Four Things Politicians will Never understand about Poor People....

[catnhatnh]

Last edited Mon Aug 5, 2013, 06:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Not my favorite site but this guy hits it out of the park while making me want to laugh or puke, alternately:

So if the issue is that these people are watching reruns and collecting government checks, guess what: 91 percent of government benefits go to the disabled, elderly, or working households. Not a typo — 91 percent. You’re free to speculate that some of those people could try harder or are faking their disability or whatever, but there’s no way the reality lines up with this politician fantasy of the lazy masses who just greedily rub their hands together while leeching their unfathomable riches from the always generous American populace. snip

He was telling a story about a road project being disrupted by biologists who placed buckets of dead rats on the side of the highway to collect an endangered species of beetle, because sometimes science is weird. But at night, raccoons would come up and eat the beetles out of the rats. Then he went on to say, “They’re not stupid. They’re going to do the easy way, if we make it easy for them, just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don’t incent them to work, they’re going to take the easy route.” snip

you and I can be told about the horrors of living in the impoverished parts of Africa, where, for instance, any able-bodied person has to be pulled from work and school so that they can spend several hours of their day hauling a 70-pound jug of muddy, parasite-infested water several miles back to their home. But no matter how good the narrative and no matter how persistent the activist, we in no way have any idea what their lives are actually like. We can’t know it because we will never live it. At best, we can feel sympathy for them and even donate some money to a charity to help them out.
But we hopefully wouldn’t be stupid enough to think we can know what it was like to grow up there and to live under a completely different set of rules and expectations. And for the love of fuck, we shouldn’t be so goddamned shit-ignorant as to somehow think they’re putting one over on us when they get food aid (“Oh, please, I wish I could have afforded an AK-47 when I was 8.”) snip

Anyhow-well worth a read

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people/

[Warpy]

1. This is hands down one of the best things I've read about poverty

and upper middle class attitudes toward it.

I have no doubt that Congressmen find that $174,000 a year horribly low. After all, they think they can waltz out and get a "consulting" job to a lobbying firm at three times that amount. Or that they'll be invited to join a lucrative corporate law partnership. When you look at it that way, $174,000 is chump change because the earning potential is so much more once they're thrown out of office.

They don't consider that their lives are being supported by people earning less than $30,000, from the guy who mows their lawn to the waitress who shoves their breakfast in front of them to the car detailers and valet car parkers. These workers are utterly invisible to them and that's really the problem. The Congresswanker sense of entitlement is such that they think all these things are owed to them.

I propose a yearly test for out Congressmen: figure out a budget on the minimum wage that includes local food, local shelter, local clothing including kid clothing, insurance premiums, car payments, and all incidentals. Maybe that would act as a reality check to the more reachable of them. Republicans, of course, would simply continue to sneer at all the people supporting them as fools who sell themselves too cheaply and lazy bums who never got educated.

I look back at how pinched my own life has been, mostly due to shitty health that rendered me uninsurable and am filled with rage at these pampered government assholes. I think the Congressional wage should be the median wage, with a moratorium on mortgage payments back home until they are out of office. That would give us very different government.

[antiquie]

2. "filled with rage at these pampered government assholes"

You are not alone and I truly appreciate your post.

[Mnemosyne]

3. Thank you, Warpy! I am also uninsurable, but wouldn't be if I had $2500 a month and

a $10-20,000 deductible.

[JoeyT]

4. You might want to change your attribution.

The original is here: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people/

Cheese is known for writing articles like this. I loved this one.

[Martin Eden]

5. K&R n/t

[UglyGreed]

6. Cracked

has some very good articles, I would not dismiss them at all.

[matthews]

7. One of the most perfect articles on why human beings are the sh*ts they are I read in

Cracked.com. I love that site. For someone as old as I am, it comes the closest as anything can to the cutting, incredibly intelligent, always sacrilegious and satirical greatness of early Mad Magazine. Here it is. It goes with your article perfectly.
****

What is the Monkeysphere?



First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them died.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?



Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

[hunter]

8. This is an awesome rant.

I want to print it on a club and beat a few politicians and clueless wealthy people with it.

(This is why I must be a pacifist...)

[Heathen57]

9. I have got to say, he nailed it

Growing up with a single mother on my father's Railroad pension we barely got by most months. Now these high wage bastards are trying to tell us what its like.