President Obama Makes Poverty Permanent
There’s an old story — not apocryphal, unfortunately — in which a politician is heard to moan:
50% earn less than the median income. Something needs to be done!
Oh, how I weep for those unfortunate people! No, not those with less money, but those who find such cris du coeur convincing.
I maintain a small collection of these appeals, because I find them useful in showing how often our progressive pals — who remind us constantly of their intelligence and caring — are apt to say something stupid.
The median income is the point at which 50% of people earn less, 50% more. The median household income in the United States is roughly $50,000. Half of all households make more than this, half less. Suppose, in their enlightened beneficence, our leaders decide to award every household an extra $1,000 a year that will be counted toward their income. (In the spirit of these times, never mind where the money comes from.)
The median income would then be $51,000. So how many households would have incomes below this number? You guessed it! Half, it would still be 50%. The proportion less than the median does not change with the addition or subtraction of any constant amount.
Therefore, although it should be as obvious as the sky is blue, a politician should know that it is impossible — not unlikely, but impossible — to eliminate poverty, if by “poverty” he means income less than the median.
This is just as true if we change the percentile from the 50th (which is the median) to the, say, 25th — sometimes called the first quartile. The 25th percentile is the point at which 25% of the people earn less and 75% earn more.
If “poverty” is defined as earning less than 75% of other people (or 60%, or whatever number you like) then the poor will always be with us and there is nothing anybody can do to change this. Omnipotence itself cannot change this.
Yet President Obama thinks he can.
This will not be the first time The One has mistaken his calling on Earth and tried to do what even God cannot. How? His administration will create a new index of poverty, one which slides upwards as all income increases. This guarantees “poverty” will always be with us. This act of will creates an eternal class of the “poor” from which there can be no relief.
Oh goody, we can add to the list of classes our President never took or never understood…basic statistics.
The next time a politician claims brilliance beyond that of mere mortals, we should insist that the media do a little fact checking. Trust but verify.
What if everyone makes the same amount of money, say $8.37 a year. Problem solved, there is no 50% making less than anyone else (or vice versa). That wasn’t really that hard to solve. I think even a “progressive” could figure that out. Now, let’s hope the leftist in the White House hasn’t.
But Mr Briggs, Sir: If we do not perpetuate poverty, nobody at all will be able to claim the coveted status of victim.
Barack Obama understands that point very well, thank you.
can we see his college transcript now please?
why is it not possible to see this?
isn’t it a public record?
just wondering…
We the people can’t get these folks out of office soon enough..
that is what happens when stupid people vote for stupid people
Fifty percent of people are below average in income! Never fear, Democrats will fix that by making everyone will be equally poor! (Hey, that’s how the Soviet Union did it… social justice, you know.)
Professor Obama has also determined that 100% of American citizens are going to die. This is why we need healthcare reform. And studies show that the city of La Paz, Bolivia had heavy concentrations of carbon dioxide in the years 1842-1867. Not one of those people is alive today!!
How sadly true Supreme Allied Commander:And also when a stupid complaint naive gullible MSM reneges on its duty to investigate and report and instead licks the as* of the Affirmative Action Teleprompter Kid the LYING MOHAMMEDAN BOGUS POTUS instead and when the Dems Party is so stupidly corrupt that they sacrifice all morals for POWER.
Creating and fostering dependency is what the Left is all about. It always has been.
They’re just plantation masters of a different stripe, that’s all.
It’s not as though the warning signs weren’t there. Obama is a stinking Marxist in the worst way. The suppression of the truth really falls at the feet of the US press. It was entirely derelict. Willing suspension of disbelief is supposed to happen in the movies, not in the news.
Material poverty is hardly an issue in a nation where obesity is the most common health problem facing “the poor.” The real problem we face, growing more acute everyday, is our nation’s moral poverty. Our Judeo-Christian heritage has been under assault for well nigh three generations.
Utopia is a hell paved with progressive policies. Progressives promise unlimited freedom without personal responsibility. Nothing could be more foolish. It’s not liberty they offer us, merely license unrestrained by moral conscience. The list of our seven deadly sins needs to be updated: promiscuity, divorce, bastardy, parental absenteeism, substance abuse, subsidized indolence, and dependency (on government). If this isn’t a culture killer, I don’t know what is.
What nation can stand for long when the family as the basic foundational pillar of society is under assault? You’ll notice that the crisis is most acute in our inner cities, precisely the place where progressive policy is the most intrusive. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a myth, but no less instructive for its allegorical content.
Government can’t solve the problem because government policy created the problem. Family values, church, and community exist now only (or largely) in the provinces. That would be red-state America in the current vernacular. Our cities have become nests of decadence and depravity. Look at Detroit if you want to see the future under progressivism.
“Poverty” as defined by politicians is a head fake. This nation does not suffer from a lack of material abundance. Redistribution is merely a method progressives use to acquire and maintain power. Our real problem is moral poverty. Perhaps a cataclysmic crisis of the economic kind is what this nation needs. Our people will be forced to return to our foundational principles of family, faith and community. Prepare yourselves.
Ommigawd! Half the people in the world are below average intelligence! It’s starting to become startling clear which half that is.
This actually works in a variety of settings. Obama obviously falls in the lower 50% of the intelligence spectrum. The proper authorities took pity on his plight and awarded him a prize. True, the prize is not based on merit, but his self-esteem was bolstered and isn’t that all that matters?
LeighB: Are you kidding? Media fact checking?
I think you are automatically expelled from journalist school if they catch you taking a statistics course.
Folks, this progressives mindset has become embedded into all institutions at all levels. It cannot be “voted out in November”. It is a whole different way of looking and thinking about the world, and it depends on the shifting sands of relativist logic (although I hesitate to use the word “logic” in this regard).
Changing the minds of these people is impossible. Now that they have almost total power, the rest of us are forced to live in a world governed by their insanity.
What can be done? Civil disobedience, state nullification, state secession, emigration, direct intervention by God Himself… oh well.
Well God beat the ‘One’ again of course. He said we would always have poor people and we should be generous in giving to them–but like an article I read, the more the government keeps taking away from us, the less we will be able to give.
I agree, why can’t we see Zero’s college transcripts, his resume?? Because it’s all false–I do think I’m turning into a ‘birther’. Poor man, he does not realize how pathetic he is when he gives a speech. I can’t wait to read his biography–and what would he put in his obligatory ‘Presidential Library’? Please hurry November 2012!!
His administration will create a new index of poverty, one which slides upwards as all income increases. This guarantees “poverty” will always be with us. This act of will creates an eternal class of the “poor” from which there can be no relief.
Well, how are you going to continue government forever unless you do stuff like re-write the rules of “poverty” and continue to foster belief in permanent victimhood ?
Today’s democrats/progressives are invested in the notion of there being a permanent underclass. They’re completely dependent on continuing class warfare and identity politics.
This despite factual and real improvements in peoples’ economic lives in America across the board.
I watched self-indulgent, self-serving Teddy Kennedy scream about the poverty of “the other” for decades.
It was his permanent shtick
Self-respecting people of whatever current economic circumstances should reject such holier-than-thou élitist caretakers.
If he’s so concerned about poverty, why doesn’t he just give all his money to the poor? Same with congress, DC Bureaucrats, Soros, the Kennedy’s, that hollywood bunch etc. etc. There’s nothing in any law book that says they can’t give all their money to the poor. Or to the government to give to the poor if they would rather.
I’m guessing that Rev. Wright didn’t preach many sermons on the Tenth Commandment.
This is just the latest incarnation of the carrot on the stick. Just as the pony takes one more step in the hope tat he will finally reach that carrot, the Democrats eternally promise those below median income to keep voting for them and they’ll finally get that carrot.
Mr. Briggs,
This statement… No matter what any man has, as long as somebody else has more, then whatever the first man has isn’t enough. It isn’t fair. And since it’s “unfair,” the government will feel justified to step up its confiscation of property from those who have “too much,” give some of what it has taken to those that are “poor,” and keep the rest for themselves… should be placed on billboards thruout the country with emphasis added to “AND KEED THE REST FOR THEMSELVES”.
Watch for the language, it’s all over the place with the socialists/progressives.
The word “justice”, economic justice, social justice, gender justice, even, if you can believe the level to which these people stoop, climate justice.
Ignoramuses like Maxine Waters are shouting such stuff from the rooftops, using their pea-sized mental capacities to threaten anybody they construe as opposed to “justice” (e.g., anyone involved with capitalist enterprise in America) with government takeover.
Barack Obama is currently the supreme self-appointed decider and arbiter of all varieties of justice, all varieties of “fairness”. This is why he will freely re-write standards (of poverty or anything else) in an attempt to get all of us ignoramuses out here to understand that he is more enlightened as to the proper role of government in our lives than those old men who conceived the Republic.
Couched in this latest move relative to standards of poverty is yet another assault on the Constitution, which is really what this President is all about.
a couple historical quotes:
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” – - Greek Philosopher, Plato 429-347 BC
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero – (106-43 B.C.)Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator Dated: 63 BC
“The American Republic will endure until the Congress discovers they can bribe the people with their own money.” — de Tocquville c. 1832
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
— George Santayana (1863–1952) (& later quoted by Churchill)
liberals / progressives want to fix the perceived inequities with your money …they never offer theirs.
…they forget that no one is stopping them from going ahead with their grand plans using their own money and not forcing others to pay for it through government programs …there is a word for it.
…..HYPOCRITE
I can’t wait to read his biography–and what would he put in his obligatory ‘Presidential Library’? Please hurry November 2012!!
All of Liberaldom (or are we calling it Progressive Statism now?) is intrinsically linked to Evolutionary Darwinian thinking. Do not be fooled by changing terms – the roots of liberalism and paradigm building are the same throughout history: First a person becomes resolute to justify sin (become “Liberal”), and then they seek to justify their actions (remake the universe to justify their desires). It is all about the interpretation of Life. It is how Liberals continually reason to the contrary (though some ignorantly say Liberalism is a mental disorder), because it is based on the concept of a Godless Materialist universe, and therefore man becomes God if he can *figure* out more than the next guy – we are only a complex summation of chemical and physical reactions.
One may say, Well, if God exists how can Man make a reasonable universal paradigm excluding God? The answer is that God is Just, and has given man the ability (the actual ability) to choose. Not just an illusion of choice, but that when you choose to avoid God in your thinking you get a world that reflects exactly that. Hence, the reasonableness of Evolution (though it is devoid of proof – it is a materialist religion). When you choose God you see a world that reflects that choice.
If you are a Conservative, Libertarian, Constitutionalist, Federalist, whatever, and you embrace and accept Evolution you are ALREADY conspiring with the enemy of freedom. The enemy of freedom is an activity. That activity is for men to have (and act on) a worldview that has themselves as the center. Men cannot govern each other in this paradigm justly. We NEED God to make it work, otherwise we impose our own evil hearts onto each other. And that God is, of course, incarnate in Jesus Christ. The light of all men.
Didn’t Alinsky state that a Community Organizer’s primary goal is to rub raw any perceived difference between what the people have and what they want?
It seems that our Dhimmy-in-Chief has learned well.
23. tanstaafl:
you are right …the liberal / progressive (scum) have hi-jacked the language long ago.
conservatives need to get in front of this issue. they need to expose the lies and the mis-use of the language. An informed public is harder to deceive.
liberals / progressives want to fix the perceived inequities with your money …they never offer theirs.
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. (GG Liddy)
looks like the O-bum-a paid closer attention to the smears of Rev. Wright then he lets on.
I’m shocked! Barry’s understanding of the notion “median” in statistics is a bit lacking. But I’m sure, he for sure understands well the notion “standard deviation,” “regression coefficients” and “hidden variables,” although they have nothing to do with hidden records.
Did he claim to have co-authored btw a paper on “Quantum Mechanics and the Constitution?” I’m sure he was inspired by the mechanics in his local auto shop in Boston, and the insights of lubrication.
27. Actually, the whole point is that you can’t construct a reasonable paradigm without God. Atheistic paradigms are inherently unreasonable and irrational, much to the chagrin of the atheists.
BTW, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is no myth- they were destroyed by a meteorite. Trinitite was found at the excavation site, and trinitite is a metamorphic rock that can only be formed by a brief, intense burst of heat as from a nuclear explosion or meteorite impact.
The answere is obvious; everybody gets exactly the same. Except, of course, our benevolent leaders, who must have more to compensate for the stress of their position.
Barry’s new Green-Speak:
“The grass is always greener.”
“The green-eyed monster.”
“Go green!”
13. Thomas_L……:
Not quite right. The two words, median and average, do not mean the same. But good catch, anyway.
And btw, a year ago, before I began following the professor’s, blog, I wouldn’t have recognized that either.
#33 Mythbuster – Why couldn’t it have been a nuclear blast? Wasn’t someone turned into a pillar of salt? Not ash, but salt! Sounds like something beyond even our abilities today.
A bit off topic, but speaking of money, whatever happened to Obama’s Nobel Prize money? Was he allowed to keep it? Was he actually legally allowed to keep it? The story just died. I’d like to hear some follow-up on it.
“A bit off topic, but speaking of money, whatever happened to Obama’s Nobel Prize money? Was he allowed to keep it? Was he actually legally allowed to keep it? The story just died. I’d like to hear some follow-up on it.”
I recall reading somewhere recently that it was given to a charity, but I don’t recall offhand which one.
Give Obie a break, he’s doing his best. The UK’s Labour government have been in power 13 years and have not made as much progress towards turning us into a third world country as “The Beloved President” has in the USA in one year.
This is all so simple. There are some people in Washington who work to end poverty, not by simply handing out other people’s money, but by providing a ladder and offering a hand.
Then there is another group that has no interest in ending poverty, because other people’s misery is simply a prop they use to further their own agenda.
Obama has simply gamed the system so that even if the first group wins,the second group will be able to claim victory instead.
Why does it matter? Because the end result is that all are hurt by the second group’s agenda. Incomes in the upper half are raided in order to dominate those in the lower half. When those who pull themselves up out of his or her poverty begin to have a sense of pride in their accomplishment, they suddenly find out they’re back where they started. Poverty will not release its grip despite his or her best efforts.
Red Queen, anyone?
The 50% below the median income, those making less than all the others, still own a Lexus, a big screen TV, cell phones and a DVD player. The 50% making less than the other 50% also own a house, possibly a motor home or a camper trailer and an ATV or two. The 50% that qualify for income assistance and food stamps may own two cars, have steady income and are covered by Medicaide.
Although the author never attributes the top quote to the President, he successfully relies on the readers to misinterpret it as such.
42. Side Note:
Although the author never attributes the top quote to the President, he successfully relies on the readers to misinterpret it as such.
Only to an illiterate. Hence – “There’s an old story…”
Wait…wouldn’t it still be $50,000, not $51,000? You would have to take the $1,000 per person from the above 50%, thus lowering their income by that exact amount.
That’s like that old paradox where you put everyone in the world in a line from the worlds most interesting person to the world’s most uninteresting person, but by fact of being the world’s most uninteresting person, you are actually somewhat interesting.
well since GOD is sovereign in all things
is Mollech Hussien Obama creating this permanent poverty? Or is he unconsciously doing GOD’s work to punish an increasingly Pagan Ungodly Apostate America?
More that 75% of all Americans are guilty of Idolatry, Human Sacrifice, Lying, Adultry, Homosexuality, ect…
There is little difference between the BAAL worship of ancient times and the world we live in today. Molech (the destestable god of the Ammorites) is never hungry as ‘they’ feed him over 3,000 babies per day. And we, the so-called christians, do nothing about it.
America has become the New Gommorah and God is abandoning the USA because the USA has abondoned God.
I see Obama as a just divine punishment and quite frankly I don’t think that God is done yet. So don’t take it so personally if God decides to punish America (with Obama) for 4 more years, and then sicks Hillary on the world.
“…For the most part, whatever vestiges of Christian religion still pervade our culture are weak and compromising if not cultic and apostate…” Dr. John MacArthur – http://www.gty.org/AudioPlayer/Sermons/56-23
quote taken from “The Christian’s Responsibility in a Pagan Society, Part 1″
WE NEED TO GET TO D.C. ON MARCH 16TH TO MARCH AGAINST THIS TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT AND THE CRIMINALS RUNNING IT.
It’s not liberty they offer us, merely license unrestrained by moral conscience. The list of our seven deadly sins needs to be updated: promiscuity, divorce, bastardy, parental absenteeism, substance abuse, subsidized indolence, and dependency (on government). If this isn’t a culture killer, I don’t know what is.
43. followed by 20 posts of people doing exactly what I said.
There’s an old story — not apocryphal, unfortunately — in which a politician is heard to moan:
No, there isn’t any such story. This is a mark of the worst kind of writer and thinker, who must create a straw man for his opponent to carry his entire argument. In the history of politics, no one has ever spoken such a statement aloud. It must be a troubling world for you indeed, where all of your opponents are of average intelligence, and you, wishing that they were retarded like you.
This is how the government defines obesity in children, too–children in the 90th percentile of weight for their age. (AGE: not height, which would still be wrong but at least be an understandable mistake.) Even if every child in America ate nothing but lead-tainted argula from Michelle Obama’s own garden, 10% of them are going to be defined as obese. It’s pointless.
The proportion less than the median does not change with the addition or subtraction of any constant amount.
Any amount, constant or not, leaves the proportion unaffected.
As a Tom Swifty: You cannot eliminate poverty, he said meanly.
That’s funny, side note. It never even occurred to me to attribute that quote to Obama.
Poverty has always been a relative term and I think that’s fine, it should be. But safety net programs shouldn’t be so coarse as to direct themselves merely to “the poor.” They should guarantee some minimum standard of living–a roof, clothes, food. Someone can be poor and yet need no help. In fact most don’t need it; most don’t even want it.
I say all the time that we’re in serious trouble because half the population is of below average intelligence…
There have always been poor. There are poor. There will continue to be poor. No law or government program will eliminate poverty created by human free will. For any group of people there will be those who choose well and those who choose unwisely. The heart of real poverty in modern America is rooted in four basic behaviors; substance abuse, creating children before having the skills and means to provide for them, zombie one’s time in school, and keeping to the old ways. Those are choices. Those who choose unwisely are co-conspirators to their own fate. They are not victims to be pitied. They are not the justification to envy the better choices of others or to seek the means to steal the wealth and resources created by others.
It takes no prescience to see that you are right- that’s exactly the principle upon which British poverty has been measured since the 1960s and it has had exactly the effect you foresee.
Every day — every day, you heartless wingnuts! — 124 people die because they did not have health insurance. Dick Durban told me so. Something needs to be done.
Lost is the fact that every day thousands die who did have health insurance.
Figures never lie, but liars always figure.
Wow, Oscar (#49): Thanks for your brilliant insight.
What would we do without your omniscient knowledge of the “entire history of politics” that your 99th percentile mind has instant and complete record of?
You’re sure that in “In the history of politics, no one has ever spoken such a statement aloud.”
Any other assertions you’d like to make that cover what every politician in “the history of politics” has not made?
This is why I have often remarked that it would be interesting if someone (for a study perhaps) came up with an objective measure of poverty. Something along the lines of: Enough income to afford a roof over your head and a minimum number of calories (of basic foodstuffs) on the local market. The problem for the victim-marketers is that if you set the criteria to anything that doesn’t include 90% of the world population, there would be a tiny percentage in the U.S. who meet the definition (I may exaggerate some, but I bet it’s not much). By any objective standard, even our poor are pretty well off. That is not to say that life is not hard for many people and that some deserve help, but I hate the faux outrage.
Several poverty amelioration programs have used the first quartile or quintile of the income spectrum to determine “the poor”, and have done so for decades. Worse yet, for many of these programs, the designation does not change even after various methods of income redistribution have been applied. In other words, we could give every “poor” family in the US a copy of Bill Gates’ mansion, and they would still, in the consideration of some programs, be poor. And even if we did consider it, there would still be a bottom quintile of “poor”. So, while the author’s “story” may not specifically be true, it is true in principle.
“It must be a troubling world for you indeed, where all of your opponents are of average intelligence, and you, wishing that they were retarded like you.”
Yeah, it must be troubling for you, Oscar, what’s it like??
I believe there may be a mistake in the analysis. If I understand the situation correctly, what Obama is proposing is not to define “poverty” as the lowest x% of all households, but rather to define it as a fraction of the median income.
This measure is even more evil than the one in the analysis, because it implies that poverty is *not* permanent. Rather, it is possible to reduce poverty, as measured this way, by reducing income inequality. Suppose, for example, we were to impose a new tax on everyone with income over the median, and throw the money away. The effect of this tax would be to reduce the median, which in turn would reduce the number of people defined as poor–even though doing so did not improve their lot at all.
Another simple principle which progressives everywhere have never grasped is that the “minimum wage” is, always has been, and always will be, zero.
Oh, one more thing.
I don’t need to see Obama’s secret college transcripts.
It’s becoming more evident every time he opens his yap that he graduated in the top 99% of his class.
So funny how you right-wingers act like the black President invented poverty. America is suffering because of Bush’s fealty to Wall Street, Big Oil, and Haliburton, and his tax cuts for the rich, which made the rich get richer on the backs of impoverished women and minorities. Once Obama raises taxes on the rich to get back the money Bush let them steal from America, things will be much better. Of course, if America is dumb enough to put Republicans back in power, then America is finished.
When I lived in Mississippi—1980 to 1987—I remember a politician stating on radio and TV, that while his opponent had been in office, half of Mississippi’s students were below average. Nobody called him on it.
Actually, such sliding poverty measures are well entrenched outside of the U.S. Obama is just catching the U.S. up with the rest of the socialist world.
You’re sure that in “In the history of politics, no one has ever spoken such a statement aloud.”
Having googled it, yes I’m absolutely sure, you stupid pos.
oscar le grouche is a false Oscar. He is trying to spoil the good name of Oscar.
Here is the UN definition….
http://rwdb.blogspot.com/2005/03/poorly-reported.html
Oscar, are you “honestly” saying, in a contemptuous and obscene manner, that something didn’t happen because you couldn’t find evidence for it on Teh Interwebs? Because that kind of thinking is something that many people have seen and ridiculed for years despite there being no specific example of it coming up on Google.
Keep opening those Cracker Jack boxes, son … I’m sure you’ll eventually find some better intellectual honesty.
Whadaya wanna bet the real reason reason “O” cancelled his trip east was hostile receptions almost everywhere including rioting in Indonesia. And … while you’re at it, it’s not a health care bill he’s supposedly hucking, it’s a whopping tax bill. Wake up sheeple.
Jesus, the Christ, once said, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” Now is one of those times when we do not have Him with us. Christ would be with us if we ask Him.
You fail to see the true genius of this. Years from now, when the effects of the Obama regime have taken their toll on the nation, he can look back and say in all honesty ‘the percentage of Americans living in poverty has not increased at all since I took office.’
Obama is not original in this. He just jumped onto the band-wagon run by the champagne liberals – predators (OF BOTH MAJOR US POLITICAL PARTIES). The con- artists /flim-flam men who are “here to help” who have neither earned their money by working for it or establishing businesses, but as the cuckoo in the nest steal the eggs. The most obvious examples the Kennedy Clan (original fortune gained by stock-market manipulation and boot – legging), and their clones the Clintons,and even the Bushes. Gangs and clans in expensive clothes with smooth manners who have been doing this for decades/ more than half a century USING government as the instrument. They control the toll-gate which then forces businessmen, “voluntarily” to support their schemes for takeover of the power / economies of nations, the USA and Europe. In other words “We Are All Guilty”. One question. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet: these groups and individuals all profess to do all this to “AID the POOR”. WHO ARE THESE POOR THEY ARE “HERE TO HELP”? With the massive amounts of money spent from governments, individual and business donations, through “concerts” from rock stars, “charities” which build finanacial and property empires from donations from gullible, kind-hearted; volunteers in soup kitchens etc. WHY?? IS THERE A SINGLE POOR PERSON ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD ?