Five Poverty-Worsening Chain Reactions

Poverty doesn't just happen. Poverty just happens. One day you're eating a roast-beef sandwich in an apartment, and then a few days later you're scraping dried mustard off of discarded sandwich wrappers in an abandoned security-guard shack at the old closed foundry over off Broad St. It all starts with one tiny, honest mistake. And now that we Americans have traded economies with China, we can all expect an even higher likelihood that some seemingly innocuous thing we don't even realize we're doing will soon lead to us all performing sexual favors on feral dogs in exchange for clumps of delicious, life-sustaining hair. Let me show you how it works.

1. You're excited about some project you're working on, and you forget to check your mailbox for a few days. You miss your water bill and your service is disconnected. You call the water company and are told that it will cost as much as buying a 12-bedroom house in the Hamptons in order to have your service restored--apparently because each molecule of water costs $6,347.02 to manufacture.
2. You show up at a sales meeting smelling like a basketball player's feet, because you haven't been able to shower in two weeks. You do not make the sale. No money is coming in because of the visible stinklines rising from your torso. Your electric, phone, and internet services are subsequently disconnected, making your dreams of finding work impossible.
3. You can't afford to repair your car so that it will pass the emissions test, and so the state will not allow you to renew your plates. You are pulled over by one of the 9,567,371 police officers who boredly cruise your suburb (pop. 6,000) looking to boost municipal revenue. You are ticketed and sent before a judge, but your auto insurance expires before the court date arrives. The judge suspends your driver's license, gleefully bangs your car into a twisted wreck with his gavel, strips you naked, douses your entire body with lighter fluid and sets you ablaze, has you publicly flayed on the local ABC affiliate, and chews off your legs. You are thrown into a dumpster by a pair of fat, laughing bailiffs.
4. Unable to climb out of the dumpster because of your burns and leglessness, you survive for a few days by drinking flat bottle-remnants of EXTREME EXPLOSION COLA! and swallowing the odd rancid pinto bean or two. Finally, you and the rest of the trash are loaded into a truck and hauled off to the landfill.
5. You are buried under a bunch of heartless Rich People's discarded iPods and property deeds. You suffocate within a few minutes.

Think it can't happen to you? It's already starting. You're welcome.