If you have a big screen TV, air conditioning, able to eat everyday without having to go to the food bank or soup kitchen, if you live in a spacious apartment or house or drive a car, you aint poor!
Its a testament to America's greatness! Even our homeless are fat and clothed!
I grew up in a 1 bedroom house with my mom, brother, grandfather, and grandmother. We scoured the fields after the growers had harvested them and cut them loose. Helped my grandmother can everything we could find. Still had to stand in line with grandmother for commodities occasionally.
We were super poor according to today’s statistics. Had leftover bean or fried potato sandwiches for lunch on many occasions but never went hungry. Guess we would be considered destitute today.
You obviously don’t live in Texas. You must have a vehicle. Outside the handful of major metropolitan areas, there is no public transportation. Most people live in the country and their nearest grocery store is 20-30 miles away. That’s why I only grocery shop once every 3-4+ weeks and combine errands.
How the heck do you propose they get to work or that food bank you mentioned without a car, no public transportation and 30 miles from town?
Not everyone in America (I don’t give a rat’s rear about France or Germany), no matter their income bracket, has front door services or shopping centers or pizza delivery or jobs 5 minutes away. It wasn’t until recently that we didn’t have to drive to town for our mail and burned our trash because there was no service. I still drive into town to take the bills to the PO.
Guessing you’ve never survived a Texas summer without a/c. It can be done but as much as I can’t stand the gimme crowd, I’d never fault their a/c.
If my great Grandpa were alive he’d probably tell you that in his day, these people would be considered well off.
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My late parents would have agreed with your great-grandfather. Both were born in the early part of the 20th century — 1911 and 1912, respectively — and both were required to drop out of high school in order to help support their respective large families. They were poor, but they worked hard, never asked for a handout, and they didn’t whine.
2009 was a long time ago, and things have changed...a LOT.
>>>If you have a big screen TV, air conditioning, able to eat everyday without having to go to the food bank or soup kitchen, if you live in a spacious apartment or house or drive a car, you aint poor! <<<
I would agree with the above quote to a degree.
Big screen TV’s are like the old crt tv’s anymore. I see quite a few poor people owning them, but they were picked out of dumpsters and are older technology..ie they can’t go online, and you can’t ‘’cast’’ a movie or show onto them.
Some apartments/dwellings offer only one source of heating/cooling. Electric. Cooling is no more a luxury in the Southern usa than heating is in the north. When you live with 9 moths of winter, you need heat. When you live with 9 or 10 months of heat, you need cool, especially in apartments and trailers/manufactured housing.
Many spacious houses and apartments are absolute health hazard dumps. Especially those in inner cities. Why the health department doesn’t shut them down is a mystery, but maybe those decreped dwellings keep people off the streets.
I’m talking dwellings with the ceilings falling down, the doors don’t fit in the frames because the houses are sinking and are no longer level. I’m talking $4-500 /mo electric bills as a matter of course...with or without air conditioning because the wiring is old and so are all the appliances ...that only half work.
Places that haven’t been painted, refloored/carpeted in 30 years or more, are full of roaches and bedbugs...
A good many of you people do NOT have even the faintest clue as to how the poor truly survive.
The lucky few who do have a computer tend to have very old, pieced together computers. Most don’t. Phones? Most have old technology freebie flip phones. Many are trying to survive on $4-500 per month with 98% of that going toward just the rent which tends to be no less than $400 for one of those sinking, unpainted, roach-bedbug filled dumps..and that price is for a studio or efficiency which barely allows room enough for a double bed and a chair. Forget a kitchen table. Now THAT’s a luxury in many places! A freaking Table with non-broken chairs...and a place to put it where you can actually sit at it.
Most of the poor people that I know, are on foot. They are elderly, disabled, and can’t make both an auto insurance payment AND be able to register the car in the same month. “ONLY $5.00 to them is what they might be lucky enough to make it through the month on after paying rent and utilities, not to mention medical co-pays that they do NOT always get help with.
You can’t line up all the ducks and make them fit all scenarios as I see done by truly ignorant trolls on forums nation wide. Many of these people only get $50-90/month foodstamps and are grateful for it because it helps...a little. Foodbanks rarely give out meat and when they do, it tends to be spoiled meat donated by a grocery store...last day of sale but it’s reeking and sticky when you thaw it out. And you are lucky to get one package of meat in a month in the places that do have it to give.
Often times, the canned goods are well past their expiration dates and don’t tell me that they last forever. They don’t.
A good 95% of what’s given at foodbanks are carbs, pure carbs. Carrots, peas, (canned of course...not much nutrition left after over cooking due to commercial canning processes), corn...all carbs. Bread, pasta, rice, beans...all carbs. Poptarts and fig newtons..carbs. Expired mayonaise in swollen containers to put into the expired tuna that is more than half water and floating flakes. Dump the water out of this cheap tuna and there’s roughly 2 tablespoons of meat there to put into a processed package of tuna helper than when finished doesn’t serve 4 at all! Unless of course you add some vitamin free canned corn, nutrient deficient stale white bread...without even margarine..We can add some chocolate cookies and cream pop tarts to that for dessert so we don’t feel totally deprived..wow! A luxury food that the poor don’t deserve to have!!
And then wonder why the poor are fat so you can make fun of that, too.
Oh! And here’s a good one! Kids get backpacks full of food at school to take home to last the weekend...
I’ve got news for you. That may happen in some places, but it does NOT happen everywhere. How nutritious is plastic packaged pudding? Chips ahoy cookies? Sugar brined canned fruit? Ya, the tummy might feel better but there’s always a persistent hunger as the body protests the poison chemical laced/leached artificial food with the added poison to make them taste better as it screams for real food/nutrients. And we wonder why the poor kids are fat as they are made to sit at desks 6-8 hours per day eating garbage they are lucky to have because after all, the poor shouldn’t have good things in their lives according to some writings I’ve seen on forums across the nation.
So the poor mainly consist of elderly, disabled, and children. All of whom are dependent upon the age groups in between. But the age groups in between are dependent upon a service industry for their living. Basically 10 bucks an hour, but not enough hours to pay the rent unless one is fortunate enough to live in an area where they can work 3 jobs and juggle schedules, have to work 12+ hours per day, many of whom are single moms/dads trying to juggle their work ours around their kids school hours and who don’t earn enough to pay for child care plus all the bills. Many don’t even own cars, and those who do struggle to put gas, keep up with insurance, registrations, repairs. This is now middle class America folks!
People who earn adequate money are now looked at as the wealthy. Those are the ones who have resources enough to pay all their rent, utilities, groceries, clothes, reliable and decent transportation with all the attending costs, who can pay a phone bill and were able to get that nice free phone just for changing phone companies, and maybe at tax time they can purchase a flat screen tv (and throw the old one in the dumpster so some poor person can retrieve it and get called names for owning an old flat screen tv...how dare the poor have a luxury!)
Y’all don’t know the reality. You see a poor person on food stamps to to the store in a ‘’fancy’’ vehicle that they most likely borrowed so they can shop once a month.
You want to know the reality???? Go stand in line with them 2-3 times a week at the church pantries. Listen carefully...throw out a woe or two and watch the line jump on it with bigger woe’s of it’s one like a fish charging a baited worm. Show up at the same places week after week and become familar with the faces...even in a big city. People are creatures of habit. Pretty soon, you’ll discover that each person has their favorite pantry to hit up several days a week because each one provides something different that they need. This one gives canned goods, this one gives hygiene, this one has some animal food, that one includes a little meat and fresh veggies...they stand in lines for hours and hours,day after day, and then have to lug the stuff home...often on foot or bicycles. Most have difficulty walking. Many are raising grand children abandoned by parents who couldn’t cope anymore, or who are in school full time trying to improve their lives (on the tax payer’s dime...grants, loans etc)
Unless you stand with these people and live as they do..a few hundred dollars a month which is less even than a minimum wage job. They aren’t lazy, but they are unemployable on a consistent basis for many reasons..no jobs available that they can actually do, and if they do, they risk loosing a steady check that hangs in there during times when their physical impairments get the better of them, and they’d loose their jobs if they had them.
When the resources are slashed by governments, THESE are the ones who take the full brunt of it.
It doesn’t do any good to experiment and live like the poor because for the poor, there is NO end. An experiment has a beginning and an end so you don’t get the full effect of...despair and hopelessness. The discouragement and depression won’t take you down as it does them. That’s why the drugs and alcohol.
It takes a hundred bux week to eat well, but it only takes 30 or so to stay drunk all week and screw the food. At least you can laugh about something.
It’s a lot like Stockholm syndrome. You adjust and don’t even realize you did. You can’t even see any other way.
Yes, poverty advocates work with metrics like “poverty lines”. They just pick an arbitrary number and dictate anyone below it is poor.
Problem is they don’t account for the fact a unique individual may naturally travel through income levels. So a 20 year old engineering student dedicating all his time to study may only have $6000 of summer work income. Technically he is poor but he knew this ahead of time and made the choice, on the calculation he would soon earn much higher than the average American.
Most areas of California a family of four on twenty-five grand is below poverty if no help. Average rent for a one bedroom( family of four??) is about $1800.