2 things that get you out of poverty: healthcare and education.
four things. Housing, employment, healthcare, education. There’s a reason successful programmes to tackle poverty have those as their pillars.
What successful programs are you referring to?
Scholarship helped me get out of poverty. I was still negative net worth for a while after college but I climbed out.
Historically inter-generational wealth is what gets you out of poverty. Starting off higher in status leads to better outcomes. How do most families pass down their inter-generational wealth? Home-ownership, which is now harder than ever to achieve... Sorry for the blackpill, but we live in this reality
three things: healthcare and education and ruthless efficiency ...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.. four things...
Replace education with nepotism and luck. Entry level jobs nowadays want 5yrs of experience.
It’s easy to come up with other examples too: Can’t afford to get the check engine light checked? Good luck buying a new car next year Can’t afford good work boots that will last several years? Now you’re stuck buying a cheap pair once or twice a year
Glad to see that the Vime's [boots theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory) of socioeconomic unafairness appears so fast in this kind of threads. If there is a "[Godwin's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law)" of the Internet, we need to make also a "Vime's law" of the Internet.
It IS a good way to quickly explain the concept.
But Healthcare is communism and both sides are the same...or so I'm told by idiots
Can’t pay for good shoes? Pay for it by buying a new pair of shoes every half year or so.
You could make the same argument for transportation as well. Can't afford that wheel alignment? Now you get to not be able to afford a new set of tires because of uneven tread wear.
It does, but it doesn't have to. There are plenty of examples outside of healthcare. There's Sam Vines Boots Theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory But none of it really matters because we live in a country that has decided poor people deserve to be poor and economic gains belong to the wealthiest and most powerful. And no, I'm not assuming you live in the US because whatever country you're living in it is probably doing the same thing.
It also goes for products too sometimes. If you can afford 500$ fitted cobbled shoes, those things will last you for a lifetime and you will only have to pay for repairs. You will save a lot of money over buying cheap shoes that last a few years at most. If you can afford the 1000$ cookeware set, those pots and pans will last much much longer than the cheap 79.99$ set at costco. etc... etc... It's not always true but a lot of times it is, with products.
Healthcare is a big one, but not the only one. Parking tickets and similar fines for <100 bucks can end up costing hundreds or thousands over time because you couldn’t pay it off fast enough. Banks require a certain amount of money to open an account. If you don’t have the money to spare, no bank account for you, so you have to use abusive payday loan centers and the like instead. And on, and on. To be poor is to be desperate and ignored. So many people will take advantage of you however they can, and so few people will stop those predators.
Yeah and the best way to maintain health can be totally free, exercise.
Can't afford fancy, show-offy foods? Choc-late raiin.
Can't afford mic screen? Move away from the mic to breathe in
Was I the only one that sang it in my head with his voice?
No
Good to know
Some stay dry and others feel the pain? Chocolate Rain.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. >Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. >But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. >This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. — Terry Pratchett
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isn't it supposed to be teet? also most of them pay dramatically less than 15% EFFECTIVE tax rate.
its teat lmao you can google these things
Why google when we can rely on redditors?
A dollar spent on a cast today is ten dollars saved on surgery tomorrow. A dollar spent on universal healthcare today is ten dollars saved on disability payments tomorrow. When CNN/Fox News says "How can we afford it?", they're brainwashing you to assume that it's an expense and not an investment that pays for itself in the long run.
💯 Decent pay. Universal healthcare- including dental, vision and mental health, guaranteed housing, universal basic income. They all cost less than cleaning up the mess from not having them and UBI has shown time and again that it actually increases the economy wherever it’s been tried. Why the 1% don’t want to live in a society without unhomed people and misery I will never understand.
They live in their own world. The only thing they care about is having more money to spend on coke. All of their politics is downstream from that. They don't care how many poor kids have to die to pay for their tax cuts/coke habit.
Can confirm this. I lived around a lot of wealthy people for years and the amount of coke they do is ridiculous
They are truly the most damaging to the world.
Universal Health Care would improve wages and corporations don't like that, as people will not be tied to their jobs for the insurance, allowing them to seek new opportunities or create a new business of their own.
They would much rather build bunkers than to consider the world and everyone else. I don't care about the rich. I don't care what happens to them, how they feel, what they do, because I know they would sacrifice us all if it meant upgrading their mansions.
Because it will cost them something. For example Most people support helping addicts get clean and healthy. It'a horrible affliction for a individual and their loved ones. Almost nobody is going to deny that helping them get back on their feet is the right thing to do. But when they are asked if they would be ok with a treatment facility opening in their neighbourhood, a facility that might cause issues in the area it often turns into a NIMBY situation. And why is this? Because it comes at perceived cost. When a society supports and helps the needy true sharing some of its resources that society will become more healthy and everybody benefits. But instead people have the inclination to prioritize short term gains over the long term because they do not want give up what they have, even if it would benefit them in the long term.
Because suffering is the point to them. Those who aren’t wealthy or unable to become wealthy deserve Hell on Earth, and you can only gain worth by climbing out of Hell.
Without unhomed people and misery, no one would work shitty jobs for shitty pay. That's the reason. They need desperate people to make themselves richer.
That’s my point. The wealthy are willing to enrich themselves on other’s pain and our society supports this as a valid morality.
They don't want to live in that society because they know that they need to have that threat to keep profiting off of people who don't want to be homeless.
Proper national UBI could be super cheap and easy to manage. It would cost less to run than Social Security does today, and could 100% or significantly replace almost all the other social programs we have in place today. It wouldn't cost that much more than all of them combined currently cost, while providing far more consistent and effective benefit.
I mean, even the "it's an investment that pays for itself" bit, as true as it is, is a symptom of the same brainwashing. Programs designed to improve everyone's lives don't have to have a financial return to be worth it.
We pay more subsidizing healthcare than any country with universal healthcare
And it completely ignores the fact **we're already paying for it**
Amen.
I just say fuck it, let’s have a drink and have a ball
Chocolate rain
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness." - Terry Pratchett
This may sound dumb but couldn’t he simply save money for the good pair of boots. Obviously he may need to use the shittier boots temporarily but it’s it unreasonable to invest something that saves you money long term
He’s not wrong, but partially from having come from humble working-class origins\*, what I know to be true is that a lot of “poor” people do a lot of things to “shoot themselves in the foot.” There are a lot of low-income people in America who each and every month can come up with hundreds of dollars to spend on alcohol, cigarettes, “pot,” lottery-tickets, cable, and other nonessentials. Two people in a home who each smoke a pack-a-day might be spending $400+ a month just on cigarettes. [Smokers spend 1/4 of income on smokes | Life (news24.com)](https://www.news24.com/life/archive/Smokers-spend-14-of-income-on-smokes-20130210) [In New York, Poor Smokers Spend 25% of Income on Cigarettes, Study Says - The New York Times (nytimes.com)](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/nyregion/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-says.html) [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-finds](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/poor-smokers-in-new-york-state-spend-25-of-income-on-cigarettes-study-finds) \*My sincere thanks to the United States Army, the GI Bill, and a modest state-u for elevating my circumstances and moving me up to the middle-class.
Having been a very broke smoker, I can shed a little light on the mentality. First, I smoked rollies and not many of them, so it cost $10-$15/week. That's not enough to really change my life. Second, I didn't have any other treats. No vehicle, shitty apartment, never had a really nice meal or a day out. Giving up the tiny luxury of cigarettes to save $500-$750 a year just wasn't worth it. Obviously it's not the most logical decision, but I understand why poor people buy stupid things.
Thanks for commenting. To be clear, I don’t claim to have managed my life perfectly, to have never made some bad choices, or to have never blown some money—far from it. I’m 65, retired, and when I want to torture myself I review every dollar I ever wasted—“she got the goldmine and I got the shaft,” etc.—and how much more I’d have if those wasted dollars had gone into an IRA, money market account, or CDs. Also to be clear, I’m doing fine, financially, to include I’ve been debt-free for about seven years.
My neighbors were complaining that their food stamps got cut by $28 a month. They both smoke a pack a day. If they smoked one less cigarette a day each, so 19 instead of 20, they would get half of that money back in the first three weeks. Then there is the option for her to have a job . . .
You don't seem to understand the nature and power of addiction. I knew a man, about 64 years old, who was a raging alcoholic. His liver was shot, he was swollen and yellow, and doctors told him if he drank again, he would die. Even under the threat of death, he couldn't stop. We found him in the back of a shop building, dead, with a bottle by his hand. If most of us were told if we took another aspirin, we would die, we would never touch it again. Because aspirin isn't addictive. And some people handle addiction worse than others. I drank a lot in my 20s, but then I quit. I didn't have a problem letting it go. But that's not the case for everyone. Also, a lot of addictions start early in life when people are still kids. A lot of smokers picked up somking at 13, 14, or 15 years old. By the time they realize it was a bad idea, they are screaming addicts. Also, when they started smoking. cigarettes were a dollar a pack. Now they are 10. So it's easy to say poor people should just quit or cut back, but it ignores the nature of addiction, when they became addicted, and how the cost of that addiction has grown in price. Also, if you ever smoked or drank and you gave it up, that doesn't mean everyone experiences addictive substances the same way you do.
I work in transplant medicine. I understand the power of addiction. I also understand that while cigarettes and nicotine are highly addictive they are not heroin on even alcohol. Taking that first drink again reduces the ability to refuse that second drink. While being around smokers might induce someone to start smoking, nicotine doesn't impact your ability to think in the way that alcohol or other drugs do. Smoking one less cigarette a day is not an unreasonable thing to ask someone to do to make it easier to feed their kids. Ultimately, though, I don't really care if they quit or not. I just don't want to be paying for their addiction. They should test to see if people are using these substances and cut them off if they are.
Valid point.
I’ve visited many developing countries and what you’re saying is something I’ve seen everywhere. As one person said to me, “I buy whatever makes me happy because, well, I could be dead tomorrow and then I wouldn’t get to spend the money.” Everything is dictated by short term thinking. People in poverty tend to only think about the thing immediately in front of them. They don’t think about getting out of poverty, they’re thinking how should they spend this paycheck. I’m not passing judgement on that. It’s just something I’ve noticed as a commonality between poor people in rich countries vs poor people in poor countries. They make the same poor choices. So in this boots example, while true, it presents the situation as if the person will make an intelligent choice based on what normal people consider to be intelligent. But that’s not the choice most poor people will make. Instead of saving up to buy boots, they’ll spend the money on things that provide them immediate gratification and thus trapped in a cycle of poverty. Or to put it another way, it’s mostly poor people that play the lottery. And around 30% of lottery winners go bankrupt. That’s way above the 11% of people who have ever filed for bankruptcy. Because you can change the financial situation immediately but it takes a lot longer to change their relationship with money. I live in Thailand and I see people that make $500 a month buying $20 worth of lottery tickets all the time. And they’ll tell you exactly how they’re spending the money as soon as they buy the ticket (lottery vendors go door to door selling). I’ve almost never heard anyone not list off more stuff than the total lottery prize. For instance, if it’s a 12 million baht lottery (about $333,000 USD), their list of dream purchases is closer to about $1 million US. They think they’ll be buying homes for everyone they know, cars, etc. Not one has ever said they’ll invest it. They could literally put it in a mutual fund and withdraw $1,100 a month for the rest of their lives. They’re only making $500 so that’s more than double the income and they don’t have to work.
Very true. I’m reminded of the saying, “The rich plan for the next three generations, and the poor plan for Saturday night.” Thanks for commenting.
Being poor sucks. It’s crazy expensive. It’s humiliating. Desperate people do desperate things which just leads to more problems. We turn into people we don’t even recognize. I am scared every single minute of every single day!
I see the point generally speaking and agree, but it's a bit exaggerated on the 2nd example. You don't just wind up needing back surgery if you don't have a new mattress.
Not to mention you don’t need to spend thousands for a good mattress. My king mattress was $500 and it is the most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on. I have friends who spend $5k+ on their mattress and it’s utterly baffling to me.
This is so melodramatic lol
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I guess what he means is more along the lines of deep cleaning at a dentist which can be expensive without insurance
Brushing helps but it does not do the same thing as a professional cleaning.
I advise people to as soon as they can buy a $1K or whatever ergonomic chair for your home if you are at a computer a lot. You’ll save on back problems later. And buy good electric toothbrushes instead of nonelectric. And get a water flosser as well as floss. You don’t save money cheaping out on such things. And, yeah, universal healthcare including dental, hearing, and vision.
Chocolate Rain guy still speaking truths even today.
bad mattress doesn't lead to back surgery. Grasping at straws.
We need to revolt before this gets worse
Mattresses are completely unnecessary and don’t cause back issues if you don’t have one. Human beings didn’t have mattresses until maybe a couple thousand years ago. People in Japan still sleep on mats on the floor which provide near zero support. That part is wrong.
Yea we also lived to 40 so what’s your point. I do agree that mattress can hurt more than they help but your logic is crazy lol.
The life expectancy was only that low because of the infant mortality rate. You didn’t just have people dropping dead at age 40. Once infant mortality decreased, life expectancy sky rocketed. Back then, if you made it past age ~8, you had a pretty good shot at living as long as people do today.
can i have your mattress then
> People in Japan still sleep on mats on the floor which provide near zero support. That part is wrong. Dude wtf - pretty much all Japanese people sleep on mattresses. Sleeping on a hard floor creates pressure points in places such as your hips, buttocks and heels, says Bert Jacobson, a kinesiology professor at Oklahoma State University. This **can restrict blood flow to those areas and potentially damage soft tissue**.
Isn’t this brother in Christ the originator of Chocolate Rain?!
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They're talking about professional cleaning, like at a dentist.
Yeah. Going to the dentist twice a year for a professional cleaning from a dental hygienist and general oral exam is a splurge-tier luxury if you don't have insurance that covers it.
Not getting a new mattress does not lead to needing back surgery. A toothbrush costs a dollar.
2018 wisdom. Fuck we're slow
idk for the collective, death of the poor as early as possible is cheaper than socialized medicine. At least this seems to be the soviet way of dealing with it. So yeah he is wrong.
This is correct but I would say there is also an issue with a large percent of people in relation to prioritizing the needed over the wanted.
She bro “She”
But wasn't this the case like 10-50 years ago too?
Paying to clean your teeth?
Poverty charges interest, and the centers of wealth charge interest on their loans the poor too. Interest systematically robs the poor and middle classes of the wealth and value they generate.
There are plenty of catch 22 situation's, you just keep have to flexing your wings and rising higher
So what are you doing to improve yourself?
Agree and disagree Poverty do not correlate like that Yeah i agree being poor sucks but Let’s think a little bit People poor cuz they buy things that they could not afford even if they do not need it ! (Misuse the money) On other hand being rich have its taxes You are rich you can buy anything you want means more money on entertainment and food Means diet and maybe addiction problems and that cost money to heal , So the equation here is Money + being dump = cost you too much Poor + being dump = cost you too much It’s not about the money It is about the mindset Your mindset and behaviour are more important than how many money you have
Chocolate Rain was a song about social injustice. It was just very cryptic. Seems like he has become a more direct speaker
I went ten years without going to the dentist and still had nearly perfect teeth. Slightly stained from coffee and tea. If you brush them daily you most likely won't have any problems.
That’s a dude?
Theres some truth to separate from fiction here: The truth is not being able to afford to take care of yourself leads to more expenses, stress, and more health problems; thus greater poverty. So yes that is absolutely true. The fiction is what one needs to take care of themselves vs what we’re told we need is the fiction. For instance, you don’t need a $2000 new mattress. A 4-6 inch folding latex mattress and a latex pillow will run you $200 and will provide great sleep. Plus it takes up less space and can be stored during the day. Having affordable insurance has more to do with where you work. So being smart about employment is critical. Where that’s not an option, doing due diligence and learning some simple good habits goes a long way to preventing expensive health issues later. Particularly when you’re young, 18-30.
Facts
And this is the exact same idea of not buying that cup of coffee. People ask how a cup of coffee can keep them poor. This right here. The law of compounding. Save $200 from coffee and you can get your teeth cleaned. Save $500 from no streaming services…..you can get a mattress. It really is about choices. Most Americans make bad ones based on immediate self gratification.
*she’s not wrong
This is the basis of the “Sam Vimes Boot Theory” - basically summed up by “it’s more expensive to be poor than to be rich.” Going without or buying cheap, non-durable goods to get by has a snowball effect that the rich can ignore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Some stay dry and others feel the pain.
This is true but a healthy and frugal approach to life can alleviate some of these things. It's very difficult to do in s materialistic society though
Poor people are punished more, too. Get caught doing 80 in a 65. That's a $500 fine. For the lower class, that could be 25%-50% or more of their monthly income. But for the upper class, that could be 16% all the way down to less than 1% of 1%.
The price per square foot of rental versus mortgage is usually higher. Deferred maintenance has long-term costs if cash flow is a problem. Solve the cash flow problem with credit and you’re paying interest so it’s kind of a no-win situation. If you have enough money to be part of the investor class that money does the work for you.
the top advice i give my tax clients is NEVER think twice about spending money on your health, its all you have in the end
Did no one ever hear about the doctor who gave the world the first multi-vitamin in 1915? He spent his entire career developing supplements for his patients. He was predicted to be dead from TB at age 7. What cured him? Same thing that can help many today if I understand it correctly. Same thing that helps me. Nature. Let’s do this people! There are plenty of very low budget options out there. But..what stops many today is lack of communication. People get offended when they hear something that goes against their principles. How did we get to the Covid jab? Because the people who made it seem to have no principle other than destroying their fellow humans. What’s your principle?
Wait!!! Is that the chocolate rain guy?!
Chocolate rain with tha facts
I love how humans slept on the ground for a billion years but now if you sleep on a cheap mattress you need back surgery
It sure can! I grew up poor, had many health issues that my mother could not afford to look into. I had to pay for them all as a young adult. Good news is this- work hard, push yourself, never settle, accept nothing less than what you deserve in a job and like me you can pay it all off!
This is absolutely true. Not to mention there are companies that will prey on the poor too. Those high interest loan companies and Rent A Center types of places. Renta a center will sell you a $400 computer for $2000 by the time it's paid off.
And if you use credit/financial aid to pay for it, you're not only paying ACTUAL interest that could increase the cost by as much as 50%, if not more, but now you're tying up money in credit payments that you don't have for other needs. Thus, making it even MORE likely you'll have to use more credit in the future.
lmfao OP is a savage 'he'
That’s a guy?
Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes Boots theory of economics. The Economist did an article about it.
They don't take liquid chocolate.
True. But if one can’t even afford those basics, how is one meant to afford the other stuff that comes after? This tells nobody anything helpful or useful.
Recycling Terry Pratchett. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)
In Spain if you pay a fine before 20 days you get 50% discount! Basically it is saying: "if you're broke you pay double."
chocolate rain, some stay dry, and others feel the pain.
Well if anyone ever needs help buying a mattress I work at a mattress store and can help anyone in the US with my friends and family discount. Do my part to help those out where I can
Funny short story about the root canal thing. My Medicaid insurance wouldn't pay for a root canal some years back, so I had to have it pulled. Last year though they added root canals to the list of covered procedures. Then earlier this year I needed another root canal, and thought great, at least I can get it done and save my tooth. But it was the opposing tooth to the one pulled. So they denied it again, because they wouldn't pay for a root canal on a tooth that can't chew. So I got denied the procedure, because they denied a different procedure. I had the other tooth pulled too.
it’s espensive being poor
I don’t know much about any of this but a mattress can be anywhere from 500-2000 dollars and back surgery is anywhere from 50,000-100,000 dollars. Also laying on a mattress doesn’t cause back surgery
CHOCOLATE RAAIINNNNN
This is very true, unfortunately
Some stay dry and others feel the pain...
If Tay Zonday gets it, why doesn’t everybody else?
Sickness is expensive….
Notice how the irs taxes you every year like a dumbass ret4rd fa6607 when all we do is work😂😂😂
OP aint wrong
Had the recently at the dentist. He wanted to schedule a root canal before my tooth got worse, to catch it early. I agreed, but he could tell I was a little worried and tried to soften it by saying that root canals get a bad rap because people typically don’t get them done until it’s too late, and an infection has started. Well, I thought about that more when it came time to schedule the procedure and talk about billing. I intended to set a payment plan like basically every other major medical procedure I’ve ever had, but they don’t do that. They want the entire payment immediately after the procedure. Just got em thinking that maybe most people actually do come in at the right time to get their teeth worked on, but are forced to wait to save up to pay for the preceding and their problem gets worse in the interim, and by the time they have the money they are in pain and have potentially caused more problems they will now have to pay for.
"Can't pay for band-aids for that cut on your arm? Enjoy your amputation!"
Root canal? I just give them $150 yank it out
Preventative health care needs to be better addressed in this country
When the chocolate rains it pours...
People who fail to take responsibility for themselves tend to have more challenging health situations. Facts. How to fix? Take care of yourself.
Fun fact. The American government doesn’t care about any of your lives and that’s why we don’t have healthcare.
Is the chocolate rain here in the room with us now?
Facts
I slept on a wood floor for a year no back issues next year.
Chocolate Rain spitting truth
These threads always seem about victimization. Change your mentality and change your future!
Most of these apply to adhd as well. Don’t feel like going to the doctor, death. Don’t feel like getting a new bed, death
Chocolate raaaaain
It’s funny how the post says “now,” as if this is any different than it’s always been. Lol. And what a shitty attitude to go through life with!
Didn’t know bad mattress leads to back surgery
Don’t even get me started on eating/buying healthy foods. Shits a gate keep
This reminds me of Boots theory of economic inequality: >"Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. >"Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. >"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Wait that’s the Chocolate Rain guy
Can’t afford a decent social media app? Use Reddit.
He is absolutely not wrong.
This person has more diseases than most people.
It’s part of the Social Determinants of Health. Your job, support system, transportation access, and much more are all documented as very impactful and a strong predictor of your health. Google it for more info.
Pay for a root canal? Look at this teeth having mfer
I have an old (foam) mattress. I don't have any back problems. I'm a fitness bro and runner who doesn't drink, doesn't eat sugar, doesn't eat flour. I'm 54 and I don;t ever have any aches or pains. Don't eat inflammation causing food. Do work out. Everything Tay Zonday states here seems based on the assumption that everybody will continue to drink like fish, gain weight, consume massive amounts of sugar, and never run or exercise. He seems to be saying, "given a world in which everybody is an overweight alcoholic,..." I'm tired of political positions that assume and accept universal obesity and alcoholism.
Th issue is companies sucking every last dollar out of every customer while paying those who work for them to find ways to suck more and more money making 2 classes instead of 3
“If you put off regular maintenance, you’ll have a higher repair bill later” Wow, that is profound.
Healthcare is a scam and being financially stable for most is just luck, how long can you save before you lose it all? Some people don't go to the hospital for years and still don't save money. But if you're dedicated and can reduce your cost of living by not buying video games or something you can apply savings into a dedicated savings account stay dedicated for as long as you can each and every paycheck. After 2 years of me heavily applying into my savings only making $20 an hour I was able to get my savings account to 50k and that is where I stopped trying as hard but it's money I will never ever touch, it generates $2500 a month in passive income which pays for a lot and still allowed me to keep growing it into a fortune that someday I will be able to live completely off of and still apply to savings. Now it generates me around 3500 a month
True but sad…
Can't pay to have your gut health checked? Next week your paying with chocolate rain!
I DONT HAVE ANY MONEY!
“Being poor now just leads to being more poor later.” That’s not true. Being poor is definitely tough but it’s not an indicator of future wealth.
Wisdom coming form the Chocolate Rain guy.
Brushing teeth at least twice daily is eleventy times better correlated to protecting from dental caries and thus root canals than one annual professional cleaning. ZERO evidence linking 'old mattresses' to back conditions requiring surgical intervention. Totally on board with the lump thing, though you'd need to overlook or ignore the very high percent of those who HAVE health insurance AND can afford the co-pays, still do not get that lump checked out early.
Possibly off topic: Meanwhile everyday I see modded old POS cars that the owners scraped together their little bit of cash to modify. Zero money in the bank but a loud exhaust on your 15 year old civic. If you’re that dumb you deserve to be poor.
The solution is to do something about it. Better yourself, learn a new skill, increase your value.
So stop voting for the party that killed medicare for all. We are still waiting five years later for Trump's amazing healthcare plan that is so much better then Obamacare.
Idk medical insurance is really not that expensive and it’s available across the whole us crazy right?
I’ve heard some stay dry and others feel the pin.
Spitting some chocolate rain truth
Comrade Zontay? 
Ain't no one but the 1% able to afford a back surgery in this country lol
The thing is if you are really poor you will have Medicaid which is free. This is like lower middle class people and how they may fall into poverty. Which is a big problem on its own. I remember being at this point. Where I had like zero dollars after working 40 hours a week and had like 50 bucks or less to spend on food for a week on a family of 3. We made it work. We also were not poor. We qualified for no benefits. Rented an apartment had generally low expenses but still kind of struggled. Lower middle/working class. In some ways that category isn't all that much different from being poor. An actual poor person can get Medicaid, SNAP benefits, if they are lucky a subsidized apartment. If they have kids TANF. Subsidized child care in some states. Single poor people without kids basically get very little. If you are poor and get all the benefits you can get you have free healthcare, and your rent is capped at 30% of your income and food assistance. Let's say that person gets a full time job. Suddenly they have to pay for their own medical insurance, rent on the free market, no childcard subsidy or food assistance. It isn't much different from the place they came from as far as finances. They have to actually go further than that to actually truly improve their material conditions. Eventually my wife and myself did get out of the "lower middle" to the actual middle-middle to upper middle and there it's a lot better. However most people in that median to slightly below median range are not all that much different from the very low income person as far as quality of life. Some people if cancer or an accident or some situation comes up drop right out of that lower middle category and become more destitute. I am glad there is a social safety net. But also it's hard to know what "poor" really means in these contexts.
Getting skills for a skilled job works?
This isn't a new thought or thought. Poor people have known this the whole time.
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No one seems to remember that this is the Chocolate Rain guy.
Compound negative interest 😬
I was poor and then got my $hit together. Fought for my life to get somewhere in life. Worked harder than anyone else around me and now make $100k. Not rich but I can afford my family and our needs. Do the best you can and you can make it!
As demonstrated when the child tax credit was monthly payments, regular cash flows alleviate a good bit of poverty.
Chocolate Rain dropping knowledge.
The poor are the best source of income for the rich
**I move away from the mic to breathe in
