The High Cost of Poverty: Why Poor Pay More

Full Article - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html?g=0

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.).
That is assuming they pay for their housing in first place?

"The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."
Wow! How about that is what their sorry asses qualified for. Last time I checked home ownership wasn't a right.

You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.
Food stamps? - once again they aren't paying a extra dollar, the taxpayers are.

"When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. You wait until Monday afternoon, when the laundromat is most likely to be empty, and you put all of that laundry from four kids into four heaps, bundle it in sheets, load a cart and drag it to the corner. "
If you are so poor, why are they having a kid let alone four? No self responsibility.

"If I had my choice, I would have a washer and a dryer," says Nya Oti, 37, a food-service worker who lives in Brightwood.
Again, what choices in your life led you to a career in food-service? If the work is temporary(such as layoff) I feel sorry for her, if not it is a choice she made.

She(Oti) buys bags of oranges or apples, but not the organic kind. "Organic is too much," she says.
I don't buy organic either, the crap is overpriced and the way I see it we are all going to die of something. I get a bad feeling that soon organic food will also be "right" in this country.

Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed."
There is a reason people are working a lot of hours for low pay. I think I touched on it in reference to the job skills required to work food service.

The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.
Newsflash if you actually paid you bills you probably wouldn't be getting collection calls. I bet they can still afford their cigarettes though.

The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money. Payday advance companies say they are providing an essential service to people who most need them. Their critics say they are preying on people who are the most "economically vulnerable." In simple terms, the company is charging a $15.50 fee for every $100 that you borrow. On your $300 payday loan -- borrowed for a term of seven days -- the effective annual percentage rate is 806 percent.
I don't get it. Is someone putting a gun to their heads and making them cash the checks or get a loan at these places?

"As you've seen with the financial services industry, if people can cut a profit, they do it," Blumenauer says. "The poor pay more for financial services. A lot of people who are 'unbanked' pay $3 for a money order to pay their electric bill. They pay a 2 percent check-cashing fee because they don't have bank services. The reasons? Part of it is lack of education.
Whose is at fault for their lack of education? In my book you've got no one to look at but yourself.

All these costs can lead the poor to a collective depression.
Kind of sounds like an excuse to me.

"The cheaper housing is in more-dangerous areas," says Reed,
So is the cheaper housing causing the area to be dangerous, or is it the residents of said area what is making it dangerous?

"People working who don't make a lot of money go to the system for help, and they deny them," Nicholas says. "They say I make too much. It almost helps if you don't work."
Maybe our country should put a limit on the time people allowed to be on system so we don't give them a incentive to not work.

What could you accomplish with the lost 20 minutes standing there in the rain? Waiting. That's another cost of poverty. You wait in lines. You wait at bus stops. You wait on the bus as it makes it way up Georgia Avenue, hitting every stop. No sense in trying to hurry when you are poor
Again maybe people need to be made aware about the choices they make in life and how it affects them.