It's not just income. Corporate America has turned "prey upon the poor" into a science. Nobody really cares about protecting the poor from that sort of thing. So they'll have to deal with BS like, say, getting paid via a debit card, whose bank charges fees for nearly anything. Then there are the astronomical credit card rates/fees. There are no limits on credit card APRs.
Even government has been highly optimized for the ultra-weathly and tries to fuck over the poor. The poor get audited at a rate orders of magnitude higher than people who make $1M+/year, despite audits on the poor rarely recovering much in the way of unpaid taxes, but audits on the wealthy tend to make the IRS giant piles of cash, because rich people love to cheat on their taxes.
Then there's court fees. Get arrested, you're suddenly on the hook for a bunch of expenses. If you don't pay them - jail.
Further: look at the ease with which you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax writeoffs for owning a bizjet.
Compare and contrast to the hoops a single mother has to go through every 6-12 months to keep "re-certifying" their children as qualifying for about ~$25 in monthly benefits for food for said kid. The appointments are only 9-5, M-F. Which means you have to take a day off from work; that means you lose at least $100 in income, which is a huge amount of money for a single mother working a minimum wage job.
The appointments are typically at state offices nowhere near major metropolitan cities or public transit, which means you need a car, or to take a taxi, or get a friend to drive you.
Apparently we need to be really concerned about single mothers just giving away their kids and still taking advantage of WIC at the tune of...$25/month?
Then there's all the administrative busywork generated by legislators who demand it so "taxpayers aren't ripped off."
Meanwhile, that bizjet sure does make a lot of weekend trips to Vail and the Bahamas in the winter...
The "prey upon the poor" is just as bad, if not worse, in Brazil. Growing up there you don't really realize, but after living abroad for a while it is painfully obvious.
Just a small example, stores that sell anything >30 USD don't put the real price of goods when they advertise them. They always put "<h5>x12</h5> <h1>{REAL_PRICE/12}</h1>" (show the price of the installment, while putting how many installments really small)
I had a data scientist friend who worked at a bank optimizing how much credit he could give out to people (while staying legal with the regulations). Like his goal was to get people to get more credit (usually credit card). My Bank app constantly bombard me with notifications about taking loans and getting credit cards.
This friend was not the most moral person I ever met and even him was disgusted after a few years working there, he was making a ton of money but he left anyway.
My parents had mid/severe problem with lotteries, they kept saying god was going to make them win the lottery so they could pay off their debts and fix the car.
I remember when I found out that some months they were spending around 20% of their income on lotteries.
Even government has been highly optimized for the ultra-weathly and tries to fuck over the poor. The poor get audited at a rate orders of magnitude higher than people who make $1M+/year, despite audits on the poor rarely recovering much in the way of unpaid taxes, but audits on the wealthy tend to make the IRS giant piles of cash, because rich people love to cheat on their taxes.
Then there's court fees. Get arrested, you're suddenly on the hook for a bunch of expenses. If you don't pay them - jail.
Further: look at the ease with which you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax writeoffs for owning a bizjet.
Compare and contrast to the hoops a single mother has to go through every 6-12 months to keep "re-certifying" their children as qualifying for about ~$25 in monthly benefits for food for said kid. The appointments are only 9-5, M-F. Which means you have to take a day off from work; that means you lose at least $100 in income, which is a huge amount of money for a single mother working a minimum wage job.
The appointments are typically at state offices nowhere near major metropolitan cities or public transit, which means you need a car, or to take a taxi, or get a friend to drive you.
Apparently we need to be really concerned about single mothers just giving away their kids and still taking advantage of WIC at the tune of...$25/month?
Then there's all the administrative busywork generated by legislators who demand it so "taxpayers aren't ripped off."
Meanwhile, that bizjet sure does make a lot of weekend trips to Vail and the Bahamas in the winter...