Spending Log

What Abby Kayser Spent in One Week:
Friday - Nothing

Saturday -
Movie ticket $9
Half the price of an iPod for mother’s day $90

Sunday - Nothing

Monday -
Salad $4
Water $1

Tuesday -
Muffins $3
Iced tea $2

Wednesday -
Gas $28

Thursday -
$10 French club shirt

Over one week, I spent $143 (excluding things like food from home and bills my parents pay). That averages out to around twenty dollars every day--twenty times the amount average human being on Earth lives on. Looking back on my spending log, I can see that I bought lots of things I don't really need. The things I bought don't seem too frivolous, though, and I would imagine that lots of other American teenagers spend similar amounts or even more daily. According to a nifty Bureau of Labor Statistics chart I found online (http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-the-average-us-consumer-spends-their-paycheck/), the average American adult spends $135 daily.

Why do we have so much when so many other people die without enough to survive? People say that poverty has been around forever, so does that mean there is no solution? I don't think so. There is enough food for everyone in the world, so why do people go hungry? In my opinion, the reason poverty exists in our world today is the same reason I was so shocked to find out that people live on one-twentieth of the amount I spend daily. We are trained by our culture to believe that we have to spend money to be happy, and told to buy into the "rat race" and only care about ourselves and how much wealth or fame we can attain before death. We put the poor in our world out of our minds and convince ourselves that there is nothing we can do to help them, or that their situation is a product of their own bad choices, and that our own good fortune is isolated from their lives, but this is not the case. One essay I read while researching for this project made a point about the link between wealthy people and those living in poverty that really stood out to me: "In the end, the likelihood of living in extreme poverty increases the more distanced one is from those living in extreme wealth. The two conditions are not, however, unlinked. One is directly dependent on the other. If you are a poor black female child starving to death in Kenya, your misery is contingent on the material advantages of a wealthy white middle-aged man living in America, and vice versa. "

Although it seems to idealistic to ever be realized, I honestly believe that the only way to eradicate extreme poverty is to give up on the "rat race" and see all other people on earth as what they are: valuable human beings created by God who deserve equal opportunities to live.