Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

deductions.
    The one difference? Rich people get way more from the government than poor people do—see above-referenced mortgage interest, capital gains, light inheritance taxes, retirement savings breaks—but the poor are the only ones getting shamed for it. You want to know how I could justify relaxing sometimes while I was on benefits? The same way you justify blowing a reckless amount of money on a really nice dinner while you take a business deduction because you talked about work for ten minutes.
    People bitch about double taxation, where corporations are taxed for their profits and then they give money to their shareholders, who are also taxed. This is apparently hugely unfair, and the only reasonable solution is apparently to exempt people from having to pay taxes on their dividends. Because some kinds of income just don’t count as income? Because someone, somewhere, already paid a tax on this particular individual dollar? By the same logic, I shouldn’t be asked to pay payroll taxes because my bosses already paid taxes on it too.
    Capital gain, by definition, is money you make for the simple fact of having money. That’s it. No work, no nothing. Justhave some money, wait for it to grow, and then you have more money. Which you clearly should not have to pay taxes on, because that would be unfair. Somehow.
    This, of course, is nothing like unemployment, where an employer pays a tax for every employee, and then if I pull unemployment, I have to pay tax on that as well. But sure, keep thinking that we’ve got all the cushy non-taxation going on down here in the lower classes.
    —
    All humans chase good feelings. It’s just that people with money chase them in ways specific to the upper classes, which makes it okay. You can’t argue that a pair of expensive shoes or an expensive steak is actually something you need. It’s just something that makes you feel good.
    According to a study published in
Science
magazine, which is a place I trust about science things, your brain actually has less capacity when you’re poor. The theory is that so much of your brain is taken up with poverty-related concerns that there’s simply less bandwidth available for other things, like life. It’s not the only study like that.
    At Princeton, they’ve found that the effect on the brains of poor people from the stress about money alone is equivalent to losing a bunch of IQ points. And they’ve also found that if you remove the stress, our brains snap back and perform at the same levels you’d expect to see in a wealthier test-subject pool. The same goes for the short-term memory impairment andtrouble with complexities—skip a night of sleep and tell me how well you’re performing the next day; you’d be functioning on about the same level we do every day. We’re not dumb—we’re conserving energy.
    They’re even starting to find similarities between people in poverty and soldiers with PTSD.
    Poor people didn’t need to wait for the science to know this, though. We feel it. We could have told you that being always tired and distracted wasn’t great for higher cognitive activity. I stopped thinking in higher concepts, gradually. I feel stupid when I realize how long it’s been since I thought about anything beyond what I had to get through to keep everything moving along: no philosophy, no music, no literature. We know we’re not at capacity, and it rankles. So we fix it, best as we can. I know a few veterans, dealing with mild to moderate cases of PTSD, who have turned into potheads. It keeps them from getting too jumpy, keeps their memories from being too sharp. I hear that bankers like coke to stay focused. College kids take Ritalin to study.
    I flirt with addiction, drinking too much coffee and smoking too much, but I’ve never let myself go there because I think it’d be too much of a relief and I’d never be able to come back voluntarily. And if I were dragged back, I’d face a lifetime of having to say no to