It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.
Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.
Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.
It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.
Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.
Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.