I then asked them: "How does the person making $9601 feel?" They said: "Lucky!" I agreed, but I also pointed out that, in short order, they would start complaining that they were poor and they would want redress. The lesson finally ended with a discussion of the fact that anytime two people compare incomes and one has less than the other, the lower income person is deemed "poor". Indeed, unless you have a perfectly even distribution of income, you will always have "poor" people. A perfect distribution of income is pure communism and has been tried in numerous social experiments (e.g., New Harmony, Owenism, etc.) and it never works. Also, "poor" in the US is a hell of a lot different that "poor" in a lot of Third World countries.
Finally, we tend to glamorize poor people, giving them more status than most deserve. Rich people create jobs, give to charities, augment capital formation, plus making many other contributions to the economic benefit of society, while poor people do little to add to the economic well-being of society. If poor people worked at bettering themselves through education and hard work with the same gusto as they do pointing to rich people and blaming them for all their problems, we probably wouldn't have any "poor people".
This lasted for about 2 years. It only took conservatives that time to win the Senate and the House and many state governments. Conservatives proved that the poor paid no taxes and were, in fact, not poor. The homeless crisis was proven a sham. Mitch committed suicide.
Suddenly, the poor are off the socialists vocabulary list.
The mantra is now "the wealth gap", "middle class disparities".
As a token for this election cycle, John Edwards has been selected by the socialists to emphasize the cause of the poor; the only candidate to do this. In fact, it is his only issue. Other candidates hardly ever bring up the word.
The socialists have succeed in virtually eliminating poverty through wealth redistribution.
They have not given up on redistribution. They just have a new constituency, the middle class, those who are taxed the most.
yitbos
The romanticism isn’t totally misplaced, though perhaps now out of date. These are the folks that, until the onslaught of masses of illegal aliens and the fleeing of manufacturing to China, undertook the lowly jobs, the close to the earth jobs, the get your hands dirty jobs. Sweat and perseverance were honored.
Granted, class envy is wrongheaded. The existence of a Bill Gates generally does not cause poor people to be poorer.
You mean that if I own a cell phone, have only one Color TV, Cable, Air Conditioning and a Car, that I could still be considered poor? And I'm likely to be 60 pounds overweight too! Now that's POOR!
There is a difference.
Um, didn't she just make the point that "servicing" the poor does deliver jobs? ;-) Well, not to the poor . . .
It worked for Uncle Joe.