All of these answers assume the 90% is ignorant, short-sighted, and bad with both money and math.
Newsflash: The 90% includes the entire middle class, and not everyone who is poor is such because they are bad with money.
What I want a citation for is:
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
What I want is definitive proof that, as claimed, most poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly.
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
Where in that sentence do they say 'most poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly' ?
That's a good start. "There are a lot" may not mean most, but it doesn't absolve it of providing some proof.
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
I want a citation on that, that's all. I want a statistic on how many people who live paycheck to paycheck live that way solely because they manage their income poorly.
Again, the notion that everyone could be rich if they only worked harder is asinine, and frankly pretty offensive. This comment supports that notion by equating living paycheck to paycheck with being bad at managing income. I want statistics, I'm tired of that opinion.
What I want a citation for is:
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
What I want is definitive proof that, as claimed, most poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly.
Honestly this is all it boils down to.
Having a higher income does make it faster to accumulate wealth but even the "poor" can accumulate considerable wealth over very long periods of time (think 30 years) if they are willing to sacrifice their standard of living.
A penny saved is certainly a penny earned, and saving is better than spending it all immediately. But if you're lower-middle-class and your goal is to "be rich" then you'll need some way to get more money not just spend less money.
One could make a case for that. A lot of people are really bad with money. The tragedy is they don't know it yet, or do not really understand the consequences of their actions on the long term. Its hard to define 'bad with money' because many people don't exactly classify their actions as such. Which is why some one calls out such activity, people feel offended because they never thought their spending patters could be considered irresponsible.
Spending cash on cameras and expensive lenses which you are not going use, eating out regularly, spending on vacations, changing phones often, cigarettes, alcohol... the list is endless. There is always a need every week on which you could spend $100 here and there. Without a way of tracking your habits, looking at it and extrapolating it over the long term you would pretty much believe that you are doing nothing harmful to your finances at all!
Now some body else is probably saving up and investing all the time and is likely to come out on top by a very huge margin. The very same people in the former category will end up calling such a person greedy.
Self reflection is hard because it destroys you, fixes the center of blame on you, you run out of excuses all when you realize it was all your own choices and actions which bought you to where you are.