Off the top of your head, how many of your friends can you think of
make less than $11,000 a year? Maybe they work some mind-numbing
part-time job, taking cover charges and stamping hands at a strip club.
Or if you're a bit older, how many families do you know of who have one
person working, bringing in less than $23,000 to support a spouse and a
couple of kids? There's nothing wrong with either of those things ...
but those numbers are the
poverty threshold in the U.S., and in my area of the country, it encompasses a fudging poopload of people (sorry, I'm trying to cut down on my cursing).
Poverty is a hot topic for politicians, but it seems like every time
they open their mouths about the subject, stupid falls out. There's a
huge part of me that wants to grab them by their orphan skin lapels and
scream reason into their preciously oblivious brains, but the logical
side of me knows it won't matter. There are some things they will just
never understand. Things like ...
#4. Poor Does Not Equal Unemployed
Not long ago, Newt Gingrich had
his famous "janitor" idea,
where he proposed that we pay impoverished students to clean up vomit
and strewn feces part time at their schools. It sprung up a lot of
debate, which I had little to no interest in beyond this key phrase:
"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of
working and have nobody around them who works. [...] They have no habit
of 'I do this and you give me cash,' unless it's illegal." Not to be
out-douched, Mitt Romney's now famous video hit the 'net, showing him
calling 47 percent of the country "entitled" and saying that they
believe they're victims and they want the government to hand them
everything:
I realize these are both republicans,
but that's actually not my point here. This isn't about philosophy, it's
about pure numbers: A big ol' chunk of people living below the poverty
line actually work. About
10.5 million of them, in fact, or
a third of the people living in poverty. Of the households below the poverty line,
84 percent have somebody in the house who is working. So that whole bit about how these kids have no concept of what work is? That's a bunch of, uh, horse pucky.
Two-thirds of poor children are in working households.
That's a far mother-frumpled cry from Gingrich's pretty broad
statement. It's such a dramatic misunderstanding of what "poor" actually
is, and it's dangerous because it paints a grossly inaccurate picture
of people laying around their house, watching
Family Guy and
enjoying their "free money." Yes, those people do exist -- I've met them
in person. I've drank their beer and dodged their roaches in their
living rooms. At one point, my parents
were those people.
This is how I remember my mom through most of my adolescence.
But of all the poor people I've known over the years -- and I have known a
lot -- I have come across very few able-bodied, able-minded people who didn't do
something
to bring in some money. Even the ones who didn't have so much as a
part-time job still managed to at least find temporary seasonal work
mowing lawns, shoveling snow, or standing on street corners and playing
the guitar with their penis.
So if the issue is that these people are watching reruns and collecting government checks, guess what:
91 percent of government benefits go to the disabled, elderly, or working households.
Not a typo -- 91 percent. You're free to speculate that some of those
people could try harder or are faking their disability or whatever, but
there's no way the reality lines up with this politician fantasy of the
lazy masses who just greedily rub their hands together while leeching
their
unfathomable riches from the always generous American populace.
"Here's all the crap I hate. Now don't bother me for another year."
Oh, while we're on that subject ...
#3. Poor People Are Not Mindless Leeches
Let me give you
a quote from then-Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer of South Carolina that will make you step away from your computer so you can have adequate room to perform a full-on Hadoken at your monitor:
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me
as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because
they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a
person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that
don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is
you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any
better."
"Look at it. All it does is eat, sleep, and crap. Same with that dog."
Oh, Andre. You crazy piece of sh- ... work. Honestly, I was going to
give you some major crap about that, but why bother? You're just one guy
spouting off some insane piece of extremist drivel. It's not like you
compared poor people to raccoons eating beetles out of the carcasses of
dead rats. Wait,
Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning actually did that?
Yep. He was telling a story about a road project being disrupted by
biologists who placed buckets of dead rats on the side of the highway to
collect an endangered species of beetle, because sometimes science is
weird. But at night, raccoons would come up and eat the beetles out of
the rats. Then he went on to say, "They're not stupid. They're going to
do the easy way, if we make it easy for them, just like welfare
recipients all across America. If we don't incent them to work, they're
going to take the easy route."
Right, the "easy route." Like spending money you don't have in order
to attend college for four years, and then flail around, grasping for
any job whatsoever in order to enjoy the frills and luxury of basic
survival. Or does he mean taking "the easy route" by accepting
government assistance and living the next year straddling the line
between homelessness and malnutrition? The major problem I have with
this isn't so much the ignorance as it is the insinuation that the poor
are blithering genital heads (seriously, how does
Prince do it?), who are constantly on the search for loopholes, allowing them to do as little as possible in life.
"I have a master's in 'Bring me a beer.'"
In reality, 47 percent of the impoverished 18 to 26 age group
have actually been to college.
Now, that doesn't mean they all graduated, but that's not the point. I
don't know many people who had the motivation and presence of mind to
enter into college and didn't also have a desire to do something special
with their lives. Most people don't go to college because they were
bored, though I will concede that it's why many people
teach at colleges. OHHHHH, eat it, teachers!
See, it's not about intelligence, it's about trying. Politicians
can't get past the idea that the only possible way to fail in America is
if you sit back and do nothing. The idea that someone can put out the
effort, yet not gain ground is inconceivable to them. Again, that
doesn't mean that human leeches don't exist. I grew up doggone poor,
myself. I've seen, firsthand, people who were content to cash their
government check and then go back to sleep. But I know overwhelmingly
more people who didn't want to be on assistance and busted their lovely
lady lumps to escape. Some succeeded and some did not, but it sure as
pickles wasn't for lack of trying.
"I am exhausted. But I'm exhausted with awesome shoes."
But, hey, if we don't let up on the poor, how are we going to flush
all of the moochers and drug addicts from the system? Wait, did I just
say "drug addicts"? That reminds me ...
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