Democratic Diva » Yet another episode of “You Can’t Win, Poor People”
Yet another episode of “You Can’t Win, Poor People”
McDonalds has been catching fire lately. First there were the reports of franchises partnering with Visa to pay minimum wage employees with fee-heavy debit cards. Now comes this:
Not so fast on that “second job”, though. Here’s McDonalds (again) featuring prominently in the zeitgeist of the One Percent:
There is perhaps nothing that would more completely convey your boss’s tyranny over you than having to put your entire life on hold awaiting them to bid you to work. Yet this appears to be what many bosses are, in fact, doing these days. But again, there goes that “second job” that the benevolent budget-makers expect you to get to make that budget work.
Still, Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post would like all you liberal meaniebutts to kindly refrain from mocking the budget that McDonalds and Visa so generously prepared for the benighted poors.
So the figures for heating and health insurance in the original Visa/McDonald’s sample budget are hard to defend. But overall, it offers a reasonable picture of how a typical person in the lower half of the income spectrum spends his money.
And the reality is that these low-income Americans have to make the kind of hard choices that critics are deriding as ridiculous. They have to make do with a used car, live in a modest apartment with a roommate, get by with basic cable and a low-end cellular plan, and travel and go out to eat infrequently.
Gawker calls the budget “just-shy-of-condescending,” but budgeting is an important skill that isn’t obvious to every young adult in America. Offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income is more constructive than ridiculing the choices required to do so.
Who the hell is he calling condescending? Timothy, being the clueless privileged honky that he is, probably only encounters working class people who are serving him in some capacity and is thus unfamiliar with them as actual human beings with lives who are able to make things work. They’re probably better at it than Timothy is. I guarantee the average single mom making $9 an hour can budget rings around Timothy. Poor families budget like nobody’s business. They have no choice in that. Being poor is ridiculously challenging and precarious and what poverty wage workers need is to earn a living wage, not be insulted with a budget produced by rich idiots who clearly assume everyone working at McDonalds is a teen living at home with his or her middle class parents.
Filed under: Economy, News and Opinions
Donna, wait until Obamacare kicks in. There will be less hours and less jobs.
I think this is just a continuation of trickle up economy the Republicans for years haved lied about being the other way around. By cutting wages and hours to boost the bottom dollar to keep managment salaries and dividends paying out , they have helped erode our societies wage and benefit bedrock simply for short term growth.
What they don’t seem to understand is that if they treat people as temporary solutions to an immediate problem, then people will treat their employer the same. Customer service, integrity, care of equipment, diligence, and work ethic will be treated as optional services by employees. You will get what will pay me for.
Inevitably society will react to the burdens these cost cutting measure place upon it. Obamacare, higher minimum wages and increasing unionization of service industries are an inevitable response to corporations that reap the benefits of American society, but will not be patriotically responsible and support the people in it.
I think the backlash will become even stronger as the trickle up economy further divides America along a “have and have not” baseline.
The unhidden selfishness and lack of empathy of many of the “I got mine” mindset will inevitably make it more and more necessary to force them to behave as responsible American citizens, and not as the fearful self entitled isolationists so many of them seem to behave as.
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