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http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/news/economy/us-middle-class-basics-study/index.html
"Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the United States."
The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE -- Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy."
"Despite seemingly positive economic signs, the ALICE data shows that financial hardship is still a pervasive problem," said Stephanie Hoopes, the project's director.
California, New Mexico and Hawaii have the largest share of struggling families, at 49% each. North Dakota has the lowest at 32%.
Many of these folks are the nation's child care workers, home health aides, office assistants and store clerks, who work low-paying jobs and have little savings, the study noted. Some 66% of jobs in the US pay less than $20 an hour.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday May 21 2018, @05:32PM (3 children)
They always seem to have enough money to constantly have a cigarette in one hand and a can of beer in the other
Only 15.5% of people in the US smoke. [cdc.gov]
15.5 < 49.
You're assertion is unsupported.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 21 2018, @06:08PM
Don't confuse him with facts and reality and truth, he's got a Narrative (TM) to push.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @09:53PM
And of course, alcohol use has much greater [nih.gov] levels of penetration.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:00AM
15.9% smoke tobacco. Seems weed the is choice of the new generation. Bigger point is entirely valid in that "poor" people seem to have little problem obtaining all sorts of things they really shouldn't be wasting their limited resources on.
But the bottom line is people aren't poor because they don't have money. They don't have money because they are poor people. Show me a poor person and within a couple of questions I can get to the proximate cause as to why they are poor. It is a sad, depressing, but fairly short list of a few pathological behavior patterns behind most of it.
1. Single parent.
2. Substance abuse.
3. Lack of ability to plan and/or budget. Ignorance is correctable by education but you can't fix stupid.
4. Failure to get an education. Even in a shithole school you generally CAN learn to read, write and do basic math. And that was before the Internet.
So the usual "moar government" proposals can only make it worse since it encourages #1, is responsible for a good part of #4 and by removing most of the pain from #2 and #3 ensure a lot more people fall into those traps. And all four create more dependency on both the government and the whole NGO cabal that has grown up around the poverty pimping racket. If they solved the problem their reason to exist goes away.
Those account for the bulk of the problem. There are of course people who are simply broken, physically or mentally, in some way, sometimes through absolutely no fault of their own. Some will become single parents even after doing everything an otherwise sensible person should do; the real world has uncertainty in all we do. In some shitholes and utterly broken families I'd agree the effort to acquire an education crosses from what a "reasonable person" can be expected to do unaided. A compassionate society should make sure such people don't fall through the cracks. Letting the government be the agent of that compassion has been proven to be a bad idea.