Don't the poor get richer too?

Question

We always hear that "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer"

Bill Gates being rich doesn't hurt anyone that's poor. The gap between them increases (like when Bill Gates is worth 100 Billion), but that doesn't hurt the poor.

It seems like the poor (we'll say poorest 10%) in America today have 2 bedrooms, cable tv, and enough to get by on. 100 years ago the poor might have had an entire family living in a small room. 200 years ago they very well may have starved to death.

I'd much rather be poor in America today than 100 or 200 years ago.

Is there something I'm missing???

Answer 1

You are right! Census data prove the poor are getting richer.

The Heritage Foundation did a study to see what being poor in America really is. It ain't living in mud huts with an open sewer running down your village. It's usually a multiroom home, oftened owned by those poor people, with heat, electricity, modern appliances, tv, a car or two, plenty of food on the table, etc.

As for those naysayers that say the poor don't live in 2 bedroom homes, especially in big cities, they've obviously never heard of Section 8 housing. They've also never really gone into the poorer neighborhoods, where the poor are mostly living in two bedroom apartments.

People often villify the rich, without realizing that people like Bill Gates have created incredible amounts of wealth and jobs for others by doing what they do. Not just at Microsoft either. Without the likes of Bill Gates and Microsoft, this world would be a poorer place to be.

Answer 2

Your take on the poor of today: [seems like the poor.... have 2 bedrooms, cable tv, and enough to get by on] is completely wrong. There are millions of poor who do not have enough to eat on a daily basis. Perhaps you shold do some charity or community service so you can become tuned into your communities needs. The only thing better about being poor today is the number of social services available to help the someone improve their circumstances. Many are still starving or living in shelters, if the are lucky

Answer 3

The rich get richer on the backs of the working poor. You are helping your boss make some more money, and have his stock options go up.

Yes, today's poor people have things that a King in anciant times couldn't have dreamed of. But it doesn't stop the fact of exploitation. The poor aren't getting richer, they're just catching pieces of technological progress.

Answer 4

I thought that the poor in America were the homeless freezing to death under bridges in the winter.

I'll agree that Bill Gates isn't to blame for their plight, but they definitely don't have enough to get by on and are starving to death now.

Answer 5

You,....need to get out more,.. get from in front of you tv, the poorest 10 % has a two bedroom and cable,.???? you have any idea what a two bedrrom goes for in the real world,..In a Major city, be real you just dissed yourself ,. with that non-sense

Answer 6

2 bedrooms?You've got to live in Malibu or sth! The poor barely have money to pay their rent and live from month to month. They don't have $$$ to invest in education. How can you, when you barely pay your rent?
Yes, in time "poor" might be redefined, but when you're poor now, you don't care what "poor" meant 100 years ago.

Answer 7

Don't worry, they still try to keep it like it was in the 1100's. Specially here! Some would even love to revive Imperial Rome.

Answer 8

yes, there's something you're missing: knowledge of what you're talking about.

only bimbaugh, o'liely, hatetity, and clouter can throw out a made up statistic, pretend it's true, then finish the argument the way they want it to go.

everyone has an opinion. smart people have knowledge.

Answer 9

idiot.no

Answer 10

Three things I'd say you are rather deliberately missing:

1) The impact of such HUGE honking differences in wealth between the top and bottm of society. When the CEOs of your major corporations make anywhere from 400-800 times the amount of yearly income that their lowest paid worker does, and do so making more and bigger mistakes and being generally more corrupt and less competent it sends all kinds of wrong messages to like, the bottom *99% of society*, and that is just purely from the social side of it.

It doesn't count the damage that concentrating such wealth at the top has because in order to concentrate wealth like that, you have to have a LOT of people out of work who DO NOT have spare money to spend. Nearly all of the extra money folks like your Bill Gateses have is courtesy of outsourcing, flagrant tax evasion courtesy of a small army of attorneys and crooked bookkeepers, and finding ways to exert unearned monopoly power over some part of the economy, none of which is healthy, and all of which deprives people both directly and indirectly of disposable income. (as in lack of meaningful, full-time *salaried* work with benefits, lack of a tax base for all government at all levels, but especially locally, and lack of meaningful competition that can take up the artificial slack created *by* the predatory outsourcing methods)

2) Our "winner-takes-all" culture. We've always had it in us to be more cutthroat and predatory, as citizens, than most other peoples of the world, but in the 1980s with the whole "greed is good" ethos, wherein folks were publicly slandered, libeled and humiliated for trying to *care* about the less fortunate, all the way down to *arresting* folks for giving *food* to the homeless, this culture became unleashed from its conscience entirely. And this is a very bad thing.

It means that in the apartment buliding where I live, a pair of my neighbors who are confined to wheelchairs (one from cerebral palsy, another from being a quadruplegic) can't leave their apartments alone from fear of being attacked (the male had his lights punched out by random strangers on the damn street, twice). And nobody cares.

It means that single mothers who might be that way in order to escape and survive abusive families and husbands, are treated like supervillains by politicians on the make, and are harrassed and attacked by the ignorant masses from their SUVs with relative impunity....

It means American can LET New Orleans, a city once known worldwide for its arts and culture, rot and die a barbaric, anarchic death, and nobody gives a damn. In fact, you end up with asshole politicians *approving* of ideas like not rebuilding, or not letting Katrina survivors find work where they have to move to, or you end up with the First Lady of the United States dismissing their plight sight unseen by saying, "Well, they're poor people, this is likely better than they're used to...."

So spending five days in ungodly heat with no drinkable water, edible food, real health care, usable shelther from either the elements or floodwaters or rampagaing masses, rampant near-post-apocalyptic racism on *all* sides, and generally being left to die in your own feces (unless you're a convicted felon! God forbid if some murderous rapist thug dies...) is "better than what you're used to." Right. Yahoo won't let me print what I think of that, but suffice it to say it is as barbaric as the provocative descent into madness and death itself.

Point is....our culture insists that we treat our Poor and Problem Citizens like utter animals and abuse them and drive them into the gutter, socially at least if not always materially, until they kill themselves.

3) I'm not saying the poor never get richer, ok? They do get massively and unfairly abused by society, and society itself does look hellbent on concentrating all the wealth into a Top One Percent clique of society that seems about ready to just turn tail and run and *let* Peak Oil and Religous Fanatics destroy Western Civilization....but some poor folks have made it out, all the way up to....

September 11. You know what I mean. It took the fall of the Twin Towers to reinforce Big Oil's naysaying of the New Economy and to make that naysaying strong enough to crush the life and vitality of the economy out of the bottom 80% of the population. It took a near despotic Presidential clique to terrorize at least half of America into beins so fearful that they willingly let their kids be shot dead by SWAT officers for *daring* to bring a pellet gun to school....

Historically speaking, ok, the odds were always long against vertical movement in the American economy. It's always been a brutally hard, high-stakes- uphill struggle just to move from destitution to working class, or from working class to middle class....

But in this day and age, post 9-11, post New-Economy-collapse, post-Reaganite Mass Media Browbeat...the game is RIGGED.

The poorest of our poor literally cannot make *one more lousy dollar* in income without a) coming under attack socially for not staying in "their place", and b) without income cliffing from the so-called social support networks taking anywhere from 3-5 dollars of needed support away. As in.

--if you are on SSI for a disability, after the first 60-100 dollars a month you earn in work, you lose fifty cents per dollar earned, and if you miss sending in paystubs, you can be punished for overpayment up to three times over any given month, up to two YEARS after the fact....never mind the double taxation on income, where in you lose money based on *gross* pre-tax income, not net, "this is the income I HAVE" income.

--if you live in public housing or are on Section 8 federal housing support, every dollar you earn from work *raises your rent* by one dollar, until/unless health care and/or dependent/childcare expenses eat it away.

--if by some miracle you have a mental health issue (a mood disorder under control by medication) and you manage to snag and keep a full-time job for the full 6-month probationary period typical of most employers, Public Medical Aid will cut you off entirely, *and* almost ALL employers are utterly bigoted in their HMO "health care" plans because they will force you to pay FULL COST out of pocket for any/all psychiatric issues you have.

Really. This was how I lost my last meaningful job. The place where I worked REFUSED to pay one red cent for my psychiatric medications which I NEEDED to stay stable enough TO work. My medical costs, in the course of one month, went up from nearly nothing (a three dollar copayment) to over $150-200 dollars a month (depending on whether I kept the counseling going or not).

Again, just so we are clear....maybe the game wasn't always rigged utterly against the poor, maybe some poor folks made it big *without* becoming celebrities before 9-11....

But it just isn't humanly possible now. The New Economy was our last best hope, and Big Oil, and their pet idiots, *murdered* it.