Posted on 01/26/2004 11:07:53 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
What do you do when you don't have as much of something as you need? One of the things you can do is stretch it out to make it last as long as it can. That is what the political left is doing with the poor. A lot of noise is made about how we are "running out" of this or that natural resource -- almost always falsely -- but the real problem of the left is that they are running out of the poor, who serve as a justification of the left's drive to extend their power over all the rest of us. Not only is the average real income per person rising in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, people seldom stay in the bottom brackets for more than a few years. Over the course of their lifetimes, most of those same people are in the top 20 percent at one time or other. What is the left to do when they find themselves running out of the poor? They must stretch the poor to make them last -- even if that requires stretching the truth. First of all, the left cannot let the public know that most of the people in the lower-income brackets are just passing through, instead of being stuck there for life. Moreover, the statistics presented to the public cannot be in terms of real income per person, because that is rising, which undermines the left's vision. Instead, the liberal media must restrict themselves to discussing family income or household income statistics, because families and households are getting smaller over the years. That conceals the rise in income per person. Another tried and proven method for spinning the facts to fit the vision is to focus on some wholly atypical example and keep hammering away at it until it seems to be the norm. A five-pages-long article in the Jan. 18 issue of the New York Times Magazine goes that route. The subject of this huge expenditure of ink is a woman who has held a string of low-paying jobs and encountered the kinds of problems in her life that not having much money can bring. As a leap of faith, let us assume that The New York Times is telling the truth about the facts. What does this one woman's story prove in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people? The Times story gets around that problem by simply declaring her to be like "millions at the bottom of the labor force" who are part of "the hidden America." This unsubstantiated assertion is crucial to the point that they are trying to make. But what if your faith can't leap that far? First of all, most of the people at the bottom of the labor force are young and this is a middle-age woman with grown children. There are undoubtedly individuals who, for one reason or another, have not moved up over the years, but transforming these exceptions into the rule is part of the magic of left-wing rhetoric. If we needed any more evidence that this story is in the spin cycle, it is the Times reporter's blaming other people for not solving this woman's problems for her. For example, "if the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared." The reporter refers to employers sarcastically as "untouchable" and declares: "Wages and hours are set by the marketplace and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace." Or a straight story from The New York Times. What does "magnanimity" mean in this context, except having somebody else pay for what this woman wants? If she goes from the night shift to the day shift, somebody else is going to have to go from the day shift to the night shift. Other people -- notably the taxpayers -- have already paid for her in terms of subsidized housing, government-provided dentures and job training. Moreover, she has also helped herself to more than $10,000 of other people's money by running up credit-card debts that she avoided paying by declaring bankruptcy. But it is never enough. Nothing is easier than for third parties to think up things that can be done at somebody else's expense. That is what the agenda of the left largely consists of.
This will sound socialistic and I'm not, but to a large degree our entire economic system is based on envy, keeping up with the Jones and coveting what others have. Simply look at how things are marketed in the media and in stores. If we stopped envy in our society, our economic system would probably collapse.
Luck, or good frotune is where opportunity and preparedness meet.
This kind of post reminds me of a thread here on FR a couple of months ago about some guy in Maryland who worked a minimum-wage job as a security guard, had no medical insurance, and yet somehow figured out a way to spend $45,000 on a brand-new SUV and add $17,000 worth of after-market bullsh!t to it, too!
As they say on Wall Street every day: Most people are born just to be customers.
Sadly, I've seen too many others get stuck in something deadend, while being good solid hardworking workers.
But again, our system encourages that rather than encourges necessary consumption and personal financial temperance.
Two poor people have 5 children equals 7 poor people.
Very few people in this country are poor because their families have lost their wealth. Most are born into poverty, or come here poor.
If your poor and you want to complain about it; blame your parents. - Tom
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.