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(4-minute read)
Poor
I’ve been away for a few days and had just sat down to get in the groove for writing another blog post. My coffee with Bailey’s Irish cream beside me. Drink a little coffee. Write. Drink a little coffee. Do some research on the internet. Drink a little coffee. Okay, you get the drift. In the afternoon I like to sip some wine while I write.
While going through my usual writing routine I watched a clip on You Tube of a MAGA party Republican opposing food stamps for children.[1] This is nothing new for MAGA Republicans. His defense was something along the lines of gathering data to see if it was cost effective to provide meals to kids. Yes, you read that right. Red states MAGA Heads routinely target the poor at the state and federal level.
This got me to thinking about when my family was poor. Poor. Not impoverished. I have been poor and lived poor in my life. I’ve talked about this in previous posts. Here. Here. Here And here. Children are just along for the ride. We started off in a small town in Missouri. My dad went to Kansas seeking work. He found work at an aerospace factory. We had no car and lived in 3 room duplex. Mom called it a 3-room efficiency. We all slept in the same bedroom. As an adult I realized that can be a complication in a loving relationship. We used the bus to go places. Dad had a good enough job that in time we were able to move to the suburbs. Actually, he worked 2 jobs.
We never went hungry. When Dad wasn’t able to work any more after his last heart attack things got a bit rough. Family showed up with a carload of food for us. We were back to being poor for a little while. Mom went to work at the same aerospace factory. But even when we were poor, we were just regular poor.
My ex-wife, now deceased, knew poverty. She lived poverty. She could remember when all that they had to eat in the house was crackers. Two of her siblings were adopted out. Her family came from Arkansas. Her dad could remember having to wear a dress to school because there was nothing else for him to wear. His clothes were worn out and no longer decent to wear in public.
That’s poverty.
Labeling
“In the second quarter of 2023, 69 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth.”[2] The top 1% own 50% of the wealth.[3]
Poverty continues to being a huge problem in America.[4] Year after year. Decade after decade. In 1990 there were 33.59 million people living in poverty, peaking at 46.66 million in 2014, and at 37.92 million in 2022.[5] That’s just the poverty line. There are around 100 million people in this country that aren’t doing very well financially.
Trump said it best when he said that he loves poor people, he just doesn’t want them in positions of authority.[6] MAGA Trump also loves the poorly educated.[7] So we have a man born into wealth that doesn’t think that poor people are good at making decisions because they aren’t very bright. MAGA Republicans need poor uneducated voters. If you watch the interviews of MAGA rally attendees you will see some staggering examples of intellectual poverty including flat earth believers.[8]
You know what? Poor people are good at managing money. They know how to stretch a dollar and economize. They take what little they have and make it work the best that they can. They make hard decisions every day. They learn how to prioritize what’s important—like eating.
Being poor or an immigrant isn’t equivalent to being lazy or stupid. The poor work the hard jobs that the financially secure don’t need or want. They do the backbreaking work in the fields and construction trades as well as other menial jobs. The Constitution as designed by the founding fathers wasn’t intended to represent their interests just as it wasn’t intended to represent the interests of slaves (people of color), children or women.
It’s why MAGA Republican Constitutional originalists talk about the good old days when slavery wasn’t all that bad, women knew their place, and child labor was popular.[9] [10] [11] Our current system made it possible for the wealthy to continue being profiteers while maintaining the low-income status of their servant population.
MAGA Republicans talk a good game of being for working class Americans.
But MAGA takes care of the wealthy.
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[1] Opposing food for kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1W0MbXyFI
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent-of-americans-have.html
[4] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.html
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/233138/number-of-people-living-below-the-poverty-in-the-us/
[6] Trump loves poor people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1pmViitEng
[7] Trump loves the poorly educated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Od7TcejvA
[8] https://www.msnbc.com/yasmin-vossoughian/watch/-the-good-liars-are-back-and-at-a-trump-rally-197701189558
[9] https://apnews.com/article/desantis-slavery-election-2024-1fb51d663e6051051aa23b71421b9479
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/us/politics/kelly-johnson-speaker-wife.html
[11] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162531885/arkansas-child-labor-law-under-16-years-old-sarah-huckabee-sanders