I've seen a few sides of money. Raised upper class, lost it all and became underclass, then made it back. I'm always amazed at how limited rich people's worldview is. The average software developer, coastal liberal etc. They've never felt terror, the visceral feeling of being terrified. They've never been predated upon. They've never been used and discarded. The underclass lives with this stuff every day, 24/7, and rich people never experience it even once in their whole lives. And the rich people presume to talk down to and lecture the poor. I have a great deal of contempt for people of my class, the rich.
I was just discussing this with a friend last week. In my case at least, it was too easy to forget. I grew up low end of middle class at best, and after high school was dirt poor.
Getting overdrafts weekly, in that era where they reorder transactions to really turn the screws. Sleeping early because it's cheaper than eating. Working two jobs and still not getting ahead. The shame of having to ask to borrow a few bucks, but trying to hide it so you didn't seem ingenuous. Having better off people talk to you like a child, giving you unsolicited one liner advice that they probably read on a motivational poster at work that morning, like they're doing me a life favor.
The thing is, I got a lucky break in my mid 20s and haven't struggled a day since. Now it's been almost 20 years, and I find myself acting like the rich person you describe. I guess like all things, appreciation wears off with age and becomes the new normal.
I don't ever want to struggle like that again, but I'd love to experience the feeling and appreciation I had for the first couple years after climbing out of it. It's easy to forget.
Unfortunately the Cruelty Industry is huge and there is a lot of money to be made putting the screws to the most financially vulnerable people.
Banks, the lending industry (including credit card companies, mortgage and student loans), debt collectors, repo men, payday loan stores and check cashers, not to mention the entire legal system, ugh... To me it's sick that they can upend someone's life just because they didn't pay a bunch of bills. Society collectively has the wealth to treat the less fortunate with grace and dignity, with compassion and forgiveness, but it's more profitable to find fault, then squeeze everything out of them and leave them by the side of the road.
A lot of people fold their arms and smugly say "Well, they made bad choices and deserve it all." Whatever lets you sleep at night, I guess.
It is really a problem that so many people in America make a living - what they consider a decent, respectable, fulfilling living - in positions where it's their job to make someone else's life worse. I don't think we've fully considered the deleterious social effects this has. It's not just rent-seeking, with all the perverse incentives that entails. It's rent-seeking on widespread suffering, with all the perverse incentives that THAT entails.
there is no "we" - no overarching moral force that makes these decisions. Banks ruin people's lives for money just because they can. Those people could retaliate on banks, but they choose not to because they were taught morality, which puts them at a disadvantage.
i'm not convinced the people whose lives are ruined by banks are in a position to retaliate.
we is in theory the government chosen by the people to give direction to society and enforce it. In practice, i think the political systems in place fail to serve that purpose unfortunately (regulations too easily manipulated by lobbying/propaganda, fake choices to vote on, largely self serving to maintain a hierarchy of exploiters vs exploitees)
Of course they weren’t stealing from the poor. It was their boss doing that when they told them to ‘increase profit at any cost’. The only thing they were doing was secure that promotion.
If the world needs to burn to make that happen? Well… that’s too bad.
On one hand, payday loan services and buy here pay here auto dealers are providing capital and transport to people that can't afford it and absolutely need it.
On the other hand, the risk of not seeing their money or vehicle back is insanely high.
That said, the transaction reordering that BoA/other banks did was insanely cruel. I was affected all of the time by this during college before I got my first job. Learning how to overdraft "correctly" was an insanely useful skill back then!
> payday loan services and buy here pay here auto dealers are providing capital and transport to people that can't afford it and absolutely need it.
They're exploiting people that are alright struggling, for sure.
But transaction reordering is just on an entirely different level. You're taking someone who actually has money and then cooking the books to make it look like they didn't, and then charging them for it.
IMO, it should have been considered outright fraud. Banks should have been forced to reimburse all the fees they took, in addition to significant punitive damages. I wonder how many people got evicted because their bank reordered their paycheck to come after their rent check and groceries, and the multiple overdraft fees made them no longer have money for rent.
Did banks ever come up with a justification for reordering? Not that it would be a good one, of course.
Welcome to the entire system. The entire purpose of income tax is to keep the poor poorer while pretending it's a tax on the rich. That and inflation. Constant inflation really targets the have-nots, who have to figure out how to save faster than asset inflation to be able to buy an asset.
It's all orchestrated by evil people, while they try to get political warfare to hide behind.
Similar feelings here - started rather pretty low, a bit of family problems, all that. While I make very decent money, that is considered upper class, my net worth is still way lower than somebody with average job, but who had richer parents who helped them buy a house quickly, or pay for studies, etc.
For me, the biggest difference money make, is the freedom to choose better options. When you don't have money, or family backup, you quite often choose poorly not because you're dumb, but the choices you can really make are very limited. You end up taking a job that's good but not that great. You are renting, and even if the job is not good, you know there would be a huge risk to try to change the job, as you could end up unable to rent something new if you don't have a stable proven job...
These are things a lot of people never ever experienced in their life. It's not their fault of course, ideally nobody should. But yeah, you just don't judge people for poor choices that much, if you've ever been in a position where those poor choices are actually often the only real choices you have.
I think that you're mixing up a few things here to be honest.
I grew up poor and I don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Terror? Predation? Being used and discarded? No, we just didn't have that much money, every penny had to be counted, our horizons were quite low, we lived in cheap areas.
Now, if we talk about things like bad parenting / broken families, dodgy immigration status, etc, I think I can understand what you're talking about. But that's a whole different (and much more complicated) issue.
There's being stable, but poor and there poor without the stability of being able to consistently afford housing. Even without the added curse of bad parenting unstable parents.
One sad element of society is the expectation that a poor person has a duty to rise above poverty and if they don’t it’s their personal moral failing. The middle class have no such obligation to jump to a higher tax bracket.
Rich people discussing how the poors are lazy failures while getting their food/drinks from a server who's working their second or third job during working hours; a meme as old as time.
