Journalists Aren’t Trying

~ Clarissa

Something bizarre is happening with journalism. Look at this article in Chicago Tribune:

This woman, who is supposed to symbolize the dire poverty of illegal migrants, is wearing a $400 Apple watch. Was it so hard to find a picture of a person who uses Medicaid and who isn’t decked out in expensive technology?

And it’s every photo these days. Every photo I come across in the mainstream press has some large gaffe. Obese victims of starvation, indigent mothers in fancy wearables. The journalists aren’t even trying any more.

Also, it’s curious how all of a sudden the narrative that illegal migrants don’t use welfare has been abandoned. What’s next, we’ll finally discover that there aren’t 11 million of them in the country but several times more?

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Published by Clarissa

29 thoughts on “Journalists Aren’t Trying”

  1. And yet. Making poor financial decisions, particularly around purchases of luxury items, is a hallmark of being poor, at least in the US. It puzzled me for my entire childhood. Like, if the Joneses are on food stamps, how is it that their kids have PowerWheels toys, when *we* can’t afford those??? Why do we re-upholster our couch when everybody else just buys a new one? Why do we have a junkier car than all these people who are definitely poorer than we are? The answer, apparently, was consumer debt. Sometimes in other people’s names.

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    1. I know, it’s so weird. The family at my kid’s school who don’t have money for a $3 hot dog provided each of their kids with a separate iPad. It had to have been done on credit because who has that kind of money? We are talking 6 kids, each with an iPad.

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      1. Credit, or indulgent grandparents. Possibly both. Have encountered, more than once, the peculiar phenomenon of going into tons of debt to “give the kids a real Christmas”… and following it up by getting evicted for nonpayment of rent.

        At this point in my life… I’m not sure I even blame them. We work really hard at being financially responsible, having an emergency fund, not buying stuff we can’t afford, considering and re-considering every purchase, like do we really *need* this, can we live without it? Can we buy it secondhand? We sweat the small stuff, and… it feels like we are just spinning our wheels in mud. I’m happy to not be in debt, but.. . seriously, after five years it’s starting to feel stupid to engage in all this household ascesis to try and save for a house, if housing just keeps going up. Why bother? Why not enjoy takeout and have nice things like everybody else? We are just barely on that line where it makes a difference: we never get our water turned off for nonpayment, and we’re never late on the rent. When the car breaks, we can get it fixed– we don’t have to pass the hat around and beg. Our kids have a modicum of stability.

        But… unless something really significant changes in the next couple years, we’ll never own a house, we’ll never retire, and we’re one big medical emergency away from insolvency. I’m waiting to see what the prize is for being responsible poor people. So far… bupkus.

        I mean, not giving the kids their own ipads is of course its own reward.

        The rest? I’m having doubts. It’s not even that I want any of the stuff credit can buy– It’s that I work really hard at this, assuming there is some kind of payoff for doing the right thing. The more time passes, the less certain I am that there is any payoff at all.

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        1. methylethyl

          We faced tough times during stagflation. Fortunately, my wife had a sense of humour, one year calculating our income taxation, she grinned, “Well, that is seven lean years, when do the fat years begin” ;-D

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          1. Indeed! It doesn’t feel great right now, but I try to keep in mind… unsustainable things end because they must. Eventually. And when we finally get there, we’ll be in a good position to take advantage of it, not being buried in debt. The difference between this and being *really* poor, is acting like there’s a long-term to plan for 😉

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            1. I’m not sure how it originally started, but today I think its more of doom spending than anything else.

              A sense of we are never going to get out of this, so we might as well taste luxury as much as we can before we finally sink.

              Its not a great way to live, but its understandable. For instance my hometown, the average wage is about 35 to 38K. Yet prices are quite high here too.

              So take a family already in debt due to student loans, who will not be able to pay them off or get rid of them by bankruptcy, who are stuck with low wage jobs, cannot afford to save up. And are likely looking at 60 plus years of practical slavery. Yea I can understand them wanting to doom spend via credit cards and bank loans in their youth.

              Its extremely stupid, but its understandable. After all if your through process is, there is no way out for me, you might as well enjoy the ride down before everything fails.

              • – W

              Again I want to note, I think doom spending is extremely stupid, but I understand why people do it. I don’t actually support doing this.

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              1. This is particularly, I think, what’s going on with buying their kids all the expensive toys. They’re never getting out. Why should the kids be deprived?

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    2. Even luxury consumer goods are still cheap compared to a house because consumer goods are mass produced, while houses have to be individually constructed and supply is limited by zoning laws. If saving on these products is never going to buy you anything meaningful, then why not splurge?

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      1. Exactly.

        Plus, there’s means testing. This is rational because you don’t want a bunch of people with half a mil in the bank using state resources while unemployed. That’s not what those resources are for. The problem is, means testing is usually set so low that if you depend on something like disability, then a small inheritance (which is not going to support you long term, and then you’re still disabled) will jeopardize your eligibility. We worked through the numbers on this with a disabled friend: she received a small inheritance on the death of an elderly parent, and… couldn’t deposit it in her bank account without losing her disability check, which she depended on. So we had to figure out the shrewdest way to spend all the money immediately: new roof on her house, and some long-term property improvements.

        This sort of situation is sometimes how you end up with people driving a BMW to the food bank. We contemplated it ourselves, at one point, looking at out-of-pocket expenses to see a pregnancy specialist after an unexpected complication. We had saved up, blood sweat and tears, to send my husband back to school for a career change. That money was possibly going to disqualify us for medicaid. We could leave the money in the bank and lose every penny to medical bills, OR, we could spend it immediately on a reliable car to last us the next ten years, and then let medicaid cover the bills. It didn’t come down to that in the end, but it was a close thing. And buying the car would have been the rational decision.

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          1. “live for today semi-criminal extreme sports scene”

            Short-term orientation. Don’t think about the future, idolize a fantasy past and being true to some code is everything. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa is known for extreme short term orientation (as is the Muslim world).

            I recently read a(n apocryphal?) anecdote about a village in Southern Africa being given cows (long term project) and the Africans killed and ate them all immediately….

            East Asia, is the opposite. Think and plan for the long term future while not thinking much about present inconvenience and put more stock in behavior than belief.

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              1. A basic problem in SA is before dams, permanent settlement was impossible, so you had to simply eat everything in a given place before moving on with the seasons. Another issue was cows being raided by the neighboring tribe, so eat them before they get stolen.

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              2. “The cow story is most likely true.”

                Actually the site says ‘satire’ so I think it’s an Onion-like story.

                Though years ago I used to know social scientists/development people who worked in Africa said planning anything was a nightmare and almost never worked.

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  2. I agree, I wince whenever I see students with better phones than me who wear fancy Nike shoes but who get the free lunch. My parents were frugal people who used stuff until they fell apart, our house has a 20-year old sofa and 30-year old love seat and my bed is also 30-years old, so is my mother’s.

    She still uses a first generation IPad and I have an IPhone 11 that’s over five years old, the last splurge I allowed myself was a box of really good Bic spend with the rubber grips, they don’t run out of ink after 30 pages. So it’s possible that person in the article is poor and has an Apple Watch, too many people would rather look rich than be rich

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  3. Work at a food pantry or other program for the so-called disadvantaged and you see this all the time — obese people who can’t afford food or toilet paper, but they can afford tattoos and body piercings, they can afford to dye their hair colors that don’t exist in nature, and to add insult to injury they usually drive a nicer car than you do…

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    1. My mother is the manager of a supermarket and she sees this all the time, obese people paying for groceries with food stamps but who have tattoos and piercings and drive nice cars, bonus points if they have the latest model phone. It sucks that we have to stretch out the food budget and be careful with bills and maybe eat out once a year, save all year for a simple vacation and these folks live better than we do. This can make anyone into a super conservative or a libertarian, people on food stamps shouldn’t live better than people who actually pay for their groceries

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        1. When I buy alcohol, it’s with my own money that I earned, and that’s because I got tired of bartenders watering down my drinks because I’m a woman. At least I buy my indulgences with my own money, I’d be ashamed to buy junk food on food stamps if God Forbid we had to use them.

          Then again, I learned to cook from my mother and how to stretch out food to last. A lot of people never learned to cook at all, cooking simple meals is a very important skill

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            1. I’ve mentioned before that my family has rental units. Something I noted when I was young was that the people in them all had really nice vehicles.

              Now this was back when the new vehicles were still 30 to 40K and not the 100K they are today, but my hometown is not a really wealthy place, and most of our tenants were not exactly wealthy either.

              I can say that last bit with confidence as part of my job was showing the rentals, and accepting the documents from potential tenants. Part of the documents was current and past work history and salary. Most of them were not making anywhere near enough to afford two or three brand new fancy looking vehicles.

              They still have fancy cars, but I suspect most of them are the slightest breeze away from financial ruin. Assuming they are not doom spending at this point.

              • – W

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  4. There’s also this idea that when you lose all hope for the future all your consumption gets directed at the present. You sort of lose any sense of delayed gratification. No saving for the future because you don’t see a future. Might as well buy an apple watch and $300 sneakers.

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      2. For sure. I was gonna add that I think this could be a chicken and egg thing. Both phenomena reinforce each other.

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  5. I wonder if saving as a way of life is an instinct or is learnt as a skill thanks to your parents or a mixture of both.

    I have three brothers: two of them are like me, never been in debt, home owners and very careful with their money all our lives, never splurged on anything, we own nice things after we saved for them. My other brother is s spendthrift, rents his apartment, lived on social security benefits, always broke after spending on very nice things that he could not afford.

    Yet our parents are very parsimonious people, who, while never wealthy, over a long life have built a nice nest for their retirement. All four of us received the same education, by word and example, though the outcomes have been very different with my profligate brother. How do these things happen?

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    1. Poor impulse control and availability of credit. Sometimes people grow into being able to control their impulses, but not everyone does. In the Olden Times (TM), this was why men’s wives were sometimes allowed to pick up their pay packets, so the families would get the money, instead of the worker going to the track or down the pub with the lads and pissing it away. If you didn’t have cash, you couldn’t act on your impulses. But now people can wave a credit card and get a tattoo or whatever they feel like they “deserve.” If you’re a person who is able to save, then you’re safe with a credit card (or layaway plan, whatever), but lots of people aren’t. Clearly in Avi’s case it’s not the case that the brother spends money in order to keep it out of the hands of improvident relatives, but that is also a thing that happens, not unlike methylethyl’s calculations about car vs medical bills.

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