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Fun with income toys
Don Sensing has a link to the Global Rich List, which is a toy in which you can poke in your annual income and learn that you're the 34,687,491st richest person in the world or something. He then goes on to discuss Tommy Slush and his family:He lived with his wife and two daughters in a mobile home in a trailer park. Tommy has had a steady job for thirty years. His employer praised Tommy's work ethic as one of the strongest he has ever seen. Tommy often worked double shifts as an assistant pressman at Ambrose Printing and Office Supply. He makes four hundred and twenty-five dollars per week. His wife and oldest daughter work also.
The Slush family is part of the "working poor," people who are one step away from poverty. The working poor don't ever sit in fifty dollar seats at Titans games or take weekend trips down to Destin. For Tommy Slush and his family, a dinner at Ponderosa is a major excursion that they can afford maybe three or four times per year.
They are not on welfare. They just don't have a savings account because they have to spend all they make to pay for their home, their food, their clothing and their transportation.
If you input Tommy's $22,100 (1999) annual income on the Global Rich List page you discover that he is in the top 6.8% richest people in the world and his income ranks 408,329,049 in the world. The U.S. proverty line for a family of four was a cash income less than $18,104 last year. I poked in that figure, of course, and found that it puts American po' folks with poverty line income among the 8.51% richest people in the world. 5,488,946,015 (just about 5.5 billion) people are worse off.
'Splain to me again why imposing our way of life is bad for the rest of the world?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-09-06 |
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=18405 |
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