I’ve known poor folks. This isn’t them. The meat?
…the average household defined as poor by the government is equipped with air conditioning, cable TV, a car, a television, a DVD player, and if a boy is in the house, an Xbox or Playstation. The size of the average poor American’s home is actually LARGER than the average living space of a typical middle-income European.
So, the next time someone opens their yap spewing about the poor in America–and all the kids going to bed hungry at night, etc.–tell ’em to shut their yap. While there are poor folks still in America (it’s a truism that the poor will always be with us because its… true), the number of genuinely poor folk is really very, very, very small and completely amendable to local solutions.
Poor kids going to bed hungry? I’d be willing to bet that 99% of “poor kids” going to bed hungry are completely, totally and in every way, shape, fashion and form traceable directly to parents wasting resources on their own gratification. Society’s problem there has a simple solution: punish those parents. If that doesn’t rein them in and compel them to care for their kids before satisfying their urges for personal luxuries, then removal of the kids from the home and further, more stringent punishment of those selfish parents should ensue. And those solutions are best left to local authorities to devise and implement.