Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is quite put out that poor people haven't had their blongings stripped from them for the crime of being poor:
Americans who live in households whose income is below the federal “poverty” level typically have cell phones (as well as landline phones), computers, televisions, video recorders, air conditioning, refrigerators, gas or electric stoves, and washers and dryers and microwaves, according to a newly released report from the Census Bureau.
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority—58.2 percent—have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in “poverty” have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Poor people own stoves? The heathens! Jeffrey's scare quotes around "poverty" are also amusing.
Jeffrey is a couple of years late to his new crusade of shaming the poor -- Fox News worked that in 2011. But as Think Progress pointed out, new technology is relatively cheap -- televisions, for example are much cheaper than they used to be, and "even a low income person can reliably obtain a level of television-based entertainment that would blow the mind of a millionaire from 1961" -- but housing, education and health have gotten more expensive, as has quality legal services.
Think Progress adds: "The federal poverty line for a family of three is $18,530 a year. I wonder how many Heritage Foundation policy analysts are deciding they want to cut back and work part time because it’d be super easy to raise two kids in DC on less than $20k in salary?" We suspect the same is true about CNS reporters and editors.
(Picture taken from Productive Flourishing.)
