The Poverty Deception

 

 

Thanks to a subscriber to ReturnToExcellence.net for providing this video concerning those living in so-called poverty in America.  Many of you may be surprised to learn the small difference between your standard of living & many who fall in the government's poverty classification. 

 

As a supplement to the video I present the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector's stats & facts about people defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

• Forty-six 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.
  
• Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
  
• Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two thirds have more than two rooms per person.
  
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
  
• Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.
  
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
  
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
  
• Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

The problem starts with poverty being defined by the government as a function of income not wealth.  This provides the deception for how many of the over 47 million people in America collect food stamps.  The Census Bureau's poverty figures measure only pretax income & therefore does not include such non-cash benefits like food stamps & subsidies for housing or rent, or the cash benefits of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or entitlements like Medicaid.  As an illustration, the Census Bureau says that if the value of the federal EITC offered to working poor families was included in the poverty figures 5 million people would have been lifted out of poverty in 2004 & the number of children in poverty in 2007 would have been cut by 2.4 million.  It is important to realize that many people reading this message could manipulate their incomes so that they would fall under the government's definition of poverty & collect benefits accordingly.

 

The above photo provides an excellent example of the poverty deception.  The cost of the bowl of soup @ the homeless center or having MO serve the government funded meal costs the people in the photo nothing.  His Black Berry cell phone costs about $500.

 

I encourage everyone to click on to A Comparison Of The FairTax Prebate To The Earned Income Tax Credit To A Negative Income Tax To The Flat Tax – a piece I originally wrote in 2009 that shows how four programs attack poverty through tax systems. 

 

Poverty should be eradicated wherever we find it – but to solve the problem we should start by asking those in real poverty to explain how they got there & what they are doing themselves to get out of it before we plunge in individually or through some government program.  We should have a different approach for those who manipulate the system to live like leeches on the rest of us.

America Bookended

BO's anti-American plans have been obvious ever since he entered the national scene & lord knows I have tried to expose them with facts & common sense reasoning every chance I get.  This posting focuses on the problems BO has caused (& is causing) people between 50 & retirement age & the two bookends of our society - seniors & young people, neither of whom have any relief in sight for what ails them.  BO has isolated & made bookends out of these latter two groups & plans to compress our societies' decay using both of them with people between 50 & retirement age being the most immediately affected.

 

Looking back @ recent history many pundits have been wondering if something like Japan's lost decade (no economic growth) that started in 1990 could happen here.  Well for starters Japan's lost decade is now exceeding two lost decades by my count.  With America's jobloss & jobless economy starting in 2008 we are already well over three years into a lost decade of our own.  Time moves on relentlessly for unemployed & underemployed people over 50 who have less & less time to financially recover before the time they would like to retire on their own terms with sufficient retirement income.

 

I know many people over 50 who have lost their jobs – people who will never work again @ the level they once knew unless BO is thrown out of office in 2012.  How dignified is it for people who made $50,000 to $70,000 per year &, after months on end of being unemployed, now have jobs that pays between $20,000 to $25,000 per year?   Now long time subscribers know I do not hold these people blameless in letting their skills deteriorate so that they now compete in trying to make a living with people in China who make pennies a day.  The point is that thanks to whatever wealth they may have accumulated over the years it will now be spent down as asset principal is needed to be added to their meager wages to make their reduced ends meet what ever standard of living they can throw together – pitiful isn't it? – but in accordance with BO's design.

 

Now for BO's attack on seniors & youth.  

 

1.  Seniors who rely on CD interest income for even a portion of their income (like a little extra spending money) have been victimized by the Federal Reserve's artificial manipulation of interest rates to virtually zero.  This damage to seniors has the beneficial effect for BO that the cost of all of his massive record borrowing is minimized – but @ the expense of savers.  Occupy The Fed is more justified by seniors than OWS ever was in lower Manhattan by people who never knew why they were there.

 

2.  The poor education & training systems (high school & college) in this country have caught up with America's youth – CUNY reports that "almost four out of every five freshmen who arrive @ its community colleges with a high school degree require remediation in reading, writing, & mathematics" – sounds like the three "Rs" with no hickory stick. 

 

No entrepreneur is going to hire someone who can not add value to their enterprise.  Accordingly, over 14% of the 42 million people aged 25 to 34 (compared with 10.6% in 2000) are forced to live in their parents' homes because they cannot support themselves.  See graph below.  A further breakdown of these stats reveals that 19% of men 25 to 34 & 10% of women 25 to 34 are forced to live with their parents – for those 18 to 24 it is 60% men & 50% women.  This means that 5.9 million young people aged 25 to 34 who by the laws of the jungle should be living on their own have not really started to create their own wealth while in the meantime their parents wealth is deteriorating as the parents support the unemployed youth of America.  Put another way BO has cheated today's youth that falls in this category (& more important to parents – much of tomorrow's youth because it will not get better) out of one quarter to one third of their lifetime earning power - wealth that will never be available to them to spend down decades from now.

 

 

 

By the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low seniors are forced to spend down their wealth (no matter how meager).  BO's purposely dreadful economy keeps young people who can't find jobs from literally moving out of their parents' homes.  Both phenomenons, coupled with what is happening to people between 50 & retirement age as explained above, keeps BO moving forward with his ideology of a government dependent society.

 

The two book ends – seniors & youth - of course squeezes the shrinking middle class.  As current seniors die out they will be replaced by a far poorer group (the aforementioned portion of people over 50 with no or poor jobs) who has already spent down a good portion of whatever wealth they had.  This obvious government dependent society progresses until today's youth becomes the pauper seniors of tomorrow. 

 

BO's plan is as plain as the nose on your face & yet only one in five holds him responsible for the hard times described above according to the most recent WSJ/NBC News poll.  Thirty four percent still blame Bush & 36% blame Wall Street Bankers meaning that OWS has been successful in deflecting responsibility away from BO thereby making our job that much harder yet.

 

 

 

A Thanksgiving Day Present From A Patriotic Painter

Thanks to our SC businessman for passing on this link of a very inspirational & patriotic painter that makes a great Thanksgiving Day present.  Carol told me it took her breath away - before she heard the song.