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August 7, 2004
Expenstive Poverty
I was hungry and ready to go to my noon meeting on Tuesday, and couldn't figure out what I wanted for lunch. I didn't have any cash on hand and found out Checker's didn't take debit cards, so I drove up the road to Arby's. The perfect lunch was on their menu, and for only $5.35 (with tax), I could enjoy a low carb turkey-bacon caesar wrap delight. This of course, is a few bucks higher than their other sandwiches, but I've been working so hard on maintaining a 32-inch waistline, I wasn't going to lose a whole week's worth of exercise by taking on a big roast beef cheddar sandwich.
The curve ball, however, was the unexpected. My debit card was declined. Desperately hungry, I spent the next fifteen minutes combing my truck to come up with the correct amount of money. Poverty is not going to make me compromise.
Inevitably, I knew what had occurred; and it all stems from not having enough money. My electric bill is unreasonably high, because I can't afford to get my air conditioner replaced or check the ductwork, and the price of fuel has skyrocketed recently. The $300 was automatically deducted from my bank account, along with some other deductions, reducing my account to a sub-zero balance, and earning me a $35 NSF fee.
Poverty is expensive. When I look at friends who have had to reinstate their insurance so they could reinstate their tags so they could reinstate their driver's license, you discover that people with less money pay more than people with more.
It's truly ironic how I heard this Republican in Congress declaring that we should have an across-the-board national sales tax, which would be fair for everyone. Not so. Sales taxes, notably those on grocery products, are known as “regressive taxes”, meaning that they impact the poor far more than they do the wealthy. Because these taxes are included on the basic necessities, food, gasoline, clothing, as well as other items. For instance:
A working class man who earns $15,000 a year pays 5% sales tax on a $10,000 used car, is paying about 3.33% of his income.
An upper class man who earns $150,000 a year pays 5% sales tax on a $60,000 luxury car is only paying about 1.12% of his income.
These figures translate pretty much across the board. In essence, the congressman is advocating taxing the working class more than the rich. And the American people persist in putting idiots like these back in congress.
It just gets harder and harder to be poor these days, and yet once you're there, it's a slippery slope staying there. Late fees, reinstatement fees, penalties, fines…these are not things that you suffer often if you have a lot a lot of money.
Posted by Bastique at August 7, 2004 10:46 PM