What makes someone poor? You often here it said that someone or another is “poor” but what exactly does this mean? Is it a measure of your spending money? your assets? Is someone who owns a mansion but cannot afford food poor?
There are two basic types of poor.
First, you’ve got your relative poor. These are the poor that we can never be rid of, because it simply means that they make less money than everyone else. Someone’s got to come in last, right?
Then there’s the absolute poor. These people are (more or less arbitrarily) defined as those making less than one U.S. dollar per day. There’s about a billion of these types of poor in the world today.
Of course, none of them live in the U.S. Hell, you would be a sorry panhandler if you couldn’t get more than a dollar a day.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanx
Trip Fall:
I just looked up ‘poor’ in the “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary”.
Poor: Lacking the means of support
Personally, I think that your answer is better.
Poor is relative to the society you’re taking about. I’m sure someone living in a sheet-metal shack in a Third World mudhole would consider an American housing project to be an unthinkable luxury.
Living in a room rented for your whole family, or if no room, you live in the car, and if the car is not available, you live with your family in a tent. Beside a creek.
Poor is getting your clothes from the free-box at church, then having to wear them and have someone say “hey, that used to be my shirt”.
Poor is going into the store to get a 5cent piece of candy with a food stamp dollar, so you can give the other change to your mom for gas money so you can get to school.
I could go on…
Poor sucks.
Easy. If your money works for you, you are rich, if you work for your money, you are Poor.
Perhaps this site will help you with the official U.S. definition.
http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/00poverty.htm