You can hardly turn on the news or C-SPAN 1, 2 or 3 without hearing some self serving activist group or politician excoriating this country because “we don’t do enough for the poor and downtrodden.” Well, I would like to put forth that if you are going to be in poverty there is nowhere else better than being in poverty and downtrodden in America. In fact I would go so far as to say that the “Poverty Stricken” in this country are the envy of the poverty stricken through out most of the World.
You might not think so with what you hear from the former journalists in the mainstream media. So let’s take a look at poverty in America. I would personally love to see one of our idiot politicians or some progressive dolt try to tell people in India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia that the poor in America are starving. By the way those 7 countries have 65% of the worlds chronically hungry. They also have the highest starvation death rates. They would probably be shot or laughed off the planet.
Let’s start with a look at hunger. In the United States only 14.6 percent of the population of over 300,000,000 were considered food insecure at least some time during the year equaling 43,800,000 people. And a mere 5.7 percent were considered very food insecure which equals 17,100,000. While those numbers are large and it is a shame that people do have to do without, let’s take a look at some of the other facts about the poor in this country.
Homelessness in America is portrayed as a massive social problem. How about we look at the facts and see if it is as bad as they like to say it is. It is estimated that there are 744,000 homeless people in the United States which I think is a bit high due to the fact that homelessness is defined differently depending on the state. Some states include households that have more than one family living in them. While others count those who are in transition (by choice) from one residence to another. But for the sake of argument we will go with 744,000. That number is right at 6% of the population of the entire country. That is right, a whopping 7 percent of the population in the United States is considered homeless by using all the different standards for figuring around the country.
Now I have heard the argument repeatedly made that one of the problems with shelters is that there are not enough beds to go around, or that there are not enough beds available in the most needed areas. Alright that sounds bad doesn’t it? It is estimated that there are about half the number of shelter beds in total to the number of homeless people. But what isn’t being told to you is that of the estimated 300,000 shelter beds available on any given night an average of 16% of those go unused.
Here is another little inconvenient fact that the bleeding hearts won’t tell you. Have you ever noticed that when they do an expose’ on the homeless it usually takes place in New York. They show a handful of disheveled individuals sleeping on street grates. Which from what I have seen have more square footage than the average apartment in New York. They then interview one or two of them and those they interview tell some heart wrenching story about how they have nowhere else to go to sleep so they are stuck on this grate. Since I am talking about New York, currently there are an estimated 2300 homeless in the big apple which has a population of an estimated 8.2 million citizens. That is just horrible. But once again what they forget to mention is that since 1981 when Callahan vs. Carey was settled the state of New York has had a right to shelter law. Which guarantees anyone who applies for shelter is, under the state constitution guaranteed shelter. However most shelters have pesky and often said unreasonable rules that state that you have to be sober to stay in them for safety reasons. So the facts behind the bleeding heart expose’s are that most of those people would rather be drunk or high than have a roof over their head.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for the lies told about the poor in this country. One such falsity is that panhandling is a last resort. This is BS. Study after study show that panhandlers make on average between $100 and $300 dollars a day and average yearly salaries of between $25 thousand and $40 thousand dollars a year. Here is one such example from KOMO News Seattle about panhandling outside of a Wal Mart in Coos Bay, OR. where as the average annual salary of working Americans is between $42 thousand and $54 thousand dollars per year. On a side note everybody I have personally talked to says that working full time they have a yearly salary of between $18 thousand and $24 thousand per year. So next time you see some guy holding a not to particularly clever sign saying something like “hungry please help” think about how much money you make in a year busting your ass and decide whether or not this guy deserves the dollar you worked for.
I am not saying that homelessness is not a problem that we should work on but I feel that we as a society should only help the poor and homeless as long as they are willing to help themselves to improve their living situation and if they are not willing to do that then they should not be helped at all and should be left to live or die on their own.
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