Carolina Politics Online

The big news out today in Charlotte are the record level of students enrolled in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system living in “poverty.”  Around 68,000 students in the school district, or roughly 51% of the school population, get taxpayer funded lunch aid, according to the Charlotte Observer.

First off, I want to verbalize my disgust at how we so loosely throw around the word poverty in this country.  I get incredibly annoyed as to whom we refer to as living in “poverty.”  Go to a third world country where people are living in mud huts and eating flies and rice and then come back and tell me that there are Americans living in poverty.  It isn’t happening.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, how many of these children getting subsidized meal are from families who are truly at the “poverty” level?  According to the same article, not all of them.  CMS has a higher income threshold than the federal “poverty” level they use to determine which kids get a free ride on your dime so the school district is spending more of your money on this than they need to in the first place.  I also wonder how many of these students would still be living in “poverty” if the school district quit subsidizing the lifestyle with your tax dollars and the parents of these kids would instead actually have to be responsible for them.

Here are some facts about America’s so called “poor”.  This is an excerpt of a publication from The Heritage Foundation using data straight from the Census Bureau.

The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various gov­ernment reports:

• Forty-three percent of all poor households actu­ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are over­crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Still interested in subsidizing those “starving” children in Mecklenburg County with that multi-million dollar price tag each year?

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