Poverty in US Cities - Eye Opening Facts

[Ron61]

Jams,

They once did that here with a small area and built nice but cheap homes for the people and basically all they had to do was keep them in nice shape. Within a year the city condemned the area and bull dozed the homes and it is now a shopping mall. Those people weren't happy at all about having a place to live. It was like everyone owed it to them and to expect them to keep them clean was discriminating against them. Really said, because if they had just did that little bit of work, they would have added more until many of the lower paid people had decent homes to live in. Now they are living off their dope trade. And staying in dumps while they have more money than most of the working people.

Ron

[DAVID GAGNARD]

Originally Posted by 392cobra

Drop out of High School + Have a kid or more + Don't get Married before having the Kid (s) + Divorce when you finally do marry = A life time BROKE

Such people have always been broke and always will.
Very rarely do stupid people doing stupid things succeed.
It's not rocket science.

I also don't see it as my job to pay/reward them for their stupid decisions.
If stupid doesn't hurt,you just keep doing stupid.

"The difference between ignorance and stupidity is that you can fix ignorance... if you're not stupid."

Zacctly correct, the only thing I guess I'll never understand is WHY I HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS WITH MY TAX DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David

[cobra de capell]

What is wrong with the official poverty rate? It measures the wrong thing--and always has. That thing is income. But poverty is a matter of consumption, and a huge gap has come to separate income and consumption at the lower strata of our income distribution. In 2006, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, reported purchases by the poorest fifth of American households were more than twice as high as reported incomes.

For reasons still only partly understood, the surfeit of spending over income among poorer U.S. households has increased dramatically since the 1970s--making income an ever less dependable predictor of living standards for the disadvantaged. Indeed, while the official poverty thresholds are meant to be constant over time, a whole host of data confirm the (welcome) fact that material conditions for our population in "poverty" have been steadily improving.

The numbers of people “living in poverty” is the raw material of the POVERTY INDUSTRY. High numbers of people living in poverty insures the employment of vast numbers of welfare workers, advocates, bureaucrats, and social workers. If this country managed to get every last AMERICAN person out of poverty, an entire “INDUSTRY” would collapse. Of course, the unemployment of vast numbers of “poverty” workers would create a NEW class of poverty stricken, which would require the re-hiring of poverty workers, which would lessen etc etc etc for ever.

2009 characteristics of poor:
1) Only one flatscreen tv at home with full cable
2) stereo in car is worth more than car
3) a couple of pair of $500 sneakers
4) cell phone less than six months old
5) an full music library on an ipod
6) overweight, on foodstamps, yet eats out at the sizzler five times a week
7) has 2 or 3 five dollar starbucks mocha’s daily
8) refuses to get job because they are holding out for a management job like cousin Eddie from Nat’l Lampoon vacation
9) free or subsidized housing with unlimited a/c
10) a built-in victimization industry that blames poverty on society rather than sloth, or ones personal attitude.

[Ron61]

Ray,

I thought that I would be considered poor but your table discounts that.

I have no flat screen TV. No stereo in my old 1965 car, no sneakers, never have had a cellphone, no music library, am overweight some, don't get food stamps, and am retired. Oh and I have never drank coffee so I don't go to Starbucks. My house I paid cash for when I had it built.

Now I have to start all over on how to get my cut of the stimulus bail out pork package.

Ron

[jhv48]

Originally Posted by stuartb

ok everyone needs to admit that our two parties are broken and won't be fixed until neither of them has power. We need to stop electing career politicians and start electing the smartest people for the jobs.

Finally, how about we all quit blaming and start fixing!

[cobra de capell]

Originally Posted by Ron61

Ray,

I thought that I would be considered poor but your table discounts that.

I have no flat screen TV. No stereo in my old 1965 car, no sneakers, never have had a cellphone, no music library, am overweight some, don't get food stamps, and am retired. Oh and I have never drank coffee so I don't go to Starbucks. My house I paid cash for when I had it built.

Now I have to start all over on how to get my cut of the stimulus bail out pork package.

Ron

You’re not poor, because you are a responsible person - living within your means. As for me, I can afford all kinds of stuff but, for example, I'm on dial-up (#$^^%##Damn) simply because I don't want to pay for satellite high-speed with no DSL or cable in this area - it's a rip off. A lot of poor people also are on all kinds of government assistance programs - their actual income doesn't tell the whole story. They end up buying crap all day long.

Of course, it's really all about the number of children in the family (families with one parent) - just think if you had 1-4 kids to feed at this time in your life. Poor people need to stop having kids that they cannot afford.

[cobra de capell]

Originally Posted by stuartb

ok everyone needs to admit that our two parties are broken and won't be fixed until neither of them has power. We need to stop electing career politicians and start electing the smartest people for the jobs.

Actually, that's not true. Liberals (Democrat's) have created this mess - Republicans just lost their way in the past two years+ sense Democrat's were placed in power by an ignorant public.

Obams recently stated "Now, my administration inherited a deficit of over $1 trillion, but because we also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression, doing little or nothing at all will result in even greater deficits, even greater job loss, even greater loss of income, and even greater loss of confidence."

Although, it might be technically true that his Presidential Administration inherited it, but he himself did not. No, he created it. Before being elected President Barack Obama was a Senator in a party that controlled both houses of Congress with a lame duck President. From 2006-present, the economy has faltered increasingly. However, the big crash happened while he was a senator at a time when Congress ruled the land (e.g. a lame duck Presidency). Yes, President Bush still had some power, but the majority of power was with the Democratic Party-controlled Congress; with Senator Obama’s Congress. Add to that the fact that President Bush was unusually catering to Pres-elect Obama after the November election (huge error), and not only did Bush consult with Obama, but at Obama’s urging he authorized the bailouts for insurance company AIG, for car corporations, and for the $700billion TARP fiasco. Obama himself URGED the first $700 billion, the deficit “his administration” inherited was created by a budget that he and his party created in Congress just prior to his election as President.

No, Obama did not inherit the bad economy. He created it, and shame on him for misrepresenting its origin by sly wording rather than honest and genuine admission of mistakes. Bush had enough mistakes to take responsibility for, and the time for scapegoating passed when millions of Democrats (filled with the spirit of hope, change, and bi-partisan unity) booed the figurehead of 46% of the nation as his helicopter left the Inauguration.

Obama and the Democrats created the bad economy, it happened on their watch-because of their budgeting, their bailout demands, and their poor choices.

2012 will be the key year - either Republicans gain seats in Congress (perhaps even control of the House or Senate) or America will continue to be on a bullet train to bankruptcy. Your thinking that neither party can get us out of this mess is just wrong headed.

[jhv48]

Can't get off the blame cycle can you!

Does it really matter HOW or WHO got us into this mess?

If only we could channel all this finger pointing into creative fixes, we might have a chance to rise above the mess.

Don't hold your breath!

[cobra de capell]

Originally Posted by jhv48

Can't get off the blame cycle can you!

Does it really matter HOW or WHO got us into this mess?

If only we could channel all this finger pointing into creative fixes, we might have a chance to rise above the mess.

Don't hold your breath!

History is important, probably more now then ever before. I doubt that Obama has only a turnaround in mind - if that were the case, full speed ahead - but, he has a separate agenda to re-make America as a socialist state - therein is a good reason to point fingers and raise hell to stop him.

[jhv48]

As long as we keep trying to figure out who to blame, the elected will continue our march to Socialism.

Now is the time to unite in one belief: Vote em all out of office while we still have the strength and numbers to do it!

[cobra bill]

CDC, if you really knew history, you would not be making such foolish statements, the last great depression was brought on by the republican party, and so was this one.
sure over the last 2 years the dems have held a slim margin, but after 107 filibusters carried out by the republicans made any slim edge a moot point, your party has no new ideas, there just obstructionist, and 30 years of right wing radio has got people like you believing the **** they spew!

[joe g]

Cobra, Bill thank god for talk radio cause cbs nbc etc never tell us the complete truth. THERE biased as heck, but dont admit it. talk radio lets you know up front where they stand. Over 84% of those envoled in the news are admitted liberals, and you think there NOT BIASED!!!
Again a one way street if your liberal. OK to spew the liberal slant on tv and not admit it
but if conservative radio spits it out you all cry UNFAIR.
Has cnn or abc let you know that in this stimulus package there is money for unemploymnet benefits for PART TIME WORKERS!! WHO put that in--i know cause i listen to talk radio, but im still waitingto here CBS or NBC even bring it up. God forbid they might upset there Misiah
Talk radio may be biased BUT EVEN YOU KNOW THAt, but the average idiot in this country beleives everything on the nightly news!!!!
joeg

[cobra bill]

What Liberal Media?

Social scientists talk about "useful myths," stories we all know aren't necessarily true, but that we choose to believe anyway because they seem to offer confirmation of what we already know (which raises the question, If we already know it, why the story?). Think of the wholly fictitious but illustrative story about little George Washington and his inability to lie about that cherry tree. For conservatives, and even many journalists, the "liberal media" is just that--a myth, to be sure, but a useful one.
Republicans of all stripes have done quite well for themselves during the past five decades fulminating about the liberal cabal/progressive thought police who spin, supplant and sometimes suppress the news we all consume. (Indeed, it's not only conservatives who find this whipping boy to be an irresistible target. In late 1993 Bill Clinton whined to Rolling Stone that he did not get "one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press.") But while some conservatives actually believe their own grumbles, the smart ones don't. They know mau-mauing the other side is just a good way to get their own ideas across--or perhaps prevent the other side from getting a fair hearing for theirs. On occasion, honest conservatives admit this. Rich Bond, then chair of the Republican Party, complained during the 1992 election, "I think we know who the media want to win this election--and I don't think it's George Bush." The very same Rich Bond, however, also noted during the very same election, "There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media].... If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Bond is hardly alone. That the media were biased against the Reagan Administration is an article of faith among Republicans. Yet James Baker, perhaps the most media-savvy of them, owned up to the fact that any such complaint was decidedly misplaced. "There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don't think we had anything to complain about," he explained to one writer. Patrick Buchanan, among the most conservative pundits and presidential candidates in Republican history, found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies. "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage--all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that," the aspiring American ayatollah cheerfully confessed during the 1996 campaign. And even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." Nevertheless, Kristol apparently feels no compunction about exploiting and reinforcing the ignorant prejudices of his own constituency. In a 2001 pitch to conservative potential subscribers to his Rupert Murdoch-funded magazine, Kristol complained, "The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias.... There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes." (It's a wonder he left out "Too much hypocrisy.")
In recent times, the right has ginned up its "liberal media" propaganda machine. Books by both Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg have topped the bestseller lists, stringing together a series of charges so extreme that, well, it's amazing neither one thought to accuse "liberals" of using the blood of conservatives' children for extra flavor in their soy-milk decaf lattes.
Given the success of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the Washington Times, the New York Post, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, the New York Sun, National Review, Commentary, Limbaugh, Drudge, etc., no sensible person can dispute the existence of a "conservative media." The reader might be surprised to learn that neither do I quarrel with the notion of a "liberal media." It is tiny and profoundly underfunded compared with its conservative counterpart, but it does exist. As a columnist for The Nation and an independent weblogger for MSNBC.com, I work in the middle of it, and so do many of my friends. And guess what? It's filled with right-wingers.
Unlike most of the publications named above, liberals, for some reason, feel compelled to include the views of the other guy on a regular basis in just the fashion that conservatives abhor. Take a tour from a native: New York magazine, in the heart of liberal country, chose as its sole national correspondent the right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson. During the 1990s, The New Yorker--the bible of sophisticated urban liberalism--chose as its Washington correspondents the belligerent right-winger Michael Kelly and the soft, DLC neoconservative Joe Klein. At least half of the "liberal New Republic" is actually a rabidly neoconservative magazine and has been edited in recent years by the very same Michael Kelly, as well as by the conservative liberal-hater Andrew Sullivan. The Nation has often opened its pages to liberal-haters, even among its columnists. The Atlantic Monthly--a mainstay of Boston liberalism--even chose the apoplectic Kelly as its editor, who then proceeded to add a bunch of Weekly Standard writers to its antiliberal stable. What is "liberal" Vanity Fair doing publishing a special hagiographic Annie Leibovitz portfolio of Bush Administration officials that appears, at first glance, to be designed (with the help of a Republican political consultant) to invoke notions of Greek and Roman gods? Why does the liberal New York Observer alternate National Review's Richard Brookhiser with the Joe McCarthy-admiring columnist Nicholas von Hoffman--both of whom appear alongside editorials that occasionally mimic the same positions taken downtown by the editors of the Wall Street Journal? On the web, the tabloid-style liberal website Salon gives free rein to the McCarthyite impulses of both Sullivan and David Horowitz. The neoliberal Slate also regularly publishes both Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard, and has even opened its "pages" to such conservative evildoers as Charles Murray and Elliott Abrams.
Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal," and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. The liberal New York Times Op-Ed page features the work of the unreconstructed Nixonite William Safire, and for years accompanied him with the firebreathing-if-difficult-to-understand neocon A.M. Rosenthal. Current denizen Bill Keller also writes regularly from a DLC neocon perspective. The Washington Post is just swarming with conservatives, from Michael Kelly to George Will to Robert Novak to Charles Krauthammer. If you wish to include CNN on your list of liberal media--I don't, but many conservatives do--then you had better find a way to explain the near-ubiquitous presence of the attack dog Robert Novak, along with that of neocon virtuecrat William Bennett, National Review's Kate O'Beirne, National Review's Jonah Goldberg, The Weekly Standard's David Brooks and Tucker Carlson. This is to say nothing of the fact that among its most frequent guests are Coulter and the anti-American telepreacher Pat Robertson. Care to include ABC News? Again, I don't, but if you wish, how to deal with the fact that the only ideological commentator on its Sunday show is the hard-line conservative George Will? Or how about the fact that its only explicitly ideological reporter is the journalistically challenged conservative crusader John Stossel? How to explain the entire career there and on NPR of Cokie Roberts, who never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend? What about Time and Newsweek? In the former, we have Krauthammer holding forth, and in the latter, Will.

[cobra de capell]

Originally Posted by cobra bill

CDC, if you really new history, you would not be making such foolish statements, the last great depression was brought on by the republican party, and so was this one.
sure over the last 2 years the dems have held a slim margin, but after 107 filibusters carried out by the republicans made any slim edge a moot point, your party has no new ideas, there just obstructionist, and 30 years of right wing radio has got people like you believing the **** they spew!

First, using "new" versus "knew" in the first sentence is a dead giveaway as to the value of the posters input.

Second, everytime you post the truth suffers, so I've created a gif image covering this post and all future posts as a warning to club members - I look at this as a clubcobra community service......

I'd respond directly to your post, but OMGWTF is really all that can be stated, once again when liberals spin facts all over everyone.

Think about re-registering as Cobra Bull.

[joe g]

As- expected you did not GET IT !! you just ranted on bla bla bla Are you trying to say Rush is more powerful then CNN OR CBS or NBC which has a captive audience EVERY NIGHT! One must LOOK for conservative radio during the day. im in sales so my car radio is set to it, but most working slaves can not get the OTHER SIDE of the story. Your 1000 word rant is typical liberal b/s. Are you going disagree that NBC put Obama on a pedistal as well as cbs and cnn to lesser degree's. And AGAIN I ASK HAS ANY network mentioned the ourrageous flaw's in this plan, like umemployment money for part timers- nope- i could go on and on about the pork. COOKIE ROBERTS are you kidding!1
Her last news cast a few weeks ago she said Government should pay ofr all medical cost for kids SO THERE PARENTS CAN spend THERE money some where else. GIVE ME A BREAK she is liberal as heck!
And again you forget that the overall mojority of news reporters are liberal-- just look what they did to Palin!! NPR RADIO is so liberal no one listens to it. IF IT WAS not paid for by the government it would fold just like RADIO AMERICA DID.
I agree with your information that many conservatives get on liberal shows BUT AGAIN
NO ONE WATCHES THEM EVERYONE see;s the nightly news and they one side of the story
joeg

[cobra bill]

CDC, I like the BS Meter, if nothing else you are imaginative.

JoeG, the article was put together by a none bias group studying the so called Liberal media, I did get it, you however did not, in their own words, the conservative talking heads admitted to hyping up the so called liberal media.
Now I admit that most journalist claim to be liberal, but who owns the media outlets? not the reporters and if they don't want it printed, or in the news, it won't get there, if that were the case we would have never went to war in Iraq, on a pack of lies.

[Sharroll Celby]

Republicans controlled Congress form 1994 to 2006. Bush was president from 2000 to 2008. If the Republican "way" was any better than what was already in place during this time, why the Hell wasnt it put into effect?

LOTS of blame to go around.

[joe g]

Those lies where also there with Britain, France and other countrys. Even bil clinton beleived them. I do agree bush over stepped his bounds on the truth on wmd 's among other things. BUT i beleive we would have gone to war with irag eventually. Sadam killed
thousands of his own people ans was jsut waiting for sanctions to end to rebuild.
we are better off with sadam gone.
We are screwed either way by both party's and as far as TRUTH from the media, we both know they gives us what THEY want us to here. The liberal bias is subtle a little here a little there, the average slob never relaizes it. Time for all to fix this mess
joeg