No, they just had a $65 bill. That doesn't imply a smartphone, that could easily be racked up in minutes or text messages. Pay-as-you-go phones are only cheap if you don't use them.

I suppose that's true. But I'm also speaking from practical experience. That TrakFone I mentioned is the phone I actually use as my main phone (no landline), and I pay less than $10/mo for minutes. You just have to be careful; if you need to have an hour long conversation with your mom, try Skype.

I have no doubt you could contrive a situation in which someone needed to talk on the phone enough that they absolutely could not pay less than $65 for it, but I would consider such a case extraordinary. My practical experience is that phone service can be had for much less, and that such a high phone bill is indicative of unnecessary luxury.

That doesn't imply you got a new car. That means you got a 24 month loan on a $5000 car with 20% interest.

I think your interest numbers are way off; the car loan being in part secured by the car itself, I have never seen a loan for it at such a percentage. One can always do better at their bank.

But leaving that aside, I would consider even a $5000 car an unreasonable expense in such a scenario. I again speak from personal experience here. Our first car was $1500, obtained from a relative. We paid cash, and it gave us little trouble for the several years we owned it. A poor friend bought a car from me for $300, on a gentleman's agreement to pay $50 a month. It had a number of cosmetic problems, but ran fine. My sister's first car was free, a gift from a friend. My sister's second car was $2400, and I contributed $2000 of that. My brother is a budding freelancer, and has my second (presently unused) car on long-term loan for free.

I could go on. My point is that every car I have encountered in a similar financial situation has been bought for a song from a friend, financed largely by family, or borrowed. Or simply gone without -- a rather high percentage event, and hardly hell. Generally nowhere near $5,000 and certainly nowhere near a triple-digit monthly payment.

I acknowledge again that you could contrive a scenario in which such a car was necessary, but I do not think this is the normal case. A large fraction of people can get by on public transportation, cycling, or walking. Of those who cannot, a large fraction can beg or borrow a junk car from a friend or relative, or pay gas in a carpool. Of those who cannot, a large fraction can buy a reliable used car with reasonable financing from the classfieds. Once you discard options you cannot afford, you'd be surprised the number of creative ways to attack a given problem.

I don't pretend that reduces the remaining folks to no one, but I do assert that it is a rare situation. I very strongly disagree with presenting such a scenario as the norm, when it isn't. That really accounts for my incredulity in the game; taking on that car payment on that income is something I would consider only after I had exhausted alternatives as extreme as icebiking, moving, finding a different job, moving in with parents, and learning to repair a free non-working car. And maybe spent weeks trying to come up with any other solution, however creative.

I don't think you understand how expensive it is to be poor. It's much cheaper to be well off, because you have the option of making the right decisions, instead of being constantly put in no-win situations like these.

I will respectfully disagree with you. Though income does afford many efficiencies, being poor is not necessarily expensive. I have found it to require humility, elbow grease, integrity, wisdom, and self-control. I particularly disagree with your sentiment that as a poor person, you do not have the option of making right decisions. I think that's exactly backwards. As a poor person, you do not have the margin to make wrong decisions!

I don't know what your experience is, but I have helped many friends in dire financial straits--as often with practical advice and physical labor as with money. I have even supported a family myself on low (or no) wages. And I used to be quite the personal finance blogosphere junkie, too, so I've heard a lot of stories. I think I have sufficient experience with poverty in the bare sense of "low income" to hold the justified opinion that, in general, it isn't permanent and isn't hopeless.

No-win scenarios are a part of life, that I don't deny. And they can happen to anyone, rich or poor. And folks in trouble deserve our compassion, that I'm on board with. But I think presenting poverty, at least in the US currently, as an inescapable parade of bad options, is both disingenuous and harmful. Some small number of people may be in hopeless scenarios, but for most, there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Saying there isn't only deprives them of the motivation necessary to get there.