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The poor will always be with us in America because the poor engage in a lot of self-sabotage. This post lists five things the poor shouldn’t do—especially the young poor—if they want to give themselves a shot of becoming affluent.
The Poor Defined
To make things simple, I’m defining a poor person as any non-retired American adult who isn’t saving 20 percent of his or her take-home pay.
That, of course, is a very crude measure of pauperism. But creating that large of a “gap” between one’s pay and one’s expenses is so critical to elevating one from poor to comfortable and eventually to wealthy, it’s foolish to focus on any other metric.
Is this definition too stringent? Yes and no. It’s too stringent in the sense that it relegates most working American adults to poor status. And that, on its surface, is patently absurd. A guy driving a Lexus and living in a McMansion is hardly poor. But on a deeper level, it’s not too stringent. Most working American adults are bad at building wealth. They’re great at accumulating stuff and debt and living paycheck to paycheck. But they’re not great at saving, investing, and growing their net worth. And my definition of poor was chosen because it exposes this alarming deficiency.
Okay, with our working definition of poor out of the way, let’s turn to the behaviors that poor people need to avoid if they no longer wish to be poor.
Play Video Games
When I was a younger man, I was consumed by certain books. I spent thousands of dollars on books about politics and social issues and devoted countless hours to reading them. And you know what this obsession did for my financial well-being? Absolutely squat. Employers, it turns out, covet people with technical skills—that is, they covet people who can improve the quality of their products or improve the efficiencies of their operations. They don’t give a crap about people who know nothing but are well-versed in the musings of bell hooks and Charles Murray.
For a lot of poor people today, video games are the time-suck of choice. Rather than mastering an economically valuable skill or the fundamentals of money and personal finance, they’re using their limited resources to master the intricacies of Mortal Kombat or Madden NFL. Not good. Except for a select few, becoming a renowned gamer will do nothing to improve one’s ability to earn more and save more.
If you’re poor, you can’t afford to be frivolous with your spare time and money. Video games, political books, and all such time-sucks should be avoided like the plague.
Go to a Four-Year College
Unless you finished in the top third of your high school class and had an SAT composite score of at least 1200, don’t even think about going to a four-year college.
Despite what the college-industrial complex claims, pursuing a bachelor’s degree isn’t a good bet for the undisciplined and cognitively weak. I should know. This was an apt description of me when I shuffled off to Buffalo University back in 1979.
Now a question. Do undisciplined and cognitively weak college students pick majors that lead to high-paying jobs? If you answered “no,” go straight to the head of the class.
Undisciplined and cognitively weak college students don’t pick majors that lead to high-paying jobs because such majors are incredibly hard—even for disciplined and cognitively strong college students. No, undisciplined and cognitively weak college students pick fluff majors such as communication, sociology, and gender studies. And those majors are very suspect economically. That’s why we have the most educated baristas, bartenders, and basement dwellers in the world.
I was a sociology major at Buffalo University. And believe me, no employer of note was clamoring for my immense critical thinking skills when I emerged from UB in 1984. The only thing that saved me from abject misery was the timing of my excursion into higher education. I went to college before the era of crushing student loan debt. Today’s young people don’t have that luxury.
If you’re poor, getting an economically dubious BA from a non-elite college is going to do more harm than good. You’d be better off learning a trade, going to a community college, or starting a business.
Quick Aside: I came across the below Dave Ramsey video the other day and it really shows the evil of the college-industrial complex. What kind of people would allow a young person to rack up close to $200,000 in student loan debt for a tuba degree?
Consume News
If you consume a lot of “news,” you’ll turn into a yossarian.
What’s a yossarian?
John Yossarian was a WWII pilot in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 who was under the mistaken impression that war was personal. In the conversation below, you get a clear glimpse of his paranoia:
“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
I understand Yossarian’s point. But I also understand Clevinger’s point, and his point is more compelling. No one was trying to kill Yossarian out of personal animus. His enemies really didn’t care about him. They were only trying to kill him because he was piloting a plane bringing bombs and carnage to their position. When Yossarian wasn’t in his B-25 over enemy territory, nobody was shooting at him.
A yosserian is thus someone who becomes so paranoid he or she can’t fathom the possibility that his or her “enemies” are only “enemies” because of his or her ruinous behavior, and not because of his or her very existence. And because he or she is so delusional, he or she is unlikely to stop performing the ruinous behavior bringing calamity and “enemies” to his or her doorstep. Talk about a catch-22.
The “news,” whether it has a left-wing bent or a right-wing bent, is expert at creating yosserians.
“You’re not a lowly fast-food worker because you’re a pot-smoking slacker who barely made it out of high school. You’re on the french fry station because you’re black and racist America refused to adequately fund the public schools you attended.”
“You’re not an unemployed carpenter living in a trailer and subsisting on SSI because you have no stomach for work and drank yourself into oblivion. You’re trailer park trash because the Dems allowed illegal aliens to swarm into our country and steal your job.”
I’m not saying, of course, that there isn’t powerful scum out there doing scummy things. There is. I’m just saying that the powerful scum’s scummy endeavors aren’t personal. You engage in stupid behaviors and the powerful scum will take advantage of you. Avoid stupid behaviors and the powerful scum will basically leave you alone.
Again, don’t consume “news.” The people who produce our “news” don’t care about your well-being. They just want you to become a half-crazed yossarian who votes for the politicians they favor. And you can’t afford to be manipulated by such tomfoolery—especially if you’re poor. No one escapes a paycheck-to-paycheck existence by being a world-class excuse-maker who votes the “right” way.
Own a Pet
I understand the appeal of pets, especially for poor people. In the video below, we see the plight of a homeless mother and daughter living in California. And I’m sure the only sentient creature that is genuinely excited to see them on a daily basis is the dog they have caged in the back of their car.
The need to matter is real. But if you’re poor, you got to resist the urge to matter via pet ownership. Pets simply require time and money you don’t have. Better to remain inconsequential and use the promise of pet ownership as a spur to righting your financial ship. Not fun, but infinitely more prudent.
Give to Charity
“Charity begins at home.” There’s a reason why earlier stewards of Western culture formulated this adage. They didn’t want poor people trying to help other poor people. A poor person’s primary job is to become non-poor. And that job becomes unnecessarily harder when a poor person’s time and money are diverted to anything that doesn’t improve his or her earning power and increase his or her savings. A poor person’s only charity should be him- or herself.
Final Thoughts
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Are these reasonable “no-go zones” for the poor? Or am I being a bit too curmudgeonly today? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.
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