The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

A recent contributor posited the question “why are there poor at all?” and concluded that poor folk “want to be poor and choose not to work to support themselves.”

The Feds classify an individual as “poor” if their income is less than $12,000 yearly, or if a family of three is trying to survive on $21,000. See more about the gradations of poverty online, if you care. There are currently 100 million people hovering between those thresholds in the U.S. A large number of that 100 million are children and seniors. Over 12 million of them are full-time workers between the ages of 25 and 64.

Those 12 million workers make less than a living at minimum wage jobs. To stave off malnutrition, debilitating illness or homelessness, most of the working poor and the unemployed rely upon any community, state or federal social programs available to them.

According to the aforementioned writer, the need by the poor to grasp at any straw of assistance so they and their children can survive in this wealthiest of nations, classifies them as “parasites.”

Much of that national wealth is generated by the overlords of Wall Street whose callously calculated programs by their gargantuan banks advertise and distribute credit cards to the underemployed working poor, who become perpetually indebted paying “affordable” interest charges yet never reduce the principal debt. Branches of those banks disguised as “payday lenders” are happy to “help” their desperate clients, between paltry paychecks, at 300 percent interest. These are the true parasites, who strip-mine communities of the impoverished, a dollar at a time. In my opinion, those who demonize the poor for being so, suffer a deeper personal poverty of their own.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island