Redefining ‘Poor’: The Fifty-Year Change in Quality of Life
The lady that babysat me and my siblings, and who also did ironing for my mother, lived about four miles out of town, and they’d just gotten indoor plumbing to her house a year or so before. There were still a fair number of houses, especially rural houses, that didn’t have indoor plumbing. We had a black and white TV, and we got three channels since the community antenna was installed a couple of years earlier. Before then, all we could get was KOAA in Albuquerque, and that was chancy.
* * *
Forty years ago, I’m seventeen in Pueblo, Colorado. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have indoor plumbing, but certainly there are friends of mine who don’t have telephones yet at all, and we all think it’s kind of amazing (and even a little scandalous) that one of the families we know actually has two phone lines. We’ve only got one line, but we have three phones: an upstairs extension, a downstairs extension, and one in my father’s bedroom.
The family business — musical instruments, propane gas, and appliances — is doing fine, with fifty-odd employees. I’ve been working there since I was about 12, and now work on the loading dock or programming the computer (8K of memory and everything on punch cards).
I still have a scar on my wrist from where I tore it open delivering a console TV much like this one. It was a 21-inch, with the newfangled rectangular picture tube (and a bunch of other tubes inside) and cost something in the neighborhood of $500. (The inflation calculator finds that to be about $2600 in today’s money.)
* * *
Thirty years ago, I just moved to Europe. When I moved back, there was a new thing on the horizon — the “cellular telephone.” It costs about a grand, and it’s the size of a big phone book. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have indoor plumbing, or a phone.
Twenty years ago — not too long after my niece was born — people are trying to convince me to get a cell phone; I refuse. A 21-inch color TV is still around $350, but that’s only about $100 in 1972 dollars. Oh, and it has a remote control, and if you have cable you have 50 or more channels.
Bill Whittle produced an excellent video, I think his best of many excellent videos, documenting this study. Worth the watch!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4
As far as “trickle down” not working? Well, perhaps somebody can explain to me then the longest sustained period of economic growth in American history from 1981-2007.
The crash of 2008 may have provided a nice talking point for the ignorant Leftists of America to discount supply side economics, but like so many things, it only demonstrates they’re really bad at math and really bad at history.
So my question for the Leftists is very simple. If supply side so diabolical and such a failure, why did it take 96 months of Reagan, 48 months of Bush I, 96 months of Clinton, and about 84 months of Bush II before it manifested such failure?
Yes, that same Bill Clinton, Patron Saint of the balanced budgets and “Democratic Reagan” cough cough, never changed course. He embraced it.
To answer your question – it took the Democrats about 7 years of Bush II to get the ‘monkey wrench’ hat trick to trip the economy. And that ‘hat trick’ actually started with Clinton – unwittingly of course – he just wanted high dollar and low interest loans for idiots that wouldn’t otherwise qualify for a loan of that kind. (Its called the unintended consequences of leftist policy). The commie bastards should be shot for their treason. I honestly believe they knew exactly what they were doing when they foisted the ‘perfect storm’ upon the American economy.
Excellent video. Have you read any of Easterbrook’s books?
Easterbrook points out that in 2000, for example, 13 percent of home purchases were of second homes; a century before, less than 1 percent were of such homes. From 1950 to 2000, the square footage of new home construction doubled from about 1,100 square feet to 2,250 square feet. Only 15 percent of our grandparents had central heating, and today over 95 percent of us do. The costs of virtually everything—per unit cost—have dropped; even the same medical treatment and cost of medicine have dropped when we take inflation into account. The only reason that costs for education and medicine have increased—the only two things that have increased in real cost—is that we have demanded much more of these. In terms of such things as longevity and the gap between the rich and poor, things are better: In 1900, the difference between the life spans of the “rich” and the poor was 15 years; today it is only four. The rich and the poor have the same levels of basic education, use the same roads, see the same television shows, and have access to the same cultural experiences. These improvements—due to the free market—can be seen internationally as well. Modern Liberals scream that globalization, capitalism, and American imperialism impoverish other countries, but a Brooking Institute study showed otherwise: In 1950, the developing world had 72 percent of the population but only 28.8 percent of global income; in 2000, their population had increased by only 9 percent, but their share of income went up to 42.2 percent. According to a United Nations study, the mean income in these countries almost doubled since 1975. Freedom has also spread. In 1980, only one-third of nations had free elections; by 2005, it increased to two-thirds. In Latin America, 40 percent of children under five were underweight; by 2004, this dropped to five percent. In the 1960s, nobody believed India could ever even feed itself. However, it has dropped most of its Socialist programs, welcomed globalization (capitalism), and is now rapidly becoming a world economic powerhouse. Jimmie Carter said that there would be mass global starvation by 2000.38 In a 2009 report about world poverty by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the findings were summarized:
“Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%.”
Where did your grandparents live that they hadn’t central heating? And for that matter, I don’t now, the house I live in is all-electric.
I’ll try not to rant–unfettered technology poisons us, as it is still doing in mining in Colorado, for instance…in trash, if we weren’t shipping it overseas…in waterways, still. We have maybe 25% young people between 18-25 unemployed (not ’cause they don’t want to work, at least not the one’s I know…although in my immediate area, minimum wage jobs won’t support anyone, housing is too high), the ages that are most dangerous in terms of stupid actions against a government. The variety of food we eat is entirely dependent on transportation and if fuel prices keep going up our kids will be back where our grandparents were–or worse, because more people used to live by farming and so were less dependent for food (and those who could hunt and fish were even more independent). And SCHOOLS REQUIRE USE OF COMPUTERS damn it, while libraries (where kids could use them for free) close ’cause taxpayers don’t want to support them and schools close, I guess ’cause no one wants to police them, so yeah, poor people need computers and the internet the way, no even more, than they once needed books!
In 1950 one person in the family working was enough to live the lifestyle you describe, and if we went back to one person in the family working we’d be there again. There’s no change, really, that I see other than that our money buys less in the way of goods and services than it used to–steak, for instance is 10x what it was in 1970, bread is 10x more, gasoline is almost 30x more, and there is less in the way of public transportation, fewer buses, trollies, trains and taxis than there were in 1970. City centers die as business–abetted by stupid city planning–moves to the outskirts where there can be bigger parking lots. I’ve been watching the little cities near me die for 50 years, and the difference in the way the rich and poor live getting wider. So I’m really not impressed by the changes in technology being listed.
“Poor” people are as you define “poor”. The federal government has several definitions, and therefore, I don’t believe any statistics offered by anyone (because they always cite some government figures). I suggest y’all read a book from the early part of the last century, “How to Lie With Statistics” which I discovered on my college reading list decades ago. Stop playing with numbers, they are not the real world.
Bravissimo!!
Good morning Charlie!
My Grandparents had the first indoor plumbing in Telluride, CO. That was 1957…
My Grandmother used to talk about living in Telluride during the depression years. She’d describe that going to Montrose, CO (nearest “big” town) took 3 days. When someone would take the 3 day trip they’d bring back a newspaper that would circulate around Telluride until someone else made the trip. She would talk about reading that people in NYC found it hard to buy shoes or vegetables. Her following comment was “We didn’t have anywhere to buy shoes and “Who had vegtables?”, if we didn’t shoot it we didn’t eat…
We’ve come a long, long way my friends. Even in Telluride, CO where the trip to Montrose now takes about an hour & 1/2, you can buy both vegetables and shoes and virtually everyone has indoor plumbing.
Yeah, exactly. Hell, in ’57 I was already two years old. When I was a kid in Alamosa, pears and peaches came in cans.
Weird. I’m 48, and our peaches come on trees.
Oh, they raised fresh peaches in Colorado then, but they were available for a couple weeks at most, and I don’t recall ever seeing one until we moved to pueblo in ’64.
I should clarify; _I_ get peaches from gas station parking lots. I don’t speak fluent Alabaman so I’m not sure how far outside of town they came from though.
Sad how we have to explain the obvious with essays. The simple fact is that liberals only see things in terms of identity and if that identity complains and says they’re poor, then they’re poor. Lacking even anecdotes, liberals will simply refer to this great group of semi-mythical people as “poor,” but without ever actually identifying them in a way which adding context would bring things to light.
Generally speaking, liberals have no principles, just skin or gender, and those that do enjoy stripping away context in order to advance a narrative – e.g. lynchings and Jim Crow are simply broadcast pell mell over the entirety of the history of the 48 states. Liberals have turned their backs on a classic education, preferring instead Marxist Pedagogy popularized by Paulo Freire, where one’s social, gender and racial awareness is more important than vocational skills. In short, they have no common sense nor can they make even simple comparisons.
Anti-racist mathematics. Ummmmm… right.
Exactly..and party lines, remember party lines? You had to be very circumspect on the phone because you’d no idea how many others–and who–were also listening.
Yes, I remember party lines. I’m 55. When we got our first phone, we had a 4 party line. You were supposed to pick up the phone and listen for the dial tone before dialing (yes, dialing) to determine if anyone else was already using the phone. If it was an emergency, they were supposed to hang up so you could make a call. If not, you had to wait until they were finished, however long that may be. Long distance calls were not yet direct dial so you had to go through the operator. They cost several dollar a minute.
We lived in rural Alabama at the time. There were 7 of us in the house with no insulation, no air conditioning and one indoor bathroom. My family had a large garden and that’s where we got a lot of our food. My parents grew up in the Depression and knew how to can foods to last through the year.
We didn’t get a TV until I was 6 years old and it was a used black and white unit. We didn’t get our first color TV until 1968. IIRC, it cost about $600 which is over $2000 today when adjusted for inflation. At first, they didn’t let me touch the TV but they soon learned I was better at fine tuning the set whenever you changed channels (all 4 of them), so I became the remote control. Every time you changed the channel, you had to fine tune it to get a good picture.
Personal computers weren’t invented until 1975, the year I graduated high school. The first video games (e.g. Pong) came out a few years earlier. I learned how to use a slide rule in my 10th grade chemistry class because even 4 function calculators cost over $100 at the time. My first calculator came a year later (4 functions and square root!) for $60.
I’m 38, but my home town when we moved out in 1981 still had party lines. There was one TV, black and white, and the only way they got reception was by being closest to the open end of the valley. No one else even bothered with TV until satellite dishes came in because there was no way to get any reception.
Yeah. We were pretty rural.
In 1962 my paternal grandparents owned about 200 acres of mountain land in western NC, yet lived in a log house built in 1836 with no running water. I’ve had the character building experience of trudging through snow to get to the outhouse at 3 am, and hauled all the spring water and firewood I ever want to see. I’ve plowed behind a mule and helped plant, cultivate, harvest, can, and freeze 2 acres of garden, mostly by hand. I’ve stirred an iron kettle of ashes, lard, and lye over an open fire making soap. I’ve been squirted in the face with warm milk and churned butter by hand.
I never thought of my grandparents as poor, even though my own parents lived a good bit better in a modern (for the day) 3 bedroom ranch.
I will say that kind of back breaking labor just to be able to eat regular would be good therapy for many of today’s “progressives”.
Reagan: Trickle down Prosperity.
Obama: Trickle up Poverty.
Here is the problem. The liberal controlled education establishment has created a mess and we have not gotten out of it in over 50 years. Generation after generation of minorities are condemned to a second rate education.
The liberal establishment condemns trickle down which has created the prosperity that Charlie Martin so nicely demonstrates. If trickle down goes away it will take more than 50 years to fix the economic mess created, if it is ever fixed. The liberals don’t want it fixed because then they would not be the philosopher kings.
Interesting and good (I can still buy peaches in cans, can’t you?), but let’s not be passive: you can also look to the future, even be proactive. Given the present level of discontents, you can also safely guess that the Founders would approve of a new approach that has nothing to do with leftist narrative.
We’re all pretty much adapted to modern communications by now; the good news is that emerging opportunities reach far, far beyond, into a better future that is neither fuzzy nor Utopian.
Modern septic tanks are essentially odorless and forever; today’s woodburning stoves are better and more efficient in every way; pellet burners and biomass recovery are/will be a practical evolution for many. Solar continues to improve and is now almost efficient enough to be adequate in a range of climates. Modern water-well drilling, recovery, filtration and storage often solve external plumbing issues completely. Every decent architectural school encourages or mandates minimalist house design using modern insulation and materials, often prefab and cheaper and quicker to assemble than ever before. 3-D printers and vertical gardening are in the near future. In short, we’re within a very few years of easy, practical, self-sufficient living that isn’t dependent on the gov’t grid and the bond market. Oh, and you can often work from home.
All of it adds up to an opportunity to combine the good stuff from the past with the healthy tech of tomorrow. Better to learn from the past than live in it, our forebears would certainly agree. Done right, there are fortunes to be made and freedom will again ring through the land.
Big caveat: it’s safe to say that the very idea makes both the luddites of the left and the country-club elites of the Stupid Party a tad nervous, since it all weakens the central, statist, One-Ring-to-Rule-Them-All model that requires a population that is passive, reactive and dependent. And don’t forget that awful ‘vision thing’ many find repugnant….
Sorry I was unclear. I meant only in cans.
Great analysis. Thank you.
I do remember the same exact things.
Evil capitalism is going to do this worldwide, if we succeed in stopping the fake revolutionaries who have tried everything they could to condemn the world to eternal poverty.
Yeah but … they promised us flying cars and telepathy!
The question is how should poverty be defined. To Progressives, it isn’t a matter of what you can afford; it’s a matter of what other people can afford that you can’t. It doesn’t matter what you have; if someone else has more, than you’re poor, and you have a right (perhaps even a duty) to resent it. Therefore, poverty can only be eradicated by levelling the playing field completely. That no society has ever managed to do this for any length of time doesn’t seem to occur to them.
The notion of poor is relative to the norm of the day. Henry VIII would have loved owning an 1880′s era revolver, taking nudie pics of Miss Boleyn using 1860′s photography, flying to Rome on a wright flyer to harangue the pope, etc.
Until the housing market crash rendered half of the erstwhile middle class upside down on their mortgages, “not poor” meant that one could reasonably afford vacations on cruise ships, trips to disneyland, road trips to see big city sights, and so on. At that time the poor couldn’t do this.
Today’s poor may own a cheap cell phone and a tossaway TV set, but they’re unable to afford the gas and ticket prices to actually go anywhere (e.g. taking ths kids to the zoo in the big city) without serious planning. The middle class tends to own reliable transport. The poor may have transport but said vehicles are often elderly rolling junk with balding tires and such. i.e. what the poor own today is more than the middle class owned 100 years ago but relatively speaking the distance from middle class to poor is still the same.
What I’m thankful for is simply that if the unthinkable happens and I wake up one morning as part of the modern poor, at least I can take a dump indoors and not have to shoot dinner.
All this aside, I think I fail to understand your point regarding the relation here of trickle down. As I understood the Reaganesque trickle concept the government invests $N gazillion in rad hardened military space tech in 1980 and by 2005 anyone can afford GPS and gets 200 sat channels on TV and the military can pretty much take out any actual real threat whenever it gets the urge (i.e. safety assuming the white house occupant is a vertebrate.) And these are but some of the direct results. In the meantime a gazillion jobs worth having (what’s learned is transferable and usable elsewhere) were created in making the toys and another gazillion business opportunities appeared that could not have existed prior to them (i.e. how do you think Denny’s shows up on your GPS?)
What I’m saying here is that in some sense ALL improvement in the lot of man is trickle down merely by definition, whereas the colloquial meaning denies that Reagan etc knew what the f**k they were doing and denies that Reagan etc did what they did on purpose. (Usually the derision aimed at Reagan trickle down also handwaves away any and all improvement in the lot of man as accidental.)
Maybe the real question is, looking at history, which philosophy has produced the biggest increase in standard of living, for the lower tier, ten years forward?
Thanks
JK
Missed is that most of those houses without indoor plumbing had no or minimal insulation, single pane windows and single panel doors.
For a real good read about the prior 50 years, I recommend ‘The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950′ by Frederick Lewis Allen. You see, 50 years prior to when Charlie starts his narrative, no one had any of those amenities not even J.P. Morgan.
It is important to remember that while in the last 50 years the poor have achieved the living standards beyond the well to do in 1950, they’ve also surpassed the amenities enjoyed by the wealthiest citizens and POTUS himself 100 years prior.
Here is a description of the finest transportation available to the wealthiest Americans just 100 years or so ago
We no longer have trickle down economics, it has become a flood leaving all awash in luxuries undreamed up by our grandparents or great grandparents.
Was anyone starting off in 1962 faced with daunting gas prices, food prices, rent on a basic one bedroom apartment? The answer, as one old enough to remember the early 60′s, is no. Relative to wages those basic necessities (and I left out clothing) were not Himalayas to climb. So in that sense it was less arduous to establish oneself then than it is now. In fact the basic one bedroom apartment is quite simply out of reach for many if not most twentysomethings, who have to share or stay in the nest, a misery for them and their parents.
When I finished college in the late 1960′s, I had no problem buying a new VW Beetle and renting a reasonably nice apartment on my beginning salary of…wait for it, here it comes…$6300.
Improvement in the availability of stuff doesn’t equal improvement in the human condition.
Over the past 50 years, we’ve ramped up and broken down at the same time.
Well, the inflation calculator says $6300 in 1969 is $37,000 now.
True. I remember voting for Nixon in 1960. Rent here locally was $40 a month and included heat and electricity. Drove a 1951 Chevy. Dollar’s worth of gasoline was a bit over three gallons. TV was B&W, couple of stations. Worked in a camera store for $50 a week, which was four days at 12 hours a day. I think population growth is probably responsible for higher rents today as there is just so much “real estate”. Back then there was no “free trade”. We had “fair trade” which set a minimum “floor” on consumer good prices and kept “Main Street” alive. Today of course we have “free trade”, cheap consumer goods at Walmart and “Main Street” is increasingly “history”. Wages are probably lower since there are fewer jobs due to “out sourcing” production to where it can be done the cheapest. In some ways this is good, in other ways bad. Good if you hold a job “that has to be done here”. Bad if you are in an occupation that can be done almost by anyone anywhere. Part of the problem today is that people are used to the sort of a life that used to be something only the fairly “well to do” could afford and feel “deprived” if they don’t have the economic means to live the way they feel they should be allowed…
The housing affordability problem is mostly caused by city planners restricting the availability of land.
see: americandreamcoalition.org/penalty.html
Thanks
JK
Progressives easily avoid this reality by defining “the poor” as a certain percentage of income or wealth. It wouldn’t matter if every person in the world had a jet pack and a time machine, some jet packs would still be faster than others. Obviously they would have to demonize the rich who are hoarding the 300 mph jetpacks while the poor can only fly at 250 mph. Thomas Sowell has done a lot of good writing on this very subject.
Without the poor staying poor and blacks staying in chains, “progressives” ain’t got nuttin’.
If you step out and up and beyond your circumstances on your own recognizance, you’re a traitor.
Sorry, Charlie. It’s fallacious to focus on the techno-goodies, and ignore the basics. Food, fuel, housing, all much more affordable in 1962. Toys, not so much. If you were wealthy back then, you invested $1000 in a color TV with a round screen where everybody was pink of green, and another $500 in a newfangled stereo. And you could fly anywhere for a princely sum. But you could buy a 5000 square foot house for $20,000, heat it with 15 cent a gallon heating oil, and fill your car up with 25 cent gas. Hardener was what, 20 cents a pound?
What really happened is the necessities and other unavoidable costs have gotten more expensive while the toys have gotten cheaper. Chock that up to technology, not economics. Nobody back then graduated from college with debts equal to several years income, and paid 5 years or more income for a house.
And these days, it takes two incomes to keep up with grandpa. Yes, technologically, we’ve advanced. Economically, we’ve gone backward. The fact that “poor” people can afford these techno-toys says several things, but the main thing is that these toys are cheap. But man does not live by toys alone.
And one more thing. I’m not so sure the new telecommunications toys are an improvement. Back then, you called somebody on the phone, they answered. If you said it was long distance, they’d jump out of the shower naked and run to the phone. Now, nobody answers their damn phones. We have more communication options that they could imagine in 1962, and it takes days to get a hold of somebody. And it’s even worse with these companies and government offices with these damn automated telephone systems that make it impossible to actually talk to a real human.
Progress, my butt.
Snork — kinda sounds like people just don’t want to talk to you.
Getting things right has a habit of doing that…….;>………..
Well, the average house size was just a bit over 1000 sq ft in 1962 and that the average wage index was just $4200. Now you might be able to pick up an old very large house for $20,000. One of the old 1910s homes now derelict on the market in need of repair. The kind of home made unreachable by the imposition of the income tax on the doctor, lawyer, university professor class, who before the income tax had large, well appointed homes with domestic help.
There are some things that are now still expensive in their much improved state. Mostly due to government mandates. Thousands of dollars are added to the price of a car due to government mandates for safety and emissions. Same for fuel and heating oil. Also, tens of thousands in costs to homes due to government mandates, some for safety, some for energy efficiency, some for aesthetics. I just decided to take on a complete separate energy service for an out building as trying to hook it into the house service would require thousands of dollars code upgrades even before the cost of running the wire to the building.
Of course, when starting out in 1962, young people would forego some discretionary toys such as unlimited texting, high speed internet, pay television or television at all, eating out, large quantities of clothing, etc. So it is really a matter of priorities.
Seriously? Your arguement is that poor people can afford big screen tvs and nice stereos but not food? Sorry, no sale. Those are choices. Do you truly believe someone who chooses to buy a big screen tv instead of buying quality food for their family should be supported by tax dollars? It is exactly this entitlement attitude that is causing much of the economic problems we are having. You buy the toys AFTER you have the necessities, not before. Plus a lot of the economic disconnects you brought up were largely caused by stupid, self-defeating left wing social engineering policies like forcing banks to lend to unqualified buyers and using good farmland to produce lousy fuel.
Excellent point. I own a few rental properties geared for the lower-income types. Most have a car (if ot two), cable TV, video games, computers, and all have cell phones. However, most would rather eat at McD’s and keep their cell phoenes and luxeries instead of paying rent on time. I even offered to swap two month’s rent for a person’s flat-plasma TV – he moved instead of trading or paying rent.
I charge rent that is well within the range of anyone who has a minimum-wage job. Most of the “poor” that I rent to could easily live decently if they prioritized their lives better; they are poor for a reason, it boils down to choice, ignorance, or a bad work ethic.
I originally went into the low-rent segment to help poor people have affordable housing. Now, eight years later, I can’t get rid of my properties fast enough (if I could find buyers).
Uhm, the problem for poor people in America is obesity. They get plenty of food. And yes, fresh veggies are still cheaper than junk food. The junk food is much tastier.
But America is known as the country where the poor people are fat.
“Poor” people don’t have to make choices between necessities & toys…that’s why God made food stamps, welfare, electricity subsidies, heating oil assistance, free childcare, Medicaid & Obamaphones.
Very good points. We have just established that many people, poor or otherwise, do NOT have the resources sufficient to own a house. Maybe the underlying “truth” is that if people live in projects, they can still afford cell phones, computers, drugs, etc.
So what would be the further point, that we should let these things become more expensive so that they cannot afford them? Pay/give them 20% less? Or maybe that we can keep things just as they are and not worry about expanding any benefits for the “poor?” Do I sense an underlying resentment in the writer that the poor now have indoor plumbing? Where are we going here?
” Do I sense an underlying resentment in the writer that the poor now have indoor plumbing? Where are we going here?”
Here’s where…the “poor” today (funded by taxpayers) are doing far better than those who considered themselves fairly well-off years ago…you know, WAY BACK when people actually worked for what they had. Other than maybe John Kerry’s yacht, what exactly don’t today’s “poor” have? Starving? Nope…food stamps. Cold? Never…heating oil subsidies. Can’t see a doctor? Probably not…Medicaid. NO CONTRACEPTIVES or ABORTIONS? Thank Pelosi…Planned Parenthood! What’s the incentive to get off your a$$? Getting an iPhone instead of a dumb old, taxpayer-funded Obamaphone?
Do I sense an underlying resentment in the writer that the poor now have indoor plumbing?
No, you moron. You sense — if you had any sense — that I’m glad people have indoor plumbing, and cell phones, and all.
Actually, you’re wrong about the food prices. The USDA has a website with the available information (see Table 7: Food expenditures by families and individuals as a share of disposable personal income).
In 1929, families and individuals paid an average of 23.4% of their disposable income on food. By 1962, that percentate had dropped to 16.5%. In 2010 (the last year of data available), they paid 9.4% of their disposable income on food.
Don’t forget that food stamps started after 1962. Pretty much all “poor” people these days don’t pay anything out of their disposable budget for food. And that includes a lot of employed people.
Nah, I don’t buy it, Snork. 25 words or less: poor people in America have an obesity problem.
I’ll grant you that the price of Cheetos and Mountain Dew haven’t risen as fast as a lot of other things.
When I was a kid there was always a decision to be made between “things” and food. Gifts of food were a big deal. Now I can show you poor neighborhoods where obese families have a fully loaded Escalade in the driveway.
You have it right.
I’ve been managing the household for the past 23 years, raising eight kids on one income. We managed okay because we don’t have nice cars (every vehicle we’ve owned would qualify as a “crappy” car as far as the First Lady of CT is concerned lol); we buy manuals so they last forever. I don’t have much of a wardrobe. We get hand-me-downs, clearance sales (see what summer clothes are still around right now), and freecycle. Yes, produce is very cheap, and a lot of food is easy to garden; tomatoes are easy, and other vine stuff; replant green onions in a small pot after you buy them and cut them. We eat a lot of ground beef and those 10-lb bags of leg quarters. Pork chops go on sale pretty regularly, and I gradually pick up a supply of steaks using the “reduced and frozen for immediate sale” freezers. The big difference is if you buy “ingredients” rather than meals. We spent 12 years with 7 up to 10 of us in a 1900-sq ft house, 2 1/2 baths. We bought an ugly house, not in move-in condition and fixed it up. It had burnt orange shag carpeting upstairs. People with half as many family members had houses twice as big, until the Barney Frank Housing Meltdown(tm). We clean our own house, mow our own lawn, spend nothing on childcare. Vacations are visiting family or camping. We don’t have ANY Iphones or Ipads, no plans for them. We only have a PS2, and no Wii until after at least two years after it came out (and it was someone’s Christmas present-that’s singular).
BTW, I gave my kids the 1970′s version of “I walked to school uphill both ways” talk. “We only had four channels, and I was the remote during commercials. Dad snapped his fingers and I grabbed the knob 4-6-8-13 for the whole commercial break. There were no cell phones. We didn’t get a color TV until my junior year in high school, a microwave in junior high. And our video game was a BALL AND TWO STICKS” They started laughing at that point and didn’t believe me…
I’m glad that you and Michelle O agree.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/09/14/how-about-a-crusade-against-the-conventional-wisdom-on-childhood-obesity/
I still refuse to carry a cell phone. I don’t want people bugging me all the time.
The big thing most poor people don’t have access to is a safe neighborhood (and I sure don’t want them living around me, or this area will start getting unsafe.)
That reminds me of the story going around when answering machines became all the rage.
Bob: Joe, I called you the other day but your answering machine wasn’t working?
Joe: I got rid of that infernal machine
Bob: Why did you get rid of it? To many messages?
Joe: No, before I got that machine I thought I was missing calls all the time. But that machine didn’t answer many calls at all. So I got rid of since it wasn’t answering them all.
I still refuse to carry a cell phone.
I didn’t say I carry it.
Let’s pretend that there are no poor people in America. Then look at this:
http://eji.org/eji/node/629
I guess some people just want to live poor. Sad, isn’t it?
Well, the traditional remedy to such a situation is to condemn those homes and force people to move or to come together as a community to build and install a sewer system. If the ground won’t perk then the homes should never have been given a building permit. I suspect the homes date from a period when permits weren’t required.
Now, the local municipality could take them into the sewer district, add the sewer tax to their water bill then put in sewers in the 10-20 years at which time all homeowners will be required to pay to connect to the sewer system. that is the way it is normally done.
Again, it is priorities, raw sewage or a new car or unlimited cell plan
I’m sure some remember the argument between Senator Robert Byrd and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill as they tried to one-up the other on the dire poverty of their upbringing (copied from http://www.wnd.com/2002/02/12768/ )
An astonished O’Neill responded to the harangue: “I started my life in a house without water or electricity. So I don’t cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch.”
And then the hearing spun totally out of control as Senator Tut redoubled his own sob story: “Well, Mr. Secretary, I lived in a house without electricity, too, no running water, no telephone, a little wooden outhouse.”
The clueless geniuses were comparing the normal life of average Americans who didn’t live in major metropolitan areas during the 1920′s to modern times. Of course, as political figures they can’t admit that we don’t really have any serious problems, at least that we haven’t created ourselves, so our minor tribulations warrant hysteria and frequent predictions of extinction.
FWIW, there are low-income subsidies for a lot of these utilities, such as cell phones and cable and internet. It’s not just that technology has made these things cheap. It’s also that if you can qualify, you can have a cell phone for essentially free, and high speed internet and cable for well less that half of the market rate.
If you really load up on government handouts; food stamps, public housing, subsidized internet, free phones, etc., your out-of-pocket living expenses are de minimus. So if you get $600 a month on SSI, for example, a big chunk of that is disposable.
Romney: ‘Middle Income’ Is Between $200,000 and $250,000 By The Associated Press 09/14/12
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/09/14/romney-middle-income-between-200k-and-250k/?ncid=webmail23
No shame whatsoever.
Emphasis, of course, mine.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/09/14/romney-middle-income-between-200k-and-250k/?ncid=webmail23
“Romney would be among the wealthiest presidents, if elected…”
Isn’t it amazing how wealth didn’t matter a bit when a Kennedy or a Kerry was involved? Ann Romney has a horse…bad, very bad…typical corporate wife! Jackie Kennedy had a FARM full of horses…very stylish…not to mention she gave poor, abused Arabians a home. And somehow we never hear a word about Obama’s $10-$15 million…hmmm.
Aw c’mon. Obama pimped those books fair and square. There’s one born every minute, and they all bought a few.
There’s a difference between absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is the more pressing problem, the lack of access to basic needs, which include family, food, shelter, clean water, health care, and education. It is more pronounced in third world countries, but also exists in the US, especially in very poor urban areas with broken families and schools, and in very poor rural areas with lack of access to services.
A key contributor to alleviating poverty is ownership of property and control of means of production, such as in a small business or farm. Our grandparents who owned property, had a well, a garden, and access to firewood, and who had extended family to help in times of need, could be self-sustaining and were not poor in terms of absolute poverty, even if they didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. And it’s been proven that a poor woman in India, given access to basic education with training in running a small business, can become self-sustaining and support her family better than any ongoing welfare program.
Poverty in the US mainly stems from the breakdown in both the family and in education, which leaves children without stable providers and without the education necessary to grow up into stable, self-supporting adults. Throwing more money at them doesn’t help, if you don’t address the underlying issues of family stability and quality of education.
Which is one argument for getting rid of teacher’s unions and bringing in a private-enterprise based system of education with actual quality control and performance and outcome measurement systems. And also an argument for returning to traditional morality and family structure – because sexual promiscuity has been devastating to family unity and economic stability, and is as great a public health threat as second hand smoking or drunk driving. And study after study shows that children do best when they have both a mother and a father taking care of them, and modeling for them how to be good adult men and women.
Excellent post! The poor should be grateful for how good they have it. They even have indoor toilets. It is great that your family business was running computers that used punched cards. Were you running a main frame? Your family business was clearly very advanced! Or you are exaggerating. Either way, the poor have it way too good today.
Political Math Obama’s Record on Private Sector Jobs is really good and much better than President Bush’s record if you believe the economic and statistical data that is being presented to you. I am skeptical of all politicians and the numbers they throw around so I was pleased to see someone actually take the time to analyze this data. As you’ll see in the video Obama’s explanation of his jobs record is Deception in Precision. If the only reason you are going to Vote for Obama is because you think he’s created a bunch of jobs then perhaps you’ll reevaluate that decision. My guess is most people will vote for whoever they like the most and think will do the best job, regardless of what the data shows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQLreUCRYXM&feature=player_embedded
I note that most of the “quality of life improvements” over the past 30-40 years are nothing but electronic junk. Yes, most “poor” people in America have TV sets and cell phones. How much is their BREAD? How much of a week’s salary does a suit of CLOTHES cost? How about SHOES? I can get a pair of shoes for about $20… they don’t even last a month, and my foot and back problems grow exponentially as I try to walk on grotty soles and busted out laces just a little while longer.
How much does their HOUSING cost? Has the price of renting or “owning” gone down? Hell no. Has the quality gone up? again, HELL no. America’s poor live largely in trailers and so-called “mobile” homes that are so shoddily made they’re falling apart before they even get dragged onto the lot. Or they live in rental units like ants in a hill.
What was the percentage of the population that owned land fifty years ago, vs. today?
I get tired of people talking about how America’s poor don’t have it bad because they have this or that example of mass produced junk that cost the manufacturers maybe $10 in parts and wages. Hell yes there are people who are FAR worse off in the world… that’s not much comfort, hell it’s completely irrelevant when you’re hanging off the bottom rung of YOUR society’s ladder and the bill collectors and tax collectors are tearing the flesh off your legs below the knee. In our society the drop between “poor with a TV set and cellphone” and living homeless in the gutter has no dropoffs in between.
Well, you *could* of course check those statistics yourself. If you did — or if you even bothered to follow the links I have in the article — you’d find that more poor people own their own homes than ever before. Of you could follow this link and see that people spend a much smaller percentage of their disposable income on food than ever before.
C’mon, put in a little work on this yourself.
I was around in the 1950′s and 60′s, and it wasn’t nearly as primitive as you people seem to think.
I just turned 64. As a child we lived in more then one place with an outhouse instead of indoor toilets. We pumped water and had a large black cookstove that also was the heat for a large two-story house (one of the houses, anyway). We never had a phone while I lived at home. Today we have cell phones and computers, but raised our kids without TV. They survived and today still have none. We prefer computers and books. Even the (grand)kids. We have some kitchen conveniences, but they take up so much space that I have purposely limited what I’ve bought for the kitchen to those items I can put away when done with them, or use a lot. Comparing what we have to many poor today, we’d look (on paper) to be poorer than them. However, I feel no loss of those items they do possess. Having moved to Turkey from Arkansas, amongst poverty-stricken people there, our poor have no reason to complain. When we left to go to Turkey, we could hardly do more than pay our mortgage and eat 3 weeks out of 4, but when we arrived there with little more than the clothes on our backs, we realized that we would never be that poor and were very blessed. Amazing how you can convince some that they are underprivileged and stricken, abused by the rich, yet they possess more then some of us care to own.
Poor in 2012 means you have to get spending money from foodstamps, earned income tax credit, city, state and county grants, Medicaid, and various other government programs. Poor people are rarely hungry, they can get way more food than they should eat.
Poor in 1950 meant you got help with neccessities from you church, your neighbors, odd jobs, and maybe even begging. Many poor people went to bed hungry.
How does this work…
To get a job, I have to be drug tested.
To get welfare, forcing me to get drug tested is an invasion of my privacy.
To keep my job, I have to have a social security number, a drivers license and a stable home address.
To get welfare, I have to have a social security number, a state issued picture ID and a stable home address.
But if you require me to show a picture ID to vote, you’re discriminating and denying me my right to vote.
Occupy Wall Street blames the one percent for the nations issues, while they live at home in Mommy’s basement with satellite TV, a Blu-Ray player and an Xbox.
This makes sense? This is ridiculous.