The Florida Democratic Agriculture Commissioner wants to commission a study on why why low-income, Black and Hispanic families have problems paying the rent and electric bills.
Let me save the state a bunch of money. The hint is right there in the article:
one mother chooses to cool off her five daughters by playing with the garden hose rather than turning on the air conditioning.
Does she have five baby daddies who help with the bills? Or just one?
If you can’t pay your electric bill, stop having kids that you can’t afford to feed.
As long as we pay poor people to have kids, we will get more poor people.
It isn’t a fucking mystery.
4 Comments
it's just Boris · June 23, 2021 at 9:06 am
It is a mystery when you think equal outcomes, not equal opportunity, is what the country is (or should be) guaranteeing.
It’s right up there with the confusion arising from the conflation of correlation with causation; recent examples include the thinking that everyone should own a home because home owners are better off financially; and everyone should get a college degree because people with college degrees make more money on average.
The real mystery to me is why, with multiple such examples writ both large and small in front of them, people still fall into the same dumb traps.
SiG · June 23, 2021 at 10:25 am
What, exactly, does this have to do with the Department of Agriculture?
I guess she’s just grandstanding?
D · June 23, 2021 at 10:30 am
Yeah, it’s not a mystery.
Some people think I’m rich because I run my own business and make around $130,000/year.
After taxes I actually bring in around $90,000/year.
Add up the “mandatory” monthly bills (mortgage, power, internet, car payment, car insurance, groceries, property tax, etc…) and that takes ~$50k/year out. That leaves me with ~$40,000.
I have 9 family members including myself and my wife.
That means there’s about $4,444 *per person per year* in non-mandatory bills. Sounds like a lot, right?
That comes out to $370/mo per person.
Now add in clothes, occasional medical visits with no serious health complications (glasses, checkups, dentist, etc…), extracurricular activities (and fuel to get there), school supplies, saving for retirement, saving for college, and so on….and you end up with $0 left over for discretionary spending.
It’ll get better soon as my oldest kid is about ready to move out and already has a job (made him save every paycheck since he was 15 so he has a decent amount of savings to start his new life) and the mortgage is almost done…
Anyways, I knew what I could afford when it came to children, and I knew the sacrifices I was able to make in my life in the short-term to get them prepared and ready to be honest, kind, hard-working, and productive members of society.
There was no “I’m earning $15/hr, so Imma gunna have 7 kids with 9 different people and get the gov to pay for them and also educate them”. What a miserable life that would have been for everyone involved.
Toastrider · June 23, 2021 at 1:32 pm
Delayed self-gratification and thrift are stunningly rare these days.
Forget money; people will tell you about coworkers who blow through vacation time as fast as they accrue it. Then they complain because they can’t take a two week vacation somewhere else (I’m not even talking about going someplace expensive; just someplace different).
Those are also the same kind of people who will tell you all about how they need more money… as they play with the latest iPhone. An iPhone that, I might add, was bought as a replacement for their OLD iPhone which was a year old.
They can’t put it off. They must spend the time, and the money, now-now-now. Maybe they’re immature. Or maybe they sense on some level the impending crash. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we are totally hosed.’
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