New Site
TPMCafe is Josh Marshall's new venture, a multi-layered group blog with lots of great features, like allowing readers to post diaries like Kos, but on a page with others of similar topic; and a regular guest-blog area. This first week, the guest blogger is John Edwards, who yesterday wrote about the fact that not only is being poor difficult, it's actually more expensive than being wealthy:

The Brookings Institution recently released a fascinating study demonstrating how low-income families pay more for all sorts of things. They pay more for groceries and gasoline. They pay more for furniture and appliances. They pay higher prices for insurance and for utilities. And—something that has troubled me for a long time—they pay more for financial services, whether it’s cashing a check or getting a loan.

And continues the train of thought last night:

(I)t’s a lot easier to save and spend wisely when you already have the means – and that much harder when you don’t. Just think about it: even on the most basic level, the websites most families (including many who are reading today) use to comparison-shop and save on everything from plane tickets to home loans simply aren’t easily accessible to many low-income families.

He's making a lot of sense - read both posts. I would add to his list the enormous cost of higher education if you're not already wealthy enough to have contacts, buy study courses for entrance exams, being able to afford extracurricular activities that make your college resume look that much more impressive, etc. But he's right - it's one thing to be disadvantages, it's another to have to pay more for the same thing as a wealthier person.

TPMCafe is also the new home of Matthew Yglesias' blog, if you've been missing that.