Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ibram
Trust me, veryveryveryveryVERY few Americans are as poor as most Chinese, or (and ESPECIALLY) North Koreans... not to mention Thais, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Cambodians...
Poor in America is still poor, and not a good thing, but its better than MIDDLE-CLASS lots of places.
And yes, I've SEEN those places.
|
I've seen what it is to be poor in Brazil, and its absolutely heartbreaking. I am not very happy about being poor in America, but I live like a queen compared to those folks in Brazil. I don't have a cell phone, but I do have an old color TV that I bought at a pawn shop. My car is a very expensity necessity that drives me crazy, worrying how to maintain it. I live in a small town, 19 miles away from my doctor and the nearest grocery store. There is NO public transportation out here, so without a car, you're dead meat. I manage to scrape together money for my Internet service, though, and I do get medical care and I never go to bed hungry. I'm sure a poor person in Brazil would give their left nut to trade places with me.
The problem in the US is that the gulf between the rich and the poor has been getting wider for quite some now. The lower and middle classes bear the lion's share of the tax burden, while the billionaire skates. Meanwhile funding for stuff like education and public health keeps getting cut, and we spend zillions of dollars on an immoral foreign war.
In the end, comparing the US to some poor third world country is a cop-out. Its like saying, "I may be a thief, but at least I don't kill people." True enough, but its still wrong to steal, and since when did the US need to compare itself to the likes of Cambodia or Brazil?