What Really is Poverty?

Townhall.com ^ | August 1, 2011 | Ed Feulner

[A_perfect_lady]

Cuba is the left's gold standard in equalizing the distribution of income.

I'll never forget anthropology professors at SIUC with pictures of Che on their office doors, picketing because the school paid them "hardly more than the groundskeepers!"

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Don’t you think it’s an outrage in a country as rich as ours that a full 20% of the population is in the bottom quintile of income?

That's what they'd like you to think, but it's not true. In order to cook the books on what percentage of income is earned by those in the "bottom quintile," they've actually defined the "bottom quintile" as being fewer than 20% of income earners.

And few of the members of the "bottom quintile are dead-enders; predominantly they are young people just starting out. More of those who were in the bottom quintile ten years ago are in the top quintile now, than are still in the bottom quintile today.

[oblomov]

When it rains. It is raining, and I think of the poor who now huddle together with their many cares, and no practice at concealing them: each is ready to hurt the others and make for himself a pitiful kind of pleasure even when the weather is bad. That and alone is the poverty of the poor! - Nietzsche

[loveliberty2]

Feulner writes of the Left's focus on what it likes to define as "poverty."

Let's remember that it has spent the last 50 years "studying" poverty, redistributing the earnings of others in the name of "poverty," and building an ever-larger voting block whose numbers they can count on to re-elect them to positions of coercive power.

That the con man John Edwards is mentioned by Feulner at all is comical--he and his "two Americas" may have been good political theatre, but it was not intellectual honesty about economic matters in America.

As he went about establishing a "poverty center" at his alma mater for the "study" of poverty, one could speculate that he merely was exploiting less fortunate citizens for the sake of advancing his own political goals.

If Edwards truly possessed such "concern" for those in "poverty," he would have been better off to establish a center at UNC for the study of wealth creation--a far better vehicle for lifting people out of poverty. He could have called it the Adam Smith Center and used that great moral philosopher's "An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" as the Center's primary course of study. (Sarcasm)

[MrB]

Cloward-Piven ideology:
“if each finally found himself in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows ... all were infinitely better off.”