The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.
Interpretation
Poverty comes with high hidden costs that make life challenging.
The quote highlights the paradox of poverty, illustrating how being poor is not just a lack of money but involves navigating a system that can create additional burdens. It emphasizes the difficulty faced by those in poverty who must contend with obstacles such as finding housing that accepts government assistance and other socioeconomic barriers that make basic living expenses seem insurmountable.
In practice
In a discussion about economic policy, this quote can illustrate the systemic issues that keep people in poverty.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.
The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders.
If Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world's population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it's obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.
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