3 ms·

I think it's probably going to do more harm than good trying to gatekeep the status of "poor" against any but the most egregiously out-of-touch claimants. E.g.

• zmgsabst 3y ago
  I think that’s a useful metric. About 10% of US households experience food insecurity [0] — and that overlaps very heavily with the poorest US families, who have 32% experience food insecurity. I’m pretty comfortably saying that if you always had enough food as a family, you were lower middle-class, not poor. [0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
• MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  If all your needs are being met and you aren't personally struggling, then you aren't poor. This isn't gatekeeping. It's simply not what being poor actually is.
• orwin 3y ago
  No. I was lower-middle class in a country with a social safety net, and the day my mother broke her car and had to fix it, we ate potatoes and were handed vegetable for months by a local producer, and we had to cut them because they were all partially rotten (but free!). Luckily my grandmother gave us eggs and milk regularly (yeah, countryside boy here, bite me), so we never missed on vitamins nor proteins, but each time we had cheese at school i was in heaven. The same thing happen in a city with less family support, and we would have been hungry (or at least would have suffered from deficiencies).