Ted Turner gives away a lot of money to charity. That’s fine. He says he wants to die with just enough to cover his funeral expenses. That’s also fine. Recently, he described himself as “almost to the edge of poverty. ”
Uh, no. He’s a millionaire instead of a billionaire. Oh, I know he was just kidding. But this is just one example of how people who’ve never been truly poor toss around the concept casually. It’s a bit like having a bad cold and saying, “Oh, it’s so terrible, I practically have cancer, ha ha!”
But it’s not just a matter of hurting the feelings of people who really are poor. It’s about us inundating ourselves with frivolous claims of poverty until we’re numb to real claims of it. That’s what happens when you describe yourself as “poor” because you can’t afford an iPhone and have to settle for a simpler cell phone, or because you can’t afford HBO in addition to regular cable.
Poor is an extremely relative term. For example, take two households of four people living on $19,000/year in Southern California. That’s solidly below the poverty line in the U.S. But one family has a small farm where they grow almost all their own food (and could certainly live on what they grow in a pinch), and they have zero debt – not even a mortgage. Another household on that income is living twenty miles away in San Diego, desperately trying to replace the two adult incomes lost in recession layoffs, with bills mounting for rent, transportation, food, laundry, etc. They don’t even have a balcony or a patch of grass for growing things. One of these households is far worse off than the other.
But then there are homeless people. And there are famines in other parts of the world. There are people dying of starvation. What exactly do we mean when we say “poor?”
Poverty isn’t simply an income level. It’s also about access to resources through bartering and direct labor – and through privilege. Poverty isn’t easy to quantify, so maybe we need to start using more specific terms. That’s why I use phrases like “working class” and “below middle class” to describe a class (my own) which isn’t enjoying financial security in proportion to its labors, but really doesn’t have much to complain about compared to some.