Posted on 08/31/2005 1:39:49 PM PDT by InvisibleChurch
POOR IN JUDGMENT
Daily Policy Digest
ECONOMIC ISSUES
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
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Is the "digital divide" simply a "cultural divide?" New Census Bureau data show that the poor have cash to spend on computers, but they choose instead to spend it on big-screen TVs, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).
Little-noticed data still trickling out from the last U.S. census shows that the poor shun PCs and other valuable information gear for entertainment toys. In fact, their spending on color TVs -- including big-screen TVs -- is on par with the rich.
Consider:
More than 34 percent of poor own two color TVs compared with 33 percent of the rich, according to the latest Census Bureau tables; and more than half own two or more color TVs. What's more, fully 1 in 4 poor households have a large-screen TV (versus 2 in 5 wealthy households). Nearly 65 percent of the poor in this country have cable or satellite hooked up to their boob tubes. And a whopping 74 percent have a VCR or DVD player. Money spent on such toys (to say nothing of Blockbuster film rentals and video games), meanwhile, is not being spent on tools that could lift them out of poverty, says IBD.
According to the census:
Less than 20 percent of the poor own a PC, and just 15 percent have access to the Internet and its vast treasure of knowledge. In contrast, 83 percent of upper-income Americans own at least one PC, and 74 percent are online. As the government's own data bear out, a great many low-income Americans are poor in technology largely because they're poor in judgment - and they're just hurting themselves, says IBD.
Source: Editorial, "Poor In Judgment," Investor's Business Daily, August 31, 2005.
For text (subscription required):
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20
For U.S. Census Bureau data:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty.html
or weigh more than an offensive tackle. All of those poor people caught in the hurricane are the fattest poor people I have ever seen. There is almost no one who could be described as slender.
So much for the "Digital Divide."
Gimme a break. Do you think the Italian, Irish, etc. immigrants were not poor? Didn't a lot of them over time make something of themselves? The only thing keeping a person like you exemplified down is themselves.
As Thomas Sowell says: Poor people have poor habits.
"What chance in life, realistically, does even a top-performing student from, say, Harlem have?"
You're kidding, right? They have oodles of scholarship money waiting for them if they are a high-performing, low-income minority student. Any smart black kid can go to college for free, or virtually so.
I'd be willing to bet that the ones who didn't get back on top were ones that had simply inherited their wealth instead of working up from nothing. I think more people today are rich because of what they've *done*, not what family they were born into.
I know a family that has been "chronically" poor for 20 years. They recently came into some money and within 4 months they were back to nothing. Not because of emergency spending, but because of reckless spending. And, while they never seem to have money to buy food (although all of them are well over 300 lbs.), they always have the cash for all of them to smoke namebrand cigs.
Another example is to look at lottery winners. Many of these formerly poor, but now instant multi-millionaires, are back to being poor within a couple years.
Once again, give me a break. There were not jobs for everybody back then. Anyone who fails a college course did something wrong. News for you, but if you study you will pass. College is not that hard when you have good time management skills, and basic core classes that you take before specialized classes are not that hard either. Keep reading your economics books. By the way, are you a liberal?
Lots of teachers are liberals, reality is not as liberals see it, and I don't care who's granddaughter you are, you're still wrong. But, before this really devolves into "I know you are, but what am I", let's just stop.
BTW: My mother is a teacher, and my great-grandparents were Italian, so does that give my argument more credence too? Whatever...
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