[CLUE-Talk] Bowling for Columbine

[G. Richard Raab]

On Sunday 01 December 2002 01:09 pm, Sean LeBlanc wrote:

>
> Exactly. Giving 20K as the poverty line across the board is intellectually
> dishonest. Where I grew up, for example:
>
> http://perry.extension.psu.edu/countyinfo.html
>
> ...you can live fairly well on 20K. Seriously. I invite you to surf real
> estate web pages for house prices in that area. Zip code of 17040 and
> surrounding areas should give you an idea.
>
> My point is, to be even close to fair, you'd have to declare what "poverty"
> is county by county, maybe even township by township. If I made 50K in some
> parts of California or in NYC, I'd be barely keeping my head above water.
> If I made 50K in Perry County, PA, I'd be living pretty high on the
> hog...and if I made 10K, I wouldn't be starving, either.

That 20K is an average for a family. (what the family definition is, I am not 
sure). And yes, it might be possible to survive where you grew up, but I 
doubt that it would be easy. 
Remember these are stats from the 2K census. It is an average across ALL of 
the USA. Not your depressed area. It would be if you took an average of the 
world male hight and concluded that it was 5'4". By american standards, it is 
short, but by other cultures it would be tall.
The vast majority of the census was not manipulated by the press or the 
republicrats, or the justice system (you could argue about over or 
undercounting in specific areas, but that tends balance out).
If you have real proof of a massive cover-up of this magnitude, then the world 
would love to hear about it. Well, maybe Fox news or national enquiror would.