Intro

It's time for a reality check ...

Maybe we’ve reached the point of diminishing astonishment.

But I suspect that much of what we’re hammered with every day really doesn’t make much of an impact on most of us anymore. We’ve heard the same stories too often. We’ve been exposed to the same issues for so long without any meaningful resolution. We recognize that reality is rapidly becoming malleable, primarily in the hands of whoever has the biggest microphone. How else can we explain a society where myth asserts itself as reality, based entirely how many hits it gets online?

We know that many of the “issues” as defined are pure crapola, hyped by politicians on both sides pandering to “the will of the people,” which is still more crapola. Inevitably, it’s not the will of all the people they reflect, but the will of relatively small groups of people with disproportionate political influence.

Nobody wants to face up to the realities of the issues. Nobody wants to say what’s right or wrong – even when it’s obvious and there are numbers to back it up. Most of us are afraid to bring up the realities for fear of being accused of being insensitive or downright mean.

So we say nothing. Until now.

It’s time for a reality check on the fundamentals – much of which is common knowledge to many of us, already. But it might be comforting to know you are not alone …

Wednesday, May 23, 2012


     There really aren’t that many “poor” in America
What’s really “poor” anymore?  Is it the ability to feed your family?  Or is it the ability to have the same things more affluent Americans may have – like cable TV, high-speed broadband, a big-screen TV, a computer, a nice car perhaps?

It all depends on how you define poor, and that’s fairly relative. 

The government uses an index based on household income for a family of four.  Right now, it calculates the poverty line at about $47,000 annual income. 

But that index doesn’t account for a variety of government support services – like food stamps, aid to working families, school lunch programs, WIC and variety of rebates and credits – all of which help subsidize basic needs. 

Nor does it account for where that family lives.  Living in San Francisco is a lot more expensive than Fargo, North Dakota.  Lots of families in many places would be perfectly fine at $47,000 a year, and hardly in poverty.   

So the numbers are quite fuzzy. 

But advocates for “the poor” always claim that there are more people in poverty every year.  The reality is that the percentage of truly poor in the U.S. has remained essentially fixed for a long, long time, estimated to be between 10-13%. 

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