Poor people pay higher time tax

Edit: Another commenter made the example of buying tools (expensive upfront) to make your own (cheaper) repairs vs. paying someone else to do it, there's such a thing as tool libraries now. IMO every community should have one.

True indeed. This article gives many more examples:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-e...

> If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and a microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience-store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times higher than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

When I think of my crappy one bedroom apartment I started out in, I wouldn’t even have room to stock up on toilet paper.

Now I’m my big house basement are several massive packages of TP, paper towels, tools that let me fix things on my own rather than having to pay, stocked up food basics … etc. These all save me money AND time (no need to shop often). None of these savings were available to me previously just due to space.

Why not just do this:

1. Make a free account on Amazon

2. Buy the cheapest portable bidet, which (looking just now) is $7 including shipping. Sure, that's 75% more than the standing weekly toilet paper budget, but surely one can find an extra 3 dollars in the couch cushions?

3. Once the bidet arrives, toilet paper usage will drop immediately. You could probably reduce that $4/week budget to, say, $1/week.

4. That means you'll already break even on the bidet in a little over 2 weeks,. After that you're effectively printing money.

5. After another 20 weeks of making it rain $3/week in pure profit over your previously massive and over-inflated toilet paper budget, you'll have $60, which is surely enough to head back to Amazon and buy all the toilet paper your heart desires, in bulk.

6. That'll likely bring the $1/week budget down even further to, say, $0.50/week.

7. That's a nearly 17% bump in your weekly recurring profit, from $3 to $3.50/week, which you can use to keep on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Heck, those numbers are basically good enough for a Series A pitch deck.

The convenience store is more convenient though and you're paying a premium for that convenience. It's really about money. You can trade off money for convenience. A middle class person has to pay for the car which they don't use 99% of the time, the gas, insurance, etc. It's not entirely clear that they're getting a better bargain when you factor in everything else.

But it's really about money. The article makes it sound like its about class or privilege as though only some people can fly:

> The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you're even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you'll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

Privilege has nothing to do with buying a plane ticket. Its open to pretty much everyone with money

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

The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities.

I would add: encourage the trades by providing free schooling and work experience programs.

You can do this by joining the merchant fleet, one of the military branches, or some other professional venture where your accommodation and other expenses are provided for you. If you take care with the choices you make with your money, you have the chance to dig yourself out of the hole.

To those already writing your responses with what about the guy with an injured knee, or what about the guy who needs to stay home and take care of their grandmother: This advice is not for everyone, but there are thousands of poor people who could turn their life around this way - thousands already have.

Could you explain what this means? Isn't poverty ipso facto its own kind of accountability, i.e., a financial accounting?

I get the feeling, however, that a lot of people want to turn an amoral, economic system — free market capitalism, wherein supply and demand determine prices — into a moral system, wherein market forces essentially render judgments about the goodness or badness of individual participants, almost as if the so-called invisible hand of the market were the Hand of God.

I don't know about that other crap you had but I didn't have they at all, must be different in states.

If only other people saw it that way. My wife is like "just hire people to do stuff" or "just buy one". Well, it costs money to hire people. Where's that going to come from? Or sure, we can buy something that cost 2x-10x and is likely half the quality or not custom built for the application.

I agree there is fulfillment in building something. So I guess part of why I DIY is cost and part is a sense of achievement I don't get from work.

Yes, I'm going to pull a Homer Simpson right there: it sure is nice we have digital magic beans we can give to other people in exchange for goods and services.

Inevitably everybody discovers that they need to work just a little more to make a huge surplus, and then they'll be interested in selling. To have double the output of your work might take only 20% more effort, because you always have the time used setting up your tools/workspace, planning your work and such.

The wonderful thing about laundromats is that everyone can use them. Including an executive from GM getting laundry done for a client(no idea why) while I was helping a friend do 10+ loads at once when they finally decided to fight their addiction.

They are still clean.

Poorer people aren't 'allowed' to factor in things such as commute time into their work hours.

Would you rather continue working in a job you love like Fauci, or find that to make ends meet you need to take a job as a cashier at BB&B after you retired from a job that left your knees aching?

I'm not advocating anyone go hardcore FIRE but I've talked to multiple people who are saving for a $15k per month retirement.

You can even pick and choose.

How much money does it take to reliably earn minimum wage + inflation consideration, from the money alone? Anyone with that money could live the exact life of the poor person without a minute of work. It's not even a lot honestly, maybe $100k in some areas/timeframes?

What about 100k and a parent who is in Congress while living in a state with the lowest minimum wage: $7.25?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/the-marriage-c...

> When a bus turned down her street, she stepped off the curb, but the bus did not slow down. Half an hour later, a second bus cruised by her outstretched, dollar-waving hand. It is an unhappy fact of Oklahoma City life that bus drivers bypass would-be riders in very poor neighborhoods, and blacks in less poor ones.

> After an hour, a bus pulled over. It took her to the center-city bus depot, which is situated in front of the county jail. Waiting for a transfer bus under a billboard for Crawley 24-Hour Bail Bonds, Kim was propositioned by a man wheeling a baby carriage and smoking a Black & Mild cigar.

> She then learned that the job required her to work until 9 p.m. There is no regular bus service to Sooner Haven or its environs after dark.

> Another bus was coming through the shopping plaza. Kim stepped forward, signalling furiously. When it swerved around her, she sank to the curb. The bus was not only the seventh one to pass her that day; it was the last bus to Sooner Haven until morning. In terms of landmass, Oklahoma City is the third-largest metropolis in America, and she was a five-hour walk from home.

Poor people can't always afford a car.

Start at age 18 and assume equal education and find a scenario where having the option is worse than having no option.

That's not possible for obvious reasons. Luck and happenstance are not valid options because they end up equalized(ish) in volume given the scenario is followed.