Poor Depends On Where You Live
The United States Census Bureau is a wonderful organization that takes our national pulse, checks our height and weight and makes inferences from that, as smoothly as any family doctor. Our body-politic is as complicated as our various couch-potato incarnations, the diagnosis as varied, the prescriptions as vulnerable to individual identity. What I’m driving at is we’re not as poor in Caledonia, Mississippi as we are in Highland Park, Illinois.
It’s not a small matter. According to today’s statistical release, one in every eight Americans lives in poverty.
Definition. We require that everything be defined in America. No different for poverty. You want to know what poor is, we can tell you. For a family of four, it’s $19,307 and a couple is poor at $12,334. The interesting thing is (if it’s not too grotesque to talk about poverty as interesting) that you can be every bit as poor earning $19,500 and yet lose various and sundry gift packages worth a whole lot of money. Such as hous…