That one makes me furious. Perhaps they got these things in better times? Especially the cell phone; try getting a job without a phone, especially as many people no longer have landlines!

I always notice that the people around me who make the least have the nicest cell phones. However, I think that goes right along with people in the ghettos driving Cadillacs. They want so bad to not appear poor that they run themselves into more "real" poverty by spending more of semi-frivolous things like over-the-top cell phones, cars, nail salons, etc.

Who wants to send their kids to school with a cheap pair of shoes and cheap jeans so that they get made fun of for being poor? If I was a low income parent, I'd do anything I could to keep my kids (or myself) from appearing poor and getting made fun of. Being poor is an embarrassment and poor people are looked down very harshly upon. If you are poor and working a poor person's job, you are a failure in our society.

It's too expensive to have both a cellphone and a computer.

If the poor have color TVs, it's because they're hand-me-down sets, either given to them or freebies. If they have cell phones, they're the prepaid, no-contract variety with minimum-rate plans, often hand-me-down phones.

The lie is when the right tries to say the poor have NEW cell phones and/or TV sets.

is that non-poor people don't think that a poor person should have one. What I mean by that is, god forbid a poor person actually has a tv, a computer, an x box, etc. Poor people don't have the funds to go on vacations and mini trips to unwind and relax. Poor people work their asses off and when they get home, this is how they unwind and relax. What the rich want to see are "real" poor people living in a shack with no electricity, no fun, and working working working. Because, their poor, why should they have any luxury?

having cellphones and computers and so forth doesn't mean anything, they're practically disposable objects in our current society. They have nothing to do with wealth. Who hasn't seen the stacks of "obsolete" computers and monitors at the recycling stations? Once they're three or four years old there's practically no market, its time to find someplace to donate them to, or someone who needs one. And its about the same with phones, and even cars. In my family, where some of my older aunts are well enough off, as are my parents, its common for things to get passed around, and down to the younger generation that's trying to keep on its feet.

That someone has something decent isn't by any means a sign of wealth; wealth is having a decent job that pays the bills. That's what most people want and deserve, and have the hardest time finding. Anyone can get a damn phone, but you have to be pretty fortunate to get a decent job.

-Laelth

..."the poor have TVs" because monochrome sets have not been manufactured for decades.

The thing they really want is a status symbol of their superiority. They can't stand it - if the poor have cell phones, then their cell phone does not mean they are ahead of the Joneses! It makes them mad they can't have something someone else doesn't have.

That you can work full time and not be able to support yourself, let alone a family.

I call him Peeper because he's constantly talking about seeing cartloads of the best cuts of meats, that HE can't afford, being paid for with food stamps or, if empty carts, loads of CASH in change from tiny redemptions. He even snapped a picture of somebody in the checkout line and was jumped on by the store employees. Not to mention the luxury vehicles his targets drive off in.

I have tried to debunk this multiple times recently. I have been surprised that this claim is believed by so many people who are not usually susceptible to RW memes, people who should know better.

Even when I explain that what they probably saw was change back from whatever way had been used to pay for the non-food items. I use the example of milk and TP. Even with my explanation, they are still unwilling to believe they hadn't witnessed fraud allowed by bureaucratic negligence.

The truth is that most poor people work full time and don't make enough money to rise above the poverty level because the rich are too damn cheap to pay them what they're really worth.

-Laelth

I think that these are crazy points that get made by people about how poor people in the US have this or that.

However, there are alot of ways the "working poor" are relieved from the little spending money they do have. And alot of those ways do include cell phones and color tvs.

The lack of good credit for whatever reason leads some people to get involved with payday loans, rent to own outfits, and monthly "no term" contracts which all sell products that are outrageously overpriced.

and the elimination of predatory banking practices would go a long way to allowing people to climb out of the "poor house" too. What are your views on those issues?

Can't get land line service that cheap.

The extravagance at my house is cable and internet. $54 a month for both but sales of my homemade things on the internet cover that plus a little left over to help with the budget.

Whining about phone and internet in poorer households is the kind of stooopid that burns.

Yup. 99 cents.

They aren't flat panels or HD or the LATEST technology but they are easily 40, 50 and 60 inches for .99.

I believe that there's a purposeful and willful attempt by that segment of the population who want to manufacture an outrage du jour about the poor akin to the "Cadillac welfare queens".

They are disgusting lies.

They sure as hell aren't CRTs. In any case, bigger isn't always better. Old rear-projection TVs are absolutely worthless.

There's a reason nobody wants them: they suck, for any purpose, including watching TV. And the lamp, in some cases plural. Some of them could be damaged by an Xbox or a playstation. Forget about hooking it up to your PC. Scanlines, flickering, poor viewing angle...

Burn them all. Leave us only with pictures.

In a word, yuck.

The Rich have taken a part of the "Life" that WAS the poor and middle-class.

air conditioning, I can't even afford air conditioning!"

Uh, most urban and suburban poor live in apartments. I don't know about other states, but in Minnesota, landlords are required to provide stoves and refrigerators. Furthermore, the air conditioners that the poor have are mostly old window-installed clunkers, again, provided by the landlord instead of by the tenant.

DVD players? Yeah, $29 at Target. They didn't buy theirs when DVDs were brand new and the players cost hundreds of dollars.

Shopping carts piled high with steak bought on food stamps? Hello, Right Wing Idiot, if you really saw someone doing that, are you aware that even if someone blows their whole monthly allotment on steak, they can't run to the welfare office and say, "I need more"? They get so much per month, and that's IT. It may be poor budgeting to buy steak on food stamps, but from the taxpayer's point of view, it makes no difference whether the food stamp recipient eats filet mignon or beans and rice.

I keep challenging right wingers to trade places with a poor person if they think it's such a cushy way of life.

In order to justify people living in squalor. Just so they can hog more. Greedy assholes.

but I bet it's something like putting a dollar value on medicaid, or adding social security to the 'poor' category. i can't see how housing assistance, food stamps and welfare could add up to $61K/person.)

A four-page article by the same author as the article linked in the OP, from December, addresses how the Heritage Foundation gooses the numbers for their narrative.

My Conservative boss is like this he makes 450k a year after taxes most avoided i am sure and complains about air conditioning in his house being too expensive so much so he rather sweat and suffer then be cool and comfortable.

TV's and cell phones cost nothing these days you can earn enough doing a paper route in a week to pay for them, really no logic claiming this some how means you are not poor.

Republicans seem in general to be really bad at math so much so they rather guess to fit the world view they want then do the work and see when their math doesn't add up, this intellectual laziness is why stuff like this is so effective to keep our wages falling.

If any republicans are reading this and work for someone else they tell you these things cause they want you to readily accept lower wages and make you work more hours...your rubes! Conservative think tanks study your stupidity and your intellectual laziness to find dog whistles like these to make you accept less. take 5 mins to think please hell 15 seconds its not hard to figure out how stupid and illogical it is!

I've likened it to a shopkeeper fixated on kids pilfering candy from in front of the register while ignoring that by far most of his losses are from his relative in the stockroom letting high-ticket items walk out the back door (for a kickback).

In one of the3 articles about Romney during the campaign, one of them noted that he (legally) bilked the FDIC for $10 million. (Van't look it up right now, I think it was how he handled negotiations over debt for the original Bain & Company, not his spin-off equity firm).

That was sometime in the early 1990s. I managed to find numbers (for Massachusetts) for welfare (forget the exact program) + food stamps for a single mother with 2 kids. Romney put the taxpayers on the hook for the equivalent of 1420 of these single-mom families.

The grandest "welfare queen" in creation could not hit that number, and that's one guy with one deal, and not even one of the biggest. Throw on the S&L crisis, the Bush meltdown and bailout, gouging defense contractors, drug companies and the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, and on and on... naaah! let's get mad because somebody with a food stamp card also has enough cash to buy some beer! If they have enough to buy beer why am I paying for their food? Hey, who picked my pocket? It's that dirty beer guy, I just know it!

Sad but true. Hatred and denigration of the poor is hardly exclusive to the Right wing.