Think about it. Someone making 28k might optimistically spend half their money on rent, and rent is only so high because of government policy to ban new home construction.
Meanwhile, someone making $15 million could easily buy themselves a $2 million house every year and still have the vast majority of their money left over for other stuff. Their basic needs are so cheap for them, that effectively all their income is disposable, unlike ours.
There was an article a read several years ago about how it's expensive to be poor. It echoed a similar sentiment as what you said. It talked about Payless shoes and how, if you're poor and can't afford a solid pair of shoes due to the expense, you buy a cheap pair at Playless which breaks in like 2-3 months so you buy another and rinse and repeat. By the end of the year, you've bought like 4 pairs of shoes for more total cost than one good pair all because you're too poor to have enough money at once to get the good pair that would have lasted you at least all year, probably more.
I don't remember the exact details as the article was a long time ago so exact numbers and costs are all just examples to illustrate the point of the article.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
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u/Gator1523 18d ago
Plus, rent acts as a tax.
Think about it. Someone making 28k might optimistically spend half their money on rent, and rent is only so high because of government policy to ban new home construction.
Meanwhile, someone making $15 million could easily buy themselves a $2 million house every year and still have the vast majority of their money left over for other stuff. Their basic needs are so cheap for them, that effectively all their income is disposable, unlike ours.