John Edwards said there are “Two Americas”. And he worked for the hedge fund to learn about poverty. Let’s ask him what more we can do to fight poverty that hasn’t already been tried.
Like so many things in life it all depends on the definition. You are correct, the left (democrats) will always change the definition in order make sure there is at least 10% poor.
Oh wait! No free bling-bling and drugs — damned America!
The poor are so poor in America that the poor of other countries are walking over shards of broken glass bare-foot to get in.
We have those in this country who are relatively poor...but the vast majority of them do not know what true poverty is as compared to how most of the rest of the world lives...and they do have a much, much better opportunity to pull themselves out of it if they simply choose to do so.
“The bottom line is that the left NEEDS to DEFINE a large portion of Americans as “poor” to continue to push their socialist agenda.”
That is completely true yet for the last six and a half years the Bush administration has been in charge of the US Bureau of the Census which collects poverty data and which publishes the annual reports on poverty and the Bush administration has done nothing to change public perception of poverty and it has increased federal funding to poverty programs.
The largest expansion of publically funded health care since LBJ is the new Medicare Part D program, passed by a Republican congress and signed into law at a cost to taxpayers of $43 billion per year by a Republican President.
I wish Republicans weren’t aiding the socialist agenda.
The United States of America. Where the poor are fat and the rich are thin.
But I have a gripe about these statistics, even though I think they are correct. I am really sick of seeing statistics on how many people own a color TV as compared to 40 years ago.
First of all, there are no black and white TVs anymore. ALL TVS ARE COLOR. Secondly, TVs are DAM CHEAP! If you want to measure affluence, count how many people have a rear projection TV or plasma TVs or a blackberry or highspeed internet service or a zero radius turn riding lawn mower or a digital camcorder, or a sony playstation3.
This color TV stupid crap really gets on my nerves. I bought my COLOR TV USED FOR 35 BUCKS! I guess that makes me rich though, doesn’t it??!?!!
Excerpt and link please. This is the longest posting I have ever seen on FR. You even added the footnotes.
Poor people have POOR HABITS.....generally speaking.
If I were a truly poor person in the Third World, I would want to be poor in the US. Unfortunately, they are making it so, no thanks to Bush and the RATs, our idiotic immigration policies and the massive failure to obey our own laws. Have any Freepers seen the 2000 mile wall yet? Gee, I thought our pressure on the morons in gummint meant something more than a legislative win. Time to inundate the morons again with “Where’s the wall, you dolts!” missives and calls.
That’s not to say that there are zero poor people, but their numbers are so small that their problems could easily be solved by a tiny percentage of the Government money leftist politicians claim is being spent on anti-poverty programs. The problem, of course, is that the numbers of truly poor Americans is so small that they represent an insignificant voting bloc, so the left isn’t really interested in them. They’re significantly more interested in the irresponsible people that they can convince are “poor” due to Republicans and capitalism.
With rare exceptions of bad luck, almost all poverty is caused by poor choices. The left will never admit that.
review
This is a problem.
bump
What the demagogues are doing is defining poverty as all those below the median income/standard rather than understanding that “median” means half are over and half are under — irrespective of their “quality of life,” which may probably require much less than the median income in affluent societies.
That’s a mentality shaped in a previous era in which money is the sole differentiator in quality of life. In these times, it’s actually the individual choices one makes that is the great differentiator of that existence. Smart people (good choosers) make whatever money they have go a long way, while the foolish, will never have “enough” no matter how much they have.
So these appeals in the mass media is for the demagogues of the world to see who resonates with these idiotic notions as those they should exploit.
The REAL problem is that the left classifies poverty as making little income each year. But America’s poor don’t need much income when they have the Federal government. Food stamps, Medicaid, Welfare gives them a pretty good life. They even have programs to help them buy houses so that wealth creation can begin. Problem is they don’t keep up their homes and bring down the property values along with their own because they don’t recongnize the value of it because they didn’t earn it. There’s also a lot of drug trade keeping poor homeowners from foreclosing as well as other undeground sources of income.
good post.
there have been lots of articles in the mainstream media recently on “poverty”.
ping for later