Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor • Hacker News Board

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#151

Post by ta988 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #143

ta988 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't because houses don't produce income (unless you rent them). So if you had your house when you could afford it but cannot anymore you get made even less wealthy with the property taxes. Taxes should be proportional to income. There should be a more fair way to do that: to not tax main house when in use, tax only at the time of sale on benefit only (corrected by inflation).

Only if renters are allowed to pay rent out of pre-tax income.

Good point. If it is for the main living place.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#152

Post by baq » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #139

throwaway6734 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to move to an area with cheaper housing. Moving to opportunity is the American way

Cheaper housing => longer and more expensive commute. Or worse job opportunities. Then people tell you to move where the jobs are. Which has really expensive housing. The free market tends to flatten this stuff out

The free market caused this situation in the first place.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#153

Post by ffggvv » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

a lot of immigrants have both the experience of starting their life poor in their home country. starting poor in america and then ending their life rich.

so we do understand what it’s like to be poor. and in a way i think sometimes we have less sympathy because we can see how good decisions can lead to wealth.

there’s countless stories of jewish or asian immigrants in new york working insane hours for little pay as textile workers and all of their children become doctors or lawyers.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#154

Post by pavlov » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #62

elliekelly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this for the longest time. An embarrassingly long time. Then I volunteered with a program that helps people who qualify for EITC to prepare their taxes and budget how they’ll use their tax return to “get them out of their situation”. Person after person came in, we did their taxes, and then we went over their expenses and each case was a frustrating puzzle that was impossible to solve. There just wasn’t eno…

Okay...but on /r/personalfinance, people show up all the time with a litany of complaints and a litany of awful, awful budget mistakes they have no interest in fixing. 120/month cellphone, 400/month doordash, Dodge Charger with a 600/month note. And so on. each case was a frustrating puzzle What puzzled you? The necessities should never be a puzzle. If the rent, the food, the utilities, the insurance, and the day car…

This person did the hard work of sitting down face-to-face with people in financial distress and discovered that helping them is not as easy as it seems when looking down from an upper middle class perch.

Then you come in and argue that their experience can’t be true because you read something on Reddit. What an absurd and rude display of privilege.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#155

Post by mechagodzilla » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

e40 wrote: post #112

bradleyjg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People made vastly more money just sitting around in their houses in the past couple years than I made in my job as an "essential" worker over the past decade. This is not an accident. It’s a result of deliberate policy choices. The incumbent homeowners voted themselves massive returns. And they felt self righteous while they were doing it to boot.

What are you talking about?

There are a lot of 'deliberate' policy decisions which both depress low-skilled workers' wages, and lead to higher property prices. On the wage side, good examples are that:

1) the minimum wage doesn't get increased with inflation

2) many jobs require a higher degree (which takes capital to pay for), or effectively require working for free via internships (which requires capital or someone else subsidizing you)

3) many higher paying jobs preclude you from working there if you have a criminal history (which is very disproportionately likely to be true for some demographics than others, in many cases just due to disparate enforcement), which effectively suppresses wages for many millions of people.

On the housing side, any policy that restricts the building of new housing in order to limit supply (and there are a lot of them) will drive up housing prices. This includes things like minimum lot sizes, enforced parking requirements, etc. It's pretty much universally accepted in the US for local politicians to talk about 'protecting home values', which usually has a subtext of [by keeping poor people out of our town]. This is probably the _most_ common policy topic in my well-off suburban community - every proposal for multi-family housing gets fought tooth and nail, it's virtually impossible to build more than 1-bedroom apartments 'lest our schools become overcrowded [by poor people]', etc.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#156

Post by benttoothpaste » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

hn8788 wrote: post #57

I had a co-worker who thought he had a typical american childhood because he didn't consider his family wealthy, even though they had millions of dollars of networth over 30 years ago. Him and his 3 bothers went to a very exclusive private school that was 50k a year per child, but since his classmates were mostly "old money" that were from family worth 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, he was picked on for being th…

Hehe I’m poor and I’m no stranger to Taco Hell runs.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#157

Post by refurb » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

TomSwirly wrote: post #86

aspaviento wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. Some people live in a bubble so far from the real world that almost seems fantasy.

> I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. It depends on where you live. I lived in New York City for years. If you had a family, it would be hard to live there as on 6000€/mo, unless you had been living in the same apartment for decades. The median cost of a 2-bedroom apartment there is 3000€ a month, taxation is high (federal, city and state taxes), food is wildly exp…

Hard to live on 3000EUR/month after housing?

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#158

Post by zepto » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

calibas wrote: post #142

It's kind of the "American dream" that if you're responsible and work hard, then anybody can achieve a reasonable level of success. There's an appeal to believing being wealthy is a choice, then you can believe the people at the "top tiers" of society earned their positions and deserve all that power and influence. If that's not true, then it implies that live in a class-based system. Wealthy people are the ones maki…

> If that's not true, then it implies that live in a class-based system.

It really doesn’t. It does absolutely imply that the system is broken, but it most certainly doesn’t imply that it is ‘class based’ in some essential way.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#159

Post by nightski » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #139

throwaway6734 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to move to an area with cheaper housing. Moving to opportunity is the American way

Cheaper housing => longer and more expensive commute. Or worse job opportunities. Then people tell you to move where the jobs are. Which has really expensive housing. The free market tends to flatten this stuff out

Not in tech. Opportunities are abound. My parents had no assets and were rather poor. Tech has allowed me to live in a cheap area and make an extraordinary income and build up wealth for the first time in my family remotely. I work from home and have never had to commute.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#160

Post by ta1234567890 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

This is essentially talking about the same findings from The Monopoly experiment (https://www.businessinsider.com/ted-talk-monopoly-makes-peop...)

In that experiment, one of the players would get more initial money and two dice rolls per turn (instead of one). Then, even though it was clear that the game was rigged in their favor, they would act as if it was their own superior game skills that allowed them to win, mocking the other players at the same time.