Obama: We still have “too many kids in poverty in this country.” Yes, yes we do.

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• What I would love to see is a poor person from let's say, Zimbabwe, brought here to take a look at the lifestyle of America's "poor."

  Let's take a look. The kids get free breakfast and lunch at school. There's an education of sorts available for them if they care to partake. They get a bus ride back and forth from school. Free medical care. They live in an apartment, not a hut. Yes, it's in terrible condition, but that's mom's fault, not mine.

  How many of our "poor" are deprived of the luxury of television, most likely a Play Station, DVD, DVR, cable? Microwave? A car, or public transportation? Money for new clothing? A bed to sleep in?

  Twenty-five percent? I sincerely doubt it. The poor person from Zimbabwe would LOVE to live the life of luxury that our "poor" have handed to them, without having to work for it.

• jacksman:"You know which kids are for the most part not hungry? ONES WITH DADS!"

  jacksman, you suffer from illegitimaphobia, an irrational belief that there is a link between fatherlessness and poverty. You're also a parentist suffering from parentism. These are the words to describe those who think children stand the best chance in a stable, two-parent, opposite sex household.

  Only kidding, jacksman. But I enjoy going into Liberalthink every now and again, which is trying to think like a liberal.

  • You're doing well. I'm glad I finished reading before posting.

    "Parentist" ? Did you think of that, or is that one really being bandied about?

    • Well illegitimaphobia is a "problem" my family has had for generations. And no ones hungry. HUH??

    • I just thought of "parentist," "parentism," and "illegitimaphobia," based on the general principle that when a liberal has lost a rational argument and wants to switch over to the emotional realm, they'll try to dismiss you as some kind of "ist" suffering from some "ism" or "phobia".

      • @MD, good points, but (there's that word again) way off topic, did you watch that game last night and have you ever seen anything like that?

        • Yes, Ghost, I saw the Phillips six RBI game. And also the 12-2 stomping last night. It's hard to believe the Cubs can't beat the Reds at Wrigley any longer. Even when the Cubs are bad they can usually beat the Reds some at Wrigley. After watching the series over the weekend, I must say the Cardinals are better than I thought.

        • Details, details, (tho that was all fun to watch) I meant the freaking fog. Nothing like trying to catch a little white baseball hit up in the air, into the fog! It looked like an NFL game in a blizzard on tv. Kept waiting for them to call a fog[rain] delay.

• You know which kids are for the most part not hungry? ONES WITH DADS!

• Corporate Greed stole their gold.

  inb4 censorship.

  • SECOND! TD....MO

    • i got the third! Go me!!!

  • Morning crawley! Looks like I get to be the first to TD your brain dead comment for the day.

    Put this in your hooka pipe and smoke it: If the gooberment was not stealing my gold, which I earned, you would not have an EBT card to buy Cheetos with.

• Other random thoughts on the subject:

  There is no poverty in this country. Take the average income of the poor, and then add the money that is in all the rent subsidies, food stamps, free medical, child support, etc. The sum will be higher than the poverty threshhold.

  Obmana's, nor anyone elses efforts will ever change anything. No matter what is done, whatever programs, whatever money, 20% of the people remain in the lowest quintile of income.

  • Right. The sad thing is that the standard of living for these people is SO LOW, despite the fact that the amount being spent on them is relatively high, because everyone is taking their cut before it gets to them.

    Valarie Jarret and her ilk, who own(ed) the slum housing in Chicago, and who know - to the penny- how much the feds will pay for each unit, and who despite making probably 80% pure profit each year, will not even fix the darn toilets inside the units? Letting the building be overrun with mice, roaches, broken windows, drug dealers, squatters... it goes on and on. And, when they don't OWN the buildings, they sit on the board of directors of city-owned slums, making $300-400k a year. (Grove Parc, in Chicago, for example).

    WE don't stop them. Why not? Why are these thieves allowed to rob us, and worse - the people that WE are trying to help? Because we don't KNOW about it, unless we go out of our qay to find out about it. The front pages of the alphabet soup "news" agencies and "news"papers tell us all about Kim Kardashian's divorce and Obama's basketball picks - but nary a word about these scumballs who are robbing us blind, and in the worst, immoral way too.

    There... I am all irritated again! Time to hit the gym and burn off some of this rage, LOL.

    • sorry about getting you all riled up. But what the hey, at least you'll get some excercise. Then Michelle won't get pissed at you. Or at least not for lack of excercise.

      I think we have a cultural thing in the USA of having a lack of attention span. Or maybe that is an overall human thing, considering it's not like people in Greece, Spain, or Somalia are paying all that much attention either.

      So first, we get a disconnect from the money. I've always said (and no I did not think of it), one of the most effective ways to fix this country, or at least get it on a considerably slower rate of degeneration, is to end withholding. Have everyone send a quarterly check in.

      Everyone.

      But people don't seem to grasp how much money is being pissed away (read: transferred to selected people), and that it's YOUR (our) money. There's a shrug, a few words at the water cooler, and we move on. Not unlike the latest Kardashian story. "OMG, those people are disgusting. Oh well, I gotta go get some food for the family ..."

      I remember when it came into the news about the $1500 toilet seats, the $950 screwdrivers, etc., that the Pentagon was buying without open bidding, since these are obviously high-security items. Everyone was appalled, Jay Leno made his jokes, and we all moved on to other things.

      So if these slumlords were outed by the news media, we'd all be outraged, and maybe some AG (many think that's "Attorney General", but they are wrong - it stands for "Aspiring Governor"), will make a big show of busting them, and we move on. No one will ask "how many more?" Well, no one anyone is listening to.

      It's no different than one of my pet peeves that I've ranted about before. When Dexter Manley - formerly of the Washington Redskins - admitted he did not know how to read (not funcionally illiterate - stone cold illiterate), despite 16 year of school, there was nothing more than a shrug and a "that's awful". No one seemed to be interested in "how many more?"

• I like to watch food channel. A lot. And the cele chefs there are often telling us about their efforts in esuring that children are not going hungry. And that is an admirable efort. No child should be going hungry.

  But I can't help but think that those efforts are very misplaced. There is more than enough food being produced in the world to feed everyone. There are more programs in place in this country and most other civilized countries that people in need can take advantage of. Heck, the govt here even ran ads telling people to go get food stamps. And we all know of the amount of money that has been and is regularly donated to charities, and the much larger sum - WELL into the trillions of dollars - that the govt has expropriated from us in the name of the poor.

  There is NO reason for anyone to be going hungry in this country, or in any other. And I say that meaning that under present circumstances, changing NOTHING, there is no reason ....

  So what the f are they doing with all the food and money?

  Instead of wringing hands and telling people to throw more money into what is apparently a black hole (at least in part - I do realize that an awful lot of help IS getting to the needy), why is no one going to the stewards of all this help and asking them "WTF?!?!?!?" And I am including in that bunch the parent (omission of "s" intentional) of the hungry child(ren).

  Get a stick, go to the Secretary of HHS, and ask

  "what (whack!) the f*** (whack!) are (whack!) you (whack!) doing (whack!) with (whack!) the money?" (whack!)

  Okay, we'll use a nerf bat.

  • Please don't use a nerf bat. A cast iron one would be better. That is one of my pet peeves. Especially when I hear stuff like "50 % of children in Washington DC are in danger of going hungry tonight". FIFTY PERCENT? IN DANGER? Explain! Now!

    Explain to me why the 2 fat women who waddled into line in front of me have 4 carts stuffed full of meat and name-brand food, and whip out their food stamp card (which they get instead of stamps, so they are not humiliated) and only have to supplement it with about $10 which seems to come from some other government welfare card. And by the time I am done with my sales and my coupons, and wheel out to the parking lot, they are only halfway done filling the trunk of their new-ish CADILLAC. Hello? Is it THEIR kids who are in danger of going hungry?

    Or is the the kids of crack-hos and meth-heads, who realize that every baby they spit out buys them 18 more years of welfare and free stuff, and that food stamps can be sold or traded for pennies on the dollar for their next hits? I guess it IS their kids, but how am I supposed to save their own kids, if they wont even HELP me try to help their child?

    If all we need to do is set up feeding stations for all the hungry kids, then why do we continue to give money and food stamps to the parents? Why not just put feeding stations on every street corner, like on a cruise ship, and let anyone come by at any time and gorge? Clearly it is more cost effective or the filthy capitalist pigs that own the cruise ships would not do it.

    Oh, and how do we square the starving children with the obese children? 25% of children are obese and 50% are starving? That means that only 25% are getting healthy food in healthy amounts? Puh-leeeease!

    These alarmists make me sick! They are lying to try and take as much money as they possibly can from everyone. That $50,000 that the chopped all-stars winner donated to charity probably covers 500 meals and a month of salary for the charity CEO.

    OK - I am calming down now. But boy, that makes me so angry! It is like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with our society!

    • Very well said Karmaa!

  • Not me, I would use a willow switch instead.

    Where does the money go? Like all gooberment programs, including pubic ededukashun, almost half of it goes into the pockets of the elite chosen to run the programs. I would bet that over half the hundreds of millions appropiated (stolen from taxpayers) for the food stamp program goes to wages and benefits for employees and paying the bills for the gooberment buildings they work in.

    The cost for the Secretary of HHS, the building and her staff, runs into the tens of millions by itself. Get rid of the position, fire all the staff, then let the states administer their own food stamp programs. The "war on poverty" has never been about how much money is being spent, it's all about where the money is being spent.

    • Although I don't hit the public works projects too often (being a solo act and non-union), but I did go on school projects enough times to get the general tone, which is one of somewhat of a welfare state. I'm talking about the contractors here. Everyone "knows", it's sort of an unwritten rule that you bid at least 50% higher on a school job than on even a park (which is still a public money job).

      And this is the private contractors. So one can only imagine the sense of entitlement to taxpayer money that exists among the actual gov workers.

      As for the feds vs the states, that's the 10th amendment, plain and simple. And no, the "provide for the general welfare" statement does NOT give the feds license. James Madison himself, one of the authors, stated himself that any notion that that statement allows the fed govt to transfer monies from one group to another is wrong - that it was never intended for the feds to do that.

      • Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against public works projects since I made my living off them for over 30 years. But I worked on highways, bridges and dams. Long lasting projects that benefit everyone.

        What I do have a problem with is the government taking money out of my pocket to give to someone else who is too lazy to take care of his own. I have a problem with our government giving hundreds of millions to other countrys to fee the poor then want more from me to feed the poor here. It's all a bunch of bullshit. The only reason a child may be hungry in this country is because their parent, or parents, are too stoned out on dope or drink to take care of them. That is not my fault and I should not have to pay anymore than I am paying now.

        • re: public works projects - look, even as a die-hard libertarian, I still draw a line at some point. Yes, I've read all those analyses about how even privtization of local streets would work. But that's a load of crap. We have enough to worry about. I have 3/4 of an acre and I can barely find the time to maintain it. And those guys want me to also worry about the damn roadway?

          No thanks. It's so much easier to have a local public works administration take care of it. But having said that, there is no question that when you put people in charge who are not paying with their own money, and on top of that, have the force of many guns to get more money whenever they need it, you're going to have corruption if no one is paying attention.

          As for the kids going hungry, 100% in agreement. That was my whole point. And the giving of money to other countries, most or all of that goes to governments, and mostly corrupt ones at that. But how else can that ever work, when it's our govt that is giving the money? Seen through the eyes of a govt worker, the govt is the only reality they know. Just as many of us see gov as inherently the enemy of freedom, they see us as the enemy of their insatiable desire to "do good." So they send it to another govt because it would be unthinkable to turn it over to *gasp* "regular people".

        • Roger that, Whiskey. There are legitimate expenditures, then there is waste and self-destructive spending. I've been part of the building of many government projects. Thankfully, never had to build a slum.

• Obama oh so loved the poor he created millions more.

• Next up, charges of racism I'm sure. Anything to distract the US sheeple's attention from these treasonous turd's activities.

• Well, clearly throwing money at the problem does not solve it. Lets try something novel. Like giving their parents an education and a JOB. It's easier to make sure your kids aren't hungry when you support them and have a sense of responsibility for them, than when they are simply a tool to get a welfare check from the gubmin.

• Ahhhh yes.....Let's distract from the lying, cheating, bullshit and worry about the "children".....Wheres Hank (Guam tips over) Johnson and his sad stories about a helium shortage? These people are unbelievable, I am sure the scandals were all for "the children"...Freakin libturds!