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older article, but a good reminder on who is considered poor in a country that has thrown TRILLIONS to over the past several decades.

I looked at the list and find I must have truly been a poor person when I grew up as about half things on list we did not have including air conditioning, microwave, dishwasher, multiple tvs, etc.

What I find missing on these sheets is a collection of vices like smoking, gambling and drinking that are undertaken that is not a "need" but a "want" that diverts additional money away from basic neccessities.

Compare MRS WIGGS OF CABBAGE PATCH with the poor today.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025523/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

I still remember people who lived really poor. One woman invited her neighbors in to see her new wallpaper made of flattened cardboard boxes!
And a man who sided his tar paper shack with feed sacks dipped in concrete to keep the wind out and his family warm.

There was an article here recently about how black women suffer most with breast cancer because they are less insured than whites, can't afford it, because blacks are afraid to go to doctors because of previous mistreatment of of blacks by doctors, etc.

The woman in the article had missed her annual mammograms because she was uninsured. So her breast cancer was undetected for a long time and now it's critical.

The picture that came with the article told me all I needed to know .... and a fact that the article failed, as they always do, to address. This uninsured poor woman could somehow afford a smart phone (and the monthly service charges) and manicured fingernails (which must be maintained) but not an inexpensive routine procedure that takes about ten minutes a year.

I am below the poverty line. I am insured (through divorce agreements) until May. But it's catastrophic care and covers nothing until costs are in the thousands. Here in California a mammogram is $99, whether you are insured or not. And I own a flip phone, not a smart phone.

If I can afford a mammogram so can she. But she chose to spend it on phones and nails. Color me very unsympathetic.

I guess I am poor then. We dropped cable at the start of 2011 because we had to make cuts and that was the most unnecessary. We have a PS3 that we got as a gift, but only use it for Netflix and redbox movies. In that way, I’m not sure if it counts to say I have a gaming console since we just use it as a DVD player.

Also, we only have one TV. It’s a small 28” in our living room.

Like so many on FR, I guess I have even less than the poor have.

No one in my family has ever owned a smart phone. It’s not worth as much as they charge, at least not to me.

My family has only owned two TVs (one at a time) since I graduated college - one small set that I had to get rid of when they stopped broadcasting regular TV, and a new medium-sized HDTV with the cheap HD version of rabbit ears. I have never had cable/satellite. Best of all, we have kept the kids from developing enough of a TV addiction that ads would make them want the latest clutter.
- 65% of the poor have more than one TV.
- 63% of the poor have cable.
- 32% of the poor have more than two TVs.

No one in my family is overweight, and we throw away almost no food, nor do we eat out more than once a month (at least half of that at Chik-fil-A or Subway).

Other than growing children (who pass down their clothes to siblings), we wear the same clothes for several years in a row, often until they are no longer fit for a thrift store.

We have never owned a n electronic gaming system, whether Nintendo, Xbox, Wii, or whatever. My kids played with blocks, jump ropes, cards, balls, and other toys that used their imagination or physical activity.
- 29% of the poor have a video game system.

I am thankful that my family doesn’t have all the junk that the poor clutter their lives with. I would not be able to tolerate the poverty that a focus on collecting stuff creates.

For quite a while I used to take a lot of food to the food banks.

But it didn’t take long for me to see people coming in and hauling away cartfulls of food - people who were driving way better cars than me.
People who mostly weighed in at 100 pounds or more more than me.
People with iJunk and cells phones better than mine.
People who had a LOT MORE bling than me!

So now I go through a church or work with people I know to help those in need.

A friend of mine used to say that there was a group in America determined to see that one-third of the population lived in substandard housing, had subnormal nutrition, and had to wear below-average clothing. What was that evil group? The statisticians, who defined things like substandard, subnormal, and below-average. That's what has happened to us. For the most part, the poor in America actually live pretty well. They are defined as "poor" only by comparison with other Americans, but not by comparison with the rest of the world or with how people lived a century or so ago.