You make a good salary and can afford to shop and buy new clothes at retail. But you really enjoy shopping at a particular thrift store, where you find great bargains even though you sometimes buy items that you really don’t need.

And there's the rub. If you buy something at that thrift store, and lots of middle class people do,  you’re probably taking it away from someone who needs it more than you ... and can afford it way less than you can.

Tough, a deal is a deal, and should be available to anyone who happens to find it. Or are you putting the screws to someone you don't even know and making their life just a tad more miserable in the process?

When is it better to earn $29,000 than to earn $69,000? When you’re a single mom living in Pennsylvania, it seems.

Describing what it feels to be the painful reality in America, Tyler Durden, the collective that writes to inflame at Zerohedge, concludes that "for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work."

Here's another zinger: New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote about families in the Appalachian hill country pulling their kids out of literacy classes since, if they learn to read and write, the parents are likely to lose their monthly stipend for kids with intellectual disabilities.

Durden is actually basing his argument on that of Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare for Pennsylvania, who published a paper last summer called Welfare’s Failure and the Solution, a scathing indictment of his own state's economic safety net.

Sometimes, all it takes is one life-changing experience to land someone on the streets: a job loss, the death of a loved one, divorce, or some natural disaster.

That's the underlying message of Spent, an online point-and-click game game in which players are asked to make tough decisions while earning minimum wages, like those often found in retailing or fast food. 

The game was created by ad agency McKinney for pro bono client Urban Ministries of Durham to highlight the challenges and tradeoffs faced by low-income earners trying to break out of the poverty cycle.

The dilemmas in the game are based on real-life experiences of people served by UMD, which maintains a homeless shelter and outreach program for the disenfranchised.