The census bureau has released a new measure for estimating poor or nearly poor citizens. The numbers apparently startled pollsters.
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This is bullshit.
“Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round. “These estimates defy the stereotypes of low-income families,” Ms. Renwick said.
Among them is Phyllis Pendleton, a social worker with Catholic Charities in Washington, who proudly displays the signs of a hard-won middle-class life. She has one BlackBerry and two cars (both Buicks from the 1990s), and a $230,000 house that she, her husband and two daughters will move into next week.
Combined, she and her husband, a janitor, make about $51,000 a year, more than 200 percent of the official poverty line. But they lose about a fifth to taxes, medical care and transportation to work — giving them a disposable income of about $40,000 a year.
Adjust the poverty threshold, as the new measure does, to $31,000 for the region’s high cost of living, and Ms. Pendleton’s income is 29 percent above the poverty line. That is to say, she is near poor.”
A blackberry and 2 cars. I don’t have a problem with how the measure is calculated, but to call it “near poor” is bullshit. It will just be another metric trumpeted by the liberal media as a reason why conservatism is bad and we need higher taxes.
The best part about the new method (of course the article disguises this by referring to them as non-hispanic, lol) is that it shows that 2/3rds of the “near poor” are white, which should end the idea that minorities are worse off in this country than whites, but it won’t.
wood’
have you lived on $51k ?
as a combined income it is paltry to say the least.
never mind that calculations for the said result is in much need of an update given inflation over time.
this morning i saw a review of Americans who normally were people who have donated to food shelters, now becoming frequent visitors of the food shelter.
as for the misconceptions, well your probably right.
Cronk, 12 years ago, the wife and I were living on a combined income of 31K. It was a choice we made, to live simply. When we decided to start a family, we made other choices, the first of which was to find jobs that paid a lot more.
Life is hard and bad things happen to good people. However, I refuse to view people as victims, with no control of their own destinies.
I agree completely that the system needs to be revamped. Of course my solution is to dramatically reduce the size of gov’t. All these “near poor” studies are used for is to demonstrate a need for more gov’t.
We have had the largest expansion of gov’t in our history over the last 10 years. Yet we still have 100 million people living as “near poor.” Gov’t wants people to believe that they are victims, with their only recourse/resource being more gov’t to take care of them. It is a vicious cycle, and it is likely going to end very badly, and it will the “near poor” and “poor” will be the ones who are hurt the most.