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Old 11-22-2011, 12:08 AM   #40
afc wimbledon
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Originally Posted by octothorp View Post
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.

I'm not sure its just the access to credit though, other than housing the availability of everything at a reasonable price has just become a matter of course, throughout my life there have been computors, when I was kid we saw them on James Bond movies and only a well off nation state could afford them, there was no reason to think it made sense selling them for a few thousand dollars in the 80's or a few hundred now, its just become accepted business practise, what ever you make, sell it to as many people as you can as cheaply as possible.

If you brought out a cell phone in the 70's you charged several thousand dollars for them, as well as hundreds of dollars a month for the use and their use was limited to the elite, each of my 15 year old foster kids has a cell paid for by their mums (who are all on fixed incomes).
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