Heritage: The Poor Have It Too Damned Good
The Heritage Foundation has a new report on poverty in America. It’s an example of compassionate conservatism at work.
The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill as well as to put food on the table. Their living standards are far different from the images of dire deprivation promoted by activists and the mainstream media.
…
Consumer items that were luxuries or significant purchases for the middle class a few decades ago have become commonplace in poor households. In part, this is caused by a normal downward trend in price following the introduction of a new product. Initially, new products tend to be expensive and available only to the affluent. Over time, prices fall sharply, and the product saturates the entire population, including poor households.
I’m surprised Heritage didn’t bring out their “lucky duckies” argument that the poor pay no federal income tax. You know, it’s generally considered a good thing if poor people have food and shelter. It means the social safety net is working. This is a good thing.
Here’s some truths:
“15 Shocking Facts About Poverty In America”
#3 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the OECD
#4 Household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year
#7 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program
Heritage wants you to think that these statistics are lies. I wonder how Heritage reconciles the rhetoric that the wealthy “job creators” need coddling and special tax breaks with the rhetoric that the poor are coddled too much? It’s Heritage, so I guess it doesn’t have to make sense.
Of course, the poor used to get paid to BUILD those products:
“The poor have too much money and the rich don’t have enough.”
It is modern Republicanism in a nutshell. The surprising thing is that they have gotten so many Democrats and poor people to agree with that cockamamie bullshit.
So according to Heritage, the poor need to live in Dickensian circumstances in order to at least be acknowledged as poor.
One of the things to keep in mind is just how cheap some of these items really are. And there isn’t a major city in the US that does not have a program that tries to provide low-cost/fee AC or fans to the elderly or the poor.
Refrigerators, stoves and ovens are luxuries? Really?
What this so-called survey does is work at demonizing poor people — as if they need more of this — while ignoring the fact that it is pretty hard to rent a place these days that don’t come with fridges, stoves and ovens. Lots of them come with AC too. Plenty of people have cell phones instead of land lines. And how do you search for work, apply for work and otherwise try to change your situation without a computer and the internet these days?
More bullshit from the Heritage Foundation. Too bad they won’t find some actual poor people to conduct one of these *surveys*. If they can throw money at crap like this, they could at least throw money at people who need it.
The other day I was driving along Second Street in Wilmington with my young son. We are two suburban white guys. He asked “Is this a slum?” I had to say “Yes, but a lot of people call it home, and a lot of them are trying to make the most of it.”
He wondered why there were so many guys hanging around on the street with their shirts off, and the girls were wearing ridiculously skimpy stuff too. I pointed at the car thermometer, which read 97 degrees. Then I pointed at the open windows on the row houses. He was visibly shocked when I explained they didn’t have air conditioning.
In a few years he will probably be asking me why those people aren’t at work. I guess I better start getting my answer ready.
Did the Heritage Foundation bother to talk to the folks who run the Emmanuel Dining Rooms here in Delaware? They would find out that the number of meals the EDR on Jackson Street in Wilmington serves per year has jumped significantly in recent years.
Are there lazy poor people? No doubt. Do some of them spend money on what many would consider luxury items? Absolutely. But to paint them all with one brush is not fair. Most are hard-working, just looking for a way to provide for their families.
And the medical care they obtain when needed is in the emergency room, clogging it up for those with real emergencies and driving the cost up for everyone. Yet when we try to make health care more affordable for them, we’re somehow un-American.
Majority of poor are NOT going to emergency rooms unless its an emergency. They do go to the health clinic inside the hospital, or to clinics around the city for their second rate ghetto care. Health care isnt affordable for working people let alone poor people. What planet are you living on Another Mike? Affordable Care doesnt take affect until 2014….even then we are still stuck with the for profit health care industry still robbing the country blind. You should be pushing for Delaware to adopt a single payer health care system, so our costs will be drastically less. Even the most hard hearted conservative should be pushing for single payer.
Cons need to hate on someone, actually a lot of ones to keep their life-forces going.
News like this always brings me back to one of my fav quotes:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” – JK Galbraith
Just about nails it.
Isn’t “conservative think tank” an oxymoron??
The poor should be regulated.
“POVERTY”. “There you go again”, as President Reagan used to say. Using a word you have no definition for.
Without revealing my own business any further, I can tell you that I have had access to about 15 “poor” households over the past dozen years. And the Heritage Foundation is correct. They struggle to pay for airconditioning and satelite TV when they struggle at all. Car payments too. Most of them are too good to ride around in a $500 beater…like I did for years. No. Make the car payments and birth your children on welfare. Whatever happened to “substandard housing”? Ten bungalows in a row on a dirt road with hand pumps in the front yards and outhouses in the backyards. That was back when being “poor” required a little work and sacrifice. Ah, those were the good old days.