08.02.11
Unintentional hilarity
“We can’t balance the budget on the backs of people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,” the president said, renewing his call for higher taxes on the wealthy. “Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair.”
Senate Republicans say it will not happen.
The Census Bureau reported last fall that 43 million Americans, one in seven of us, were poor. But what is poverty in America?
The most recent government data show more than half of the families defined as poor by the Census Bureau now have a computer in the home. More than three of every four poor families have air conditioning, almost two-thirds have cable or satellite television, and 92 percent have microwaves.
How poor are America’s poor? The typical poor family has at least two color TVs, a VCR and a DVD player. A third have a widescreen, plasma or LCD TV. And the typical poor family with children has a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation.
Gotta be on Stossel and Fox all weekend. Similar, a month or so ago to claims on Fox, delivered by hacks from the Manhattan Institute, that the homeless in America were the most entitled. You could tell because they’re fat from all the free food, leaving their begging money for spend on liquor and drugs.
So with Heritage, you have the ready made Tea Party/GOP argument for eliminating food stamps because they’ve written that America’s poor are spoiled and with too much cheap consumer electronics in the apartment.
Of course, I didn’t see this while canvassing for the census. The poor people in Pasadena’s city center were definitely visibly poor.
“None of this means America’s poor live in the lap of luxury,” concedes the Heritage man near the end, apparently a little self-conscious over where he’s taken the reader. “The lifestyle of the typical poor family certainly isn’t opulent.”
Isn’t opulent. That seems safe to say. Where do they dig up these manglers of English and critical thinking?
Anyway, you know America is still the best-est country in the world.
Or this variation:
“The whole world sucks but at least America sucks the best.”
Attributed to Ted Nugent, to a crowd of white trash drunks in some dump near Beaumont, TX, in April.