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When Bread Bags Weren't Funny

• dalke 12y ago
  The view of poverty expressed in this essay says, in essence, that Louis XIV of France - the Sun King - with all of his riches couldn't get an iPhone or antibiotics so was poorer than most Americans today. This is absurd, but resolving the absurdity is not simple. Orshansky's "relatively absolute" poverty thresholds from the 1960s were the basis to how the US currently defines poverty. There is such as a thing as "socially acceptable minimum standard". If the Ingalls were to set up a sod house in the middle of Independence, Kansas, and live in the same style, odds are good that the building code enforcers and Child Protective Services would soon show up. (There's also the problem of getting a good supply of prairie grass sod. For the Ingalls it was free.) The main increases in costs have been housing, transportation (our car economy, and the hidden cost of free parking), and health care. You'll note that these weren't mentioned in the essay. The comment about $15 shoes being just 2 hours of minimum wage assumes that those working at minimum wage aren't already fully budgeted, or have access to more work should money be needed. At the SNAP/food stamps rate of under $5 days, that corresponds to three days of food.