From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-rice/poverty-election_b_2150138.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
Mark Rice
11/20/2012
President Obama’s recent re-election sent many people on the right scrambling to find explanations for an event they found unfathomable. Echoing Mitt Romney’s comments about the forty-seven percent of voters who feel they are entitled to food, housing, and “you name it,” Bill O’Reilly lamented on election night that too many Americans want “stuff” and “things.” Romney, himself, doubled-down on his earlier comment when he explained his loss by saying that the majority of voters wanted “gifts” and believed that President Obama would deliver those gifts to them.
This is not a new theme for conservatives, and it colors they way that they think about class in America. On my blog, Ranking America, I’ve posted a variety of rankings dealing with poverty in the U.S. In 2009 I posted one showing that the United States had the third highest rate of poverty among thirty member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and in 2010 I posted another showing that the U.S. had the fourth highest rate of child poverty in the OECD.
One of my more recent rankings, taken from UNICEF, shows that the U.S. has the second highest rate of child poverty among thirty-five economically advanced countries. This particular entry sparked an exchange of comments among a number of readers and was “liked” on Facebook nearly 400 times.
For their study, UNICEF defined “child poverty” as children living in households whose income was lower than 50 percent of the country’s median income. It turns out that in the U.S., nearly one in four children live in such households. The question that some readers asked was whether or not the metric used by UNICEF accurately described how poverty is experienced in the U.S.
It’s not uncommon to hear some people to shrug off poverty in the U.S. by saying that poor Americans just don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it. For example, Victor Davis Hanson, has suggested that the fact that because someone who is poor may have “water that is as hot as the rich man’s” and “a cell phone that is not inferior to the zillionaire’s,” it somehow follows that that person really can’t be very poor.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-rice/poverty-election_b_2150138.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
