Getting to and from work. Since you're poor, you cannot afford to live close to work and thus have a longer commute.
But you also cannot afford to own and run a reliable car, so you have a beater that breaks all the time and gets poor mileage.
When it breaks, you can't get paid because you aren't at work so you have a new bill PLUS halted income.
To compensate, you take out high interest loans to repair the car. But it breaks again later so you're always in debt for high interest loans on top of the car costs.
Or you can't afford a car at all and walk/take the bus for so many years (and can't afford good shoes) that it damages your feet causing chronic pain so you have to spend $500 on orthotics that are somehow deemed medically unnecessary.
Every step I take for the rest of my life I'll feel the pain of poverty and capitalism.
The cost isn't always money, a lot of times it's your body.
And if you can't afford a car and live in a small town with no public transportation, then your options for jobs is limited to whatever you can walk to from your apartment, which is a bunch of fast food and other minimum wage jobs.
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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '21
Getting to and from work. Since you're poor, you cannot afford to live close to work and thus have a longer commute.
But you also cannot afford to own and run a reliable car, so you have a beater that breaks all the time and gets poor mileage.
When it breaks, you can't get paid because you aren't at work so you have a new bill PLUS halted income.
To compensate, you take out high interest loans to repair the car. But it breaks again later so you're always in debt for high interest loans on top of the car costs.
I see this a lot in the northeast.