Friday, January 6, 2012

The poor

  • Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

  • Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

  • Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

  • The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

  • Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

  • Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

  • Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

  • Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

8 comments:

  1. Our family used to participate in our local newspaper's annual Christmas drive: Pick a poor family off the list in the newspaper and take them presents for Christmas. We would pull up behind their big new cherried-out pick-up truck (driving our battered old van with 150K miles on it) and walk in to find their kids on the couch playing expensive video games, listening to music on a really nice sound system, and so on. After a couple of years in a row of delivering presents to "poor" families who were living better (materially speaking) than we were, we gave up on that.

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  2. Brock, Et Alia:

    Oh, wo is me, for I am soooo poor!!!

    My room here at the Armed Forces Retirement Home doesn't have an automatic dishwasher!

    How inhumane can society be?

    Oh, I'm soooo poor!

    With no stereo or DVD player, I have to use my computer to watch DVDs or listen to CDs!

    Oh, the horror!

    Oh, the utter indignity!

    My four wheel drive deluxe pickup truck is a 2004!

    Ooooh!!!

    I'm soooo embarrassed!

    Oh, the SHAME of it all!

    Alas and alack!

    Hmmm - - - I do indeed lack a lass.

    But, that's another story for another time.

    Thank you.

    John Robert Mallernee
    Armed Forces Retirement Home
    Gulfport, Mississippi 39507

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  3. Go on welfare and your problems will be solved!:)

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  4. I'm willing to bet that every one of those numbers is LOW.

    Damn near everyone owns a microwave and a stereo -- hell, every "poor" person I know has a cell phone and many have SMART-phones!

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  5. according to the current administration, a cell phone is a basic human right and, if you can't afford one, one will be provided for you. with minutes.

    i suspect that laptop computers will be next.

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  6. i suspect that laptop computers will be next.

    Good Lord, down the road we go.

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