If you're poor it's basically your own fault, isn't it?

[ReputableBiscuit]

I'm so sick of this attitude, in society in general and on MN specifically. Some people just don't seem to have the imagination to realise that poverty is a complex thing and fucking hard to escape. 'Why don't you try budgeting?', 'how can you call yourself poor when you have a big TV?', 'give up smoking then you won't be poor'. 'Cook from scratch.' It's just not as simple as that. Unemployment, disability, mental health problems, social disadvantage, debt, benefits stoppages... none of these are magically undone by somebody writing a list of their outgoings or learning to cook a hearty potato soup.

I only do 50-70 hrs a week. When you add on the commuting, keeping a house and trying to look after children I'm regularly exhausted. Guess that's why I'm not loaded, obviously too lazy.

I also suspect that there would be SS involvement if I had my dd's living in a cockroach infested property.

I have a question. Why is it that someone earning 50k but working only 40 hrs per week is hard working but someone earning minimum wage over 60hrs per week is lazy?. I'd really like to understand because it pisses me off.

We are financially very comfortable that is down to luck and I would never be arrogant enough to say otherwise.

Most of the people I know on low wages work harder than either DH or I

YY Solid re. the workfare thing Capitalism eating itself.

This thread is actually really sad. It is no ones fault they are poor. Realistically if you asked every person living on benefits or working and trying to make ends meet they would say if they had the opportunities to work to earn more they would. Such is life. It's crap for some, why make it worse by sneering. It could very easily be you one day.

eat not everyone who is poor has dependents so what made him (and I don't know) choose to do what he did? And know how to do it? How did he overcome all the things that people have been saying stop people? Why?
(And nothing to do with me - I met him when he had already started doing it...)
And the point is sparkly he came from absolutely nothing ...but his DC are going to be in a much better starting position...
useless that was my point about the huge gap between rich and poor ...it is bigger than it has ever been - and it has been growing for the last 20+yrs - so maybe it is the unfairness that holds people back (not consciously) - why should I work 60hrs and earn a lot less than someone else?
(and no-one working 60hr week is lazy - especially not at the kind of job you do for minimum wage...)

purple would yr grandfather have got the job as errand boy in that bank which set him on his path if he had had to compete with a workfarer for the job who had been forced to do it for no wage.

Because that is todays reality.

Where has anyone said that someone working 60 hours a week is lazy just because they're on NMW?

MrsTatum, that's simply not true. You can't make absolute statements like that about nobody and everybody. Some people are not interested in opportunities to improve their lives.

Some people are poor because they have made bad choices, or are bad at managing their lives.

They may be a minority, but to deny they exist is naive.

I dont know Derek, but the Boycott Workfare website has a list I did see in my Twitter feed that Shoezone are doing it again They were doing it the Xmas before last It wipes out xmas temp jobs. Which means ppl like students who need the temp jobs to fund their education........???!!!

MrsTatum, that view is very naive.

Some people are poor because of choices they have made, even when they do know better.

That's not the case for all poor people of course, and there are plenty that would jump at the chance of a better opportunity in life. But there are plenty that don't, and even worse, that don't try to achieve better for their children.

johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/lets-make-shoezoness-workfare-fall-apart/

I don't think it's naive. I think if a a group of people are collectively sneered at, told they will not amount to anything and pigeonholed into being the "scum" of society then they will irrespectivly begin to behave that way.

If you're going to use that argument you have to decide which came first. Did people start getting sneered at for no reason and then become poor as a result? I don't think so.

Clearly it's not ok to sneer at people or belittle them in any way, but someone who wants to work and to raise their children to achieve more than they had isn't going to stop doing that just because a few people they never actually meet have a low opinion of them.

But in these days of social media and advances in technology they ARE more likely to meet the people that are sneering at them.
If sneering at someone you have never met did no harm there would be no teenagers who have killed themselves due to cyber bullying.

That's personal and over a long period of time though, and I'd have thought that most cyber bullies do know their victim in person from school or somewhere.

It's really not the same as reading a few random Facebook comments about how benefit claimants should get a job.

And again, people are unlikely to sneer at others for being poor if they aren't poor, so you can't give that as the initial cause.

The gap between rich and poor used to be smaller, much smaller. The divide was there, but not so people were detached from each other. Then came welfare and the welfare state, the poorer people claimed welfare and were pigeonholed, the rich, they got richer. Fast forward 50 or so years, the huge divide between rich and poor.
the gap came first, the government created the gap in society so large that people could be defined purely by status alone, your either rich or poor. The reason that matters is attitude towards either side of the fence. Families for generation have been poor or rich and attitudes towards either will grow greater as the gap widens.

Calling anybody scum is pretty disgraceful. But thinking that poor people all feel the same way about how society views them is just odd.

Surely they come from a wide spectrum of opinion etc, just as middle income earners do.

And there is that gap - why do "poor" people have to tidy gardens and pick litter? "Poor" people have brains and it is that attitude that ensures that these people get no opportunities, real opportunities! Let them pick litter! FGS

Most people are getting by though aren't they, and are neither rich or poor.

People are not either rich or poor. There are millions and millions of us in the middle somewhere.

It's no wonder those in the middle feel like they are never considered by society if people honestly believe that you can only be either rich or poor.

What's wrong with picking litter?

If there's litter to be picked, then it's a job that society needs doing.

There's no shame in doing voluntary work FFS!