"Give every person in poverty a million dollars..." and you will kick off hyperinflation because you will need to print so much currency to make that a reality it will devalue all of the existing dollars in circulation.
it's not a policy suggestion, it's a rhetorical device. If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life because poverty is caused by money, not education. Education helps people escape poverty because education can be used to earn money, not because knowing how to open a bank account is the path to salvation. There are lots of smart and well educated and successful people who are terrible with money but never end up in poverty because they have enough money to absorb the mistakes.
// If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life
You sound like you have never been around a poor person. Most people if they get a raise, their spending magically goes up by the same amount.
And people don't understand how money works.
My in-laws provide healthcare and profit sharing for everyone who works in their business. And guess what, a big percentage of their turnover is someone gets a 50 cent an hour raise somewhere else but doesn't understand that they are missing out on much more in profit sharing and healthcare. When they leave and get paid out their profit sharing, they are like "what's this??" even though it's been explained to them a thousand times.
A million dollars is nothing. You can blow it on a few ill advised purchases and be back where you started. It takes brains to make it last, not to mention make it grow.
I’ve been around rich people, I’ve been around poor people. I am fortunate enough to be well off today but that’s not where I come from, I grew up around people in poverty.
There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot.
Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income.
There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.
