On The Money, The Poverty Line

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

The Poverty Line

“The poor will always be with us, but it wouldn’t take that long to exterminate the rich.”

WJSHS (What Jesus Should Have Said)

 

We hear about “the poverty line” a lot on the news. The number of children living below the poverty line, the number of families below the poverty line, jobs that pay “below poverty line” wages have all made headlines recently. What does “the poverty line” really mean?

Allegedly, this is how much it costs to get by in this country. “The poverty line” is an official statistic compiled by the OECD.  The poverty line doesn’t take into account things like the cost of housing, food, health care, utilities, transportation.  No, instead, the poverty line is based on 60% of median household income.  Ultimately, it adds up to a pretty good chunk of change.  In 2010 the poverty line for a single adult under 65 was $11,344, a lot more than I made that year.

 

While people need housing, no one needs a landlord. So a lot of the income it takes to reach “the poverty line”, just goes to greedy bloodsuckers bent on taking advantage of us. If we could get rid of greed, I think poverty would evaporate before our eyes. Really, we don’t need a metric to tell us that we are poor, especially if it only tells us that we make less than other people.  We need a metric that tells us when we are being greedy.

I suggest we use the same metric, but call it “the greed line”. Certainly “the poverty line” doesn’t cut it as a gauge of economic hardship. Some people living at the poverty line have miserable lives, while others, like myself, enjoy an enviable lifestyle. Ultimately, income doesn’t have as much to do with how happy you are, as does your health, or how you spend your time. So, we might as well call it “the greed line”, and get some practical use out of it.

 

If we want to know about economic hardship in this country, I suggest another metric all together. Call it “the slavery line” “The slavery line would take into account how much of your time and energy it takes to reach “the greed line”. If you can make “the greed line” income in less than 25 hrs a week, you’re living pretty well. If you have to work 40- 50 hours a week to reach “the poverty line” your life sucks. If you work more than 50 hours a week, at any income, you qualify as a slave. If you earn an income above “the greed line” you are a slave to greed. If you earn below the greed line, you are just a slave. It’s about time we call a slave “a slave” in this country, and it’s about time we abolish slavery in this country as well.

 

In cultures that have survived for tens of thousands of years, greed is considered a very bad thing, at best, a childish thing to be outgrown before adulthood. It’s time we outgrew it too. To outgrow greed, we need to understand it. To understand greed, we need to know where it begins, and greed begins where poverty ends. So, it makes as much sense to call it “The greed line” as “the poverty line”.

 

Actually, both of these terms have too many negative connotations. Both “the greed line” and “the poverty line” make you want to move away from them. You don’t want to be anywhere near “the poverty line”. Heavens no! You want to be well above it, but you don’t want to be accused of crossing “the greed line”. No, you want to stay below that. So, how can you live above “the poverty line” but below “the greed line? You can’t. That’s capitalism’s dirty little secret.

No, we need to call it something else altogether. Let’s just call it “enough”.

Word Power, Dementian

Word Power

Building Your Vocabulary by Inventing New Words

Dementian

de ment ian (pronounce like dimension)n, an inhabitant of dementia.

 

I coined this term after listening to the Friday morning talk show on our dear little community radio station, KMUD, called, embarrassingly enough, Thank Jah Its Friday. Older, boomer-aged host Al “Owl” Cerulo had just shouted down his younger partner, Tanner Spea’s concerns about the environmental crisis, with the statement “We’re gonna move into another dimension.”

 

Cerulo often airs these psychotic notions on this show. While the world, and our local community face real issues that deserve discussion, the kinds of discussion Tanner usually initiates, Cerulo cannot stop talking about UFOs, mysterious black boxes, or the awesome power of the pyramids, …or dimensions.

 

Ever since Carl Sagan tried to explain astrophysics on PBS, lunatics like Cerulo have latched onto the idea that we can somehow inhabit theoretical mathematical constructs. People who laughed at the rapture day retards, chuckled at the castrated comet cult, and just stared in disbelief at Jim Jones’ Koolaid kill-off, somehow take this “other dimension” shit seriously.

 

Some people simply can no longer look reality in the face. They pray for salvation. They become born again Christians. They seek Nirvana. They believe in UFOs or lapse into some other dementia. Rather than seeing this tendency as yet another symptom of a failed culture, people cling to these salvation fantasies while they lose their grip on reality. Rather than living in the real world, they begin to inhabit their own dementia. In other words, they become dementians.

 

Dementians see our complete failure as a culture as a kind of achievement. As though only by destroying the natural systems that support life on Earth, can we prove to the aliens, or Jesus or whatever, that we deserve a better place to live. Or, maybe they think that through the process of destroying the planet, we will gain so much knowledge that the aliens will finally find us interesting enough to want to talk to.

 

It’s really hard to know what dememtians think, because they are crazy. Crazy people don’t think rationally. That’s why we call them crazy. Once they buy into Jesus or UFOs or quantum theory, every subsequent fantasy gets easier to swallow. In this way, one silly idea leads to another until soon they inhabit a world of their own construction, built entirely from demented ideas. They become dementians.

 

Dementians, like zombies, try to eat the brains of the people around them, like “Owl” tried to do to Tanner on Thank Jah Its Friday last week. Dementians, like zombies have lost the capacity for reason, so there’s no point talking to them. Like zombies, dementians continue blindly consuming everything they can get their grasping clutches on, because they believe that a better world awaits them just on the other side of reality.

 

Dementians act like zombies in many ways, and every day, the world looks more like a zombie apocalypse because of them. This drives more people crazy, who then become new dementains. The more crazy people surround you, the more likely you are to crack yourself. Don’t let them suck you into their dementia. We have plenty of dementians as it is.