So who's poor?
46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
They're better off than I am. I live in exactly such a home, and the bank owns it. And should I pay off the bank's share, I'll still have to rent it from the government. (Rent? Well, if I don't pay my taxes, I can't live there anymore; what else do you call it?) Yeah, yeah, I know, they meant "home ownership" as "your name is on the deed." But anymore, it's almost as easy as renting...which is why we have a foreclosure crisis.
I'm not into this punitive thing of "count the toys." I want to find out why these people think that 16 hrs a week of work is going to make it. I want to stop the government from enabling that, and I want to encourage the American consumer (not the companies...they're just giving people what they want) to quit exporting jobs to Asia.
Comments
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: August 28, 2007 11:13 PM
Actually, forty six percent of poor households lives in a bigger home than I do. We've got two bedrooms and no garage. However, I have two and a half bathrooms. Is the key to not being poor having three places to s**t?
And most of the toys he cites in the article, like DVDs and air conditioners, are common because they are cheap. Even a used car is not necessarily more than a grand, and small cheap versions of the other stuff cost only a few hundred dollars a pop.
The last answering machine I bought was about twenty dollars.
There's also a parallel development I've seen at the other end of the spectrum. What used to be called wealthy when I was growing up is now apparently only middle class. As a (Republican) friend of mine once explained, a combined income of 100k can not reasonably be expected to support a household with two SUVs and three kids to put through college, and pay the mortgage on the five bedroom house, so such a family can not be called affluent. I simply responded that such a family simply didn't know how to budget or save, and that I was brought up to think of such people as being on the fringe that separated upper middle class from middle class: middle class was people (like me and him and you) who are not poor, but are not affluent either. Or am I wrong somewhere in that?
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: August 29, 2007 08:29 PM
I dunno...with things like AMT and constant inflation, your friend may have a point. It may even be a conscious political strategy: if 100K is not "the rich", then its not the class that Democrats swear to loot.