How to live on $432 a month in America

I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one:

Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.

The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.

And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.

Rural living also looks cheaper because most people do not even remotely consider the costs of transportation.

The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.

Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.

Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.

As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...

Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.

For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.