I’ve never been really rich. I’ve been well off, I’ve had cash, but I’ve never really been rolling in it– although I know some folks who are.
And I’ve never really been poor. I’ve been broke, I’ve been in debt, I’ve had days where I didn’t know where my next bit of money was coming from– but I’ve never really been in horrific shape. But again, I know some folks who are. A lot more of those folks, in fact.
I’ve never quite had to deal with the level of poor than John Scalzi talks about here, for example, but I’ve seen it. I’ve had to go to check cashing places to get money for the week; I’ve spent time in bad neighborhoods.
But I’ve never had to deal with the level of poverty that Will Shetterly talks about here, about having to have teeth pulled because he couldn’t afford root canals:
I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and I don’t like either.Part One: Teeth.
I have twenty teeth. I would have at least twenty-four if I could’ve afforded the root canals. I’ve been rich enough to afford root canals, and then rich enough to put them on a credit card. But when the cards are maxed, the tooth goes. While I sympathize with people who’re going through root canals, I envy them, too.
I’ve never been so poor that I couldn’t go to a dentist when I had to. I’m extremely fortunate….
I don’t dwell on my past much, so I can’t remember whether affordable dental care would’ve let me keep more than twenty-four of my teeth. And I’m very happy with the twenty I’ve got: ten above, ten below, no gaps, equally spaced in the front of my mouth. No one sees a missing tooth and assumes I’m white trash or trailer trash or any of the things that poor whites get called. If I ever need major work on a front tooth, I’ll have a very tough decision.
And this is a man who ran for Governor of Minnesota and finished third in a field of six.
What’s pricking my ears is that I’m hearing a LOT of this in the last few days, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I know a lot of guys in the comics and books and computing industries. Many of them are tops in their fields, many you’d recognize, many you’ve never heard of.
And all of them are in tight financial straits. Some may have to sell their house to cover the bills, some are already having trouble making the rent. Some are looking at bankruptcy. Some have already declared it in the past and are recovering. Medical costs are always a concern.
And I have a bad feeling it’s going to be getting much worse very quickly.
We still don’t know what the full impact of Katrina is going to be. I haven’t heard of any ships making it through the Port of Southern Louisiana, and I’m not sure when they’ll be able to. That’s billions of tons of goods not getting in or out of the country. And the harvest is coming.
We haven’t discussed the oil spills. Or the bacterial problems, and the diaspora of spores. Nor have we dealt with the cultural impact of the new American Gypsies, in a population relocation not seen since the days of the Dust Bowl. Prices are going to rise in a number of areas, and plummet in a number of others.
And I don’t yet know where we go from here. There seems to be a great sense of people holding their breath– because they don’t know what’s going to happen, and they don’t know what help they can rely on, the official responses to Katrina has shaken a lot of folks.
Any comments? Any clues? Any trends that I’m missing?
6 thoughts on “On being poor”
Comments are closed.
Unless the media is absolutely clueless–and I’m the first to admit that this is not entirely out of the realm of possibility–it’s hard to imagine that the dire predictions you’ve made over the impact of Katrina are going to come true. Except for a few gloom and doomers (and being paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you, as we know) there has not been any sense of impending disaster. At the very least I would expect the stock market to plummet. There are a lot of people who make their living on how well the harvest will go and I have not heard any major shifts in the commodities markets.
Already the gas prices are coming down almost as fast as they rose, so the predictions that we would have our ability to refine oil crippled seem to be untrue.
i remember reading something about the port of Houston (I think) seeing a tremendous benefit from the disaster, so saying that a billion dollars worth of goods is not leaving the country may not be accurate–it may be that they are leaving by an alternate route. That route may be less officiant and result in a slightly higher price but it is not an economic catastrophe.
But it’s early and you may well be proven right. At this point I’d bet against it, though it wouldn’t be with the kid’s college fund.
Bill Mulligan posted:
Already the gas prices are coming down almost as fast as they rose, so the predictions that we would have our ability to refine oil crippled seem to be untrue.
I’m not sure how you define “coming down almost as fast as they rose”, but I don’t see it where I live. When prices rise 10% for regular unleaded in less than a week (around here, that averaged 25¢ per gallon), but haven’t dropped more than a nickel per gallon in the following 10 days, that doesn’t qualify as “almost as fast”. Gas prices have NEVER come down at a rate matching their increases, and they never will.
What has happened in some extreme cases is the fact that gas stations were gouging customers, either in a positive sense or a negative sense. From the positive side, the stations wanted to safeguard their supply from running out too quickly (having worked at a convenience store/gas station for several years I know the resupply trucks only run a few times a week) and when there’s a chance that there will be a disruption in the supply, the managers may have little choice but to raise prices in order the station doesn’t run completely dry (and considering what type of predictions were forecast to happen post-Katrina to not only the refineries in South Louisiana, but also the offshore rigs in the Gulf, it was reasonable to predict a possible shortage, especially with the usually heavy Labor Day holiday travel coming up within a week). Now, I’m sure some unscrupulous retailers may have gouged solely to make extra money from the crisis, but those retailers may also be subjected to state prosecutions (here in Alabama, some hotels and grocery stores have paid hefty fines for price gouging during natural disasters when they couldn’t back up the reasons for their price hikes; the fines have kept them from having to go to court over price gouging, something NO retailer’s going to want to face, especially with the case going in front of a jury). I’ve already heard that Georgia’s attorney general has announced that many gas stations throughout the state are being investigated to determine whether the alleged price hikes were warranted. But I’ll point out that one gas station I frequent raised its prices immensely on the Wednesday following Katrina. When I drove by on my way home from work Wednesday morning, the regular unleaded was selling for $2.48/gallon. Just 5 hours later, I passed by it after picking up my new comics and saw the price was $2.68/gallon. On my way to work that night (about 9 hours later), I saw the sign read $2.79/gallon, and the next morning, on the way home again, the price was up to $2.88/gallon. (In a 24-hour period, that’s a rather outrageous 16% price increase.) Over the next couple of days, prices dropped back to the $2.75 area, but shot back up to the $2.90 mark over the Labor Day weekend. A week since then, the prices are back down to the $2.75 area. But, overall the prices are still running about 10% over what they were before Katrina, and I don’t foresee prices ever returning to the pre-Katrina range around here; I expect we’ll be paying higher prices as the “shock and awe” of the post-Katrina price jump wears off (just as most of us a few short years ago would probably have sworn that we’d walk before ever paying $2.50 for a gallon of gas).
Bill, it really depends where you look. But here’s a simple point to consider.
According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the average discretionary income in the United States is $2,745 per household. Oil prices could take away $1,475 of discretionary income per average U.S. household, according to them. (Do the math yourself– if you drive 10,000 miles a year in a car that gets 25 MPG and gas goes up $1, which it has in the last year, that’s an additional $400 a year just in driving costs. That doesn’t even include the increase in home heating and cooling.)
This, in turn, translates to a total potential loss of discretionary income in the United States alone of some $126.6 billion.
More points:
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/09/katrina_lowers_.html
Forget most of what you are reading about the post-Katrina recovery. This is an unprecedented U.S. disaster that will have repercussions – around the global economy, but most especially domestically. A major American city has been all but wiped off the map, taking the country’s largest port with it. To put this into context, the costs for rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina will exceed those of rebuilding Chicago after the great fire, San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, and New York and D.C. after September 11th – combined. And that’s after adjusting for inflation.
Despite what some of the more bullish pundits have been saying, the stimulus of rebuilding New Orleans will not outweigh the overall loss to the economy; if it did, we would level a different city each year and rebuild it from the ground up, shiny and new. But it doesn’t, and so we don’t.
This comes when the Consumer is running increasingly low on dry powder. As we noted last week, the consumer is nearly – but not quite – shopped out. Gas price spiking added some caution to their already waning sentiment.
Additionally, we note that the market’s impressive resilience in the face of such adversity is not historically unprecedented. When the great San Francisco earthquake hit, it took markets several weeks to register the colossal costs and impact. So too, the market all but ignored the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo of the U.S. For two weeks, US stock markets actually traded sideways, before recognizing what the enormity of what the embargo meant to the U.S.
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170701758
Hurricane Katrina impacts semiconductor wafer supply
Peter Clarke
EE Times
(09/09/2005 8:49 AM EDT)
LONDON — Hurricane Katrina has caused the shutdown of a New Orleans facility owned by Air Products and Chemicals Inc. that produces hydrogen used in the manufacturing of silicon wafers, a development that could impact global production of semiconductors, according to market research company iSuppli Corp.
Hydrogen is used in the deposition of epitaxial silicon films on wafers, and the industrial gas complex in New Orleans is the site of much of Air Products’ hydrogen manufacturing activity, iSuppli said. These films are critical in the manufacturing of higher-voltage semiconductors used in power management applications, iSuppli said.
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170701684
EE Times: Latest News
Katrina effect could cost IC market billions
Mark LaPedus
EE Times
(09/08/2005 7:57 PM EDT)
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) on Thursday (September 8) warned that the “Katrina effect” could potentially cost the worldwide semiconductor industry nearly $25 billion in overall sales growth.
Recently, the SIA (San Jose, Calif.) said strong competition in the computer and mobile phone markets contributed to downward pressure on chip prices in July, adding that rising global oil prices could soon affect the chip market (see Sept. 1 story).
At a press event on Thursday, Doug Andrey, principal analyst with the SIA, expanded on the trade group’s assertions and painted a hypothetical — and gloomy — scenario based on the potential loss of discretionary income in the United States alone due to soaring gas prices and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.
Well, the following would seem to me to be proof that the worst case scenarios will not come to pass:
http://olympics.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2005-09-14T182512Z_01_DIT455845_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESS-FOOD-KATRINA-PORT-DC.XML
Storm-hit New Orleans port back to life
CHICAGO (Reuters) – The Port of New Orleans resumed operations on Wednesday as the first vessel headed out to sea more than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina closed down shipping.
“The ship is leaving as we speak,” Paul Zimmermann, the port’s director of operations, told Reuters by telephone, as the Lykes Flyer carried an assortment of products to Brazil, Argentina and Mexico after unloading coffee from Brazil.
More than 640 people have been confirmed dead, mostly in Louisiana, and some 1 million people were displaced by Katrina, which swept across Louisiana and Mississippi on August 29.
Most ports at the Gulf affected by the storm have since resumed operations, as have facilities along the lower reaches of the Mississippi River in the New Orleans area that ship billions of dollars of grain across the globe.
It also states that it may take 6 months to become fully operational but between reopening so quickly and the ability of other ports to take up much of the slack it seems clear that we are not doomed to economic meltdown over this.
Maybe. On the other hand, the other headlines on that Reuters page were:
Delta, Northwest file for Chapter 11
Delta’s debts to cause widespread pain
Disney studio to lose up to $300 mln
Stocks fall as oil gains by nearly $2
Retail sales fall, storm hits industries
So I’m not quite optimistic yet.
Well, some of those headlines are still not so bad–sure, Disney’s movie division lost 300 million but according to the article, “…Disney was on track to meet its forecast of double-digit overall growth in earnings, excluding the Delta charge, based on the performance of its theme parks and cable networks, including ESPN. Staggs did not say whether he was talking about the fourth quarter, the year or both, but Wall Street analysts had been forecasting that Disney would post nearly 20-percent gain in full-year earnings per share. That was in line with the company’s long-held outlook.”
Amazing that a company could lose 300 million and still gain 20% in earnings but there you are.