POOR IN JUDGMENT - The poor spend more on big-screen televisions than computers...

ncpa.org ^ | Wednesday, August 31, 2005

[Elmer Gantry]

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.

[michaelt]

So much for the "Digital Divide."

[mrsdeb]

I used to run a business that hired many "lower socio-economic level" women who had, for example, a hard time connecting the number of hours they worked with the size of their paycheck.

One was evicted from her rental house for non-payment of rent. She moved to another town and got some sort of rent assistance. Came to give me her new address, and when I asked for her new telephone number, said: "I don't have one yet. It'll be a couple of days before I get a new number, because we've signed up with a plan where we get cable TV, DSL, and cell phones in a package, and they can't do the install for a few days."

She couldn't afford to pay rent but she had to have cable TV, DSL, and cell phones...

[MadManDan]

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.

[Altamira]

As Thomas Sowell says: Poor people have poor habits.

[July 4th]

The definition of "poor" should exclude people who have cash to buy computers or big-screen TVs.

I did some community service in high school. It was a total crock. We were delivering food to families on welfare that had walls of hi-fi gear but no food in the fridge. Why not spend the money on food? Oh yeah, the kids from the burbs will bring the food so the poor can spend the $$ on stereos and TVs.

[Altamira]

"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.

[nodumbblonde]

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.

[DeweyCA]

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.

[ASOC]

There is a book set called "The Unheavenly City" and the "Unheavenly City Revisited" - a look at Harlem before and after the 'war on poverty'.

Very short version - Think - event horizon. Poor man has trouble working for two weeks to collect a paycheck, can't see that far ahead, a Getty looks at something and asks, how will this affect my grandchildren.

[slightlyovertaxed]

You really mean to tell me that the socio-political and socio-economic climate of the 1900's is anywhere near what it is today? Back then, you could get a job that would feed your family even if you were functionally illiterate. Nowadays, you're lucky to find a minimum wage one with a HS education. Tell me how many jobs back then required skilled technical labor versus the number that required manual labor and then tell me how the pay rates have changed. The two aren't equivalent.

To the comment about "lots of scholarship money," take a look at the attrition rates vs. graduation rates of poor students in college. You're going to tell me that an industrious kid goes from getting A's in HS to failing college because he, what, suddenly gets lazy? I doubt it. There's a different caliber of work expected in college, even at a lousy one. It's not just about getting in.

[MadManDan]

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?

[slightlyovertaxed]

Daughter of two teachers who spent a lot of time in the inner cities. The theory you're talking about is a lot different from the reality they saw. Plus those wacky statistics I'm mentioning, since I don't like wandering into a debate without a fact. Granddaughter of Italian immigrants, as well...

I'm a divine right monarchist.

[Stone Mountain]

The definition of "poor" should exclude people who have cash to buy computers or big-screen TVs.

Computers are cheap these days.

[MadManDan]

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...