This is in response to this diary that has since fallen off the page -
I was poor as recently as two years ago. Homeless poor. This was not because I was lazy. This was because my eldest daughter had a rare disease. The majority of the medicines and therapies she needed to live were not covered by any insurance plan. So in order to give my daughter the care she needed, we were forced to sell our house and reduce our income to poverty level so as to qualify for Medicare. We tried making it in a modest rental for a while, but after two years found ourselves drowning in debt. That's when we became homeless - living off the charity of any family member or friend who would take us.
Eventually we moved to another state that did not require us to have a poverty level income to cover my daughter's health expenses. Little by little we've fought our way back to the middle class. But we lost our house, several years of savings...everything. At 40 years old I'm starting out from scratch again.
Given all of this - I've given the idea of poverty a bit of thought. I have heard the line of "reasoning" the Heritage Foundation is advancing before. Here are a few random thoughts on the subject:
- While it is true that the poor in this country enjoy some creature comforts that they would not have had in other generations it ought to be noted that this is largely a function of the devaluation of the labor that goes into making those products. VCR's are cheap. They also generate little income at the bottom end of our economy. These days that can be said of many products the poor might have. We live in a society that has more need to produce and sell these products than an actual need for the functions these products perform. So what do we do? We sell them on credit.
- Credit is the real indicator of poverty in America. As a person who lived for years under a cloud of debt, I longed for a day when I would have nothing, but owe nothing. In my mind, THAT was wealth. From time to time I would encounter a homeless person who would ask me for money. Being a softy I'd often oblige, but a voice in the back of my head sometimes mused that this person was in many ways likely to be richer than me, because he had no debt. And so when you meet a conservative who starts spewing the Heritage Foundation's line, just remind them that not only do the poor have VCR's and TV's - they also generally have at least a year's worth of wages in debt following them around. How does that reality leave them in comparison with the poor from other generations?