There Are No Poor People in America...

...only poor excuses for people.

Georgia woman reports theft of $400 handbag and $200 wallet containing $800 in cash and food stamp EBT cards.

When I think of "poverty" I imagine the sort of dirt-encrusted, spirit-crushing, garbage-heap-picking, disease-ridden sort of poverty you see in those "Save the Children" infomercials. You know, the ones where the children look into a camera with that Thousand-Yard stare typical of hard-bitten infantrymen on the front lines (or Libtards having to defend the Obama Administration) with flies swarming about their swollen little bodies, running sores visible from head to heel. The sort of poverty that one might experience in some rotten place like Mumbai, Mexico City or Sudan.

I never imagine that someone who manages to find the scratch for a Gucci bag while claiming the sort of bankruptcy that requires government food assistance and a subsidized apartment is really poor in any meaningful sense, except for a deficit of honesty, integrity or a lack of a work ethic. If anything, people like this have made "poverty" a career choice. And why shouldn't they? There's an entire system set up to make them "poor", keep them "poor', and then cater to their pet peeves and selfish, identity-politicking-based stupidity.

Hell, half the government "workers" at the state and federal level probably, in one fashion or another, are dedicated to the "poor", drawing salaries and benefit packages which exceed that of the Middle Class which pays for it, more often than not.

The problem is that poverty is often associated with a lack of material goods, and is not even considered a moral failing. If people were held accountable for the pile of shit they've made of their own lives -- if they had to truly suffer the consequences of their poor decision-making skills and lack of effort -- "poverty" would disappear in this country practically overnight.

The typical "poor family" (as defined by the Government, Department of Health and Human Services) of four "earns" (that is, is given by government or charity) somewhere in the neighborhood of $43k a year, including medicare/Medicaid. This is something on the order of 50% more income than the average Mexican worker earns, four (4) times that of the average Chinese worker's income, and roughly fifty-eight (58) times the average Indian income. And when you consider that America's "poor" don't have to work for it, State-supported poverty as a career choice seems like a pretty good deal.

Hence we get the American version of "poverty" in which people who are paid to stay unemployed, paid to stay ignorant, paid to stay politically malleable, often have their own cars, air conditioners, cell phones, Playstations, flat-screen televisions, bling up the wazoo (including gold teeth? How poor can you be if you can have gold-and-diamond-encrusted teeth, for Christ's sake?), living in a rent-subsidized or stabilized apartment that rivals the size of my whole fucking house?

Walk into any supermarket in America, and this is most likely what you'll see:

Fat-ass woman (race is unimportant) with four misbehaving, foul-mouthed children by five fathers in tow, all dressed in designer finery, yakking on a cell phone, exquisitely coiffed and manicured/pedicured, wearing enough gold to choke an Arab Sheik, crowding the isles with two carts of top-grade groceries paid for with an Electronic Benefits Card. Said groceries are then packed into the Escalade or Navigator, complete with seat-back DVD players, a kick-ass sound system, and what I like to refer to as gold-tinted "Ben-Hur" rims.

Now, maybe that's just here in New York City, but I doubt it; after all, the article is about a supposedly-poor woman in Georgia packing Louis Vuitton, or some shit.

We're always hearing how the price of this or that unduly affects the "working poor"; if we're talking about gasoline, the high price somehow hurts them more despite the fact that we're talking about people who a) apparently have jobs, and b) are driving to them in private automobiles. If we're talking higher taxes on cigarettes or booze, this too, somehow, hurts the "working poor" even though the money is often raised to fund hospitals overflowing with "working poor" who have no fucking medical insurance. Cuts to education funding affect the "working poor" who, according to all the empirical evidence you could ever hope to find, are typically dumber than dogshit and wasting valuable resources in our schools.

After all, if the "working poor" were decent students and placed any value on education, they wouldn't be 'working poor", would they? They'd all be working for Microsoft or J.P, Morgan or in a private Law or Medical practice, or finding some way to make Green Energy work.

People are poor because they often choose to be so. Life is easier that way, and here in America, we'll bribe you with free money and other goodies just to save ourselves the trouble and bad press that comes with bloody riots in the streets. Personally, I'm all for some of that Social Darwinism that President Frequent-Flyer-Miles is suddenly so frightened of -- it sounds like a perfectly good and reasonable idea if it means "The Poor" as a class disappear in America, whether by violence, neglect or starvation, it makes no difference.

Update: Fixed the link. Sorry!