No Money, No Time

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/no-clocking-out/

by aturek • 12 years ago

193 89 12 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty.

Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case.

http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data

If I have time tomorrow I may do it myself.

nilkn2• 12 years ago

given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working

Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.

nilkn2• 12 years ago

I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now.

I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.

The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.

They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.

Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt.

This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.

yummyfajitas3• 12 years ago

As of a few years ago, 36% of poor adults work at least half the year and 25% work full time. Original sources cited here:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wor...

You could be right that transit takes up a lot of time, but why rely on anecdote? Stats are available. I linked to them. And if it wasn't 1:30AM (in India) when I posted that, I'd probably have munged them myself.

beat6• 12 years ago

You're assuming that work is the primary consumer of time. Have you ever tried packing up a baby, a toddler, and a sullen/rebellious pre-teen and taken them on the bus for two hours each way to fill out paperwork that is so far beyond your comprehension level that it may as well be in a foreign language? That's a normal state of affairs for many of the non-working poor.

Lack of transportation, combined with living in "undesirable" neighborhoods far from the business centers, is an ugly combination. It makes even basic engagement like grocery shopping a very time-consuming experience.

zorpner• 12 years ago

The impoverished, at least in America, work more jobs/person than the non-impoverished.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

Imagine:

You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range.

That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes.

When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.

Yahivin• 12 years ago

The main cause of money-poverty is lack of money, not lack of work.

hnal943• 12 years ago

If that were true, welfare would work.

sogen2• 12 years ago

Another article in the increasing line of studies of the poor getting poorer.

tl;dr: The poor are worse at managing time and money because they are exhausted all the time and have fewer/no options (i.e. costlier credits than the wealthy)

fit2rule• 12 years ago

There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories, then you're stuck in a feedback loop of no progress. And so it goes.

This is why the truly rich (not necessarily wealthy) find pleasure in lifes' simple, cheap, offerings. It's almost impossible to find vegetables as good as the ones we grow in our home garden, but yet it takes on average 30 minutes of work every day to keep things in order .. finding that balance is what is key to moving from being poor to rich, in my opinion. The time not spent getting in the car to go grocery shopping is instead spent maintaining a well-ordered garden plot ..

judk2• 12 years ago

Not really true. Buying in bulk is a minor savings that offsets the cost if a big car or big house or whatever. The core issue is that life has transaction costs on that the wealthier folks don't need to worry about, but a poor person faces catastrophic collapse by going over budget with no way to borrow against the future.

JASchilz• 12 years ago

Could you give a few examples of these transaction costs?

aturek• 12 years ago

There's a great quote from a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

SilasX4• 12 years ago

That quote always bothers me, because most long-term savings like that aren't nearly so clear in numerical terms.

threatofrain• 12 years ago

I generally have the suspicion that "boots" and the like offer only micro-optimizations. Buying a $100-150 bag advertised for durability versus a $30-40 generic brand backpack. Or buying a MacBook Pro versus a midrange laptop with Windows.

While there may be optimizations to be found in these situations, I also wonder about the cognitive cost per optimization, and I wonder if it might not be better to put the most of your mind on a job or geography transition.

prawn3• 12 years ago

I agree that shopping can be a trap. If you don't have money to do a big, occasional shop for food/etc, you'll likely make a series of smaller trips to a supermarket, buying few things but still losing time, fuel and maintenance on each drive of your car, for example. Lose time and you're under more pressure elsewhere in life.

beat6• 12 years ago

The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else.

Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.

Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.

I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.

Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.

But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.

judk2• 12 years ago

Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.

prawn3• 12 years ago

They're talking about advancing society, not replacing a t-shirt. You're having a separate discussion.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Plenty of people born into well-off families squander their time, life and fall victim to the same ails as the lower classes.

Suncho• 12 years ago

Most people will "squander" their time in the sense that they'll never accomplish anything that contributes meaningfully to society. That's totally okay. Like beat said, society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals.

What's not okay is when members of this small minority, who have the potential to do great things, instead remain stuck in poverty.

Meekro2• 12 years ago

The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.

alexqgb4• 12 years ago

Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom.

Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will have to make extraordinary sacrifices. So yes, give them credit. But don't - whatever you do - look at people who haven't managed to keep their heads about water, and think "well, this one guy made it against all odds and you didn't, so you must be a lazy, stupid human."

That may be fair (if harsh) in a supportive world where it takes rare talent to fail. But it's a monstrous attitude in a world where the opposite is so clearly the case.

dannypgh4• 12 years ago

I guess the fact that some people have successfully escaped from prison means that prisoners are really free, right?

Your reasoning is lousy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

sogen2• 12 years ago

No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship:

"...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..."

"...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two countries with the high level of inequality -- Chile and Brazil—had some of the lowest mobility. A 2012 graph plotting the relationship between inequality and mobility in the United States and twelve other developed countries has been dubbed "The Great Gatsby Curve"[27][28][29] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

PEW report: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/selling-out-over-long-term-...

U. Bekerley.edu / NYTimes feature: http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/features/20130726_upward_mobili...

r0s• 12 years ago

Skills and work ethic are learned behaviors. You're technically correct that those things can help you rise above, but you're missing the point that environment is the key factor.

beat6• 12 years ago

We still have class mobility, to a degree. Not enough of a degree, which is my concern. My daughter, who is 20, is concerned that society is actually going backwards, and there's less opportunity for her generation than for previous generations.

GuiA• 12 years ago

"Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

beat6• 12 years ago

I think my idea is consistent with both the Great Man theory and its critics. I'm concerned that, due to the negative impacts of poverty and other social failure modes, we're preventing the formation of Great Men (and Great Women - one of the grand social ills that we've only halfway addressed is sexism).

pjmorris2• 12 years ago

I can relate. Dad died when I was 13, Mom and 3 kids moved to a single-wide in rural Florida. I was buried in books and calculators from the time I could walk to the library, but I had no positive role models. I had no idea of the value or importance of the PSAT and SAT, I had no idea what I would do once I graduated from High School. I lucked into the local community college offering scholarships for the top of the local HS graduating class, lucked into a moonlighting GE engineer teaching a programming (Fortran!) class, then started to work toward a State university, a Fortune 500 job, and a career as a software developer rather than a cook/kitchen manager like I might have been. I married a HS guidance counselor who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see... and I have much the same vision. My real career dream, beyond getting to be a software developer, is to help even one kid short-circuit the journey I took to realizing their potential.

epaladin• 12 years ago

"who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see"

There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty. From my middle class home town, most people I was familiar with from elementary school seem to be working at restaurants and the like. I could have definitely used a mentor to help me see the possibilities that my parents weren't familiar with. Now that I'm finally developing the self-awareness necessary to really go somewhere (hopefully) I've tried to think on how to help kids realize their potential, but in such a way as to be scalable. While maybe apps could help with self-esteem, it's probably not possible at this point to replace the knowledge and experience of a good mentor with a standalone information system.

I know the frustration I've experienced, so I can only imagine what it's got to be like coming from less- props to you for making it.

incision5• 12 years ago

I'm glad to see a few studies bearing out the sort of things I perceived growing up.

'To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.'

I believe this is exactly the right sort of thinking. Finding ways to encourage and enable people to start moving gradually in order to build positive momentum.

The "front loading" of forms, waiting lists and probationary periods are like mountains. Some people break themselves on the ascent, others spend themselves reaching the summit and have no energy to continue safely down the far side. These man made mountains need not remain arbitrarily steep.

_delirium3• 12 years ago

As mostly an outside observer in both countries (fortunately), this is one of the big differences I see between the American and Danish welfare systems. The Danish one has a reputation for being much more generous, which is true to some extent, but is not as true in terms of throughput as it is in terms of latency. The Danish system does a lot of short-term "business": people get onto the system in a matter of days, use it for 6-12 months, then get off again. (By "the system" I mean a range of things: housing subsidy, retraining, cash welfare, mental-health treatment, etc.) Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list, with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.

incision5• 12 years ago

'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list..'

My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible. The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel.

...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.'

Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

SilasX4• 12 years ago

I think that ignores the fact that the forms and such are there in the first place precisely to contain the tide of applicants.

What do you think happens when organizations are under budget constraints and have to find creative ways to cut [edit: typo] costs?

incision5• 12 years ago

'I think that ignores the fact that the forms and such are there in the first place precisely to contain the tide of applicants.'

This thought did cross my mind, but I've done lots of work in the public sector - local, federal, education and health.

As a rule, these agencies just aren't that clever, not even close.

In my experience, bad forms and the like are generally a matter of "That's how we've always done it."

That's not to say the concern isn't real. Surely it wouldn't serve to simplify an intake form without altering other parts of the process. To fail to do that would just be moving the bottleneck.

Ideally, sticking with the mountain analogy, you'd end up with a steady stream of healthy, willing and ultimately productive hands coming into the valley via a long, winding, but relatively safe pass.

Mz3• 12 years ago

I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece gives a small snippet of examples of what works.

How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer.

But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.

prawn3• 12 years ago

I don't think it's that people don't want "the poor" to solve their problems, but there isn't an immediate benefit for others to solve that problem for them. Many have their own problems (even if they aren't as series as those faced by others).

xnerak• 12 years ago

I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.

One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.

I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?

Mz3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback on the book.

As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.

I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to the point of being actively hostile.)

antisocial2• 12 years ago

Hostile attitude towards poor? I don't think so. Most of us are just busy trying to make a living/career, raise a family etc. There is not enough free time to go around. And whatever free time that is left is sucked up by TV/internet.

billmalarky• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that basic income was designed to give the poor the base they need to relieve the pressures of being poor enough that they could actually focus on getting a leg up instead of devoting all of their resources to simply surviving week to week.

Mz3• 12 years ago

a) I don't think this article mentions basic income. So I kind of think that is not relevant to this discussion.

b) I am not for basic income. I don't think completely screwing over the economy helps people at the bottom. I think "basic income" likely would screw over the economy.

alexqgb4• 12 years ago

Outside of the SV bubble, it's extraordinarily difficult to fail without seeing your credit take a serious hit. And boy howdy is getting back on your feet hard when you (a) can't get an apartment, and (b) find yourself getting screened out of otherwise available jobs. Forget getting money on loan, this is just getting access to the basics of economical survival - work to do and a place to sleep.

The fact that we punish economic failure by making economic success even harder to achieve is evidence of the deep insanity within American culture. Sink or swim is a misnomer. Swim or be drowned is closer to the mark.

So it's great that we're making technical progress on every front imaginable. But how many of these advances see their promise still born in a culture that pays more attention to recycling its trash than the people it discards on its streets?

This winner-take-all/losers-get-ruin problem goes way beyond the business cycle. As Reuters noted a couple of years ago, entrepreneurship has been suffering a decades-long retreat. Having peaked in 1987, it's declined precipitously ever since.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-bus...

In just about every way imaginable, SV is the exception not the rule. For those who are young enough, smart enough, skilled enough, male enough, credentialed enough, connected enough, unencumbered enough, and possibly delusional enough it's great. But strike any one of those factors from the list, and watch the curve get steep. Start crossing off two or more and the odds on the lottery start looking good.

Those are the odds that the rest of America sees. So it's no wonder they're backing further and further away from risk, regardless of the long-terms costs the country. Until this country has a social contract that's worth a damn, people are going to be very adverse to even the slightest setback. And for good reason.

After all, there's a big difference between the kind of failure that can be chalked up "a valuable learning experience" and failure so catastrophically crushingly severe you never, ever, get back on your feet. There's a lot of that in America. It's where the Fear comes from. That's what drives most people. Not dreams of being one of the great or the good. Those are luxuries for the fortunate few. Most people just live in constant dread of being thrown in the street.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle.

I'm willing to build it if you are. Contact me.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

In my experience, in everything from going out to lunch to planning a camping trip to having a party to asking someone out to doing any work-- you have to do it, and yes let other people know you're doing it, but you have to be doing it regardless.

Things generally don't work if you say "I'll do it if you agree to do it too."

javajosh2• 12 years ago

Nonsense. If I can't find someone to go to the movies with me, I probably won't go. I care about this issue, and am willing to work toward it - and it might even be fundable through grants, and other philanthropy. So I'd recommend contacting me if it interests you.

zackmorris• 12 years ago

I actually think this is one of the great problems of our time (how wealth inequality lowers productivity by suppressing people who might otherwise contribute to society) and have experienced it acutely at times. One of my mottos is that you can have money or time but not both, but if you do manage to achieve both, then you are in a position to change the world.

I'm not sure I would quite take the matching approach you propose, but I've often thought that a better contracting service like fiverr (where people could make money quickly for the skills they truly excel at) could change the world by giving people alternatives to things like credit cards and payday loans. But there needs to be no little or no friction to make it feasible. Right now it's a PITA to make money through most of the online freelance sites because it's too hands-on, and technology doesn't do nearly enough.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi because this is something that I would like to work on also.

jseliger• 12 years ago

I wrote about this in more detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive... , but one underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own.

I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .

ThrustVectoring• 12 years ago

The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.

jqm• 12 years ago

This was a good article.

The comments seem to focus mostly on the financial aspects but I found the portion regarding how time is spent interesting. (True, the article does tie them together to an extent).

As far as financial poverty... my personal opinion is that "finance" is too widely regarded as an unalterable given that is intrinsic to the human condition. Certainly the concept of money has produced a system that has advanced human control over our environment, but a bit of perspective suggests it is a concept that we did without for tens of thousands of years. And, I suspect sometime in the future we will do without it again.

Maybe not "poor people need money" but rather "hungry people need food" might be the type of larger and more directly useful framework to address some of these problems within. Certainly we are at the level we should be able to provide basic food, clothing and shelter to all members of our species and no one should suffer and die from want. If we aren't doing this, given what we have and what we can do, then there is something wrong with the system and this needs correcting before we will be able to move much further. IMHOP. Maybe the thing that got us here (the concept of money) is becoming a conceptual problem that is now keeping us from advancing further. I don't have a fix. I just see what I think is part of the problem.

gambiting• 12 years ago

>It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich ones were doing worse.

I reminds me of a sentence from a recent study of breastfeeding vs. formula milk - "It's not that natural milk is better for babies - it's that baby formula is worse for the babies".

harmonicon• 12 years ago

In a capitalist society, the key to "a good life" is passing a certain threshold of capital accumulation. The poor, not having much to begin with, has to constantly fight this uphill battle of trying to save more money, of finding more resources constantly, adding to their net worth, etc. This article shows that there is even an adverse psychological effect that makes reaching the goal still harder. All this seems to require big intervention of the governments part to level the playing field and make capital accumulation possible.

Unfortunately in the US, one bad financial decision, one loss of job, one bad case of illness or one trouble at home can reset the pool to 0 and often negative due the extensive background and credit history checking. It is the US government's responsibility to fix this because we submit to its authority, fund its existence and elect its officials for the purpose of trusting it to steward our nation and its people. Sadly when I tune into the political discourse it's all about gun/abortion/tax/federal debt and whatever other kinds of "freedom". Why is helping people never and enhancing social mobility on the table. And I am so so tired of politicians parading education as the silver bullet.

No Money, No Time

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