Ok. Most of you aren’t broke. My mom, with two child daughters, having left an abusive relationship was living in a studio apartment having to choose between food for her daughters or paying rent.
Most people I know who consider themselves broke complain about ticketmaster fees, and inflation on fast food.
If you even CONSIDER eating fast food, or going to concerts, at all, you’re NOT broke.
Broke people think differently. They repurpose every little thing they can in life to get more milage to avoid spending money. Any money. On anything that isn’t strictly needed for survival. Forget streaming. Forget entertainment. That stuff is for rich people.
Until you reach that level, you aren’t broke. You’re just bad at managing money.
“Okay I cut back on the SODAS and AVACADO TOAST and CONCERT TICKETS(!) and now I’m saving $76/month. Any tips on rent taking up 40% of my income?”
you’re just bad at managing money.
No, this country is bad at paying people.
40%? That’s not broke. My rent takes up closer to 75% of my rent. And I live in a tiny apartment with no pets, despite wanting a cat, but knowing it’s unfair to have a cat that I can’t afford.
pity Olympics
If 40% of your income every month is being vaporized into nonequitable housing, you’re probably broke. You being taken advantage of even more than most people doesn’t make them “not broke” and that reply makes you frankly come across as a jaded cynic more than anything.
At the same time we’re breaking travel records: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-07-08/us-agency-screens-record-3-million-airline-passengers-in-single-day
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people are hurting. Others are splurging for whatever reason.
Apocalypse spending.
People throwing cash on the fire to make themselves feel happy for a moment the same way the games industry is using addiction to keep spending on microtransactions high.
Also rebound from covid with the wealthy trying to maximise on their “lost” time.
Times are weird.
I’m one of those who don’t spend my money on anything except the essentials and splurge for trips and stuff. I don’t see a future any more, so I might as well enjoy whatever little I can get in this life.
In 1989, I knew that the gas station nearby had loaves of bread for a quarter, the Aldi was fifty cents, and while their bread was better, they were also a bus ride away. More than once, I scrounged coins around the apartment in order to walk down to a further away gas station and buy a couple of loosies. We didn’t have a phone. We had a 13" black and white TV with rabbit ears. I stole. Friends stole for me. I slept all day and was awake all night, going to one hangout or another where there was likely to be some pizza. I would pop loose popcorn and throw it in a paper grocery bag to take out into the world with me.
Even then, I wasn’t really “broke,” because I was at college, and when push came to shove, I had a little bit of family that I could return to. There was always a light at the end of the tunnel, and I knew it.
Gatekeeping poverty and financial precarity. Doesn’t get more American than that.
Ironically it’s this kind of attitude that helps prevent class solidarity.
“The economy is doing great, sweety.”
Don’t you love being gaslighted about the economy?
It’s ok to keep eating chips and drinking coke to fuel this capitalist bullshit nightmare.
Change your buying habits and maybe things will change.
I’ve been saying this for months now. If every metric of the economy says things are doing great but people are reporting unprecedented levels of economic anxiety, then the only thing we know is that the metrics we use to measure the economy are flawed!
Seriously. An economy isn’t dictated by natural law. We’re not finding the diffusal rates of two different viscous liquids or trying to piece together why particle X behaves the way it does in light, in other words: there is no “right answer” to be revealed through observation. We’re talking about an entirely man-made, artificial social construct. If the people who make up “the economy” are saying the economy’s bad, we already have the conclusion and should be working backwards from that.
OK, but Americans are nuts.
Nobody cares what’s going on in Africa, why would people care about what’s going on in America?
Have you ever even seen their last or current presiden?
This is what’s going to help Trump the most, sadly.
I’m not broke
I’m in debt
And I’m in precarity.
And that is what is stressing me out, and if I were less aware yeah, a stong-appearing leader might be an attractive candidate. Over 80% of the US is in this situation, according to some studies.
In 2020, Biden and Harris were the most right-wing of the possible candidates in the DNC primary. Biden made more effort than I expected but less than people need.
Harris needs to push for election reform to give more power to the public, and in the meantime push for way more relief while we figure out how to gut SCOTUS (maybe literally) and restore the power for the state and federal government to regulate commercial interests.
Then and only then will the US back away from one-party autocracy and civil war.
Long odds.
It may be too late already.
But that is the road back away from the precipice.
Yeah, people who want Trump or any dictator just want to stop feeling scared and broke.
Its not hard to see them as people just hoping for an easy fix without thinking it through cause most people wouldn’t. Life is simple to them.
This kind of shit is why people say both sides cause until money and geriatrics get out of power it’s not anywhere near enough to fully stop an autocratic takeover.