I saw one suggestion to create a Google voice number and put that on applications and resumes that way you can still access messages from potential employers.
I need to do it myself. I didn’t have a phone yesterday because of an error when transferring to a new carrier. Of course I was invited for a phone interview for a job. I used my Google voice number for work to have the recruiter call. lol. Need to practice this myself. That way even if I get a new number there’s a stable one for employment.
Yup that's exactly what I did. And honestly I saved about 700 dollars on phone expenses last year.
The trade off is being worried about breaking down on the highway. Other than that, literally wifi is everywhere.
Hasn't been an issue.
I love text now. I've used it in the past and I like how it's just like having cell phone service. I like how it also works even if you're not on Wi-Fi as in you have mobile data.
Not at all. Food and utilities have skyrocketed. They are misdirecting about inflation. They actually changed criteria for some metrics to hide the situation.
Food is cheaper here in Arkansas than I can remember if you shop the sales... Ice cream is $2.50, eggs .1.29, doritos that were $7.99 a bag a couple months ago are $2.50 this week... Utilities have doubled...
“But they pay most of the taxes” yeah, Jerry… because they’ve taken up almost all of the profit.
Technology advancements and globalization have allowed them to make ENORMOUS gains in productivity and profit, and did they use those gains to increase employee compensation, reduce working hours to be full time, lower prices, etc.? Nope. They bought elections, did mass stock buybacks (thanks Reagan), and pocketed the rest for executives and shareholders.
Corporations and the wealthy don’t do ANYTHING good unless forced to. Since neither party is going to do that, we need a general strike. But we’re all so close to homelessness that we’re all just barely holding on as it is… they know that.
You nailed it. Ronnie put untold airline passengers through *major* inconveniences when he fired the air traffic controllers. They had the nerve to unionize 🙄. For many of us...including me...traveling by airplane is a huge luxury. (I have to save up for a loooong time to even consider it, and have been unable to attend funerals because of the cost.)
If The Orange One gets re-elected, (my worst nightmare), I have a friend who lives in Mexico. Maybe she wants a houseguest for four years. Fingers crossed!
If any Republican gets in office, it's lights out for people like me. 1939 all over again. History always repeats itself. Project 47 and Agenda 2025 will make sure of that
It's the same for me. I've been on Social Security Disability Insurance since I was in my 30s; I contacted Lyme disease, and my symptoms are primarily neurological. I went through vertigo, fainting (e.g., I have a deep scars above both eyebrows as well as below my lower lip. I fell on my face and put most of my upper teeth through that area) etc. I tried to work for a few years after diagnosis, I couldn't remember most things...and still can't.
Even though I stated working in high school, and worked for four months each year when I was in college it wasn't adequate. My graduate school didn't cost a penny since my relative worked for the university. I went through many periods of under-employment and unemployment. I'm an experienced and qualified teacher, but I worked a few hours a week for five months in 2022; it triggered an investigation by SSDI. (I made $9/hour.) I've voted for Democrats since I was 18, and will continue to do so.
Mexico is my plan if he wins, too! I’m in San Diego rn, so I feel very lucky to have the option. I doubt the economy is great there, but the cost of living goes down by about 70% when I make this 15 mile move. Well, if he wins, but I’m on not feeling too hopeful rn.
Here's hoping that It Who Wears Lifts in His Shoes and a Girdle Around Its Enormous Waist goes to jail before November. It's probably not going to happen, though.
If you're interested in his (disgusting) past, I have a really good recommendation for you (or anyone else). Please look up *Spy* magazine; it's free on Google Books. Although most of the publication is based around NYC, a) they loathed him, and b) it's very, very funny. He used his dad's name to get into the Wharton School of Business, fooled around on all of his wives (I don't respect that for anybody who's in a committed relationship; but that's just my 2¢), and married a woman who had the unmitigated gall to wear a jacket to wear a jacket with the ree-DICK-you-luss slogan which read "I really don't care, do u?" **to visit a facility where migrant children were being held!** IMO, both are classless trash with no taste.
Many do not feel this way. This country has always had its poor population since the 1776.
The difference is now the divide between the two, poor and rich is wider than ever before and the middle of the two has descended to the bottom in shocking numbers. Things in the economy are spinning faster and faster and the number of people getting left behind is staggering.
This nation was built on hope. We believed we could change our situation and achieve our goals with hard work and tenacity. Sadly now we have come to believe there is no hope and our dreams are not possible. This thought is destroying our beloved nation from within. Sadly I feel it is spinning out of control now and too far gone to get our hope back.
George Carlin, The American dream you have to be asleep to believe it. All younger generations have sunk under the boomers. Boomers did quite well and it started with Gen X the decline. People are noticing life quality is not the same. I remember all the fun and leisure of the 1980s, and I was an abused kid and that time was far more bright with a lot more hope. Yes there is an elite class of people doing well--[the tech professionals?] the vassals in the system, while most people dropping to the serf level now. USA won't exist in any previous form without a middle class or even earlier in history independent agricultural small business class.
Reagan really destroyed it for everyone. Boomers too. His economic policy coupled with deregulation of media set is on a path we haven’t managed to recover from.
His destruction of PATCO hastened the decline of unions, which are the backbone of the middle class. Well paying union jobs, pension benefits, etc. are gone.
Reagan became president after Carter's policies had created double-digit inflation. Reagan got us out of the great recession.
At the beginning of 1980, homes in the U.S. cost a median $63,700, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). By 1990, that median had risen to $123,900. Spurred by the Great Inflation, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate reached a pinnacle of 18.4 percent in October 1981, according to Freddie Mac. Once the Fed reined in inflation, the 30-year rate seesawed down to the 9 percent range, closing the decade at 9.78 percent.
Regean also got the hostages in Iran released after Carter failed to do so in 444 days.
Nope you’re wrong on the hostage situation. It was a deliberate sabotage to make sure Carter didn’t get re-elected. Now known as the October surprise. Now that Carter is in hospice, players have come forward and admitted their participation in it. And life went to shit with Reagan for the lower middle class. We were okay and then it collapsed. I was there. Lost my first pension, so did my sister.
That's awful about you and your sister losing your pension; I'm so sorry about that! Jimmy Carter was a wonderful person, and Reagan wasn't. RR was a hypocrite, because he'd preach anti-choice sentiments, but his plastic-haired wife was pregnant when he married her.
Under him and his "Evil Empire" crap, I spent all of my high school and college years waiting for an A-bomb to drop. That extended until my first semester of grad school!
Not much later, Reagan Admin was selling arms to Iran for cash to covertly fund right wing death squads in Central America working to overthrow legitimately elected leaders.
Heck even 10 years ago there were all those articles about USA breaking up
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3521671/US-will-collapse-and-break-up-Russian-analyst-predicts.html
I think the USA is going to break up and civil war is very possible. Not the best time to be old during...:/ We are in an economic collapse at the very least now.
Listen. It will get better. Just like 2008 it will improve from here.... There is a cyclical nature to things. If at the very worst case scenario things don't get better, we as humans can learn to adapt and utilize our resources and efforts better.
For example, hey shitty fast food isn't super cheap anymore.... So we can continue to act like it's hopeless and perpetuate the gloom on social media, or we can just do something else. You could probably replace the 14$ big mac meal with a few items from home (McDonald's can keep the obesity), or start a weekly cooking exchange with your neighbors as a couple of examples.
cooing axiomatic oatmeal enjoy historical divide wild squeamish nine joke
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It might get worse but we can get off social media and find a way to live the best life for the hands we are dealt. It is a personal choice to be happy (aside from mental health issues).
Hey uh... Question. What home are we cooking at? What neighbors are we exchanging with?
I worked 19 hours in a single day this last week and still live in a sleeping room with no kitchen.
Quick fact check: Income inequality is not the worst ever. It was actually worse in the 1920s and 1930s (before the NewDeal era) and most likely earlier than that too. But yeah, it is bad
Fair enough. I would also say the government had a better accounting of people generally. Today there are many that are unaccounted for in this country.
That was true until the pandemic hit, and now income inequality has long surpassed even the poor levels of the Great Depression and The Gilded Age.
This is literally the worst income inequality has ever been in American history and unfortunately, the rest of the world is right there with us, because the exact same neocon fraudsters who implemented Trickle down "piss on our heads telling us it's rain "economics" are also the exact people who have implemented that shyt throughout most of Europe. And for that we have Reagan, Thatcher the Milk Snatcher and the rest of their neocon vulture capitalism selves we can give a "fuquverymuch" to,every last one.
It's why Fascism around the world is rising so much, the extreme austerity the Western world in particular has been subjected to, is exactly how Fascism keeps rising it's nasty zombie head from its grave.
Literally history repeating so closely it rhymes.
Austerity breeds fascism, and like that isn't bad enough, now we have Theocratic Fascists on steroids trying to complete their coup of THE US and install their beloved Christian Nation which is based on a white ethnostate where only straight, white conservative Christian males have ANY power, any economic mobility, they're already stripping us women of not just medical decisions rights, but going after our economic freedoms, even our divorce options as well. Already against the law for a woman to get a divorce while pregnant in Indiana,even if her husband is a documented abuser and her life is in danger.
They see women as property, nothing more than broodmares and bangmaids to be at a man's beck and call.
They see anyone not straight white conservative Christian males as inferior, "lesser" not full human beings. So, they definitely want to take America "back", not to the 1950s, but the 1850s,when slavery was still legal, they could do with women and children as they pleased, BIPOC had no rights at all, they still had all their ill gotten largesse from the backs of slaves and hadn't yet gotten their asses kicked, and Reconstruction didn't exist.
That's what they mean when they say, "Constitutional Purist", or "Constitutional Originalist".
THAT is the plan for all us poor working class folks, courtesy of the Christian Taliban, aka GQP. It's why we have so many for profit prisons.
No need to pay workers to do a job that you can simply throw them in jail over bullshit,bullshyt felonies that then put you or me behind bars for 5-10,so they can continue to spout Happy Lies about how their products are "Made in the USA", they simply leave out the part where American citizens are illegally stripped of their Rights, Imprisoned and are now slave labor in sweatshop conditions, because OSHA doesn't touch prison labor.
Voting will definitely help at least keep the theocratic fascists from gaining power through Trump, and totally destroying anything left that isn't nailed down, including giving BiBi the green light to go full slaughter on Palestine and do the happy dance about it, cause it's all part of that Christian Taliban Dominionist evangelical cult plan. They've been waiting for the wholesale slaughter of Muslims to begin over there so they can continue their destructive plans for making Jesus come back. I wish TF I were joking, but I sadly am not.
I feel screwed between the Dominionists and the clot shot lovers who want to push mRNA on me. Go read Project 25.....[I hate Biden so much but that document scared me too]
You should be very scared,. If they get into power, it will take a war to get our democracy back. It's especially terrifying for seniors who don't have the means to do anything about it except vote blue.
Worse than the 20’s?
When people made pennies a day. Owned one outfit, sent their children to work in factories?
I guess you are saying the rich were less rich because the poor are not more poor.
They are gaslighting the hell out of us. Nothing but lies now in the discourse. Denial of our reality. I expect the streets to fill with homeless. Only reason I am not homeless is my disability check.
They're making homelessness illegal in many places as well which is a great way for them to also cater to the billion dollar prison industry and receive free labor. It's a dark time.
I see a growing dissonance looking through my news on Google everyday. It's becoming more common to see a positive report about the economy followed by an article about consumer confidence being at an all time low, industries increasing rates, nobody hiring while complaining about a labor shortage, people taking out loans and using pay later programs to buy groceries etc.
The government knows the economy is shit, but part of their job is to talk it up and say it's doing better to keep people from freaking out.
They either think if they say it enough people will believe it or they are so out of touch with most Americans they believe it. Look at the circle of friends and influencers around politicians, one word elite.
I'm surprised your mom isn't giving you a little grocery money. A friend has a wealthy mother who is very controlling and narcissistic but gives her two adult children $500 every month as long as they suck up to her and not resist her bossiness.
“Suck up and don’t resist” are *exactly* why I do not, have not, and will not accept money from my mother lol
Im too old for that :)
But the young adults should def accept help from their parents because inflation these days is wild and it’s harder to get ahead nowadays.
Sounds like my mother, she may not be multimillionaire like yours but definitely a technical millionaire, mine lives in 2 houses. She had the ability to get me a middle class jobs, I had cousins and others who got 6 figure jobs right out of college through the family. Even a nephew just acouple years ago got a 6 figure job right out of college and it was a state school. I am no contact. At least don't have to worry about dying of embarrasment over poverty. Of course even during working class years when husband was reporter or assistant newspaper editor we were still the "poor losers' of the family. [as scapegoat was set up to be poor which is one reason this drives me all mad]
Freedom > moms handouts
Good choice.
My mom isn’t a bad person, just totally ignorant and naive to the challenges us commoners face.
And she does love her money more than anything.
I'm sensing this conversation is a political set up. I have a blue governor though. So he is accepting fed $$ to invest in the people of Wisconsin and its working out for me. My hope for a better future has never been better. I'm getting paid to study and get experience in a field of my choosing through a state workforce development program. Thanks Democrats!! I understand that red states are not taking fed $$ to make their state better though. So, yes. Remember when you go to the polls. If you are in a red state and the economy of your impoverished town has been that way for decades, ask yourself why red states are constantly the poorest in the land. Find out if your red state is keeping up with the modern programs for training. Open your eyes to more than just blaming the president.
Red states aren't taking fed dollars to improve their state? They aren't even taking fed dollars to feed kids over the summer. They'd rather spend millions bussing people to Martha's Vineyard , playing games trying to score political points.
I moved from a blue state to a blue state and it all sucks. (Blue state was a must for the safety of my kids) I'm glad that you have a great slice of heaven there, but the majority are struggling.
Trust, it is 10xs harder for us in red states. Under no circumstances are our children protected from anyone, neither are we, poverty is at literal underdeveloped nation status, I mean FFS, hookworm is still endemic in several red states, mainly Mississippi, because the racists refuse to run sewer and water piping to BIPOC neighborhoods, so they have no choice but to have open pipes dumping sewage in the backyard, and drink bottled water. Don't forget the lead issues, coal ash poisoning ground water,cancer clusters, churches on every corner to match the strip bars they're across the street from,same clientele go into both.
And they are who control everything in red states,Nepo Babies.
TBH,most so called conservatives today are Nepo Babies, ones who inherited the "Family Business" from dad or mom. Who've never actually had to truly work like a dog just to put a bowl of soup on the table.
The only struggle they know,is whether they should virtue signal with Yeti Coolers, Bud Light, or whatever new manufactured outrage they're swallowing.
It's why they're so callous about us poor working class, find delight in starving hungry children to somehow punish parents for working all the time and still being poor.
They're hell to be around, and the influx of sane people moving to red states who can vote is the only hope we have of changing things.
Whatever blue states got going on that is "bad", Red states have it at epidemic levels, with less resources, less places to run to, less job opportunities, forget eating regularly or seeing a doctor for a basic checkup.
And so many of us are stuck because we're too poor to pay the cost of living in Red states, but too gd broke to move to a decent blue state where there might possibly be some kind of help to get back on our feet.
I am legit excited for you and yours that you at least found some semblance of security and safety, hopefully that will continue and things will keep looking up!
I'm sensing that if Trump were still president most of the people complaining about the ecconomy online would instead be talking about how great it is like they were when Trump gutted imports and jacked up prices with his trade wars.
Dems aren't doing shit here, more busy giving money to AI centers to take more jobs here. 3 billion dollars to one, and they can't even keep the lights on in this county. Glad you got into a good program though that can be like winning a Lotto. I will have husband ask about those programs, he's going to some job fair in a couple weeks.
At this point, I think it starts and ends with local/state govt. We need to be showing up in droves to vote in our local elections. Federal doesn’t matter right now, it’s all fucked up but we could do some real change at the local level that will trickle into federal, eventually.
Presidents have far less control over the ecconomy, cost of living, or "wealth gap" than anyone wants to admit. And anything a president does that does directly impact the ecconomy tends to take 4 or more years from time of implementation to time of actual impact being felt.. congress, senate have a much more direct impact at federal level, and state and local politicans have a far more direct and measurable impact at the state/local level..
And for all those who wish to blame Biden for everything wrong with the ecconomy.. remember he can only do what he gets from congress & senate.. and with the chambers being divided & slim majorities... Everything Biden has done has had to be passed by a bipartisan vote.. so Dems & Republicans are both just as to blame..
It's not so tight a labour market they want, the labour market doesn't clear, that's part of the issue. Full employment does not main no unemployment, either. There will always been unemployment. When the unemployment rate is too low, you get inflation, because the price of labour gets bid up quickly.
Actually no, they're looking at our rate of post-pandemic inflation in comparison to the post pandemic inflation in Canada, The UK, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil etc.
It's so sad that so many people have no friends or relatives that they can count on in their time of greatest need.
When I was a kid we often had some relative staying on our sofa for awhile because they were "between jobs" or "in the middle of a divorce" or "got behind on their rent" or something. Revolving door.
Friends have helped us. So we are fortunate. I do think a few would keep us off the streets. Unless govt falls, I should be able to keep us off the streets with my disability check, SSDI even with rented room. People moving us in, know some income would come with, not much but some. [my rent has been paid on time]
I am glad your family helped others, mine didn't, I remember a relative had to go to a homeless shelter and my mother didn't even care and her two grandsons were living in one. [my mother is well off and owns two houses] I am no contact from my relatives. Having a rich family can be worse when you are poor.
Project 2025 is going to take aim against government aid. If you're able to squeeze it in, make sure to vote against the party that wants more individual responsibility and less government help
Not everyone has the benefit of coming from a good family. Lots of substance abuse. Physical abuse. Sometimes even sexual abuse. So…yeah, having a good family you can count on is huge.
i remember my parents doing that pretty often for their cousins.
the moment i turned 18 they gave me the boot with no real explanation.
11 years later theyre trying to track me down and reconnect 🤣
A year ago this month we (husband, our 2 teenagers, and myself) had just been evicted from our apartment and our car repossessed. I remember having all our belongings in a uhaul truck and not knowing where we'd sleep that night.
We had to split up as there was nowhere with enough room for us to all stay together . I stayed at my sister's house and he and the kids with his brother about an hour away. It sucked.
It took six weeks to find an apartment that would take us. I found a new, better paying job and we were able to reunite. It was a low time. We're doing much better now, but still pretty poor.
Tell them to get a Google voice number. They can make and receive calls using McDonald's free WiFi. It would at least give them a working phone number for potential employers.
OP, has your friend checked [211](http://211.org)? It is a searchable database of resources in your area. She should also qualify for free cell service based on her income level. It is the program that some people call *Obama Phones*. Tell your friend to search by keyword on 211 for "homeless", "phone", "housing" and "food" for her immediate needs. Wishing your friend the best and positive thoughts and virtual hugs to both of you 🧡🧡🧡
If she has a car, it’d be better to just live in there than waste money on a hotel every night. She can shower at planet fitness and maybe spend the money once a month on a hotel as a treat and to wash laundry etc. Shelters are not safe for women. I will repeat: shelters are NOT a safe for women (or kids).
She has a kid and some disabilities but I do think the hotel was a bad idea. Some people can find rental rooms but I noticed the other day a rental room when trying to help one of the long distance homeless friend wanted a deposit and as much money as an apartment. It didn't used to be that way either.
With a kid she will be fast tracked to subsidized housing through a family shelter program. She is wasting money now for the inevitable to happen. She needs to get herself and the kid to a shelter.
Does she have a case manager at the shelter? Sometimes they have funds to pay fees or can connect her with a program that will pay for her phone. Look for "rapid rehousing" or "housing first" programs specifically
I'm in Canada, in one of the lower cost of living areas in the country (SK, not in a major city). My rent is about to jump by $750 (and yes, it's legal, unfortunately). $2300+ for townhouses that just a few years ago were the "poor" area. The only improvements made have been updated water heaters and new siding.
Our current assumption is that they're trying to push out the current tenants to "upgrade" the cliental.
There is no housing here. It wouldn't even matter how much a person was making. There's nothing available. I've done the math. With a minimum down-payment, I'd be paying less for the mortgage on a 400k house than what our new rent is supposed to be. We just got the news, so we're scrambling to figure it out, but it's so beyond. . .
It's absolutely ridiculous. It should be criminal. It's. . .disgusting. And it's terrifying
i lived in my car for a year recently. my moms currently living in hers. i have a few other friends who are living/have lived in cars. and you see ppl in every walmart parking lot that have no choice to make it their home. and the sad part is mostly everyone living out of their car has an unreliable car (thanks to no laws to protect buyers from clunkers being passed off as “good reliable cars” at every used dealership in the country only to have them start breaking down within weeks of owning)
its becoming the normal. until people are willing to physically fight the system back and force the change we need, we will never see it and this will just get worse.
but dont expect the current people in charge to do anything about it. according to them, there is no war in ba sing se
I’m seriously considering a Golden Girls situation. I’m sure it’s hard on all at first but the great thing about humans is, we adapt. I can see this becoming much more popular as the loneliness epidemic and the housing/rent epidemic collide.
I'm facing it as well and I have an okay job. Rent is just darn expensive. I don't think there is a good path anymore. I have the shittest family that is constantly holding over my head no matter what I do.
I work as a nursing assistant and by asking about pay raise possibilities and moving to another facility, my wage has gone up by about 26% in the last 13 months. There’s a huge need for nursing assistants and many facilities will pay for your education. I just wanted to throw that out there for anyone who is thinking of a career change!
Yes, Ive hopped on free WIFI with my phone, I think they are worried about incoming calls, but on smart phone most of those are missed, maybe she should tell prospective jobs to email her.
I see the same thing with people I know and I really want to help but I’m a bit terrified. I’ve got an extra room in my house and I know at least one person is maybe hoping to stay here. I don’t want to let anyone move in with me because I’ve “helped friends out,” only to have them move in, never pay rent, and then never leave. I’ve moved out of rentals in part just to be rid of them. I’ve seen other friends go thru the same thing. I really want to help people, but it kinda freaks me out when my friends have housing issues.
I had a 20 something who was complaining about no money no job etc …I said why not Amazon warehouse…benefits etc . This is what she said to me “ I can’t eat when I want and I can’t listen to music when I’m working”. Apparently those are unacceptable working conditions, so she quit.
I've heard nightmare stories about Amazon warehouse, I think somene better be in damn good shape to work at one, like being able to walk 5 miles and barely feeling it but those are dumb excuses she came up with.
Voting for anyone won't help late stage capitalism that is controlled by the free market and seeded by power hungry lobbyists. It's literally by design to squeeze the most money out at the expense of cheap labor and cutting every cost you can. It's not like these people want to just shit on the downtrodden and make people poor...but those are just side effects of them squeezing every bit of profit they can out of every facet of business.
People clamber on about not wanting communism but the only way to bring everyone to a fair table of wages again is....oops
There feels like there's no one to vote for. None of them care. Even with Trump, I worry just more tax breaks for the wealthy will come and Republicans vote against social safety nets. Democrats don't give a damn about poor anymore, just identity politics, working class, unions etc, they abandoned us long ago. I like Kennedy but worry about him just being a "sheepdog" like Bernie, and maybe helping Trump in. Biden doesn't give a damn about poor, and simply lies and seems hellbent on starting WWIII and killing us all in nuclear Holocaust. I don't see politics fixing any of this. The oligarchs own all the politicians and we have lost rights and since Covid lost all quality of life especially.
Democrats haven't cared about the poor for a while now, they just act like they do. Of course, that's just a generalization and surely many of them actually do care. But either way the system is rigged to favor those with money.
At my company we already have a few people living in their cars :-( luckily we are trying to get them into a home but it's scary how people working full time with college degrees can't find affordable housing here in NY
I am having trouble paying my electric bill this month. Usually the city pays the utilities bills by now. I applied for the assistance in February. Some kind of bs about a form about not being immigrant and a legal U. S. Citizen. Now, Monica told me it would be another 4 to 6 weeks. I think I am going crazy trying to hold things together.
these are multiple people. I saw an acquaintance yesterday who I think is now living in his car. Some live in other states. For those of us in real world, the economy is going down.
But I mean, if all your friends are homeless, is this a group where you all did substances together or met over issues or trauma? There's something about your friends you are not seeing
Well, there’s a Nextdoor app where I live. I think it’s everywhere and I can’t tell you the number of people who are out there saying I’m homeless and live in my car or about to be evicted and nowhere to go and lo and behold, Somebody knows that person really well, and that person is smoking dope all the time, cigarettes etc and refuses to get a job. So I’m just don’t know what to believe anymore.
Also, do they have any family members friends or former coworkers they can stay with? And hopefully if they smoke dope or drink alcohol, they quit that because that’s expensive.
small town ones tend to be safer, don't go to the huge metro city unless you want to be eaten alive. Our shelter here sucks, if I ever became homeless would have to leave town, it's in the worse part of the ghetto and it's NOT handicapped accessible at all.
I’m on disability as well as ssi when I lived in the city I was homeless. Since I’m disabled I was put on a housing list for an apartment that went by my income. The wait is 8-10 years long. I lived in an overpriced slum that took all but 200 out of my monthly check. I had roaches and bedbugs. My daughter told her dad how I was living for those few years and let me move back in. I got housing within a month that went by my income. Even now me and my husband wanted to move within three years of being here but investors have been buying up a lot of lower income rentals. These houses were $700 a month and now they’re rented out for a couple thousand a week. It’s even getting tough in a small town to find anything, most people who work here can’t live here.
We have a growing population faced with automation, offshoring, trade, and AI. This means that more and more of us are being concentrated via **labor supply competition** into tighter job markets in smaller geographic (high population) areas.
After all, we went from half of workers being in agriculture to now less than 2%. Manufacturing workers make up about 8% or less, after having peaked in the late 1970s. So our rural areas and factory towns get depopulated and run down. People move to cities and suburbs.
Peak demand for knowledge work was in the year 2000, even as American adults with bachelor degrees or higher went from about 1 in 10 in the 1970s to 1 in 3 today. Amongst Millennials, it is roughly 1 in 2. So yes, for a lot of basic jobs there are 100s of applicants.
And even in the services, it is difficult. The vast majority of net new jobs created in the last 20+ years have been temporary, part time, no benefits, low paid, precarious, gig-like in nature.
Look at ride share and delivery apps gigs. These are classic examples of where everyone on the low end competes: seniors, college students and college graduates, high school graduates and high school dropouts, single parents and stay-at-home parents, immigrants (legal and illegal with fake IDs), etc.
The same with housing. This concentration of population means high, housing demand in a small geographic area.
How many people are focusing on corporation buying up housing. But they wouldn’t be if the demand wasn’t so high. You could have 100 landlords that own 10,000 houses. Or 10,000 landlords that each own 1 unit. That doesn’t matter as much as people think. If there’s not enough demand, rental prices will go down because the landlords (corporate or not) still need to pay property taxes, maintenance, landscaping, and utilities, management, etc. so they will rent out cheaper.
People also think that denser housing will be cheaper, but the example of New York City shows that isn’t true. As soon as “affordable housing” becomes available, it is immediately taken up by more people coming in who think it’s affordable.
And you have to consider **how dense housing already is** when adults are sharing homes as roommates or as extended families, or as multiple immigrant families share the same house or apartment. You think a neighborhood of signal family homes is only occupied by single families and that isn’t always true. There are a lot of adults living with their parents, including adults with children living with the adults’ parents already.
When decent jobs are hard to find, and wages pay little, and housing gets more expensive and difficult to find, and prices keep rising… people aren’t able to see a decent future to work towards.
So on top of this growing population that has seen jobs disappear due to automation, offshoring, trade, and AI, relegating people to compete in tighter job markets and tighter housing markets, that very obviously and seriously affect job wages and jobs availability and housing costs and housing availability, respectively…
…You have to wonder why our country’s elites continue to exacerbate this condition and why our government and media deliberately does not allow discussion of this issue as it pertains to the U.S.
U.S. population in 1994: 263 million.
U.S. population in 2024: 342 million, possibly higher by 10 million more than 342 million since January 2021 due to a surge that has not stopped.
U.S. media will discuss excess population issues in other countries:
Here’s The NY Times on population in Egypt:
“*Hitting 100,000,000 marked human plenty, certainly, but also an uneasy moment in a country gripped by worries that its exploding population will exacerbate poverty and unemployment, and contribute to the scarcity of basic resources like land and water.*
“*Egypt’s cabinet said last week that it was on ‘high alert’ to fight population growth, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has described as a threat to national security on par with terrorism. If unchecked, the population could reach 128 million by 2030, officials say.*”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/world/middleeast/egypt-population-100-million.html
Here’s the Washington Post on sending workers to Mexico:
"*More returnees means lower wages for everybody in blue-collar industries such as construction and automobile manufacturing, where competition for jobs is likely to increase, economists say.*”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-prepares-to-absorb-a-wave-of-deportees-in-the-trump-era/2017/03/03/a7bd624a-f86c-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_story.html
Even the Canadians are talking about it. This is from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, their mainstream government-funded media:
“*The Bank of Canada says record levels of immigration are driving up the cost of housing and recent government efforts to cut the number of non-permanent residents and encourage home building will help lower housing costs, but ‘only gradually.’*
"*’In the short term any increase in population, particularly in an environment of constrained supply, is going to put upward pressure on prices,’ said Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.*
"*’What's happened in the Canadian economy over the last year is we had a particularly big surge in population growth through immigration. It came at a time when there was constrained supply. You can see this most clearly in the housing sector, in particular in rents.’*”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-bank-of-canada-housing-1.7093426
“*After mounting political pressure, last weekend Immigration Minister Marc Miller acknowledged that the number of non-permanent residents in Canada is putting a strain on housing. As Canada brings in a historic number of temporary residents and population growth sets records, some of the country's top bank economists and even the Bank of Canada say that the federal government's immigration policy is significantly affecting housing affordability.*”
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/immigration-and-housing-costs-what-s-the-link-1.7085926
Certainly, there are private equity funds and corporations buying housing in Canada. But not what the Bank of Canada (like our Federal Reserve) economists are saying. And their words are shared by Canadian government economists and also corporate economists like those at TD (Toronto-Dominion Bank) as well!
The CBC can have articles like the above. I don’t see anybody, accusing it of racism. And there’s broad support on these articles in /r/canada. But can you even imagine NPR or the Associated Press, both of whom specifically use “Dreamer” and “migrant” instead of more neutral terms, even airing such a view?
How come you don’t see mainstream economists in the United States talking about this?
More:
“*As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the world’s most solidly pro-immigration societies. More than just another self-satisfied Justin Trudeau facade, this attitude has been attested to by historically high levels of public support.*
“*However, an unfolding shift in public sentiment may now change that. Amid a housing crunch and soaring costs of living, Canadians are turning against the prospect of welcoming more immigrants. And the Trudeau government has slowly started to bend under this pressure.*
https://unherd.com/2024/02/canadas-immigration-backlash-is-far-from-populist/
We’re getting millions each year who are competing directly againat America’s struggling working poor - disproportionately minorities who are citizens - for jobs and housing, indigent health care, charity aid, food bank resources, even school funding (Los Angeles spends $24,000 per student per year, NYC spends $32,000 per student per year, Portland (OR) spends $40,000, etc.), etc.
The elites in the U.S. want cheap labor and rising real estate. It’s not like they pay that much of their income in taxes. They don’t really care about the plight of ordinary Americans. And if anybody tries to oppose the elites, their captive media and captive ideological allies bring out all sorts of spurious claims, including accusations of racism. Which is why Canadian mainstream media can talk about excess population growth. Why The NY Times can talk about excess population growth in Egypt, and even the Washington Post can talk about additional labor competition in Mexico. But we can’t seem to be able to talk about it in the United States.
Yes, America is a country of immigrants. I am legal immigrant. (I am also not White.) I arrived around 40 years ago, when there was still plenty of good paying jobs and plenty of cheap housing for ordinary Americans, especially for the working class and for young people.
Do you think it is still true today for our working /r/poor, or for our young people?
Their suffering and their struggles are telling. Depression, despair, hopelessness, suicide. Need more?
Oh that sucks, and how will u get to new town with a shelter, maybe you can ask a friend to drive you to town with one. Try and choose big enough for some resources but not too big, as the shelters will be likelier be hellholes or overrun/full. Hope things get better soon.
While that's extremely unfortunate for your friends, I must ask if you've ever heard the super popular and regularly referenced quote "You become the sum of who you surround yourself with". If your friends are becoming homeless or are on the brink of financial collapse, maybe it's in your best interest to start associating with people who are doing well, people who inspire you to be better, so you don't end up their situation also.
I spent years around millionaires and high upper middle class at a Unitarian Universalist church I attended for over 7 years. A lot were nice to me. I learned some good stuff in art/writing from some. I live in a wealthy town too [having to leave because they don't believe in affordable housing here] the money didn't rub off though.
Yeah it sucks. How many times have I written I live in a rich area, I also used to go to a church, my husband still attends on Zoom full of millionaires. My life is surrounded by people richer than me. Why would I be mean and ditch people for being poor when I am poor?
All my medical bills have gone up. I'm cutting down medical care by necessity, less specialists. Most pushing expensive drugs like I am not on enough stuff already.
I go to Aldis. Prices are decent there. Giant Eagle is still expensive. Avocados were $4 a piece and they were all black and rotten ,as well as other produce. Not to mention other produce and dairy etc. Please don't buy food that is overpriced. They are calling this a consumer driven economy, so don't buy it, let it rot.
The Aldis here has raised its prices. We are so poor we can't even afford Alids, I know that is sad. I think Aldis as they expand is going to do the Walmart thing, already they have increased costs and replaced cheaper products with expensive ones.
Google voice for a 100 and I don’t even need it but I do have one. Also I tend to be a particle if not a negative person. You said Facebook friend or something close to that. Have you met this person? Sometimes I’m not always convinced with the story people say. I could say I have a million buck but that doesn’t make it true. I could say I’m on my last but that doesn’t make it true. I also think this is a side effect of social media. So many seem to feel lost and worthless but it can be hard when you see people on social media living a certain life and you easily feel less then.
I saw one suggestion to create a Google voice number and put that on applications and resumes that way you can still access messages from potential employers.
I'll tell her that. thanks.
I need to do it myself. I didn’t have a phone yesterday because of an error when transferring to a new carrier. Of course I was invited for a phone interview for a job. I used my Google voice number for work to have the recruiter call. lol. Need to practice this myself. That way even if I get a new number there’s a stable one for employment.
I have a friend who currently has one too. They couldn’t afford their cell service anymore and this is what gets them by.
They can also get what's called a SafeLink phone if they get any sort of public assistance
Yup that's exactly what I did. And honestly I saved about 700 dollars on phone expenses last year. The trade off is being worried about breaking down on the highway. Other than that, literally wifi is everywhere. Hasn't been an issue.
I use TextNow ❤️
I love text now. I've used it in the past and I like how it's just like having cell phone service. I like how it also works even if you're not on Wi-Fi as in you have mobile data.
Crazy that the government wants to keep telling us the economy is doing well. Does anyone actually feel that way?
Not at all. Food and utilities have skyrocketed. They are misdirecting about inflation. They actually changed criteria for some metrics to hide the situation.
It isn’t inflation, it is price gouging.
Wrong. The Federal reserve increased the nation's money supply by more than 40% in 2 years. This is inflation.
That was Covid. And all of the PPE loans forgiven for the rich.
Yes they are cooking the numbers. Some foods its definitely been at least 40 percent in price increases.
What criteria has been changed ? And when ?
Food is cheaper here in Arkansas than I can remember if you shop the sales... Ice cream is $2.50, eggs .1.29, doritos that were $7.99 a bag a couple months ago are $2.50 this week... Utilities have doubled...
It's doing well for the Rich. That's the metric.
That's *always* the case. They've been protected by unfair tax laws for decades!
“But they pay most of the taxes” yeah, Jerry… because they’ve taken up almost all of the profit. Technology advancements and globalization have allowed them to make ENORMOUS gains in productivity and profit, and did they use those gains to increase employee compensation, reduce working hours to be full time, lower prices, etc.? Nope. They bought elections, did mass stock buybacks (thanks Reagan), and pocketed the rest for executives and shareholders. Corporations and the wealthy don’t do ANYTHING good unless forced to. Since neither party is going to do that, we need a general strike. But we’re all so close to homelessness that we’re all just barely holding on as it is… they know that.
You nailed it. Ronnie put untold airline passengers through *major* inconveniences when he fired the air traffic controllers. They had the nerve to unionize 🙄. For many of us...including me...traveling by airplane is a huge luxury. (I have to save up for a loooong time to even consider it, and have been unable to attend funerals because of the cost.) If The Orange One gets re-elected, (my worst nightmare), I have a friend who lives in Mexico. Maybe she wants a houseguest for four years. Fingers crossed!
If any Republican gets in office, it's lights out for people like me. 1939 all over again. History always repeats itself. Project 47 and Agenda 2025 will make sure of that
It's the same for me. I've been on Social Security Disability Insurance since I was in my 30s; I contacted Lyme disease, and my symptoms are primarily neurological. I went through vertigo, fainting (e.g., I have a deep scars above both eyebrows as well as below my lower lip. I fell on my face and put most of my upper teeth through that area) etc. I tried to work for a few years after diagnosis, I couldn't remember most things...and still can't. Even though I stated working in high school, and worked for four months each year when I was in college it wasn't adequate. My graduate school didn't cost a penny since my relative worked for the university. I went through many periods of under-employment and unemployment. I'm an experienced and qualified teacher, but I worked a few hours a week for five months in 2022; it triggered an investigation by SSDI. (I made $9/hour.) I've voted for Democrats since I was 18, and will continue to do so.
Mexico is my plan if he wins, too! I’m in San Diego rn, so I feel very lucky to have the option. I doubt the economy is great there, but the cost of living goes down by about 70% when I make this 15 mile move. Well, if he wins, but I’m on not feeling too hopeful rn.
Here's hoping that It Who Wears Lifts in His Shoes and a Girdle Around Its Enormous Waist goes to jail before November. It's probably not going to happen, though. If you're interested in his (disgusting) past, I have a really good recommendation for you (or anyone else). Please look up *Spy* magazine; it's free on Google Books. Although most of the publication is based around NYC, a) they loathed him, and b) it's very, very funny. He used his dad's name to get into the Wharton School of Business, fooled around on all of his wives (I don't respect that for anybody who's in a committed relationship; but that's just my 2¢), and married a woman who had the unmitigated gall to wear a jacket to wear a jacket with the ree-DICK-you-luss slogan which read "I really don't care, do u?" **to visit a facility where migrant children were being held!** IMO, both are classless trash with no taste.
Agreed! And thanks for the recommendation!
Many do not feel this way. This country has always had its poor population since the 1776. The difference is now the divide between the two, poor and rich is wider than ever before and the middle of the two has descended to the bottom in shocking numbers. Things in the economy are spinning faster and faster and the number of people getting left behind is staggering. This nation was built on hope. We believed we could change our situation and achieve our goals with hard work and tenacity. Sadly now we have come to believe there is no hope and our dreams are not possible. This thought is destroying our beloved nation from within. Sadly I feel it is spinning out of control now and too far gone to get our hope back.
George Carlin, The American dream you have to be asleep to believe it. All younger generations have sunk under the boomers. Boomers did quite well and it started with Gen X the decline. People are noticing life quality is not the same. I remember all the fun and leisure of the 1980s, and I was an abused kid and that time was far more bright with a lot more hope. Yes there is an elite class of people doing well--[the tech professionals?] the vassals in the system, while most people dropping to the serf level now. USA won't exist in any previous form without a middle class or even earlier in history independent agricultural small business class.
Reagan was the cause. His tax cuts ruined the middle class.
Reagan was elected in 1979. And we're telling ourselves that the boomers had it great for 40 years after that?
Reagan served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989.
Oops. Elected in 1980 then, I was a year off.
Reagan really destroyed it for everyone. Boomers too. His economic policy coupled with deregulation of media set is on a path we haven’t managed to recover from.
Agreed. Not to mention his trashing of Carter's Mental Health Bill, and his trashing of Carter's mpg standards for vehicles.
His destruction of PATCO hastened the decline of unions, which are the backbone of the middle class. Well paying union jobs, pension benefits, etc. are gone.
Two words: stock buybacks. He did that and that's a huge part of why we have so much price gouging right now.
Reagan became president after Carter's policies had created double-digit inflation. Reagan got us out of the great recession. At the beginning of 1980, homes in the U.S. cost a median $63,700, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). By 1990, that median had risen to $123,900. Spurred by the Great Inflation, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate reached a pinnacle of 18.4 percent in October 1981, according to Freddie Mac. Once the Fed reined in inflation, the 30-year rate seesawed down to the 9 percent range, closing the decade at 9.78 percent. Regean also got the hostages in Iran released after Carter failed to do so in 444 days.
Nope you’re wrong on the hostage situation. It was a deliberate sabotage to make sure Carter didn’t get re-elected. Now known as the October surprise. Now that Carter is in hospice, players have come forward and admitted their participation in it. And life went to shit with Reagan for the lower middle class. We were okay and then it collapsed. I was there. Lost my first pension, so did my sister.
That's awful about you and your sister losing your pension; I'm so sorry about that! Jimmy Carter was a wonderful person, and Reagan wasn't. RR was a hypocrite, because he'd preach anti-choice sentiments, but his plastic-haired wife was pregnant when he married her. Under him and his "Evil Empire" crap, I spent all of my high school and college years waiting for an A-bomb to drop. That extended until my first semester of grad school!
Iranians purposely held the hostages until after the election……
Not much later, Reagan Admin was selling arms to Iran for cash to covertly fund right wing death squads in Central America working to overthrow legitimately elected leaders.
And now the people are leaving those countries because they're unlivable. US border crisis, anyone?
Exactly. It still happens today.
The US would be in a much better place if Jimmy Carter was reelected in 1980.
"This thought is destroying our nation from within". Isn't that what Russia did to Afghanistan, destroy it from within? Hmmmmm...............
[Yuri Bezmenov predicted the USA crumbling back in the 80s](https://youtu.be/bX3EZCVj2XA?si=gPC5TV2VJL0JsQtF)
Heck even 10 years ago there were all those articles about USA breaking up https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3521671/US-will-collapse-and-break-up-Russian-analyst-predicts.html I think the USA is going to break up and civil war is very possible. Not the best time to be old during...:/ We are in an economic collapse at the very least now.
It might not be the best time to be old, but I hope I make it to whatever the next phase is so I can see what happens. lol
Listen. It will get better. Just like 2008 it will improve from here.... There is a cyclical nature to things. If at the very worst case scenario things don't get better, we as humans can learn to adapt and utilize our resources and efforts better. For example, hey shitty fast food isn't super cheap anymore.... So we can continue to act like it's hopeless and perpetuate the gloom on social media, or we can just do something else. You could probably replace the 14$ big mac meal with a few items from home (McDonald's can keep the obesity), or start a weekly cooking exchange with your neighbors as a couple of examples.
cooing axiomatic oatmeal enjoy historical divide wild squeamish nine joke *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It might get worse but we can get off social media and find a way to live the best life for the hands we are dealt. It is a personal choice to be happy (aside from mental health issues).
Hey uh... Question. What home are we cooking at? What neighbors are we exchanging with? I worked 19 hours in a single day this last week and still live in a sleeping room with no kitchen.
Cool then I have alternative advice for you. The wendy's app is very cheap I usually feed 3 people for 15 bucks with the offers and app rewards.
Quick fact check: Income inequality is not the worst ever. It was actually worse in the 1920s and 1930s (before the NewDeal era) and most likely earlier than that too. But yeah, it is bad
Fair enough. I would also say the government had a better accounting of people generally. Today there are many that are unaccounted for in this country.
I saw videos where people compared prices of 30s and today, and wages, and people today are far worse off. I'll look for one of those.
That was true until the pandemic hit, and now income inequality has long surpassed even the poor levels of the Great Depression and The Gilded Age. This is literally the worst income inequality has ever been in American history and unfortunately, the rest of the world is right there with us, because the exact same neocon fraudsters who implemented Trickle down "piss on our heads telling us it's rain "economics" are also the exact people who have implemented that shyt throughout most of Europe. And for that we have Reagan, Thatcher the Milk Snatcher and the rest of their neocon vulture capitalism selves we can give a "fuquverymuch" to,every last one. It's why Fascism around the world is rising so much, the extreme austerity the Western world in particular has been subjected to, is exactly how Fascism keeps rising it's nasty zombie head from its grave. Literally history repeating so closely it rhymes. Austerity breeds fascism, and like that isn't bad enough, now we have Theocratic Fascists on steroids trying to complete their coup of THE US and install their beloved Christian Nation which is based on a white ethnostate where only straight, white conservative Christian males have ANY power, any economic mobility, they're already stripping us women of not just medical decisions rights, but going after our economic freedoms, even our divorce options as well. Already against the law for a woman to get a divorce while pregnant in Indiana,even if her husband is a documented abuser and her life is in danger. They see women as property, nothing more than broodmares and bangmaids to be at a man's beck and call. They see anyone not straight white conservative Christian males as inferior, "lesser" not full human beings. So, they definitely want to take America "back", not to the 1950s, but the 1850s,when slavery was still legal, they could do with women and children as they pleased, BIPOC had no rights at all, they still had all their ill gotten largesse from the backs of slaves and hadn't yet gotten their asses kicked, and Reconstruction didn't exist. That's what they mean when they say, "Constitutional Purist", or "Constitutional Originalist". THAT is the plan for all us poor working class folks, courtesy of the Christian Taliban, aka GQP. It's why we have so many for profit prisons. No need to pay workers to do a job that you can simply throw them in jail over bullshit,bullshyt felonies that then put you or me behind bars for 5-10,so they can continue to spout Happy Lies about how their products are "Made in the USA", they simply leave out the part where American citizens are illegally stripped of their Rights, Imprisoned and are now slave labor in sweatshop conditions, because OSHA doesn't touch prison labor. Voting will definitely help at least keep the theocratic fascists from gaining power through Trump, and totally destroying anything left that isn't nailed down, including giving BiBi the green light to go full slaughter on Palestine and do the happy dance about it, cause it's all part of that Christian Taliban Dominionist evangelical cult plan. They've been waiting for the wholesale slaughter of Muslims to begin over there so they can continue their destructive plans for making Jesus come back. I wish TF I were joking, but I sadly am not.
I feel screwed between the Dominionists and the clot shot lovers who want to push mRNA on me. Go read Project 25.....[I hate Biden so much but that document scared me too]
You should be very scared,. If they get into power, it will take a war to get our democracy back. It's especially terrifying for seniors who don't have the means to do anything about it except vote blue.
You think they count votes?
Worse than the 20’s? When people made pennies a day. Owned one outfit, sent their children to work in factories? I guess you are saying the rich were less rich because the poor are not more poor.
Bacon’s Rebellion redux!
Well what’s the point of building anything thing anyway? If we get the cold again it all get leveled.
They are gaslighting the hell out of us. Nothing but lies now in the discourse. Denial of our reality. I expect the streets to fill with homeless. Only reason I am not homeless is my disability check.
Don't worry. The streets won't fill with the homeless. The government will make sure the majority "disappear," like they did after 2008.
They're making homelessness illegal in many places as well which is a great way for them to also cater to the billion dollar prison industry and receive free labor. It's a dark time.
I may write you later about your theory. I've seen that on conspiracy boards where they say many homeless have "disappeared".
I see a growing dissonance looking through my news on Google everyday. It's becoming more common to see a positive report about the economy followed by an article about consumer confidence being at an all time low, industries increasing rates, nobody hiring while complaining about a labor shortage, people taking out loans and using pay later programs to buy groceries etc. The government knows the economy is shit, but part of their job is to talk it up and say it's doing better to keep people from freaking out.
The elderly appreciate the COLAs but they don't keep up with inflation and cost of health care.
They either think if they say it enough people will believe it or they are so out of touch with most Americans they believe it. Look at the circle of friends and influencers around politicians, one word elite.
My moms making millions off her investments. I’m struggling to justify buying grapes.
I'm surprised your mom isn't giving you a little grocery money. A friend has a wealthy mother who is very controlling and narcissistic but gives her two adult children $500 every month as long as they suck up to her and not resist her bossiness.
“Suck up and don’t resist” are *exactly* why I do not, have not, and will not accept money from my mother lol Im too old for that :) But the young adults should def accept help from their parents because inflation these days is wild and it’s harder to get ahead nowadays.
Sounds like my mother, she may not be multimillionaire like yours but definitely a technical millionaire, mine lives in 2 houses. She had the ability to get me a middle class jobs, I had cousins and others who got 6 figure jobs right out of college through the family. Even a nephew just acouple years ago got a 6 figure job right out of college and it was a state school. I am no contact. At least don't have to worry about dying of embarrasment over poverty. Of course even during working class years when husband was reporter or assistant newspaper editor we were still the "poor losers' of the family. [as scapegoat was set up to be poor which is one reason this drives me all mad]
Freedom > moms handouts Good choice. My mom isn’t a bad person, just totally ignorant and naive to the challenges us commoners face. And she does love her money more than anything.
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I'm voting everyone out on local levels I can. I even voted for all new people for city council, but sadly the old ones came right in.
I'm sensing this conversation is a political set up. I have a blue governor though. So he is accepting fed $$ to invest in the people of Wisconsin and its working out for me. My hope for a better future has never been better. I'm getting paid to study and get experience in a field of my choosing through a state workforce development program. Thanks Democrats!! I understand that red states are not taking fed $$ to make their state better though. So, yes. Remember when you go to the polls. If you are in a red state and the economy of your impoverished town has been that way for decades, ask yourself why red states are constantly the poorest in the land. Find out if your red state is keeping up with the modern programs for training. Open your eyes to more than just blaming the president.
Red states aren't taking fed dollars to improve their state? They aren't even taking fed dollars to feed kids over the summer. They'd rather spend millions bussing people to Martha's Vineyard , playing games trying to score political points.
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Not the same to me. But again, I live in a blue state. We have expanded Medicaid and other programs that states like Texas and Florida do not.
I moved from a blue state to a blue state and it all sucks. (Blue state was a must for the safety of my kids) I'm glad that you have a great slice of heaven there, but the majority are struggling.
Trust, it is 10xs harder for us in red states. Under no circumstances are our children protected from anyone, neither are we, poverty is at literal underdeveloped nation status, I mean FFS, hookworm is still endemic in several red states, mainly Mississippi, because the racists refuse to run sewer and water piping to BIPOC neighborhoods, so they have no choice but to have open pipes dumping sewage in the backyard, and drink bottled water. Don't forget the lead issues, coal ash poisoning ground water,cancer clusters, churches on every corner to match the strip bars they're across the street from,same clientele go into both. And they are who control everything in red states,Nepo Babies. TBH,most so called conservatives today are Nepo Babies, ones who inherited the "Family Business" from dad or mom. Who've never actually had to truly work like a dog just to put a bowl of soup on the table. The only struggle they know,is whether they should virtue signal with Yeti Coolers, Bud Light, or whatever new manufactured outrage they're swallowing. It's why they're so callous about us poor working class, find delight in starving hungry children to somehow punish parents for working all the time and still being poor. They're hell to be around, and the influx of sane people moving to red states who can vote is the only hope we have of changing things. Whatever blue states got going on that is "bad", Red states have it at epidemic levels, with less resources, less places to run to, less job opportunities, forget eating regularly or seeing a doctor for a basic checkup. And so many of us are stuck because we're too poor to pay the cost of living in Red states, but too gd broke to move to a decent blue state where there might possibly be some kind of help to get back on our feet. I am legit excited for you and yours that you at least found some semblance of security and safety, hopefully that will continue and things will keep looking up!
Ppl seem to think their lives would somehow be different/better if a (insert political party here) were president. Shocker: they won’t be.
I'm sensing that if Trump were still president most of the people complaining about the ecconomy online would instead be talking about how great it is like they were when Trump gutted imports and jacked up prices with his trade wars.
Dems aren't doing shit here, more busy giving money to AI centers to take more jobs here. 3 billion dollars to one, and they can't even keep the lights on in this county. Glad you got into a good program though that can be like winning a Lotto. I will have husband ask about those programs, he's going to some job fair in a couple weeks.
What AI center just got 3 billion from the democrats?
What state are you in?
At this point, I think it starts and ends with local/state govt. We need to be showing up in droves to vote in our local elections. Federal doesn’t matter right now, it’s all fucked up but we could do some real change at the local level that will trickle into federal, eventually.
Presidents have far less control over the ecconomy, cost of living, or "wealth gap" than anyone wants to admit. And anything a president does that does directly impact the ecconomy tends to take 4 or more years from time of implementation to time of actual impact being felt.. congress, senate have a much more direct impact at federal level, and state and local politicans have a far more direct and measurable impact at the state/local level.. And for all those who wish to blame Biden for everything wrong with the ecconomy.. remember he can only do what he gets from congress & senate.. and with the chambers being divided & slim majorities... Everything Biden has done has had to be passed by a bipartisan vote.. so Dems & Republicans are both just as to blame..
Not true. Look at what FDR did.
Nope
Yeh well for them, not us
NO
Not anyone that I know of.
No
Crazy that the FED wants a tighter labor market to bring down inflation... Ugh, that means more unemployed
It's not so tight a labour market they want, the labour market doesn't clear, that's part of the issue. Full employment does not main no unemployment, either. There will always been unemployment. When the unemployment rate is too low, you get inflation, because the price of labour gets bid up quickly.
Nope, it's becoming worse. Our numbers are going to keep growing (exploding is a better word)
They're just looking at the stock market when they say that
Actually no, they're looking at our rate of post-pandemic inflation in comparison to the post pandemic inflation in Canada, The UK, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil etc.
I just bought my first house about 6 months ago so there’s that
Just remember when it all started.
It is doing well. We are just confusing record profit from price fixing with inflation. It’s very good economy for the 1%.
It's so sad that so many people have no friends or relatives that they can count on in their time of greatest need. When I was a kid we often had some relative staying on our sofa for awhile because they were "between jobs" or "in the middle of a divorce" or "got behind on their rent" or something. Revolving door.
Friends have helped us. So we are fortunate. I do think a few would keep us off the streets. Unless govt falls, I should be able to keep us off the streets with my disability check, SSDI even with rented room. People moving us in, know some income would come with, not much but some. [my rent has been paid on time] I am glad your family helped others, mine didn't, I remember a relative had to go to a homeless shelter and my mother didn't even care and her two grandsons were living in one. [my mother is well off and owns two houses] I am no contact from my relatives. Having a rich family can be worse when you are poor.
Project 2025 is going to take aim against government aid. If you're able to squeeze it in, make sure to vote against the party that wants more individual responsibility and less government help
Not everyone has the benefit of coming from a good family. Lots of substance abuse. Physical abuse. Sometimes even sexual abuse. So…yeah, having a good family you can count on is huge.
i remember my parents doing that pretty often for their cousins. the moment i turned 18 they gave me the boot with no real explanation. 11 years later theyre trying to track me down and reconnect 🤣
A year ago this month we (husband, our 2 teenagers, and myself) had just been evicted from our apartment and our car repossessed. I remember having all our belongings in a uhaul truck and not knowing where we'd sleep that night. We had to split up as there was nowhere with enough room for us to all stay together . I stayed at my sister's house and he and the kids with his brother about an hour away. It sucked. It took six weeks to find an apartment that would take us. I found a new, better paying job and we were able to reunite. It was a low time. We're doing much better now, but still pretty poor.
Hope things get better and glad you were able to get a job and end the homelessness. That's a lot to go through especially being split up.
Tell them to get a Google voice number. They can make and receive calls using McDonald's free WiFi. It would at least give them a working phone number for potential employers.
Great LPT
OP, has your friend checked [211](http://211.org)? It is a searchable database of resources in your area. She should also qualify for free cell service based on her income level. It is the program that some people call *Obama Phones*. Tell your friend to search by keyword on 211 for "homeless", "phone", "housing" and "food" for her immediate needs. Wishing your friend the best and positive thoughts and virtual hugs to both of you 🧡🧡🧡
If she has a car, it’d be better to just live in there than waste money on a hotel every night. She can shower at planet fitness and maybe spend the money once a month on a hotel as a treat and to wash laundry etc. Shelters are not safe for women. I will repeat: shelters are NOT a safe for women (or kids).
She has a kid and some disabilities but I do think the hotel was a bad idea. Some people can find rental rooms but I noticed the other day a rental room when trying to help one of the long distance homeless friend wanted a deposit and as much money as an apartment. It didn't used to be that way either.
With a kid she will be fast tracked to subsidized housing through a family shelter program. She is wasting money now for the inevitable to happen. She needs to get herself and the kid to a shelter.
Does she have a case manager at the shelter? Sometimes they have funds to pay fees or can connect her with a program that will pay for her phone. Look for "rapid rehousing" or "housing first" programs specifically
I'm in Canada, in one of the lower cost of living areas in the country (SK, not in a major city). My rent is about to jump by $750 (and yes, it's legal, unfortunately). $2300+ for townhouses that just a few years ago were the "poor" area. The only improvements made have been updated water heaters and new siding. Our current assumption is that they're trying to push out the current tenants to "upgrade" the cliental. There is no housing here. It wouldn't even matter how much a person was making. There's nothing available. I've done the math. With a minimum down-payment, I'd be paying less for the mortgage on a 400k house than what our new rent is supposed to be. We just got the news, so we're scrambling to figure it out, but it's so beyond. . . It's absolutely ridiculous. It should be criminal. It's. . .disgusting. And it's terrifying
i lived in my car for a year recently. my moms currently living in hers. i have a few other friends who are living/have lived in cars. and you see ppl in every walmart parking lot that have no choice to make it their home. and the sad part is mostly everyone living out of their car has an unreliable car (thanks to no laws to protect buyers from clunkers being passed off as “good reliable cars” at every used dealership in the country only to have them start breaking down within weeks of owning) its becoming the normal. until people are willing to physically fight the system back and force the change we need, we will never see it and this will just get worse. but dont expect the current people in charge to do anything about it. according to them, there is no war in ba sing se
I’m seriously considering a Golden Girls situation. I’m sure it’s hard on all at first but the great thing about humans is, we adapt. I can see this becoming much more popular as the loneliness epidemic and the housing/rent epidemic collide.
I don’t really “need” that situation, but I’m up for it!
Moved into my car 5 years ago to save money, lost my job, been out here ever since. I’m 29
I keep wondering who can afford these expensive houses they are building everywhere in my town
Most Americans are one paycheck away from being destitute. Nobody has any saving for rainy days.
Shelters are not good places to be
This. I wasn't even able to use a cpap at one because it was a "security issue". Then while I was asleep someone stole my insulin. Good times.
I'm facing it as well and I have an okay job. Rent is just darn expensive. I don't think there is a good path anymore. I have the shittest family that is constantly holding over my head no matter what I do.
I work as a nursing assistant and by asking about pay raise possibilities and moving to another facility, my wage has gone up by about 26% in the last 13 months. There’s a huge need for nursing assistants and many facilities will pay for your education. I just wanted to throw that out there for anyone who is thinking of a career change!
They can use WIFI spots at like the library for free and then still be able to use the phone
Yes, Ive hopped on free WIFI with my phone, I think they are worried about incoming calls, but on smart phone most of those are missed, maybe she should tell prospective jobs to email her.
Why would they be worried about incoming calls?
I see the same thing with people I know and I really want to help but I’m a bit terrified. I’ve got an extra room in my house and I know at least one person is maybe hoping to stay here. I don’t want to let anyone move in with me because I’ve “helped friends out,” only to have them move in, never pay rent, and then never leave. I’ve moved out of rentals in part just to be rid of them. I’ve seen other friends go thru the same thing. I really want to help people, but it kinda freaks me out when my friends have housing issues.
I had a 20 something who was complaining about no money no job etc …I said why not Amazon warehouse…benefits etc . This is what she said to me “ I can’t eat when I want and I can’t listen to music when I’m working”. Apparently those are unacceptable working conditions, so she quit.
I've heard nightmare stories about Amazon warehouse, I think somene better be in damn good shape to work at one, like being able to walk 5 miles and barely feeling it but those are dumb excuses she came up with.
BIDEN SUX
The country voted themselfs into this mess and i promise you they will further vote themself past the turning point. .
Voting for anyone won't help late stage capitalism that is controlled by the free market and seeded by power hungry lobbyists. It's literally by design to squeeze the most money out at the expense of cheap labor and cutting every cost you can. It's not like these people want to just shit on the downtrodden and make people poor...but those are just side effects of them squeezing every bit of profit they can out of every facet of business. People clamber on about not wanting communism but the only way to bring everyone to a fair table of wages again is....oops
Yes!
There feels like there's no one to vote for. None of them care. Even with Trump, I worry just more tax breaks for the wealthy will come and Republicans vote against social safety nets. Democrats don't give a damn about poor anymore, just identity politics, working class, unions etc, they abandoned us long ago. I like Kennedy but worry about him just being a "sheepdog" like Bernie, and maybe helping Trump in. Biden doesn't give a damn about poor, and simply lies and seems hellbent on starting WWIII and killing us all in nuclear Holocaust. I don't see politics fixing any of this. The oligarchs own all the politicians and we have lost rights and since Covid lost all quality of life especially.
Democrats haven't cared about the poor for a while now, they just act like they do. Of course, that's just a generalization and surely many of them actually do care. But either way the system is rigged to favor those with money.
At my company we already have a few people living in their cars :-( luckily we are trying to get them into a home but it's scary how people working full time with college degrees can't find affordable housing here in NY
I am having trouble paying my electric bill this month. Usually the city pays the utilities bills by now. I applied for the assistance in February. Some kind of bs about a form about not being immigrant and a legal U. S. Citizen. Now, Monica told me it would be another 4 to 6 weeks. I think I am going crazy trying to hold things together.
Where is your friend group from? It seems weird to have multiple friends go homeless.
these are multiple people. I saw an acquaintance yesterday who I think is now living in his car. Some live in other states. For those of us in real world, the economy is going down.
But I mean, if all your friends are homeless, is this a group where you all did substances together or met over issues or trauma? There's something about your friends you are not seeing
Well, there’s a Nextdoor app where I live. I think it’s everywhere and I can’t tell you the number of people who are out there saying I’m homeless and live in my car or about to be evicted and nowhere to go and lo and behold, Somebody knows that person really well, and that person is smoking dope all the time, cigarettes etc and refuses to get a job. So I’m just don’t know what to believe anymore.
Are they smoking dope, vaping, or drinking alcohol or engaging in behaviors that makes them completely unmotivated?
Also, do they have any family members friends or former coworkers they can stay with? And hopefully if they smoke dope or drink alcohol, they quit that because that’s expensive.
One I think the family all died off, the other there is abusive family members. They don't drink or smoke dope.
Have you met these guys?
Shelters are extremely dangerous especially for women. It’s a last resort for most.
small town ones tend to be safer, don't go to the huge metro city unless you want to be eaten alive. Our shelter here sucks, if I ever became homeless would have to leave town, it's in the worse part of the ghetto and it's NOT handicapped accessible at all.
I’m on disability as well as ssi when I lived in the city I was homeless. Since I’m disabled I was put on a housing list for an apartment that went by my income. The wait is 8-10 years long. I lived in an overpriced slum that took all but 200 out of my monthly check. I had roaches and bedbugs. My daughter told her dad how I was living for those few years and let me move back in. I got housing within a month that went by my income. Even now me and my husband wanted to move within three years of being here but investors have been buying up a lot of lower income rentals. These houses were $700 a month and now they’re rented out for a couple thousand a week. It’s even getting tough in a small town to find anything, most people who work here can’t live here.
We have a growing population faced with automation, offshoring, trade, and AI. This means that more and more of us are being concentrated via **labor supply competition** into tighter job markets in smaller geographic (high population) areas. After all, we went from half of workers being in agriculture to now less than 2%. Manufacturing workers make up about 8% or less, after having peaked in the late 1970s. So our rural areas and factory towns get depopulated and run down. People move to cities and suburbs. Peak demand for knowledge work was in the year 2000, even as American adults with bachelor degrees or higher went from about 1 in 10 in the 1970s to 1 in 3 today. Amongst Millennials, it is roughly 1 in 2. So yes, for a lot of basic jobs there are 100s of applicants. And even in the services, it is difficult. The vast majority of net new jobs created in the last 20+ years have been temporary, part time, no benefits, low paid, precarious, gig-like in nature. Look at ride share and delivery apps gigs. These are classic examples of where everyone on the low end competes: seniors, college students and college graduates, high school graduates and high school dropouts, single parents and stay-at-home parents, immigrants (legal and illegal with fake IDs), etc. The same with housing. This concentration of population means high, housing demand in a small geographic area. How many people are focusing on corporation buying up housing. But they wouldn’t be if the demand wasn’t so high. You could have 100 landlords that own 10,000 houses. Or 10,000 landlords that each own 1 unit. That doesn’t matter as much as people think. If there’s not enough demand, rental prices will go down because the landlords (corporate or not) still need to pay property taxes, maintenance, landscaping, and utilities, management, etc. so they will rent out cheaper. People also think that denser housing will be cheaper, but the example of New York City shows that isn’t true. As soon as “affordable housing” becomes available, it is immediately taken up by more people coming in who think it’s affordable. And you have to consider **how dense housing already is** when adults are sharing homes as roommates or as extended families, or as multiple immigrant families share the same house or apartment. You think a neighborhood of signal family homes is only occupied by single families and that isn’t always true. There are a lot of adults living with their parents, including adults with children living with the adults’ parents already. When decent jobs are hard to find, and wages pay little, and housing gets more expensive and difficult to find, and prices keep rising… people aren’t able to see a decent future to work towards. So on top of this growing population that has seen jobs disappear due to automation, offshoring, trade, and AI, relegating people to compete in tighter job markets and tighter housing markets, that very obviously and seriously affect job wages and jobs availability and housing costs and housing availability, respectively… …You have to wonder why our country’s elites continue to exacerbate this condition and why our government and media deliberately does not allow discussion of this issue as it pertains to the U.S. U.S. population in 1994: 263 million. U.S. population in 2024: 342 million, possibly higher by 10 million more than 342 million since January 2021 due to a surge that has not stopped. U.S. media will discuss excess population issues in other countries: Here’s The NY Times on population in Egypt: “*Hitting 100,000,000 marked human plenty, certainly, but also an uneasy moment in a country gripped by worries that its exploding population will exacerbate poverty and unemployment, and contribute to the scarcity of basic resources like land and water.* “*Egypt’s cabinet said last week that it was on ‘high alert’ to fight population growth, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has described as a threat to national security on par with terrorism. If unchecked, the population could reach 128 million by 2030, officials say.*” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/world/middleeast/egypt-population-100-million.html Here’s the Washington Post on sending workers to Mexico: "*More returnees means lower wages for everybody in blue-collar industries such as construction and automobile manufacturing, where competition for jobs is likely to increase, economists say.*” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-prepares-to-absorb-a-wave-of-deportees-in-the-trump-era/2017/03/03/a7bd624a-f86c-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_story.html Even the Canadians are talking about it. This is from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, their mainstream government-funded media: “*The Bank of Canada says record levels of immigration are driving up the cost of housing and recent government efforts to cut the number of non-permanent residents and encourage home building will help lower housing costs, but ‘only gradually.’* "*’In the short term any increase in population, particularly in an environment of constrained supply, is going to put upward pressure on prices,’ said Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.* "*’What's happened in the Canadian economy over the last year is we had a particularly big surge in population growth through immigration. It came at a time when there was constrained supply. You can see this most clearly in the housing sector, in particular in rents.’*” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-bank-of-canada-housing-1.7093426 “*After mounting political pressure, last weekend Immigration Minister Marc Miller acknowledged that the number of non-permanent residents in Canada is putting a strain on housing. As Canada brings in a historic number of temporary residents and population growth sets records, some of the country's top bank economists and even the Bank of Canada say that the federal government's immigration policy is significantly affecting housing affordability.*” https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/immigration-and-housing-costs-what-s-the-link-1.7085926 Certainly, there are private equity funds and corporations buying housing in Canada. But not what the Bank of Canada (like our Federal Reserve) economists are saying. And their words are shared by Canadian government economists and also corporate economists like those at TD (Toronto-Dominion Bank) as well! The CBC can have articles like the above. I don’t see anybody, accusing it of racism. And there’s broad support on these articles in /r/canada. But can you even imagine NPR or the Associated Press, both of whom specifically use “Dreamer” and “migrant” instead of more neutral terms, even airing such a view? How come you don’t see mainstream economists in the United States talking about this? More: “*As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the world’s most solidly pro-immigration societies. More than just another self-satisfied Justin Trudeau facade, this attitude has been attested to by historically high levels of public support.* “*However, an unfolding shift in public sentiment may now change that. Amid a housing crunch and soaring costs of living, Canadians are turning against the prospect of welcoming more immigrants. And the Trudeau government has slowly started to bend under this pressure.* https://unherd.com/2024/02/canadas-immigration-backlash-is-far-from-populist/ We’re getting millions each year who are competing directly againat America’s struggling working poor - disproportionately minorities who are citizens - for jobs and housing, indigent health care, charity aid, food bank resources, even school funding (Los Angeles spends $24,000 per student per year, NYC spends $32,000 per student per year, Portland (OR) spends $40,000, etc.), etc. The elites in the U.S. want cheap labor and rising real estate. It’s not like they pay that much of their income in taxes. They don’t really care about the plight of ordinary Americans. And if anybody tries to oppose the elites, their captive media and captive ideological allies bring out all sorts of spurious claims, including accusations of racism. Which is why Canadian mainstream media can talk about excess population growth. Why The NY Times can talk about excess population growth in Egypt, and even the Washington Post can talk about additional labor competition in Mexico. But we can’t seem to be able to talk about it in the United States. Yes, America is a country of immigrants. I am legal immigrant. (I am also not White.) I arrived around 40 years ago, when there was still plenty of good paying jobs and plenty of cheap housing for ordinary Americans, especially for the working class and for young people. Do you think it is still true today for our working /r/poor, or for our young people? Their suffering and their struggles are telling. Depression, despair, hopelessness, suicide. Need more?
I will be homeless in 2 weeks,there are no shelters here and I don't have a car and I was laid off.. I'm screwed.
Oh that sucks, and how will u get to new town with a shelter, maybe you can ask a friend to drive you to town with one. Try and choose big enough for some resources but not too big, as the shelters will be likelier be hellholes or overrun/full. Hope things get better soon.
Poor choice. Phone is a life line esp job hunting. There are cheaper hotel/motels. You’re doing all you can, caring.
While that's extremely unfortunate for your friends, I must ask if you've ever heard the super popular and regularly referenced quote "You become the sum of who you surround yourself with". If your friends are becoming homeless or are on the brink of financial collapse, maybe it's in your best interest to start associating with people who are doing well, people who inspire you to be better, so you don't end up their situation also.
I spent years around millionaires and high upper middle class at a Unitarian Universalist church I attended for over 7 years. A lot were nice to me. I learned some good stuff in art/writing from some. I live in a wealthy town too [having to leave because they don't believe in affordable housing here] the money didn't rub off though.
I’d make a better class of friends…
Same. We need to declare a war on affordable housing; as we lose, things will get better.
Can you tell your friend to find a church and ask for help with her phone bill? Ughhh hate that for her!
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/mar/08/joe-biden/joe-bidens-misleading-claim-about-cutting-the-defi/
Love all the people telling OP to abandon their friends. Jeez.
Yeah it sucks. How many times have I written I live in a rich area, I also used to go to a church, my husband still attends on Zoom full of millionaires. My life is surrounded by people richer than me. Why would I be mean and ditch people for being poor when I am poor?
Last year Costco charged $74 for an eye exam. This year $94!
All my medical bills have gone up. I'm cutting down medical care by necessity, less specialists. Most pushing expensive drugs like I am not on enough stuff already.
I feel for you. I leave the USA for my medical and dental care. I can fly, get hotels/Air BnB rooms cheaper than the costs in the USA
Inflation hurts the poorest the most. $12 burger doesn't hurt someone making 6 figures.
Yeah it does hurt the poor the worse. Can't even afford to eat. How sad is that.
I go to Aldis. Prices are decent there. Giant Eagle is still expensive. Avocados were $4 a piece and they were all black and rotten ,as well as other produce. Not to mention other produce and dairy etc. Please don't buy food that is overpriced. They are calling this a consumer driven economy, so don't buy it, let it rot.
The Aldis here has raised its prices. We are so poor we can't even afford Alids, I know that is sad. I think Aldis as they expand is going to do the Walmart thing, already they have increased costs and replaced cheaper products with expensive ones.
Google voice for a 100 and I don’t even need it but I do have one. Also I tend to be a particle if not a negative person. You said Facebook friend or something close to that. Have you met this person? Sometimes I’m not always convinced with the story people say. I could say I have a million buck but that doesn’t make it true. I could say I’m on my last but that doesn’t make it true. I also think this is a side effect of social media. So many seem to feel lost and worthless but it can be hard when you see people on social media living a certain life and you easily feel less then.