I remain endlessly aggravated, as someone who remembers STANDING IN LINE when food stamps were still paper instead of cards, at the number of trust fund assholes who feel all sorts of comfortable opining about the realities of poverty.

They're not speaking from expertise.

They're not speaking from experience.

They're just bullshitting, spouting the shit they need to be true to have their inane, blindered worldview actually be true.

And since the fuckers have never actually experienced NEED...

I went through free lunch program, splitting kids meals, sharing birthdays, multiple adults splitting bedrooms to save on rent, hand-me-down level poverty.

And I will still not act like my experience was anywhere NEAR universal, or among the worst.

Poverty doesn't inherently drive crime. If anything you'll find a lot of people TERRIFIED of stepping out of line because a missed work/school day is something they can't afford.

But CRIMINALIZING everyday activity is an effective way to keep people IN poverty.

I am utterly tired of seeing these fuckwits spouting these statistics and completely ignoring the realities behind them.

They're not even slightly equipped to actually have any understanding of those realities, they're comfortably separated from them.

If you're looking at connections between crime statistics and poverty AND IGNORING THAT POVERTY IS ENDLESSLY CRIMINALIZED, you have no business saying ANYTHING publicly.

You're too fucking braindead.

The assertion that poverty does not CAUSE crime is not saying that poor people are thus inherently criminal.

It's noting the plain fact that what specifically drives those statistics is what IS and IS NOT counted as criminal.

It's not a matter of the binary choice between people being criminal vs poverty driving people to crime.

It's a matter of what we define as crime, and how we punish it. Poverty influences behaviors which get treated as criminal, which reinforces poverty.

Wealthy people engage in crime, too.

There's no need or desperation there, just impunity.

They engage in petty crimes and in violent crimes.

Hell, wealthy conservatives have been engaging in sedition en masse.

But statistics don't frame wealthy areas as crime-ridden.

Your chances of arrest, trial, and conviction for petty crimes and for violent crimes are lower just by having more resources with which to face the legal system.

All of this makes the question of how you fix these issues less one that can be answered by "give people more money" and more "we must fundamentally address the roots of what we consider criminal and how we choose to address it in terms of concepts like restitution and justice".

We can ALSO give people more money, and we SHOULD.

There are a lot of things in a lot of people's lives that could be improved simply by not having so much stress over money.

But also you give Black people more money without addressing the system, you just gave the system money

You have to be SPECIFICALLY DEVOTED to ignoring that we have a system that unless completely dismantled and built from the ground up will continue to treat it as if even wealthy Black people having money is inherently suspicious and likely criminal.

There are so many subtle and more obvious ways that what we have now is built to ensure that money always comes back to the same hands.

That must be completely reshaped if you want lifting people out of poverty to actually be a realistic goal.

And there are so many people out there who have been putting the actual work into addressing this shit.

People pushing to dismantle the carceral state. People pushing to dismantle the power of the financial sector. People pushing to dismantle policing.

These motherfuckers spouting this bullshit like the simple, easy, universal solution is to simply and immediately lift everyone out of poverty are not only speaking out of their asses, but they're speaking from abject ignorance ignoring ALL OF THAT WORK.

It's always the same motherfuckers.

People who grew up with access to good schools, comfortable neighborhoods, who went to a fancy fucking college and finally read some Marx and are now MILITANT but with not one single clue beyond a 101-level understanding of what they read.

And who now can't even contemplate that their puddle-deep grasp of theory and their annoying clinging to jargon isn't actually the same as actually understanding anything deep enough to insist on being listened to about anything.

The sort of twerps who if you point out that their lived experience has NEVER actually involved wearing out a pair of shoes like to smugly assert their own status as "class traitors".

And who spend ALL THEIR TIME speaking over everyone else.

They will ALWAYS be the ones pushing themselves into the spotlight whenever they can get away with it, when what they should be doing is recognizing that their backgrounds give them access to resources they COULD be using to boost others.

And of course not a single one of them will listen to any argument that their background might bias them in any particular direction, even as they assert that people coming from poverty are inherently unable to represent their own position because of that poverty.

Trust fund types who want to show actual devotion to leftist ideals should fucking give it all away.

Everything, donate it towards the cause. Put your money where your mouth is.