In Search of Secrets

They say it takes money to make money: wealth compounds when you use it wisely. Unfortunately, it also takes money to get out of poverty–poorness compounds, too. Here are just a few of the things currently costing me money that I can’t afford to get rid of:

• With my 2-3 hours of commuting per day, I’m spending roughly $400 a month on gas, because I can’t afford a more fuel-efficient car.
• This means I can’t afford extra gas for the multiple trips across town it would take to empty out our second storage unit–meaning we’re paying $250 a month for storage we don’t really need.
• We can’t afford to buy our own land to put our tiny home on, so we’re spending $800 a month on a lease that might go up or get revoked at our landlord’s whim, instead of investing that money in land that will appreciate over time, which we could choose to sell if we needed the money for something else.
• …like moving to a country with a lower cost of living (and/or better LGBTQ+ protections), for example.
• Debt. Just…debt.
• I spend, on average, about an hour a day washing dishes (valued at roughly $40 an hour, given my current salary), because we can’t afford to have a dishwasher installed.
• Speaking of the value of my time, did I mention my 2-3 hour commute? When we were looking for a place to park our home we found several that were closer to my office, but we couldn’t afford any of them.
• Every time my bank account gets overdrawn, I’m charged a $35 fee–putting my account even further in the red and making it that much more difficult to keep it in the black between my next two paychecks.

For these and other reasons, we often struggle to make ends meet–even though our household income is well above the poverty line.

I am strongly in favor of the social safety net–one of the responsibilities of government is to alleviate poverty among its citizens. But our current system, aside from being grotesquely underfunded, is managed by a lot of small bureaucracies, each one specializing in a different type of need: food, shelter, health care, debt, energy, and so on. This results in a lot of waste, overlap, and inefficiency for the government; and a lot of hoops to jump through, missed or wasted opportunities, and band-aid fixes for the people in need.

This is why I am also strongly in favor of replacing much of our current social safety net with a Universal Basic Income. Poor people have a lot of problems, income alone is not enough to determine whether someone is in financial distress, and the expense that would make the most impact is not necessarily the most obvious. In my case, for example, if we account for time, uncertainty, and hassle as well as money, by far the most cost-effective intervention would be…a dishwasher!

Leave the decision of what help is most needed to the people who actually need the help!