The Black Republican

The "I'm more sympathetic than you" crowd has a new gold standard: no one is allowed to measure poverty in terms of wealth.It's a lazy Sunday afternoon, so I thought I'd check out what's tripping across the Fox News wire. I should have stayed in bed this morning.

But alas, at least I have a bed. Unlike most poor Americans, right? Think again:

According to a recent study by the Heritage Foundation, 46 percent of the technically "poor" live in their own homes, most with more living space than the average person in Paris, London or Vienna. While 73 percent own at least one car, 30 percent own two or more, and 76 percent have air conditioning. Also, according to the study, 65 percent have a washing machine, 97 percent have a color TV and 78 percent have a DVD player or VCR.

Of course, a large part of this incongruity is that most "poor" people aren't really "poor". In the complicated dance that is class warfare politics, the Democrats have for years been defining poverty up (while defining wealth down - all the better to tax you with, my dear). Many Americans, beset by high taxes and forgetting who has put them in this bind, go along with the classification on the supposition that things have to be getting worse for "poor people" (whoever that means) because they themselves feel so squeezed right now, too. But when the Heritage Foundation tries to inject logic into the Democrats' carefully constructed house of cards, the rhetoric rises to new levels of stupidity - not to mention vicious exploitation, mostly for effect on racial politics.

"I just think that measuring quality of life in the United States -- or for that matter anywhere -- by material possessions is morally bankrupt," said Bob Erlenbusch with the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger. "We've got in L.A. County on any given night, 80,000 to 90,000 people who are homeless."

I won't even bother to get into a debate over the accuracy of those numbers, the stupidity of what constitutes "homeless", how those people got there, or why - with all the money we spend on the problem - how they stay that way. And I won't discuss the fact that L.A. county is the home of some of the most affluent liberals in the country, all of whom seem to go out and sleep on a heating vent once or twice a year, like Charlie Sheen. No, I'll leave that for some other time.

For now, let's concentrate on the first part of the quote, the part where a guy whose job is to make white liberals feel guilty about not being poor in LA (and we all know who that would be, don't we?) rails against the concept of measuring how many poor people there are at all. And rails against using wealth as the yardstick against which we would take that measure. And he says this right before he himself quotes numbers based on how many people don't have a house to live in... which is a fairly substantial "material possession" isn't it? How does all this work inside a liberal mind?

Oh, wait... there's video footage of that already, isn't there?