Reprogramming the Poverty Consciousness

I have been reading a lot of motivational books and books about setting up businesses lately with an eye to the future.

It seems completely obvious if you think about it but one particular book has hit me straight between the eyes with the truth that schools and universities are and always have been intended to prepare children to become employees, not bosses. There is also a social conditioning to fear money so that if you are poor, you fear you'll never have any money and if you somehow become comfortably middle class or even rich, you fear losing it. Money often controls its users, not the other way round as it should be with what is essentially just a tool to facilitate, not an end in itself. This is because there is no financial education to help youngsters overcome this fear and maybe societally, that suits.

Perhaps this explains why 70% of successful entrepreneurs have apparently not been to university. They've been prepared to take chances that more educated people might not.

However the traditional (and still standard) parental advice; 'Study hard, get good grades and you'll get a good job' is undoubtedly somewhat simplistic or even outmoded in today's society where there is no longer job security or company loyalty in the vast majority of jobs, so people may as well take their chances via other routes.

The book is called 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and features the advice a young boy received from the two 'dads' in his life, his natural father who studied hard, got good grades and became a teacher, but never a well-off one as he paid so many taxes and the man who became a second father to him, his best mate's dad who taught him how to think differently if he wanted to be truly successful and rich just like him and how he followed that advice and found it worked.

Certainly my grandfather's world where his company looked after him and his family for over 30 years and even had its own theatre and sports centre are long gone for most people, though perhaps the loyalty of yesteryear just made employees less dissatisfied wage slaves than they are now, rather than happy per se, as the engineering work my grandfather did was undoubtedly boring and monotonous, but there was no expectation then that a job should do much more than put food on the table and pay the bills, never mind provide any kind of happiness or spiritual fulfilment. My grandad's generation were just grateful to have survived WWII.

To get back to the book, another eye-opener was the contrast of how an individual is taxed on everything before they know what they have left and then continues to be taxed on spendings,  savings, private pensions and even after death via death duties and benefactors through inheritance tax, whereas a corporation spends everything it wants as well as needs to, and then only pays tax on the rest!

In view of this, I think I'll register myself 'Laura King inc' at Companies House pronto!

I went to a school where there was an unspoken understanding that we were a school of shop assistants and farmer's wives, with perhaps a smattering of teachers. It took me a long time  as an adult to believe I could achieve so much more for myself, other than being able to write and facilitate. On the plus side, I haven't been over-educated, which I have observed in some, can be just as much of a handicap to realising one's true and full potential when it can also lead to false beliefs about oneself plus overconfidence in one's abilities and intellectual inflexibility.

Living Illegally

According to an LBC phone-in I was listening to the other day in the car, even the most basic studio flat is £1,000 + per month (bills exclusive) to rent in London nowadays and that is not even in zone 1 or 2, so add a few thousand a year travel to get to work on top of that.

This made me wonder how all the low-paid workers (legal and otherwise) manage to live and work in central London - those typically on under £15k a year such as cleaners, hotel workers, security guards, sales assistants.

Apparently when not living in hostels or on friends' floors, a growing answer is garden sheds. Also many (typically asian) landlords are allegedly buying up semi-detached houses in the suburbs and housing four to a room, one in each corner at £25 per week and passing them off as family homes, even though the denizens might be total strangers to one another. This circumvents the legal requirement that all multi-occupational houses be licenced as HMO's and adhere to stringent regulations on occupancy levels, H&S, fire and room sizes rented out.

So it is not just a question of British workers not wanting to accept employment for breadline-level wages. They are also refusing to occupy sheds or live four to a room to sustain this false situation, which is illegal anyway and would garner no formal housing assistance or wage credits for them. And on the subject of family credit and other wage top-ups, this is also enabling minimum wages to endure with the government subsidising businesses to pay as little as possible with no prospects for betterment in sight, even when the company might be prospering and able to afford to pay better.

What will happen to the London economy when its councils finally get their thermal imaging helicopters out and clamp down on all this illegal living I wonder?

Already those on the 'average wage' - said to be £26k - are deserting the capital in their droves, claiming they cannot afford to live there. And certainly with over 50% of their income going on rent and travel (not even counting the bills), they are way over the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recommendation that no more than 33% of income should be expended in rent and bills, or poverty will ensue.

Some while ago I was at a London party at a friend's flat. Half her friends couldn't afford to go anywhere or enjoy London after they had struggled to pay the rent on their shared house room and the other half were earning good salaries but worked long hours and had no leisure to enjoy London. Between the two groups, hardly anyone was enjoying the fact they were living in London and all moaned endlessly about the tubes,what zone they lived in, the crowds and other irritations of their lives.

22/12/13 Since this posting, there has been another article in the Daily Mail entitled Beds in Sheds

Little House on the Prairie revisited

This week I have been overdosing on True Entertainment (Channel 61's) back-to-back episodes of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons as I battle the dreaded lurgy. I have thoroughly enjoyed this trip down memory lane as I have not seen either series since I was little. And for all the perceived mawkishness, both series dole out some tough love and some surprisingly gritty storylines crop up in Little House on the Prairie. Both series were hits around the world, especially Little House. People internationally it seemed, could not get enough of the portrayal of a happy functional family who stuck together through thick and thin, not least one assumes, if they did not have one of their own. Perhaps this had always been part of the appeal for me too I mused, since my own childhood home situation was far from happy. Both series were embarked on with trepidation after the mores of the 60s, but the TV companies had underestimated the public appetite for a return to the values and clear black and white morality of earlier ages, before the nuclear family began to be nuked and life became so ridiculously complicated.

Since the demise of these series in the early 80s, TV has largely returned to its assumption that only the salacious or an endless misery fest will keep up us glued to our screens. Not so for this viewer who yearns for more intelligence,  more imaginative use of language and better stories on screen.

By sharp contrast, the elongated commercial breaks on Channel 61 alternate between ever more gambling advertisements and ever more loan company advertisements touting loans for a mere zillion percent, with yet a third breed exhorting you to sue everyone for everything that's ever gone wrong in your life on a no win, no fee basis! - the complete opposite of the family values portrayed by the series they are screening! Is this sheer ignorance of their viewing public on the part of a new broadcasting kid on the block, or a cynical attempt to tempt those who wouldn't normally be interested in such dodgy money raising attempts to succumb?

Which led me to wonder how many people are taking part in online gambling to win enough to pay their bills, then getting into even deeper debt, necessitating yet another loan? Do they then fake an accident to sue for compensation? How does it work? In Victorian times people were sent to debtor's prisons for being in debt. Now debt has been rebranded 'credit' and individuals can only build up a 'credit record' by incurring and managing a sizeable amount of debt! Unless they fail, in which case they can now STILL obtain a credit card with a bad credit rating, if they're prepared to overlook the mere detail of a zillion percent interest.

What a crazy world of deferred consequences dressed up as advantages. And what an alarming thing it says about our country if our greatest home-grown products are now gambling, debt and sue-age.  Worse still, it's a bubble that's bound to burst when everyone is declared bankrupt who embarks down that slippery path to ruin.

Economically, we are meant to be in recovery now, yet at the weekend I find that Brighton has CLOSED its tourist information office, directing all the city's millions of visitors to a website address, and now London Transport has declared it is closing all manned Underground ticket offices within two years. Human beings are disappearing fast, but where to, and how is this helping the economy when more and more companies are seeking to reduce staff, even if they can well afford to continue providing human services (London Transport is not known for being broke).

How do people who've lost their jobs or those who are so cash-strapped with bills, they have no disposable income left to spend on non-essentials or in the High Street, support the economy and its recovery? In the same week I read that one-in-five families now cannot afford to pay all their bills, a rise of 800,000 from this time last year, yet the government is still refusing to do anything to cap exorbitant rents, energy bills, rail fare rises and petrol prices.

What would Charles Ingalls do? Perhaps Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons can teach us how to be poor and build our own houses out of planks as well as how to have happy families.