The Expense of Poverty

I keep running across this, in quotes and now in pictures:

The closest I ever came to being really poor were those years when I was a student: as an undergrad and later as a seminary student, I had very little money to spend on things I wanted.  But I wasn't really dealing with poverty... I had the back up of a middle class family and a middle class church and family inheritances and overwhelming support from all of those systems.  Entitlements, not welfare, not from the government, but entitlements nonetheless: privilege.  I was born white, middle class and male (add straight to that list if you want), in other words, I have very little experience with being oppressed.

Because of that, I have had to learn to see oppression, because it sometimes seems like a fictional thing to me.  My experience, if I do not examine the privilege that I was born into, tells me that you can get an education and somehow make your way in the world without getting crushed by injustice, judged for some categorical fact of identity, and sentenced to a life of struggling just to get by.

But I know that those assumptions are lying to me, I know that the game is fixed and the field was tilted in my favor before I was even born, and that keeps me from glibly thinking and acting as though people who live in the grip of persistent poverty, could somehow just will their way out of it.

We bought a house last year.  We had good credit, and a good friend working as our real estate agent.  The process itself was daunting and I became keenly aware of how difficult it would have been were it not for the peculiar advantages I have as a pastor: instant connection to a community, the financial resources of the church, and family that can and will help out.  We were able to get a specific sort of loan that has a really great fixed interest rate, and did not require a down payment, it was like things were just meant to be.

Maybe they were, I believe that God has a hand in that sort of thing, but I need to be vigilant that I do not interpret my good fortune as a sign that God somehow prefers me over a person who has a different experience of that system.

When we closed on the house, we finally got the whole picture: not the asking price of the home, but the full cost of what we were going to pay in taxes and interest and everything over the 30 year term of the mortgage: over $450,000!  Which means, even with our advantages and privilege, we are still going to pay almost twice the market value of our home.

That same scenario is true when you finance anything, the price goes up when you cannot pay up front, and woe is you if you have to start borrowing from those payday advance places, you're going to get behind the eight ball in a big hurry.

While on the other hand, people with large amounts of capital (read pre-exsistent wealth) can make money with their money in relative safety.  The system is rigged against the poor and for the wealthy, because the wealthy designed the system.

When you're poor, or even middle class, the cost of everything is higher in terms of actual dollars, but even more so in terms of living value.  And then there is the spiritual cost of discovering that somehow your best efforts are not enough to "get by."  Or even if they do manage to stave off financial disaster, that your work is never going to get you to that Cadillac and comfortable retirement.

It makes me angry when I hear people who make their living by talking on the television deride the "takers" and the "welfare queens," because I know that, while abuses of the system may indeed happen, the majority of people in public assistance programs work incredibly hard just to stay afloat, even with the extra boost.

Let's be honest, if the world even approached justice, the people who do the many thankless jobs, which make our lifestyle even possible would not have to worry about whether or not their children were going to be able to eat, while people who sit in comfortable offices doing most of their work with two fingers can afford cars that cost as much as a house.

That is not a statement about white collar work, because the world needs accountants as much as it needs mechanics.  It is simply a question of scale in terms of value and/or necessity, and the fact that we don't have a very sensible one.