alt Hacker News> credit is the only way they're surviving on something close to minimum wage. Or credit was the only "safety net" they had during a rough time
In my experience, the average American has no concept of saving money, and those below average even less.
It's funny to me that America gets flak from all over the world for having no social safety net; if this was actually true, you'd expect to see people put aside a bit of their income, however meager it may be, out of an expectation that they will need it. What do you see in practice? You see people dashing over to the nearest rent-to-own rims shop. (If you don't know poor people, you may not know such businesses exist.)
> Almost none of these people have the kind of collateral needed to use credit to truly transform their lives, and the government assistance for that is seriously lacking in the US
I doubt that greater availability of credit, perhaps facilitated through government subsidy, is what precludes the majority of such people from transforming their lives.
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When everything around suggests that the system is rigged against you and care against you, it's no surprise that many people live for the moment and try to find some small bit of pleasure or joy in the moment without planning for a future that may not come.
It's easy to say "why don't they save more?" from an upper or middle class stability, but when the price of everything keeps going up, the police are out to get you, and healthcare is just a fast track to debt that will take away any savings or assets you managed to have, what's the point?
You can't individual financial education your way out of systemic poverty.
Furthermore, the common pattern where poorer people spend money as soon as they get it is, in fact, rational when you look at it from their perspective rather than your own (which, as with most people attempting to moralize to poor people about their choices, appears to be a perspective of "you should be doing absolutely everything you can to maximize your net cash flow").
First of all, people need things like little luxuries. A Starbucks coffee here. A joint to smoke there. We are not, and cannot make ourselves, robots who live only to produce.
Second of all, they know, from experience going all the way back to childhood, that if they have an opportunity to splurge a little now and don't take it, they'll lose that opportunity.
Third of all, they similarly know that regardless of whether they splurge on an ice cream cone today because it's 90°F out, whatever financial trouble that comes tomorrow to eat up the little surplus that makes that possible will still put them in debt. Being in debt $150 instead of $145 just doesn't make that much difference. And if they wanted to avoid that particular debt entirely, they'd have to give up 30 separate instances of "I have an extra $5 today, let me get something to make life a little less shitty".
The only solution to the problems that lead to people not being able to save is increasing the amount of money they get paid.
I'm picturing you in my head as one of those 19th century Englishmen, writing about how being poor is a moral failure and the famine in Ireland is actually a punishment from God and thus nothing should be done about it.
> You see people dashing over to the nearest rent-to-own rims shop. (If you don't know poor people, you may not know such businesses exist.)
And many on this site don’t recognize a racist dog whistle I guess.
> It's funny to me that America gets flak from all over the world for having no social safety net; if this was actually true, you'd expect to see people put aside a bit of their income, however meager it may be, out of an expectation that they will need it.
Congratulations, you've just discovered that human beings are not perfect rational actors.