Media Spin and the Hidden Poverty in America

#100 also the US should conscript Masadi in the inner city peace corps so he can put his money where his mouth is. :-)

This article doesn’t make any recommendations as to what can be done to tackle the poverty issue. I think, USA should completely cut off all economic and other Aid to developing world to alleviate poverty at home. It should also deport leeches what suck on its system while glorifying jihad and other communistic nonsense.

How come 5 million undocumented workers are willing to do anything to stay in the US? I guess they want to become poorer.

The author had raised an important issue i.e. poverty in USA. I dont see why everyone has to beat him up for that.

Even for those who have suburbanized their lives completely, Katrina had revealed this Poverty problem which is real and if complacent can increase significantly...

Now, to the issue of whether USA should stop the war on Islamic fundamentalism to work only on this Poverty issue, the answer is definitely NO

Thanks,
Avkrishna

#97 maybe we can find a welfare queen for masadi as well. then he could accompany her every month as she does her rounds to leech off the system and, as mr. aslam approvingly notes, could also claim later on that ``he hasn`t done days work since``. :-)

#96 by hamidm2 on April 4, 2006 5:28am PT
hamid mian
one of my cousin lived in new york brooklyn in the 90`s he was begging us to find him brit-paki kuri so we found him one he came to uk as `mangy` the girl had a house of her own some guys have all the luck ghar bi melay aur ghar wali bi, he has 3 kids now he hasn`t done days work since.

Re: # 95

aslam mian,


....... no, we are not prepared to pay more taxes so that we can live miserable lives like the british ! ......... no offense, but the uk is like a third world country compared to the usa ....

masadi
uk spends 3 times more per head in dollar terms on social security than US, then taxes are high here, are us taxpayers prepared to pay higher taxes, because at the end of the day money has to come from somewhere

masadi,

I have with my own eyes seen a lot of `poor` drive into the gas station, fill up, and trade-in their food-stamps for pints of whiskey from the liquor store!

As I said before on some board, `poor` in Singapore means having to go to Pattaya for vacation insted of Switzerland.

Your threshold of $19k for a family of 4 is a lot of money in a country where a big mac costs about the same as Pakistan on a purchasing power parity basis, and gas is HALF the price. Did you know that?

#92 einsteinwallah writes <<< Poverty percent rate in 20s is high. You would need army, dictatorship and censorship just to effectively enforce segregation >>>

I am sure you can do better than the objection you have come up with. The official poverty figures are calculated as adequate food times three, the real figures would include things like rent, actual fuel costs, health care, proper education etc which easily doubles the official figures. Then, all US cities are hypersegregated where as fact African Americans and Hispanics are segregated from whites (due to several institutional mechanisms, unfortunately your intelligence goes only till the medieval times where force was the only mechanism of segregation)

From article:

[If we use ``real`` measures of poverty, based upon average incomes in the US and a current basket of goods, including health and childcare, this percentage is actually double that of the official figures (many private studies and models based on them have documented this).]

And what is this ``real`` measure of poverty? Let me make my question clear. Let us first look at another quote from the article:

[Stating that poverty figures in the US under Clinton in 1996 were at 13.7 % of the population while now they are at 12.7%, he concludes that America is looking after its poor by, spending a ``massive amount`` ($368 billion was the number he quoted) even in the midst of a ``war on terror``.]

So was the figure of 13.7% also ``actually`` double if we use the ``real`` measure of poverty? You see my problem? You cannot double 12.7% and then compare it to 13.7% and then argue that it has increased. In fact no discussion is possible unless you reproduce in these pages details about this real measure.

Poverty percent rate in 20s is high. You would need army, dictatorship and censorship just to effectively enforce segregation.

Masadi Sahib,

(yes, I still hold a job, and have held one ever since I arrived in this godforsaken country, )

What is a good Muslim like you doing in a godforsaken country. There are so many Muslim paradises- IRP, Iran, KSA and if you are partial towards godforsaken paradises there are always North Korea, Cuba etc.

Regards

Big mess you all have created on here for me to go through. Perhaphs one quote from HP sahib captures it all:

<<< Asadi has brought two points and I don’t understand why people are avoiding those issues behind some individual stories. Behind the success of every Poncho, there are ten Ponchos that are still working under the minimum wage and are caught in a cycle of perpetual poverty >>>

All through these various posts by fuzair, tahmed (the df), Zeemax, Hamidm, samosa etc, the real issues are avoided. Are you denying the fact that the official US poverty level, reported by this government, puts 38 million under the poverty line (which is not the UN/World Bank measure of $1 a day that deliberately tries to understate poverty in the ``underdeveloped`` countries, which is apparently lost on Zeemax). Out of this 38 million most are way below the threshold of $19k for a family of 4 as revealed by `living wage analysis`, which puts the living wage above $8 an hour based on this threshold while the minimum wage is under $6 (and these number of the very poor cannot be explained as underreporting of income either, as they stay more or less constant year to year, except the number has increased by over 19% during Bush`s presidency). When the USDA, puts the number of people who suffer from hunger at some point in a year or are at risk of food insecurity at around the same number 38 million a year, these damn fools deny that and say the poor are eating cheetos and watching cable TV. That is the most ignorant observation I have heard and then they try to use research by a dubious right wing Heritage Foundation article that deliberately fudges the numbers.

So, if poor households have two Tvs in the US, how many meals will those two Tvs buy if need be? And if one person in that ``household`` has to work and needs a car that takes up a huge chunk of his income leaving very little for all else can he or she do given a public transport system next to nothing in most US cities? Or if the ``household`` cancels their $40 a month cable subscription how many meals will that buy to make them ``non-poor``. These are all distraction indicators, they are not social indicators of well being. The fact is that the poor given all indicators, even access to life (since they DIE at three times the rate and suffer from diseases much more than those above the poverty line) suffer tremendously.

Here is an artilce about the Heritage Foundation BS that you copy pasted

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January/February 1999
The Ever-Present Yet Nonexistent Poor


For Heritage`s poverty expert, numbers mean what he says they mean
By Seth Ackerman

As a poverty specialist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector is one of the right-wing media machine`s most prolific pundits. In 1996, the year of the welfare reform debate, he was cited in media outlets an average of more than 15 times a month (Nexis). Rector also feeds a vast network of right-wing talkshow hosts and syndicated columnists who pick up and broadcast his findings. Yet for all his influence, Rector`s work is a mess of misleading statistics and specious arguments all contrived to accomplish a single goal: to cut spending on the poor.

In 1995, Rector testified before Congress that ``since the onset of the War on Poverty, the U.S. has spent over $5.3 trillion on welfare. But during the same period, the official poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged.`` Rector`s figure--which he soon updated to $5.4 trillion--is grossly misleading: It includes huge amounts of spending not directed towards families on welfare.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that approximately 70 percent of the federal spending that Rector classified as ``welfare`` went to households that did not receive Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the core welfare program in recent decades. Instead, most of the money went to non-AFDC households with elderly, disabled or ``medically needy`` individuals, as well as students and low-income workers--not groups most people would associate with ``welfare.``

Even if Rector`s $5.4 trillion figure were accurate, it would need to be put in perspective. Spending on ``national defense`` since 1964 overshadows even Rector`s inflated ``welfare`` number, exceeding $8 trillion at the time of Rector`s testimony--and that figure does not include spending on intelligence, foreign military aid and other military-related items.

Despite its flimsiness, Rector`s charge echoed through the media. The Los Angeles Times published a column by Rector (7/11/95) making the $5.4 trillion claim. He repeated the figure on a PBS NewsHour panel (12/26/95). Tony Snow picked it up in a column in USA Today (9/25/95) and Linda Bowles published it in a Chicago Tribune column (7/31/96). Syndicated columnist Walter Williams then placed it in the Cincinnati Enquirer (11/26/95) and Dallas Morning News (12/9/95), among other papers. The figure reappeared in the Arizona Republic this year in a news article about welfare fraud (4/19/98).

Erasing Hunger

Despite his 1995 claim before Congress that 30 years of welfare spending had not reduced poverty, Rector has at the same time argued for years that poverty has fallen so steeply since the War on Poverty that virtually no one in America today is really poor (see Footnote*). This argument was enunciated by Rector in a 1990 Heritage Foundation ``Backgrounder`` titled ``How `Poor` Are America`s Poor?`` and Rector has updated the paper several times since then--always around the September release of the Census Bureau`s annual poverty report. Rector`s report is given a different name each time it`s released--this year`s version was called ``The Myth of Widespread American Poverty``--but the content is virtually identical from one year to the next.

Rector writes in the 1998 report that ``despite frequent charges of widespread hunger in the United States, 84 percent of the poor report their families have `enough` food to eat; 13 percent state they `sometimes` do not have enough to eat, and 3 percent say they `often` do not have enough to eat.`` But his figures are taken from the ``food sufficiency`` portion of the 1988-1991 Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is considered by many researchers to be an inadequate measure of hunger. He fails to mention in his report the authoritative 1995 Food Security Survey, performed by the Census Bureau on behalf of the USDA, which was designed to improve upon the old ``food sufficiency`` measure.

The Census study found that in addition to the 14 percent of poor individuals found to be hungry that year, another 25 percent of the poor were classified as ``food insecure.`` That means those households had a ``limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.`` For example, 81 percent of respondents in households classified as ``food insecure`` said that sometimes in the past 12 months the food that they bought ``just didn`t last`` and they ``didn`t have money to get more.`` 63 percent said they could sometimes provide ``only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed the children`` because they ``were running out of money to buy food.``

Nationwide, 13.8 percent of Americans, poor and non-poor, were either hungry or food insecure--a number identical to the 13.8 percent poverty rate that year. In other words, while it is true that not every person counted as officially poor lacked food, for every officially poor person who didn`t lack food, another (officially ``non-poor``) person did.

Curiously, despite his omission of the Census Bureau`s more recent findings, Rector was not unaware of them; he refers to the Census Bureau`s study in a footnote. One can only wonder how Rector happened to come across the newer report while leaving out its salient findings.

The Wealthy Poor

Rector makes much of the fact that many poor people own cars. ``Seventy percent of `poor` households own a car; 27 percent own two or more cars.`` But Rector does not stop to consider that many of these households might need cars to get to their jobs. In fact, the 69.7 percent of poor households that Rector reports as having one or more cars in 1995 roughly mirrors the 61.4 percent of poor households with one or more workers in that year.

Rector has claimed that ``poor Americans live in larger houses or apartments`` than ``the general population in Western Europe.`` Presumably as evidence of this assertion, he included in this year`s report a chart titled ``International Comparison of Living Space.`` However, what the chart actually compares is the average floor space per person in certain European cities, such as Paris and Athens, with the average floor space in all poor U.S. households--22 percent of whom live in rural areas and 33 percent of whom live in suburbs. (Even with such an egregious bias, his numbers are underwhelming: The mostly rural and suburban homes of the U.S. poor are only about one-fourth larger than the average home in notoriously crowded Paris.)

The intent of Rector`s dubious number-crunching was to make his point that ``there is a huge gap between the `poor` as defined by the Census Bureau and what most ordinary Americans consider to be poverty.`` He was more right than he knew. That same year, the National Opinion Research Center conducted a poll of ``ordinary Americans`` asking the question: ``What amount of weekly income would you use as a poverty line for a family of four (husband, wife and two children) in this community?`` The official poverty line for such a family that year was $14,654 a year, or $282 weekly. Sixty-four percent of respondents suggested a figure greater than $282.

The following year, the Center for the Study of Policy Attitudes conducted a poll in which respondents were told the current poverty line and asked whether they thought the line should be ``set higher, set lower, or kept about the same.`` Fifty-eight percent said the poverty line should be higher and 32 percent said it should be kept about the same. Only 7 percent said it should be lower. The respondents who thought the poverty line should be changed suggested an average level of $19,400--more than $4,600 higher than the actual level that year. (Given the percentage of ``non-poor`` people who have trouble buying enough food, this seems like a more realistic standard.)

All these flaws did not keep Rector`s poverty ``research`` from being taken seriously by various media outlets--not just by Rush Limbaugh (9/25/98). His most recent paper prompted a news article in the Atlanta Journal & Constitution (9/25/98) and columns in such papers as the Kansas City Star (9/26/98), Christian Science Monitor (10/7/98) and Chicago Tribune (11/25/98).

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[FOOTNOTE:] * Rector tries to reconcile these arguments by cautioning that ``higher material living standards should not be regarded as a victory for the War on Poverty. Living conditions were improving dramatically and poverty was dropping sharply long before the War on Poverty began.`` But if these ``dramatically`` improved living conditions did not come from government programs, where had they come from? Certainly not from an improved job market; in January 1995, when Rector presented his testimony to Congress, jobs were neither better-paying nor more plentiful than they had been two decades earlier. The unemployment rate was a half-point higher than in 1973 and real hourly wages for the bottom tenth of workers were 12 percent lower.

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Then in #68 fuzair throws out the term ``lumpen proletariat`` wihtout understanding what it means, trying to justify this poverty using Marx, absurd nonsense. People don`t find jobs because jobs are not being produced by this economy. Further that sob Dinesh D`souza`s ``culture of poverty`` reused argument holds no water whatsoever. Look around the globe people share different cultures and different work ethics yet they are poor regardless of that. The economy doesn`t work based on ``culture``. You are trying to blame the poor for their own poverty because they don`t ``work``. What if there are no jobs being produced for them, what if the jobs they work at pay a below living wage? These are all facts and the fact is that the poor, the vast majority including the homeless among them hold jobs and do work. The rest are a few paychecks away (including the non poor given the net-worth nature of Americans) from being homeless.

Tahmed in his usual nonsense fashion claims that $10K can make a person live a ``comfortable`` life in the US. You need to reexamine the poverty level defined by this government which is calculated by multiplying a food basket necessary for survival times three. Even that is unrealistic since rent and fuel together amount to more than food times three, and nevermind the over 80 million that are are without basic health care at any point during two years, are at brink of falling below the poverty level if even a small ailment like apendicitis were to affect them. And the damn fool blames the mexican border crossers for the disparity in the gini index which shows near total inequality in distribution of income in the US (what percent of the income goes to these minimum wage earners is what he does not ask and what he ignores is the percent of the income that goes to the very top which is the REAL reason why there is near total inequality.

This system is a total disgrace as far as human rights and fulfilling the basic needs of its citizens goes. A total disgrace, an inhumane disgrace. Now, if I have missed answering any of your concerns rather than three weeks later you make a post stating that ``he is wrong because he didnt address my post``, state is clearly now and don`t repeat your nonsense about your gardener making $100K a year and other bs like how many poor people I know. I know no rich people that means, wealth does not exist in the US ! Hamidm reasoning at its best.

If something is not done about Medical Insurance coverage

in the United States soon, the actual poverty level is bound

to shoot up.

There are many under-employed and unemployed people here

plus the ``Working Poor`` with no health coverage and waiting

for something to go wrong.

and now to seriously beat a dead mule (any resemblance to the author of this article is strictly coincidental):

Most economists agree that $10,000 per capita income is enough to provide a comfortable life. After that, relative poverty takes over - that is, if you are $10,000 per capita fellow in a country with a $1,000 per capita average, you feel on top of the world. however, if you are a $10,000 per captita fellow in a country with a $20,000 per capita average, you feel poor.

Also, philosophers like Masadi ignore the fact that large scale immigration (as in US) is bound to create income inequalities - a Mexican may quadruple his salary by coming swimming across the rio grande to the US, but he will make the gini coefficient (which is a measure of income distribtion) worse in the US.

And of course there are tons of other things written by other posters more learned than yours truly (not to be confused with Urstruly, please).
anyway, enough of this bs. As I said, I dont expect dead mules to jump up and say ``eureka`` when presented with some reasoning.

jang #86 please dont refer to hamidm as ``others``. That is very rude.

(For the benefit of Serious and Profound Thinkers like Masadi: The above is not meant to be taken seriously.)

And dont just keep repeating the same thing over and over again, ignoring what has been said. That is Masadi`s schtick, not yours!!

(Att: The above is also meant to be taken seriously, but only if you are a desi babu who wouldnt drive a cab if his life depended on it. )

tahmed and others calm down..noone is saying that cabbie is a bad or ill-paying profession..its just that dulles flyer is full of paki cab drivers. its nothing derogatory..hinjus are code-coolies or physicians bangladeshis run 7-11s, somalis are great parking lot attendants, irish are cops, joos are lawyers, and greek run diners..its just the way it is, nothing bad about it.