IF YOU’RE STARVING IN SAN FRANCISCO

(you might as well be sleepless – in Seattle)

Few of our elected officials, or their apartnik coterie of bureaucrats, seem able to come up with a unitarian  definition of….poverty.

Poverty, however, is a relative thing. That is, if you’re starving in San Francisco because rent costs gobble up much of any income, you might as well be sleepless in Seattle, where the dampness of the climate makes your rheumatism act up 24/7. Either way, your quality of life level is impaired….so you’re in poverty.

The “elderly” or “seniors” of our society (polite euphemisms to avoid just calling them old coots) are particularly affected by such things because, if, besides whatever measly dole they might be getting from Social Insecurity, they don’t have some source of extra income as well, then they are, indeed, reduced to making daily decisions whether to….pay the rent….pay for meds….or check out the dollar menu at some fast food joint. A low level quality of life which more accurately defines – poverty – than any arbitrary government definitions of it.

Compounding that are the Catch-22 structures of both our tax code and various government programs supposedly aimed at relieving such problems. If anyone is physically and otherwise still willing and able to work (if only part-time), or, able to create some sort of personal enterprise or income producing hobby, and the returns of such efforts at self-sufficiency exceed certain limits, they are then penalized by the tax code for doing so….pushing them back down into a poverty level dependent on government programs of one kind or another. Thus, it seems that our system, rather than promoting self-sufficiency, is designed to maintain the elderly in poverty and “dependent” on government largesse as much as possible, instead.

Which raises a disturbing question.  Is this a deliberate design conceived by our elite caste of career politicos, in the misbegotten belief that by keeping the elderly dependent on their “war on poverty” programs, that will generate more numbers of grateful votes in their favor at election time?

It would seem so.

CENTURION