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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
Is it just me but every time I hear the OWS people going on about how much greater the disparity is between the rich and the poor I think back to the seventies when my single parent mum brought me up with no money and times for the poor in the seventies seemed way worse than they are now.
We had no phone, no TV and no car which was in no way unusual in the UK, we generally lived on canned meat, corned beef and spam, or offal, tripe, liver kidneys etc. I don't think I ever had a steak until I moved here in my mid twenties!
There were times, many many times, when we couldn't afford to put coins into the gas or electric meter so had no heat or light and most of my friends went through the same. My mum patched up my clothes, as did every other mum.
I ask this question because obviously things were harder in the UK than in Canada, but even with that in mind it seems to me that things have never been better for the poor than they are now, my foster kids parents, most of who are 'poor' have TV's, cell phones, food in the fridge and none of them have ever had their heat or services cut off except for the pointless cell phones they seem to waste much of their welfare on, all seem to be able to afford playstations and take the kids to McD's fairly regularly.
Is it just me or does being poor now look immeasurably better than being poor 30 or 40 years ago?
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The OWS rhetoric is always difficult to parse through, but from what I've seen it's more about what's been happening to the middle-class and about the number of people below or in danger of falling below the poverty line, as opposed to what exactly it means to be poor. So I sort of think that a question like 'are poor better off now' is a bit of a red herring.
But leaving aside any sort of OWS tie-in, it's a legit question. I think one of the big issues is that debt is far easier to come by than it was 40 years ago, especially for people who are in low income jobs, living just above the poverty line. The sub-prime loan policies in the US are a perfect example of this, where low income families were allowed to assume a debt obligation they would have never had even 20 years earlier.
So people have two options: live within your means, not buy any luxuries, contemplate every purchase and every meal; or go into debt so that you can buy yourself some luxuries that will make you feel less impoverished, and not need to feel like you're living day-to-day. Obviously a lot of people choose the second path, and it ends up catching up with them sooner or later. They go from being just above the poverty line to well below it, and without any credit to fall back on. Forty years ago, people in that sort of situation simply would not have been able to get credit and would have learned to live within their means.