'Cuz the times, they are a changin'Follow

I thought that consumers had to spend their money on frivolous bullshit to keep the economy running?

After so many years of Republicans trying to lower my taxes I just have to chuckle that there are those among them that want to make them go up again.

Maybe I'm all turned around on this but I thought the child tax credit passed a Republican-controlled legislature in the first place?

You can be pithy all you like, but if you have no outrage over the fact that you're subsidizing the poor so they can go out and pay cable TV, cell phone & internet bills, you're not qualified to chime in on the subject, period.

Here's the full graph.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find an apartment in Chicago with a dishwasher? Like finding a piece of the true cross.

We haven't even run the dishwasher since she moved in.

Crazy Hawaiians...

Explains why less than 40% have one!

They do have cell phones though. Technology so rare and expensive that it can only be owned by the wealthiest of princes.

Actually, a lot of the apartments around here also include basic cable in the package too. And due to monopolies, even if you could afford and wanted to pay money for a different cable company, or a sattelite dish, you're not allowed to.

About the only apartments I've lived in that didn't included at least basic cable as part of the rent were the Slumlord Deluxe (tm) places. One was a house built in the 1930s that was made of plaste and lathe walls and had squirrels in the roof. The other one was the bottom half of a duplex built in the 1960s that had clapboard shingles on the outside and a palmetto bug infestation that no number of calls to pest control could ever fix.

Ironically, our rent for that 1930s house was $1000 a month and the mortgage on our brand new, much nicer owned house is $660, including the escrow payments for insurance.

The crappy house was condemned by the county shortly after we moved out, and the owners were forced to do extensive repairs and rennovations in order to continue renting it out. Damn government regulations! Come to think of it, it didn't have a dishwasher either.

Edit: The "poor people shouldn't have cell phones" one always gets me, especially those who are homeless. How do you expect them to get a job if they can't get any phone calls? Most of the time, the homeless or indigent won't qualify for the contract based phone providers, so they're pre-paying for a lower quality of service and they had to pay cash up front for their phone, to boot. I'm not going to hold it against someone for paying $50 cash for a feature phone from MetroPCS and $40 a month for unlimited calls with no data plan. If you have no job, that $40 a month IS an investment.

Edited, Sep 21st 2011 1:36pm by catwho

Apparently all things that people below the poverty line are sometimes forced to live without as well. And I'm sure there's some people out there living above their supposed poverty stricken means. But you'll have to excuse me for leaving my torch unlit when presented with "Video game system - 29.3%" which means anything from an Atari 2600 to a first generation Gameboy or Playstation to an Xbox 360.

Sure, you can nitpick on the lack of detail in certain small-ticket items (cell phones, video game consoles, TVs). It's true, at least in the sense that it can't be disproven.

But why on God's green earth should taxpayers be subsidizing anybody to purchase big-screen plasma/LCD TVs or internet? These aren't what I'd call "basic needs" any more than a pay-as-you-go cell phone or Atari 2600 are.

If that's a serious question, they are in scrapping the current tax code altogether for a flat rate income tax, regardless of source, that would hit every single income earner and corporation in the United States of America, lowering government spending on an annual basis to no more than 18% GDP and limiting deficit spending to 4% GDP in wartime.

So we're not talking about wasted tax payer's money?

This is about your vibrating chair again isn't it?

I'm still envious.

There's a Salvation Army joke in here somewhere, I just can't find it.