8:26pm August 1, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: ave-atque-vale: That McDonald’s budget people are making fun of isn’t...

ave -atque -vale:

That McDonald’s budget people are making fun of isn’t cruel. It’s realistic.

jadelyn:

stfuconservatives:

People are mocking McDonalds and Visa for giving budgeting advice to low-income Americans. But the advice isn’t so ridiculous.

Naturally the…

Yeah it’s just like when people try to give poor people lessons on cooking as if that will give us the money to buy food.

And all sorts of things. A lot of disgusting good liberal organizations around here love to talk about educating poor people and giving us free lessons in how to do things. When the problem IS MONEY.

There’s this implication that we are just too STUPID to get out of poverty.

And this horrible condescension.

I remember reading tips for saving money.

When it started with “stop eating out at restaurants” I stopped. Then retained myself from slamming my head on the desk.

Most things like that I find are about helping middle class people live within their means. But it’s useless for someone who can’t afford to eat out to begin with.

Most poor people are experts at making our money stretch as much as possible. We could teach the middle classes things about saving money. But they always assume it’s the other way around. And then they give us ludicrous advice that doesn’t even make sense.

By the way, I had a middle class friend who agonized about money even though he had tons of it. He wanted a million different things all of which cost money. Most of which were not necessities.

But I’d advise him, if you really want this one thing so badly, you need to cut out these other things and find cheaper ways of doing them.

And he’d tell me how he just couldn’t give up these things. Things I didn’t even have. I’d tell him other ways to live. He’d say he couldn’t live like that.

I’ve been living “like that” my entire adult life. I have to give those things up because I could never in a million years afford them. They’re so out of reach I can’t even imagine them.

And he “can’t live without” them. Apparently he’d rather agonize about not having enough money, than give up anything. Let alone learn the difference between need and want.

But it’s people who live like him, trying to teach people who live like me, about budgeting.

Condescending isn’t the half of it.

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