Poor people pay higher time tax

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

by thecosas • 3 years ago

93 101 3 years ago

spurgu• 3 years ago

This seems quite obvious to me.

Another spin on it is that you can trade self-reliance for time. All of these conveniences you can get for money make you dependent on someone else (and dependent on your income stream). You eat out at the expense of forgetting (or not even learning) how to cook. You take an Uber at the expense of not having a car (or knowing how to drive).

On the other extreme end of the spectrum you have a small piece of land where you grow your own food and sell/trade a little surplus for things you cannot make yourself.

The latter is more like my utopia. I've lived the "take Uber everywhere" lifestyle and it's not particularly fulfilling. I've also grown my own food (not in a self-sustaining way, more like dabbling in it so far) and I find the time I put into that to be so much more fulfilling.

I suppose there's a spectrum between those two ends as well and most people find comfort somewhere in between.

Edit: I only browsed through the first half of the article, I see that author is proposing some conclusions and solutions at the end. I hadn't read nor considered those when I wrote the above.

qsort• 3 years ago

I suppose there's a spectrum between those two ends as well and most people find comfort somewhere in between.

Yes, I'm going to pull a Homer Simpson right there: it sure is nice we have digital magic beans we can give to other people in exchange for goods and services.

giantg22• 3 years ago

"Another spin on it is that you can trade self-reliance for time. All of these conveniences you can get for money make you dependent on someone else (and dependent on your income stream)."

If only other people saw it that way. My wife is like "just hire people to do stuff" or "just buy one". Well, it costs money to hire people. Where's that going to come from? Or sure, we can buy something that cost 2x-10x and is likely half the quality or not custom built for the application.

I agree there is fulfillment in building something. So I guess part of why I DIY is cost and part is a sense of achievement I don't get from work.

doubled112• 3 years ago

part is a sense of achievement I don't get from work

This hit me in the feels, somehow. Everybody made me believe I'd get a sense of achievement from hard work, but that stopped being true some time ago.

If the work isn't something I'm ever going to see and use, I just feel detached and uninterested. Maybe it'll come back some day, but it's all pretty meh right now. Another problem solved for somebody else, but at least I'm getting paid.

A DIY project at home, however, fills a void work doesn't.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

Buying a replacement or hiring a repairperson instead of fixing something yourself means that you also have to pay a cycle of income tax on it. If your marginal rate is 40%, to pay a repair person $250, you have to go out and earn ~$420.

That $250 you saved by doing a DIY repair is economically the same to your family as earning $420 additional from freelance work and paying someone $250 and the government $170.

harvey96• 3 years ago

Poor people are less likely to be homeowners who can make that investment in DIY. Instead their time cost is chasing up a landlord who is slow to do repairs. I do agree with your wider point though, and car maintenance skills are especially valuable to poor people keeping an older car running.

carlosjobim5• 3 years ago

On the other extreme end of the spectrum you have a small piece of land where you grow your own food and sell/trade a little surplus for things you cannot make yourself.

Inevitably everybody discovers that they need to work just a little more to make a huge surplus, and then they'll be interested in selling. To have double the output of your work might take only 20% more effort, because you always have the time used setting up your tools/workspace, planning your work and such.

retrac• 3 years ago

Closely related to the toilet paper metric. The poorer you are the more you pay per sheet, on average. A middle-class person will drive to a place like Costco a few times a year, buy a few large packs, and they're set. For a poor person this has an number of hurdles. Costco membership is an up-front cost. Can't fit three large packs on the bus so expensive cab fare. Less likely to have the time when the store is open. They won't have as much storage space. And $60 of toilet paper is a rather big outlay when you're broke. You can buy two rolls at the convenience store for $4 though. And again the next week. And again. Which prevents them from saving up for the bulk purchase and cab fare so they can escape the vicious cycle of over-spending on TP. It's very expensive to be poor.

paulpauper2• 3 years ago

obligatory reference to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities.

duxup• 3 years ago

Yeah the amount of cost saving I discovered…. after I stopped being poor was amazing.

When I think of my crappy one bedroom apartment I started out in, I wouldn’t even have room to stock up on toilet paper.

Now I’m my big house basement are several massive packages of TP, paper towels, tools that let me fix things on my own rather than having to pay, stocked up food basics … etc. These all save me money AND time (no need to shop often). None of these savings were available to me previously just due to space.

blackshaw• 3 years ago

It's very expensive to be poor.

True indeed. This article gives many more examples:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-e...

If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and a microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience-store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times higher than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

Plasmoid2• 3 years ago

People create a lot of laws around rental housing that are designed to help the poor. The effects tend to make housing completely inaccessible to the working poor but more accessible to middle class.

For example, making it difficult to evict someone will cause landlords to raise the qualifications for renting.

cvccvroomvroom3• 3 years ago

Yep. The same goes for utilization of public benefits: a homeless person without refrigeration or transportation is often reduced to buying small quantities of food and things from expensive convenience stores. Their dollars of assistance are so meager and yet they don't have a meaningful ability to use them better.

graphe9• 3 years ago

You're speaking about a very narrow type of person, atypical of any scenario. Homeless can go to churches if they behave. Most recipients are not homeless people with no transportation.

I'd ask how meager? How much money did they get per month? My ex and I were eating better than we'd get for ourselves normally and we had money left over, with one link card. In California you can use link for restaurants too.

waboremo2• 3 years ago

This is also a fantastic illustration for understanding why lifestyle changes are very difficult the more poor you are, even before any mental or physical conditions.

MonkeyMalarky• 3 years ago

This is why social support networks are important. When someone in that position has a friend or relative with a car that's willing to take them shopping, it becomes a question of "when you've saved up a bit and are ready to go, just text me". It doesn't fix poverty but mutual aid makes it less worse.

Edit: Another commenter made the example of buying tools (expensive upfront) to make your own (cheaper) repairs vs. paying someone else to do it, there's such a thing as tool libraries now. IMO every community should have one.

graphe9• 3 years ago

It's true. A lack of redundancy is the issue. One feeble car. One month rent. One day worth of food. One day at a time you have to juggle taking more out of one or fearing it'll go away or stop working.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 3 years ago

This seems unnecessarily dramatic, or at least outdated?

Why not just do this:

1. Make a free account on Amazon

2. Buy the cheapest portable bidet, which (looking just now) is $7 including shipping. Sure, that's 75% more than the standing weekly toilet paper budget, but surely one can find an extra 3 dollars in the couch cushions?

3. Once the bidet arrives, toilet paper usage will drop immediately. You could probably reduce that $4/week budget to, say, $1/week.

4. That means you'll already break even on the bidet in a little over 2 weeks,. After that you're effectively printing money.

5. After another 20 weeks of making it rain $3/week in pure profit over your previously massive and over-inflated toilet paper budget, you'll have $60, which is surely enough to head back to Amazon and buy all the toilet paper your heart desires, in bulk.

6. That'll likely bring the $1/week budget down even further to, say, $0.50/week.

7. That's a nearly 17% bump in your weekly recurring profit, from $3 to $3.50/week, which you can use to keep on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Heck, those numbers are basically good enough for a Series A pitch deck.

vsareto• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, but the answer to "why not just do this" is because those people probably don't know about bidets, because it's not very prevalent elsewhere in life (in the US especially). Lack of knowledge is a problem when you're poor too.

If bidets were ubiquitous in the US such that just about everyone has used one, you'd not be seeing this issue.

bko6• 3 years ago

Yes, this is the best way to get out of poverty. Just requires some planning and discipline. From my experience, the working poor often have a lot of ingenuity in some regards. For instance, as a group they have a lot of collective knowledge about navigating transfer payments (e.g. food stamp eligibility, subsidized housing, etc). But in other respects they fall short. For instance, they're the largest gamblers.

Nationwide, people who make less than $10,000 spend on average $597 on lottery tickets — about 6 percent of their income.
Those in the lowest fifth in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) had the “highest rate of lottery gambling (61%) and the highest mean level of days gambled in the past year (26.1 days).” Moreover, there were “very few observed differences in lottery gambling for those in the three upper SES groups — 42–43% gambled on the lottery and the three upper groups averaged about 10 days of gambling on the lottery in the past year.” [0]

Gambling and lottery in particular is really bad for the poor. It's one thing for it to be legal, but do we really need to let states run phone apps to make playing lottery even easier?

[0] https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/1/13/10763268/lottery-po...

[1] https://journalistsresource.org/economics/research-review-lo...

baremetal5• 3 years ago

People with a mentality like this don't stay poor.

Also taking a shower directly after using the restroom does wonders.

waboremo2• 3 years ago

Bidet usage doesn't actually dramatically reduce toilet paper usage (especially those portable ones). Not unless you were one of those people who spun yards for a wipe (which most poor people aren't doing). So your toilet paper costs are already at around $1/week.

So in this hypothetical, the $7 bidet cost is coming out of nowhere. And no, a magical solution like finding it in your couch is not viable. This idea that poor people have plush cushions that cause them to lose a lot of pocket money in is hilarious - they have no pocket money.

bko6• 3 years ago

Sure, but rich people are more likely to buy more expensive toilet paper (name brand n-ply), while a lot of less wealthy people by the cheapest off brand toilet paper (Fiesta brand is popular in bodegas)

The convenience store is more convenient though and you're paying a premium for that convenience. It's really about money. You can trade off money for convenience. A middle class person has to pay for the car which they don't use 99% of the time, the gas, insurance, etc. It's not entirely clear that they're getting a better bargain when you factor in everything else.

But it's really about money. The article makes it sound like its about class or privilege as though only some people can fly:

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you're even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you'll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

Privilege has nothing to do with buying a plane ticket. Its open to pretty much everyone with money

nostrademons3• 3 years ago

Money is privilege.

paulpauper2• 3 years ago

Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own – not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

But wealthier people also seem to work longer hours and are delaying retirement. The trend has been for the top 5% of society to work much more and longer than they need to. For the highest paying of jobs, the work-life balance becomes more blurred, such as impromptu zoom meetings or weekend meetings.

Wealthier people also tend to pay higher up-front costs, like student loan debt and college, instead of working right after college.

anonymouskimmer7• 3 years ago

But wealthier people also seem to work longer hours and are delaying retirement.

Poorer people aren't 'allowed' to factor in things such as commute time into their work hours.

Would you rather continue working in a job you love like Fauci, or find that to make ends meet you need to take a job as a cashier at BB&B after you retired from a job that left your knees aching?

badlucklottery• 3 years ago

IME part of that is wanting to "retire like you're rich". People want to stay in their house near that tech/finance/government hub when they retire even though the property tax alone is more than rent in most cities (or even in the outskirts of that same hub). They pick up expensive hobbies/tastes to decompress from their stressful jobs and want to keep those when they retire. Etc., etc.

I'm not advocating anyone go hardcore FIRE but I've talked to multiple people who are saving for a $15k per month retirement.

antihipocrat• 3 years ago

Delaying retirement is an option for people with jobs that aren't physically demanding.

iinnPP13• 3 years ago

Rich people can simply choose to live the life of a poor person. The poor person doesn't have a 100% chance at the opposite.

You can even pick and choose.

How much money does it take to reliably earn minimum wage + inflation consideration, from the money alone? Anyone with that money could live the exact life of the poor person without a minute of work. It's not even a lot honestly, maybe $100k in some areas/timeframes?

What about 100k and a parent who is in Congress while living in a state with the lowest minimum wage: $7.25?

_yid9• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the more “progressive” the tax system, the more total taxation and regulatory overhead small businesses and individuals pay.

If you compare the total compliance cost per dollar of gross revenue, small businesses pay 10x - 100x more than eg. WalMart or Amazon.

Book-keeping, accounting, etc. typically consumes 10%+ of small businesses’ gross revenue, vs. low single-digit percentage of the large businesses they compete against.

This is unlikely by accident - since it is these businesses that supply their lawmakers with funding, and often with the text of proposed legislation which primarily negatively affects their opponents in small business…

cvccvroomvroom3• 3 years ago

The very poor in the US are constantly made to wait.

For public benefits, they are made to sit waiting in a "DMV" office for several days per year. Then required to attend meetings, training, and complete paperwork that is likely pointless to their plight or assuring a better path, mostly to check bureaucratic boxes while simultaneously treating them like criminals for the heinous crime of being poor.

graphe9• 3 years ago

I've been in that situation and sitting around in a shitty room for an hour and getting an interview for 10 minutes to give me healthcare and food stamps for a year is definitely giving me more than I put in.

I don't know about that other crap you had but I didn't have they at all, must be different in states.

cvccvroomvroom3• 3 years ago

My knowledge is from second-hand experience of red, blue, and purple states. It's generally worse in most red and purple states in big cities.

It's slightly better than how people are treated in India.

baremetal5• 3 years ago

I have also been in this situation, and it was a blessing.

lr4444lr2• 3 years ago

I'm a fairly cutthroat free markets kinda guy, but this topic is very palpable, and distresses me a lot. It's one thing to hold people accountable for unproductive choices that keep them poor, but quite another to make it impossible for them to exercise better ones because the time-cost of dealing with the here and now prevents the full exercise of their industrious energy.

We definitely should ensure that public transit is adequately capacious and on schedule, that public schools aren't bogged down in bureaucracy that saps academic learning time, and that there are enough incentives from the medical licensing gatekeepers to not impede the flow of competent healthcare workers in under served communities. (Among other things.)

carlosjobim5• 3 years ago

A good solution for people who are poor is to combine the two most important things: Making money and saving money.

You can do this by joining the merchant fleet, one of the military branches, or some other professional venture where your accommodation and other expenses are provided for you. If you take care with the choices you make with your money, you have the chance to dig yourself out of the hole.

To those already writing your responses with what about the guy with an injured knee, or what about the guy who needs to stay home and take care of their grandmother: This advice is not for everyone, but there are thousands of poor people who could turn their life around this way - thousands already have.

lapcat5• 3 years ago

one of the military branches

This can indeed turn your life around, but not in a good way, if you become a battle casualty.

where your accommodation and other expenses are provided for you

Another time tax. In this case, your entire life 24 hours a day becomes regimented, and there's no "going home" after work.

anonymouskimmer7• 3 years ago

joining the merchant fleet, one of the military branches, or some other professional venture where your accommodation and other expenses are provided for you.

Requires education. Requires education. Requires education. So available to some, but not all of the poor.

We're a long way from the days when people would be crimped into being sailors. And a couple of generations away from when people without a High School diploma or GED could join the military, at least in the USA.

lapcat5• 3 years ago

It's one thing to hold people accountable for unproductive choices

Could you explain what this means? Isn't poverty ipso facto its own kind of accountability, i.e., a financial accounting?

I get the feeling, however, that a lot of people want to turn an amoral, economic system — free market capitalism, wherein supply and demand determine prices — into a moral system, wherein market forces essentially render judgments about the goodness or badness of individual participants, almost as if the so-called invisible hand of the market were the Hand of God.

lr4444lr2• 3 years ago

For example, someone who buys a new car on little to no money down shouldn't come complaining to me if he loses his job that he cannot find a new job because the car was repossessed, when he could have bought a used, maybe not very pretty one outright for cash and had a stable resource. But he should have a nearby bus that runs at all hours of the day on schedule to go interview when he realizes the error of his ways.

baremetal5• 3 years ago

We definitely should ensure that public transit is adequately capacious and on schedule, that public schools aren't bogged down in bureaucracy that saps academic learning time, and that there are enough incentives from the medical licensing gatekeepers to not impede the flow of competent healthcare workers in under served communities. (Among other things.)

I would add: encourage the trades by providing free schooling and work experience programs.

iinnPP13• 3 years ago

Or just any schooling.

the_snooze• 3 years ago

It's not just a time tax in terms of money, but also in social norms as well. I'm a very well-compensated professional. But there's no one telling me exactly when I should be at work, or on lunch break, or in the bathroom, or when my day is over. I can shift things around at my discretion (including personal priorities) and there's no system telling me the "how" of things other than some deadlines on the order of weeks or months away.

Yet the norm is to be very strict on the schedules of workers who cost a fraction of what I do.

iinnPP13• 3 years ago

Some call centre companies in Canada and the US do not pay for washroom breaks. All of them insist on being "ready for a call" at the start time where that status takes a minimum of 10 minutes on their PC from 1999.

graphe9• 3 years ago

I disagree completely with the article. It calls it a time tax because he is rich and obsessed with efficient use of time. Rich people have a washer and dryer at home. The poor go to laundromats. They meet others, have a chat, kids play, do their hw there and they left the house. Someone might even meet a future spouse.

The rich efficient people stayed on their computers studying efficiently like the electronics they want to enulate in doing more work. The rich are disconnected from reality, riding Ubers or their cars and getting around efficiently while someone might prefer to portion the time to read instead, hard in a 10 minute Uber. Poor people just do more human things.

iinnPP13• 3 years ago

I have known many poor people in my life. Exactly zero of them used a laundromat outside of large items that won't fit in their personal or accessible machines.

The wonderful thing about laundromats is that everyone can use them. Including an executive from GM getting laundry done for a client(no idea why) while I was helping a friend do 10+ loads at once when they finally decided to fight their addiction.

They are still clean.

graphe9• 3 years ago

I live in a Mexican area, so that is the cultural divide. You can replace it with McDonald's, the public library, grocery stores, etc and it have the same message. You're correct that anyone can use them, and even rich people use them too. Chance encounters like that go away when you're too efficient.

Good on you for helping your friend and I'm glad they're clean. :)

willnonya• 3 years ago

So, the rich pay for convenience? Shocker, even more so when their examples for 'rich' include rhe working poor.

The through message though seemed to be that anyone reliant on government services will be expected to pay a price and that anyone not dependent upon them is rewarded to some degree. Rather than misconstrue captlitalism as a cause of bureaucracy perhaps they should have considered replacing government t services with market drive solutions since they tend to be the ones providing the savings.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Now I disagree that it is a "time tax" to use public transportation. Instead, I would argue that private personal transportation sucks away that commute time much worse. Because if you are committed and responsible for driving a vehicle, your attention must be 100% devoted to operation of that vehicle, from source to destination. The best you can do is listen to a podcast or something, passively.

By contrast, as soon as I plop down at a bus stop or I board a train, my time is my own and I can make the most of it, interactively! I can check forums like Hacker News, I can pull out a laptop, edit Wikipedia, I can make phone calls, or I could tune out and just listen to some music or meditate. I can close my eyes and make use of the calmest 2 hours I might get all day long.

So I would say that the middle class are the ones with the "transportation time tax" and they can't free themselves of that until they can indeed afford to take a cab everywhere, or better yet, have their own chauffered vehicle and driver. (Yeah, it is not easy to do your own thing while a taxi driver wants to chit-chat.)

kthejoker2• 3 years ago

You have a very sheltered view of the time tax of public transportation.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/the-marriage-c...

When a bus turned down her street, she stepped off the curb, but the bus did not slow down. Half an hour later, a second bus cruised by her outstretched, dollar-waving hand. It is an unhappy fact of Oklahoma City life that bus drivers bypass would-be riders in very poor neighborhoods, and blacks in less poor ones.
After an hour, a bus pulled over. It took her to the center-city bus depot, which is situated in front of the county jail. Waiting for a transfer bus under a billboard for Crawley 24-Hour Bail Bonds, Kim was propositioned by a man wheeling a baby carriage and smoking a Black & Mild cigar.
She then learned that the job required her to work until 9 p.m. There is no regular bus service to Sooner Haven or its environs after dark.
Another bus was coming through the shopping plaza. Kim stepped forward, signalling furiously. When it swerved around her, she sank to the curb. The bus was not only the seventh one to pass her that day; it was the last bus to Sooner Haven until morning. In terms of landmass, Oklahoma City is the third-largest metropolis in America, and she was a five-hour walk from home.

iinnPP13• 3 years ago

You can use public transportation if you want.

Poor people can't always afford a car.

Start at age 18 and assume equal education and find a scenario where having the option is worse than having no option.

That's not possible for obvious reasons. Luck and happenstance are not valid options because they end up equalized(ish) in volume given the scenario is followed.

robocat• 3 years ago

The article completely ignores all the time taxes paid by semi-professionals and professionals:

1: more hours taxed e.g. minimum wage in NZ $37k total tax 15%, but if you earn $100k then total tax is now ~25% and you are working four hours per week more for the government (marginal rate is even worse for extra income).

2: university: say 3 to 6 years out of 45 years plus fees - easily 7% to 15% of lifetime earning costs. A very non-trivial amount.

3: car costs: the article mentions public transport costing time, but it ignores the time we work to pay for our car. “$430 is the typical monthly automobile payment in the United States for a used vehicle” which converted to hours (worked to earn that car) is a significant amount. Say 5% of hours worked.

4: insurance, security, money management, legal fees. When you are poor, bankruptcy is an effective liability mitigation. As soon as you have money, you need to avoid losses through a variety of costly means.

5: professional development: I have professional friends spending many hours every week on this. My working class friends seem to be able to clock-out and relax.

I can think of a bunch of other minor time sinks that apply to the middle class, but not the poor.

I agree the extremely wealthy can avoid time sinks, but most of us can’t.

xialvjun• 3 years ago

Freedom! Haha! Sucks!

vanviegen• 3 years ago

The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it's 15m.

Those statistics don't seem credible to me. Are waiting lines in US supermarkets commonly that long?

Poor people pay higher time tax

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