This ties in with the healthcare thing pretty well. There was a time when I could not work due to illness but could not get disability. I had to continue paying for COBRA insurance. I had savings but eventually, I could no longer afford the insurance, so I went to social services and got Family Health Plus in NY, which is a medicaid-sort of thing. It's free but you pay low co-pays on things instead of everything being free. So an insurance company essentially ate all my savings until the state got to take over. (Actually, my employer self-insured, so does that mean that they kept all the COBRA payments? Huh.) I'm pretty sure that the premiums were substantially more than the insurance ever had to pay out for me.
If I hadn't been thrifty, I could have bought a car, maybe a fancy computer, and all that until I had no more savings. Then I would have been in the same position with no non-essential assets and no money, and the State would have taken over earlier.
Of course, if there were no safety net, then I would have been SOL, probably dead by now. This is why I generally think that NY, in spite of the graft and dirty politics, at least can organize things with some heart. I'd hate to have been in the same situation in other states that have pretty heartless rules. A lot of people who have earned good money and saved it feel an injustice when their tax money is used to help out people who cannot plan. I don't argue much with people like that but I support the safety net. I tell people that there are other ways of funding things so that it seems less unfair, like the NHS in the UK funded by a VAT.
For a lot of people, it seems that having money to spend is rare event and they feel they deserve to do it when they can. I read the original article as a sort of excuse-making, saying that these purchases are actually good things in some twisted way. But they are not really good in any way.
I used to work in a very poor fishing town. When things were good in the industry, people had money and they bought crazy things they couldn't afford. Instead of saving, they would just get what they could when the money was there. Then, when hard times came, they looked for relief, which usually came in some manner. If you were not in the fishing industry, during hard times the fishermen would expect services for free, because they needed it and couldn't pay it. People would tell me that their truck payment was so high that they couldn't possibly be expected to pay their other bills. On a one-to-one level, it does make your blood boil. I would tell my staff that they shouldn't have personal feelings about it and try to treat the clients with respect even when they are disrespectful.
However, the psychology of the thing is not going to change because other people look down on poor people, or by removing the social safety net. They way to change the psychology is to make it OK for people not to want everything on TV. Change hip hop culture so that it glorifies something other than labels. (Yo, that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt). Question people who say things like "I like German Engineering™." (?) Ask people if their car is making them happy, especially their car payment. Tell people you're actually excited about your quality vehicle from 1998 (I'll sell in 2018), your bitchin' 1993 bicycle that you've kept on the road yourself, your toolset that you built your furniture from, your $20/month (or less or no) phone. In my future, I see bragging rights as telling people that they tried to sell you a Maserati, but it just wasn't worth the price. Telling people that you took on a work project because you wanted to raise $50,000 for an important charity. Life being about being a good person, who does good work, not consuming and consuming and consuming.
