My stint in poverty wasn’t even that bad. Sure, I had $40 for food and gas for two weeks while the soles literally fell out of my shoes and off my feet while working in a hot kitchen for several years. But I wasn’t a migrant, legal or otherwise. I had an okay upbringing, and didn’t have trauma cut my future before it even started. I was never homeless. And so on.
Nonetheless, I felt taken advantage of over time. Eventually, the restaurant I worked at moved to a new location with me, gave me a rise to $10 per hr, which was huge to me, and then cut my hours in half. I had to get another job after helping these people through so much. I was one of the original employees at that location and was pushed out by management.
So, there was one burning question in my mind: why was I pushed out? But the question transformed into “Why did I have to go through that at all?”
One of the reasons I got an economics degree is to understand the most popular answers deeply. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough, they’re unskilled or low-skilled, government is taking your money, etc.
All of it is bullshit. All of it. Every last trash excuse that justifies poverty is a lie. Neoclassical economics is a theory of selfishness and misanthropy.
Poverty is a policy choice. Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, is an excellent book about this. We give tax breaks for people owning second homes, for example. What else could the money collected from owners of second homes do for social policy? Reagan cut corporate taxes. But, if those taxes were higher, how could the money be used to alleviate poverty?
Essentially, I lived poverty, tried to understand why I endured it, and came up empty. There’s no reason other than selfishness why I endured it. And the same is true of everybody in poverty today around the entire world.
No one should be poor. No exceptions.
My stint in poverty wasn’t even that bad. Sure, I had $40 for food and gas for two weeks while the soles literally fell out of my shoes and off my feet while working in a hot kitchen for several years. But I wasn’t a migrant, legal or otherwise. I had an okay upbringing, and didn’t have trauma cut my future before it even started. I was never homeless. And so on.
Nonetheless, I felt taken advantage of over time. Eventually, the restaurant I worked at moved to a new location with me, gave me a rise to $10 per hr, which was huge to me, and then cut my hours in half. I had to get another job after helping these people through so much. I was one of the original employees at that location and was pushed out by management.
So, there was one burning question in my mind: why was I pushed out? But the question transformed into “Why did I have to go through that at all?”
One of the reasons I got an economics degree is to understand the most popular answers deeply. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough, they’re unskilled or low-skilled, government is taking your money, etc.
All of it is bullshit. All of it. Every last trash excuse that justifies poverty is a lie. Neoclassical economics is a theory of selfishness and misanthropy.
Poverty is a policy choice. Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, is an excellent book about this. We give tax breaks for people owning second homes, for example. What else could the money collected from owners of second homes do for social policy? Reagan cut corporate taxes. But, if those taxes were higher, how could the money be used to alleviate poverty?
Essentially, I lived poverty, tried to understand why I endured it, and came up empty. There’s no reason other than selfishness why I endured it. And the same is true of everybody in poverty today around the entire world.