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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (251723)	9/17/2005 6:07:00 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574452

May be not an entire city but certainly a big portion of a city like New Orleans. New Oreleans might have third world conditions now, but not before Katrina. Yes parts of New Orleans were very poor, but places like he 9th ward were not "third world". As poverty is measured, a third of NO is below the poverty level and exists at an income level comparable to the third world community. Now that doesn't mean that a NO's resident makes the same salary as someone in El Salvador does but it does mean that their salary buys about the same amount of goods and services as that of the average El Salvadoran. Many of the amenities that the average American takes for granted like a car many of these poor New Orleanians do not have. NO is one of the dark, dirty secrets hidden by the capitalism you are so fond of. And now the world knows that secret. We are no better as a nation than the least among us. "The definition is entirely based on inequality. Not poverty in any absolute sense." I am not understanding you. Inequality often leads to poverty why do you suggest they are mutually exclusive? They are not mutually exlusive. Far from it. However measuring one is not measuring the other. Poor people are less likely to have PhDs then wealthy people. Much less likely. But measuring poverty doesn't measure PhDs, and measuring the number of people with advanced degrees in a city doesn't measure its poverty level. Its the same with inequality and poverty. If you have a high level of inequality you are more likely to have a greater % of poor people. But you can have a bunch of people who are equally poor, or you can have inequality without high levels of poverty. You are going off on a tangent that sounds strangely like gobbley gook. You have been doing that a lot lately as you look for ways to defend the indefensible. If you devine "poverty" as having income compared to the national average, then you are really measuring inequality. If you have no other good data to use, it might be better than nothing, but it isn't really a measure of poverty. I am determining poverty by how people live.......the conditions under which people live. Have you ever seen a family eat the cockroaches that fall off the ceiling and into their food right along with the cooked food? That kind of poverty. And one other thing............I was amazed to see so many people with gold teeth coming out of NO. The last time I had seen that was with poor Mexicans when I was in Mexico City. Back then, I figured that it was a kind of status symbol among the poor......since gold costs more to fix a tooth than porcelain. However, when I saw the people in NO, I decided to ask a dentist. It turns out that a major reason why a dentist uses gold is when there is very little tooth left..........for some reason the gold 'grips' the remaining tooth better than porcelain. Its also will last longer than porcelain. He said that its more common among poor people because they can't afford to see a dentist on a regular basis and they lose a great deal of a tooth before they actually get to the dentist. As it turns out, the poor usually lose all their teeth sometime between the ages of 50 and 60. That's just one of many examples of third world poverty in NO. ted