The Daily Show with Jon Stewart remains the best place to get
Fox News distilled down to essential streams of propaganda. Last night’s episode began with a combination of Fox’s reactions to Warren Buffett’s call for increasing taxes on the rich and the overarching theme of Fox, that the “poor” are a “moocher class” of “parasites,” “racoons” and “irresponsible animals.” The best part of the segment was a piece that Stuart Varney did explaining how the “poor” have a very high standard of living.
The technical definition of being poor is a family of four with an income of $22,350 a year. That’s $429.81 per week, less $18.05 in payroll taxes. Now, even though an income that small will result in a refund of Federal and State income taxes, they are nonetheless deducted from paychecks, so figure an additional loss of around $13.00 a week. That brings the take home income to $398.76 per week.
First of all, in his little rant about the standard of living enjoyed by the “poor” Varney didn’t define them. The chant on the right is all about how 51% of Americans don’t pay any income tax, ignoring the other taxes they pay. It’s a fair bet that when Varney talks about the “poor” he’s talking about anyone with an income below median, which has slipped to around $51,000 a year.
Varney and a guest ran down a list of luxuries that the “poor” enjoy – starting with how 99.6% of the “poor” have refrigerators. The impression they gave was that everything on their list was purchased by the “poor” and not included in a rental property. Unless I’m deeply mistaken, every state has a requirement that a rental property include a refrigerator, even if they don’t include a stove. A fair number of apartments also include dishwashers, which a whopping 25% of the “poor” have. How old these appliances are is not discussed, but from personal experience I can tell you that low rent apartment refrigerators are so old they need to be defrosted manually. In some parts of the country, air conditioning, which 78.3% of the “poor” enjoy is also included in the rental, though it might not be used very often since the electricity is not included and the :”poor” have to pay for that themselves.
Among the other “luxuries” of the lifestyle of the “poor” are microwaves, 81.4% (available for around $15 in a thrift store), cell phones, 54.5% (trac phones and prepaid cells are cheaper than landlines which require deposits), and coffee makers, 48.6% (Really? A coffee maker is a luxury? How about $9 at Walmart.). And about those cell phones…..the town I lived in in Georgia had a pre-World War II phone system that was constantly breaking down. It got so bad that when the Bell South repairman came, they would simply say “dead squirrel” as short hand for the latest failure of my phones. We went all cellular because we needed reliable telephone service. You will find, if you care to look, that a lot of the inner city and small city low-income neighborhoods have similar infrastructure failures.
The only thing on Varney’s luxury lifestyle list that might be arguable is the 63.7% of the “poor” who have cable or satellite television. He should be grateful they do, because without it, he wouldn’t have an audience would he? As I look around my neighborhood, there are several converted old houses with two to four apartments in them that have satellite dishes. The dishes were installed by the owner of the building. The tenant pays to hook them up. Varney’s luxury list didn’t stipulate if the cable was basic or a higher level. He didn’t point out that 99+% of American homes have televisions. He didn’t point out that in some communities, basic cable costs less per month than taking a family of four to one movie. Comcast basic cable costs around $30 a month in Vermont. Without it, you don’t get television at all because our broadcast channels have gone digital. You need some kind of box to receive broadcast and then you need to be on the right side of the mountain to get any reception at all. People who live in big cities have no idea what the hassles are in getting television reception in the rest of the country.
I’m really, really, sorry, Mr. Varney, but even the poor deserve some kind of entertainment from time to time. With all the cutbacks in local government fundings, it’s getting harder to even go to the library and take out books, that is if one was lucky enough to go to a school system that didn’t let people “graduate” who were functionally illiterate.
Surprisingly, Varney’s list also didn’t include cars. Apparently, in his mind, owning a 20-year-old clunker isn’t a luxury.
Aside from the obvious as listed above, Varney’s little list ignored a simple reality. Not everyone who is poor today was poor four years ago. With between 14 and 20 million Americans unemployed, it’s a fair assumption that some of them actually had decent incomes before being laid off. It’s also a fair assumption that the elderly, who are now the elderly poor, had a lifetime of decent income to acquire possessions. The didn’t necessarily acquire estate-level possessions, just the ordinary possessions of an ordinary life – things like televisions, coffeemakers, microwaves, window air conditioners, cars, and for the younger, newly impoverished, gaming systems and computers. This computer is five years old. I can’t afford to upgrade or replace it.
Fox News and right wing radio keep accusing the Democrats of conducting “class warfare.” They are right. That’s what is building. As the Republicans insist on blaming the unemployed for being unemployed, as they block the things that would restore our economy and try to take our nation back into the late 19
th century instead of into the 21
st, as they classify the newly impoverished as moochers and leeches, as they defend the right of one man to make $3 billion on a single financial transaction that cost a million people their homes, they are building up the anger, frustration and hatred that fuels revolutions. The American Revolution was the only one in the history of mankind that was mostly political, and slightly economic. All the others have been driven by economics, by the gap between rich and poor. And as Jon Stewart pointed out, America is pushing itself into dangerous territory with that income gap.
A healthy nation needs a strong middle class, not a coddled, pampered upper class. In the last thirty years, since the rise of conservativism under Ronald Reagan, we have seen the middle class dwindle to a ghost of what it was in the days of Eisenhower, when we had high union membership and a 90% top tax rate. If the right wing can’t figure that out pretty soon, the class warfare they are whining about will turn into a real revolution. A little socialism saves a whole lot of capitalist ass. So does a fair economy.
