Ownership not restricted to the middle class and up.
Remember how the Heritage Foundation put out a paper suggesting that American
poor people aren't
really poor and that therefore it's a good idea to shred the safety net? As absurd as the claim is given the reality of food insecurity in this country, and the low level at which the poverty threshold is set, it's the kind of thing that recurs because, as I previously noted, the things considered basic amenities tend to change over time. It wasn't that long ago, relatively speaking, that electricity and indoor plumbing were considered luxuries. And as the culture changes, things that were luxuries actually do become
necessities in important ways.
But there's another huge problem with the Heritage Foundation paper's claims. Jamison Foser at Political Correction explains:
Heritage overstates how typical these appliances are among the poor. Here's Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector:
[W]hat does it mean to be "poor" in the U.S.? Government data show that the typical poor family with children has a computer, cable TV, air conditioning, a car, multiple TVs, a microwave, and an Xbox in the home.
Rector links a report he published earlier this year, at the end of which is an appendix indicating that 50.8 percent of poor households with children have a personal computer (though little more than a third has Internet access) and 53.9 percent have a video game system and 61.8 percent have cable TV, and so on. Here's the problem: If roughly half of poor families with children have a computer, and roughly half have a video game system, and roughly 60 percent have cable TV, and those amenities are independently distributed, we'd expect only about 15 percent to have all three.
Certainly, then, it would not be accurate to say a "typical" poor family has all three (and more.) And if the amenities are not independently distributed — if all poor households that have a computer also have a video game system and cable television — that means that roughly 40 percent don't have a computer, video game, or cable television. So, again, it would be misleading to say a "typical" poor family has all three amenities if 40 percent don't have any of them.
The case was lousy enough to start, but finding out that Heritage actively misrepresented the statistics really puts the cherry on top of the shit sundae this always was.