Boy, was I relieved to hear the good news when Obama spoke to us about the debt crisis. There are no poor people in the United States anymore! There were a lot when he was campaigning in 2008, and he talked about poverty often. The 2010 census results said that 14.3% of Americans live at poverty level incomes or less–about 45 million people. Many millions more would have been classified as poor if they hadn’t doubled up with another household.
It’s great that since 2010, all those poor people have become middle class! In his short talk on the 25th, Obama only talked about the wealthy, and the middle class. He said, “the deck seems stacked against the middle class.” How “many of them are just scraping by,” “coming home bone tired,” and so on. Ironically, he said this from an opulent hallway of the White House, which would have been in poor taste, if poor people really existed here.
If there were still poor people in this country, a President grounded in reality would take the time to mention them in his speech to the entire nation, so that they would not feel forgotten, and so we would not continue to slowly agree to the ongoing dismantling of safety net income programs. So based on this thinking I figure that there are no longer any poor people in the United States, just a lot of us struggling middle class types.
I must be imagining the people I work with everyday: the young unemployed father I met last week; the 30 year old father who works 40 hours a week for minimum wage and can’t afford to move out of his parents house; the mother who is fighting off the bank; the mother who can’t afford beds for her children and had to let “Rent-A-Center” carry out the ones she had; the one who can’t get to appts because she cannot afford a car. The waiting room of Social Services of Delaware County is full every day–I guess the people in the seats are just a lot of “middle class” Americans educating themselves on what it used to be like to apply for assistance.
If poor people still existed, I know the President would surely say so–and he wouldn’t be considering more cuts to safety net payments like the ones he signed into law last year–those are going to cut the average family’s Food Stamps by $60 per month, resulting in even more imaginary poor people.
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