In modern America, it’s expensive to be poor. If you have a car, it’s old and habitually breaks down. Often, there aren’t banking services in your area and you must live with high-cost alternatives. And in white working-class towns decimated by years of outsourcing, the jobs available don’t provide the kind of wages to break the cycle of poverty.
That’s not to say the situation of the American poor hasn’t preoccupied policy-makers and the pundit class. Recently, there’s been a bipartisan grumbling among elite wonks that the poor should just rent a U-Haul and leave their depressed communities if they want a better life. (Their dismissive attitude is presumably because America is extremely economically segregated; rich and poor hardly need to associate with one another.)...
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While moving to where jobs are more plentiful would be a good strategy for those in high-unemployment areas, we know that the Americans have less mobility—economic and geographic—than they did in previous decades. Geographic migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the percentage of Americans who move to a different state or a different county within the same state has plummeted by nearly half since the 1980s. As Justin Fox points out at Bloomberg, it’s even worse for white Americans with no college education, a rough approximate of the working-class whites derided for their supposed lack of initiative. Poorer Americans are now more likely to stay put. To put it simply, they don’t have enough money to move.