The "Poor'" Take A Hit From The NY Times

Don't panic! That's not a future New York Times headline. In fact, it's the front page the day after the 2008 presidential election. And it already contained a major inaccuracy. Not only did the racial barriers not fall, but after three years, Barack Obama has been busily rebuilding those barriers which were damaged by improving race relations. One of his ploys to divide by race and class has been the issue of poverty.

So imagine my surprise when the "newspaper of record" actually ran a front page article indicating that the "poverty problem" has been grossly overstated for years. It wasn't even an article on the editorial pages written by a token conservative. It was right there in front of God and everyone of the front newspage, written by two Times welfare beat reporters. After regaling us for months with horror stories of the rich getting richer and the poor getting children, these reporters actually addressed the issue of defining poverty up.

Poverty in America is generally equal to comfortable middle class status in about 90% of the world. But in order to promote class warfare and government dependency, the liberals have continually based the description of poverty on the family income of the "poor." Those claiming that extreme poverty is on the rise because of the undertaxed rich have left out a major factor regarding the "poor." Government largess has jumped in to replace income, and government social welfare programs and safety nets have more than filled the gap in lost or never-earned income. The socialist paradise hasn't yet arrived, but these people ain't starving nor are they out in the streets with no place to live.

The reporters open with: "When the Census Bureau said in September that the number of poor Americans had soared by 10 million to rates rarely seen in four decades, commentators called the report 'shocking' and 'bleak.' Most poverty experts would add another description--'flawed.'" When poverty is described as "only" having one car, one roof over your head, air-conditioning for the summer and heating for the winter, and a balanced diet, the term becomes meaningless. And when those perks are paid for largely by the government and not included in family income, the whole "poverty problem" becomes largely a myth designed to destroy the conservative doctrine of self-reliance.

The Census study also tends to put San Francisco and Manhattan prices together with Mississippi and Arkansas incomes. Reporters Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff go on to say that after its big "revelations" of the increase in "poverty," the Census Bureau is quietly going to offer an alternative version this coming week. The reporters say that an added Census study will address a different way of counting the resources of the alleged poor and their legitimate needs. "Similar measures, quietly published in the past, suggest among other things that safety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship. As much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears."

"Virtually every effort to take a fuller view--counting more income and more expenses--shows poverty rising more slowly in the recession than the official data suggests," say DeParle and Gebeloff. While the official national measure shows a rise of nearly 10 million newly-impoverished people, the revised Census measures put it at more like 4.5 million to 4.8 million--fewer than would normally be expected during a major recession.

De Parle particularly has had a seeming epiphany somewhere along the line. When Congress pushed Bill Clinton into welfare reform, he wrote: "Poor mothers will turn to prostitution, abandoning their children, or being forced to 'camp out in the streets and beg.'" We all know that such a thing never happened, but isn't it refreshing to have a liberal admit it (sort of)?

Now let's not get to too excited and start thinking that liberal thinking has changed. In the case of this particular New York Times story, the only thing that changed was how these liberals want to calculate poverty. Fairly enough, they added government assistance to income, but that's as far as it goes. They still draw the opposite conclusion from conservatives.

Liberals still think that skewing the poverty rate by throwing government money at the poor will solve the "problem." Don't hold your breath for them to decide that generational dependency on government redistribution of wealth destroys the initiative, creativity, and work-ethic that made this nation great. In fact, if they admit it at all, they'll tell you it's a good thing.