40% in Michigan Can't Make Ends Meet

[workathome]

"4 in 10 Michigan households struggle to make ends meet"

http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index ... ouseh.html

However, they define self-sufficiency as 92k/year... seems a bit high to me...

[Sclass]

I have mixed feelings when I read articles like this. I guess this is why you post it.

On one hand it just sounds like these people are really inefficient. I read another one a year back about how 20% food stamp cuts were going to starve out people. I laughed when I thought of the people here regularly making great meals for $3 ea.

I had the once in a lifetime chance (for a middle class kid) of shacking up with a single mom on welfare when I was a college student. I'll never feel the same about welfare people. It was kind of like extreme reality summer camp. She had plenty of money for food but she just squandered it on dumb purchases like Bugs Bunny TV dinners for her kid. They ate expensive trash. They got fat. She was doled out about 80% what I made as a summer intern at a big corporation.

What made it even easier for me then was we lived in the San Joaquin Valley. I learned how to hit the packing sheds after work and buy produce unfit to ship. I ate very well on almost no money.

My roommate was stunned I ate so much fresh food. "honey you heat so healthy!"

She got fat. Her kid got fat. She stole my stuff and pawned it. She defaulted on a $400 loan i gave her (priceless education!). I ran back to college after poverty summer camp ended. Now I'm a pretty cold bastard when I read these accounts of hardship.

[workathome]

That explains this then:

"Kraft’s incoming CEO Tony Vernon said as much when he told the Financial Times on Sunday that he opposes cuts to the food stamp program or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP for short). Vernon said food stamp buys make up one-sixth of Kraft's revenue and a bigger share of the company’s total sales.

But Kraft isn’t the only company that’s a fan of food stamps, Walmart, Coca-Cola and other big brands have lobbied surrounding the issue, according to a June 2012 report from advocacy group Eat Drink Politics called "Food Stamps: Follow the Money."

Though Coca-Cola is definitely the kind of think you shouldn't be buying if you need food stamps.

[disparatum]

When I think of a poor person, who is poor for many reasons (socially, monetarily, intellectually maybe), I see them looking all around them and making sense of the world as limited by their perspective.

Certain kinds of capital have the quality of networks--with the attendant exponential growth that emerges . Monetary capital attracts more dollars on the basis of having attracted previous dollars, and social capital, which is more easily analogous, increases as people establish a greater number of connections on the basis of having established previous ones. This is what creates that s-curve that Jacob speaks about (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/bette ... urves.html).

The important part of this is that it's easy to see the curve for what it is when you can take a step back and look at the whole picture, but it's not at all obvious when you're sitting in the flat part of the line in the lower left hand corner that there is some critical point at which the entire dynamics of the system change. I would say that nonlinear thinking is very unintuitive (as the climate change debate seems to attest to).

The point I'm ultimately getting at is that I think simply stepping outside the system to look at the larger picture takes some threshold of intellectual capital that can't be attained in the same self-sustaining way. And I'm not saying that it requires a rocket scientist to learn to cook your own food for much cheaper, but I do think it takes some brains (and a certain temperament that goes along with it maybe?) to see the localized nature of one's circumstances. And in some ways I think it's kind of a high bar. How many people go through 12-16 years of school and never question a system of education that is quite inefficient, bloated, and readily extinguishes intellectual curiosity? And I guess I have (a little) sympathy for the individual for which the prevailing mode of thought is so arrayed against their better interests. The sharp minds, massive organization, and billions of dollars that go into marketing and advertising campaigns creates quite an asymmetry of power. That Kraft example only makes my point.

That said, if I lived with someone like you described, sclass, I would probably bang my head against a wall.

[7Wannabe5]

I find it interesting that the numbers are actually pretty accurate if you accept the likely standard underlying assumptions used to generate them. For instance, the least you could rent a studio apartment for in Washtenaw county would be around $650 and the average cost of a two bedroom apartment is probably around $1000. The legal occupation rate for a two bedroom apartment is 5 people but I would bet dollars to donuts that the assumption made for these calculations is that in order to be "surviving" a single adult needs to either be renting a one bedroom apartment or, at worst, half of a two bedroom apartment. However, I know that there are single adult graduate students from other countries occupying apartments at the legal maximum. So, one single adult needs $650/month for minimum shelter survival requirements and another single adult needs only $200/month. Since the tenancy law does take square ft. space per person into consideration in regards to fire safety/ventilation etc., the assumption obviously being made here is that privacy is necessary for survival as a single adult in our culture.

OTOH, I would note that one adult who is working 60 hrs./wk at $12/hr in order to support another adult who is disabled (let's say in a manner not covered by disability such as "drunken")and two kids is going to be far less able to otherwise improve lifestyle than a single adult who is living off a passive income of $8000/yr. As in, here I am riding my bike 8 miles from my rural trailer to my job at Walmart, here I am standing on my feet at Walmart all day, here I am riding back, here I am chopping vegetables for dinner, here I am breaking up a fight between the kids, here I am getting one kid organized to do homework, here I am doing a load of stinky cloth diapers while attempting to learn Ruby so I can maybe get a better job someday, here I am attending Alanon meeting to get information on free legal help to divorce drunken spouse. Of course, this adult made own free choices that created this deep rut but I'm just saying when it comes to bootstrapping from "where you are now" some people are going to have to reach harder and pull stronger.

[jacob]

Also see,

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/angry ... -poor.html

One of the most fundamental aspects of ERE which is so fundamental that it rarely if ever gets mentioned explicitly is that skill capital substitutes for spending capital.---That there are other ways of acquiring "goods" than spending money. This part is also entirely missed by the majority of people and here I include many self-professed ["less extreme"] frugalites.

For someone with zero alternative capital, I can well image that "surviving" really does require insane amounts of money. I mean, personal toilet assistants don't come cheap these days, right? However, despite living what passes for a middle-class lifestyle, I frequently see people defending their higher-than-mine spending with statements like "being as extreme as Jacob is not for me" insinuating that my life is too austere for their taste.

This is probably due to my failure to communicate how much skill can substitute for money with no limit. This failure to communicate is aggravated and thwarted when people either don't have the resources to think outside the box (e.g. the poor underclass) or if they're so steeped in their box (think recent college grads who still believe that the first paycheck they put as a downpayment on an entry level luxury car actual means that they have arrived) that they're simply blind to what could be obvious.

[disparatum]

I guess I should have realized you already addressed this issue ; )

So, after having read the link to your blog post, I wonder if you've found any better way to communicate with a wider group of people? I'm not sure how recent your post was. It's an interesting problem and, judging by the number of people who see their inability to communicate with their intellectual inferiors as a badge of honor, an under-appreciated skill.

[Riggerjack]

from the article:

The Household Stability Budget, which enables Michigan families to be self-sufficient, is $22,849 for a single adult and $92,409 for a family of four.

Am I the only one who did the math, and saw that a family of 4 needs more than 4 times what a single adult needs?

I guess we should all get out our checkbooks, then. "It takes a village", or is that "it taxes a village?" In any case, surely, more money will solve this.

I grew up poor. As in living without electricity, and/or running water, and evicted, often. 5 people living in a van or a tent is exactly as much fun as it sounds. I'm currently a landlord, and have plenty of bad karma I expect I'll work off on that score. The poor that Sclass describes were the folks I grew up with. It wasn't money we lacked. I've known many who did better with less. We had welfare. We also had under the table income. We also had drugs, and jiffy pop, and plenty of extravagances. What we didn't have was hope, or a clue, or plans beyond literal pipe dreams.

So I'm not talking out my A$$ about "those lazy poor people". I grew up in that world. Jacob nailed it when he posted about the angry poor. Poverty in America isn't about money. It's about choices, it's about making changes, hell, it's about knowing that changes CAN BE MADE.

We have the internet, now. Anything anyone wants to know can be Googled. So it drives me nuts when people provide excuses for being poor, instead of solutions.

When I was a laborer for 6 bucks an hour, I wanted to know how to get one of those good paying union jobs. I was told "you gotta have an in." I didn't, so I didn't even try. Most likely, neither had the foreman who told me that. It turns out, "the in" was applying, often. All I needed was to try, but everyone around me reinforced the storyline that if you didn't have a connection, you couldn't make things better by yourself. The excuses were many and varied, but it all boiled down to "I've been doing this for years, who are you to think you can do better?"

So when I read posts like

I would note that one adult who is working 60 hrs./wk at $12/hr in order to support another adult who is disabled (let's say in a manner not covered by disability such as "drunken")and two kids is going to be far less able to otherwise improve lifestyle than a single adult who is living off a passive income of $8000/yr.

I just hear more of the excuses for why people can't make things better.

Yes, I know, 7wannabe5 was making a case that it's not always as easy as it is for the able bodied adults among us. Got it. However, in my experience, the stereotypical welfare queen is interested in excuses and sympathy, not solutions. The same goes for the ALICE crowd in the charity study. Adding more money does nothing to change that.

Sympathy is toxic. Sympathy is an opiate that numbs people to the squalor they surround themselves with. Sympathy says it's OK that you've made sh!t decisions that have fcuked up your life. It's OK, you're the victim, and being the victim means you are absolved of any responsibility.

It makes me want to say "This is 21st Century America. Things are not equal, or perfectly fair; but if you can't succeed here, now, when and where would you have succeeded?"

OK, crazy judgmental soapbox rant complete.

[Sclass]

Ok. So much for sharing my isolated experience. I agree, people like my old roommate were not as enlightened as the people here making $3 meals and riding around on well tuned bicycles with trailers.

My welfare gal was just a lazy individual. She didn't even receive food stamps because she said it was too hard to fill out the monthly form and too embarrassing to use them. She was pure AFDC. when she quit her "job" as a filing clerk at a medical office she said it was just too hard to get everything in alphabetical order. She was tired of the doctors getting mad when the files were out of order. "honey I get paid if I go there or not, don't you worry!"

I actuall tracked her down on Google Images after I posted. Wow, the power of Google...thanks Riggerjack! Maybe I'll Friend her and ask for my $400 back with twenty years of compound interest.

Just my anecdote. There certainly are folks who really cannot make enough income to get by on their own out there. And I'm really glad they aren't beating down my door for a meal. Hmmm, on second thought I'd better not friend that gal.

[Riggerjack]

Sorry folks. I really didn't intend to derail the thread. This has been rattling around in my head since the thread talking about conservatives secretly hating poor people. I don't hate poor people. I do despise the self inflicted helpless people, and their enablers. There just happens to be a lot of overlap in those groups.

[7Wannabe5]

Riggerjack said: Am I the only one who did the math, and saw that a family of 4 needs more than 4 times what a single adult needs?

Yeah, I noticed that too. I think this is because the assumption being made is that both parents are working outside of the home so there is an additional cost for daycare which is greater than the privacy cost of shelter for a single adult. IOW, the math goes something like 2 bedroom apartment split 2 ways between 2 single adults = $500/month shelter cost/person and 2 bedroom apartment split 4 ways between 2 consensual adults and 2 kids = $250/month shelter cost per person but after-school care for one child is $100/wk and full-time care for the other child is $250/wk or something like that.

Yes, I know, 7wannabe5 was making a case that it's not always as easy as it is for the able bodied adults among us. Got it.

I wasn't really trying to evoke sympathy with my bit of fictional narrative. I agree with what you wrote, especially the example of the union job. What I was trying to communicate without resorting to numbers is that a person can at any given moment in time have a social network or a basket full of social obligations which are the equivalent of coming out of college with $80,000 in loans vs. $10,000 in money saved from part-time job.

Anyways, there are a million narratives in the big city. Let me share a non-fictional one from my own youth in contrast to the one offered by Sclass. When I was a 20-something stay-at-home-Mom with a baby and a toddler, my EX and I decided that we needed to focus on saving up enough money to buy a house so we moved out of our relatively nice 2 bedroom apartment and into "married" student family housing (my EX was taking some classes at the time.) At least half of the apartments in this complex were occupied by single/divorced women with children. The woman who lived above me and the woman who lived across from me were demographic twins in just about every way, same age (24-ish), same socio-economic background (Midwest rural working class), same kid basket (2 kids around 3 and 5), same IQ and working towards acquiring same sort of college degree (both having difficulty with level of math necessary to become nurse) and they were both collecting some government funds. Anyways, the reason why this narrative is in contrast to the one offered by SClass is that the one striking demographic difference between my two "Welfare Queen" neighbors was that one was extremely physically attractive (genetic factors) and fit (her own effort) and the other was the opposite and this alone made a HUGE difference in the quality of their lifestyles. The attractive one had the government, her parents, her EX, her current BF and some kid in a fraternity associated with the Big Brother program who had a crush on her all helping her out with her two sons either financially or on a practical basis all the time. The unattractive one just had the government and her parents. The attractive one managed to graduate. The unattractive one didn't. However, the "laziest" woman in this story was me because I could have been working a lucrative corporate job with my degree in mathematics/actuarial science but instead I was making homemade play-dough, washing cloth diapers and hanging out in the communal sandbox with a couple of "Welfare Queens."

[Sclass]

Riggerjack, 7wannbe5, thank you for sharing your stories. That kind of real color is one of the things that makes this place interesting.

I guess it is kind of shallow of me jumping up and saying this is what I went through as if one experience can explain some of Michigan's issue. (backpedalling bike here) 40% is a big number so there are probably a lot of stories in there. There's gotta be good people in 40% of Michigan.

I'm kind of scarred by the whole thing. I lost part of my college tuition in that bad loan. My landlady told me they overstayed after I left and I lost deposits and I got stuck with the last utility bills. The landlady said in parting, "sometimes a sweet boy gets taken advantage of. I hope you learned something."

I was really embarrassed because she had watched the whole thing play out from the managers unit. I realized the 70 yo property manager had seen it all. Most of my neighbors were single mothers on AFDC. There I was, calling from my college dorm room asking for part of my deposit back long after they'd trashed the place. I can still remember hanging up the phone and sitting there wondering how I'd pay for my books. OMG...I can remember photocopying my friends books that semester because I had access to a free copy machine. I can laugh about it now.

Maybe I learned too much from that one.

I've actually spent a good deal of time in Detroit on business and I notice that a lot of the place is uninhabitable because it just looks worse than the movie 8 Mile. Maybe the cost of living is high there because families need to move out to safer areas. That could explain aid money getting eaten up by housing if your aid budget is based on living in Highland Park (I wanted to see the old Ford plant and my cabbie refused to take me) and you refuse to live there.

[7Wannabe5]

SClass said: There's gotta be good people in 40% of Michigan.

I don't know if the AGW (assumption of good will) is as relevant as the AFW (assumption of free will.) Part of the point I was trying to make with the story of my two neighbors is that statistics always lie because nobody is your demographic twin and any little difference can alter your decision making process.

I'm kind of scarred by the whole thing.

Reality sucks at times. Even at the time I was mostly philosophically amused by the mechanics of my more attractive neighbor but part of me was like "Hey, that's not fair. Why can't I get a frat boy to babysit my kids while I go to the gym just because I am married to the father of my children? I am the good one." I mean, I wouldn't have traded my brains for her looks but still...

I've actually spent a good deal of time in Detroit on business and I notice that a lot of the place is uninhabitable because it just looks worse than the movie 8 Mile. Maybe the cost of living is high there because families need to move out to safer areas. That could explain aid money getting eaten up by housing if your aid budget is based on living in Highland Park (I wanted to see the old Ford plant and my cabbie refused to take me) and you refuse to live there.

True. This thread topic is of particular interest to me because I recently moved from living next door to the wealthiest neighborhood in Washtenaw county to living next door to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Wayne county. If I still had young children it would be much more unlikely that I would have done this. My D23 spent the weekend with me in my new abode recently and she said "Mom, you are an independent lady...and I'm not even being sarcastic." -lol

[jacob]

@disparatum - That post was written shortly before I quit blogging. And no, I have not found a better way to communicate(*) with a wider group of people, nor do I think has anyone else. It is indeed an interesting problem (people who wear their inability to communicate with their presumed intellectual inferiors as a badge are fortunately few in numberrs) and if it could be solved, much of the poverty that results from poor choices could be eliminated.

As I see it, the problem is similar to finding a better way to communicate vector calculus to a wider group of people. It's inherently impossible in the sense that if you simplify the message, you're no longer communicating the original message. There's a material information loss in the conversion.

The problem of communicating/teaching is two-fold. 1) First people actually have to want to learn and this is far from the case. It is much easier not to learn something. Also as has been mentioned above, there's a significant amount of enablers---people who do have the skills and energy to exit poverty but prefer to spend them blaming everybody else instead and thus lend an intellectual defence to those who lack those skills. This became clear to after seeing the threads referred in the blog post where supposedly people struggling in poverty were writing detailed and elaborate analyses of why they were so poor as opposed to putting those writing and analyses skills towards exiting poverty. 2) The capital problem is that a lot of understanding builds upon other understanding. In order to learn how to read and write, one must first learn the alphabet. No matter how clever the pedagogical efforts, there's just no way around this. Learning non-poverty behavior is similar. The problem here is that it can take an ENTIRE upbringing, that is 10+ years to learn this behavior. Even worse if other behavior has to be unlearned.

My solution has been to acknowledge the Wheaton scale and limit my exposure to who already know the basics or even the intermediates of personal finance and people who can process abstract thought, that is, people who are able to think semi-independently if given the tools. This is also why I'm very reluctant to deal with mainstream journalists. As you can see from looking at some of the 1-star book reviews I occasionally get on amazon, this "barrier" approach is not always successful. I hit both people who blames me for the cognitive dissonance they experience from my description of consumer-life and people who simply don't (can't!?) see that the crucial difference is the ability to think and analyze (they see this discussion as philosophical "babble") and get disappointed when they don't find any "advice" or "plans". This is an example of both problems described above: 1) People who simply don't want to learn. 2) People who lack the requisites to learn.

It's the problem of 1) The closed-mind; and 2) the limited-mind; or a combination thereof.

Or to put it in silly proverbs:
1) You can lead a horse to the water but you can't make it drink.
2) You can lead a horse to the water but you can't make it think.

As I said, apparently, nobody has really managed to come up with a proper solution. I think the problem with closed-minded people has more to do with neurochemistry than anything else, so that's almost impossible to deal with. It should also be acknowledged that closed-mindedness can be a genetic (inclusive fitness) advantage in some cases. When it comes to thinking ability, that is, the value of using personal thinking to reach a goal as opposed to asking or googling for "advice", I think education is the only answer. Unfortunately, much of the modern education system is actually geared towards developing the latter characteristic. People who don't want to think on their own as well as people who are post-rationalizing their [unconscious] choices rather than questioning them. The status quo has a great interest in keeping people from questioning too much. Consequently there are very many people who absolutely requires a plan in order to take any action. Their ability to make up their own has either been trained out of them or it has never existed in the first place.

(*) This is a problem I find very interesting. Probably too interesting. It boggles my mind how two different people can describe the exact same writing as "an example of clarity and the best they've ever read" and "totally incomprehensible and the worst they've ever read". Understanding is obviously EXTREMELY subjective. But how can knowledge be subjective?! It's a conundrum! Modernism, meet post-modernism. Bonus question: how can one communicate so that both target groups receive the same message?

[Ego]

People get very good at concocting excuses when they are justifying failure to those who will be bailing them out. On the other hand, I've been amazed by the candid pragmatism of those who bought homes at the top of the market and learned hard lessons. They had no choice but to learn since there was no one willing to bail them out.

Consequences are funny like that. Remove them and people become remarkably forgetful.

[Chad]

In my experience, it's "all of the above" concerning people. Some want and have the ability to learn. Some want, but don't have great ability to learn. Some don't want to learn, but have the ability. Some don't want to learn and don't have the ability. Obviously, there are variations within these variations.

When I was coaching I had one player who was definitely in the "want, but doesn't have great ability to learn." It was obvious, because he was desperate to start and had the physical ability to start. Unfortunately, he lacked the ability to learn the offense in the classroom and translate it to the field. I would spend a couple hours teaching on the white board, but it would never translate onto the practice field for him. My other couple guys could have probably taken the knowledge to the practice field without me. It wasn't until I tried some different techniques, such as completely abandoning the white board for actual dummies representing other players that I was able to get to him in the classroom. He just didn't have the ability to grasp the plays in a 2-D environment, but the other guys were fine with a 2-D or 3-D classroom.

[jennypenny]

I really don't think it's a communication problem. Or, at least, I don't think it's an insurmountable communication problem. The other team doesn't seem to have any trouble convincing people that consumption equals status and that money is the only means to achieve it. They've obviously convinced the people who came up with the standards in that article and many others I've seen. Why else would cable TV be factored into self-sufficiency or class status? There's money to be made (and an economy to be saved) by convincing people that cable and cell phones are necessary for survival in the US.

The percentage of people who 'get' ERE is probably the same within all of the economic classes. The problem is in how class is defined, not achieved. If class is determined by what you own, or at least possess, then how something is attained is almost irrelevant. In that case, the argument that attaining something on credit without doing any work or using any money has merit.

If the classes were defined differently, say lower class is running a deficit, middle class is breaking even, and upper class is running a surplus, then the means of attaining things becomes much more important. The case for ERE is much easier to make under that definition. People might be more receptive to the idea of alternative capital.

I will agree that people usually only learn things when they need to learn them. The ever-growing manna from heaven assistance program is the wrong approach, whether it's directed at banks or individuals. The wrong lesson is being learned.

[jacob]

@jennypenny - It seems that this supposes a symmetry where it might not exist. Ceteris paribus it's a lot easier to watch TV and be subliminally influenced to consume than it is to read a book and question everything you know about the world. Maybe we're using the wrong tools? I've previously considered that the way to reach the next Wheaton level(s) is not by writing an easy-read book but simply to post pictures or videos of the ERE lifestyle w/o any commentary that could set off people's defenses.

Ultimately, it's all about definitions. This is why some people get pissy when I redefine words.---Because it challenges their entire framework. Think "retirement".

And yes, it's certainly a lot easier to "teach" people by letting nature run them over than convincing them that preemptive corrections are optimal. However, the collateral damage (at least if you care about the person) often outweighs the brief pleasure of an "I told you so".

[jennypenny]

@jennypenny - It seems that this supposes a symmetry where it might not exist. Ceteris paribus it's a lot easier to watch TV and be subliminally influenced to consume than it is to read a book and question everything you know about the world. Maybe we're using the wrong tools? I've previously considered that the way to reach the next Wheaton level(s) is not by writing an easy-read book but simply to post pictures or videos of the ERE lifestyle w/o any commentary that could set off people's defenses.

But TV is a fairly recent invention. Peer pressure to keep up appearances has been around longer than that. Ultimately, I don't think it's the particular medium but the desire to conform to perceived norms that influences people.

Isn't that related to Strauss and Howe's work? Aren't some generations more prone to that than others? Does that mean ERE has to wait for a generation to die off before it's ideas can take hold?

To your point, I don't think TV is the culprit, but you're right that the sides might not be even since consumerism is the incumbent and ERE is the challenger.

[jacob]

Being a [very] young Gen-X, because I adopted computers and in particular the net much earlier than my age-peers and before Gen-Y, sometimes I think I'm leading/voicing Gen-Y (idealist) ideas.

I want to know what creates the perceived norms in the first place. Currently it's the issue that most people's friends, aside from their parents and children, are the celebrities on TV which they know better than their neighbors and cousins. Technology does matter.