"The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier. That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it."

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Ezra Klein (via damnitamber)

It’s unreal to me just how many of the homeschooling moms I know have housekeepers, some of whom come daily - and how most of my neighbors pay for lawn services, and how it’s just normal for so many adults to be able to hire a pet sitter while they go out of town or pay a babysitter whenever they have anything to do. Those things are just not generally options for us, period. Like not even on our radar of options to consider. We’ve been driving our van around dented up ever since an accident that happened a year and a half ago, and continuously get asked, “What happened??” as though it is new damage - nobody can understand why we wouldn’t have either had full coverage insurance or rushed over to the dealer and dropped $8,000 to replace fender/bumper/headlight assembly, etc. My only real problem with that is that it causes us to have to get alignments and new struts and other such $300-$500 repairs every few months because of how much driving we’re doing with the body out of shape :/ What else can I do? Our dishwasher has been broken beyond repair for almost two years, but to replace it we’d have to get electrical work done where it connects, first - it adds up to a thousand dollars or something. I have a major hernia that makes standing up, still, for long periods really (take my breath away) hard on my back. So we have piled up dishes a lot. And my husband is driving a car to work everyday with a change of clothes, since he arrives all sweaty, since we live in the tropics and the air conditioner doesn’t work and a new compressor runs $800 or so with labor. 

My college teachers REGULARLY expect me to do things outside of class time (hours in the lab, makeup tests, extra credit opportunities) that directly conflict with being able to pick up and drop off my kids at school, take them to their activities, or even attend my other classes…and I don’t even have a “job” (I do a few hours of work per week towards a writing career, but that in itself is a luxury even if I do squeeze it into my sleeping time). 

Even trying to FATHOM how any single thing in my life would be possible without a supportive and helpful co-parent who works is just crazy. For God’s sake, we all have excellent health and dental insurance for the first time in my entire life, I feel like I’m extremely privileged just because of that! My kids live in a house full of books and educational toys and well tended pets, in a pretty safe neighborhood, and I’m able to control their media exposure and negative influences to a pretty high degree! I am fully aware that we’re living a life of luxury by the standards of many - we have tons of space in our house, eat very good food, have a fair amount of recreation.

But it’s really, really hard for me to deal with people who see a dented up van, or some dishes in the sink, or my running late to something, or our grass being overgrown, or WHATEVER, as some kind of sloppy laziness and general illegitimacy. And I get absolutely enraged when I see rich white men in power looking down on poor families for getting food stamps or medicaid, or assholes on the internet saying they shouldn’t be able to ever get a steak or buy a soda with “Their Tax Dollars” - good grief, stfu.

(via damnitamber)

Tags: Ezra Klein money working poor Romney personal responsibility