I'm not poor and this looks like my freezer...

What does being poor mean by having nothing in your ice box?  Nothing....

I hate liberals...I really do...

He's gotta be poor - freezers usually have some frost on the inside, so's I'm thinking there's no electricy in the house either. And, if there isn't enough money in the pay check, maybe the local taxes should go down. But, I've got to wonder, if things are SO bad, why is it that there are so many people breaking the law to work here, and if things are so bad, why don't some of these folks take back the jobs that they don't want. If this soesn't make sense, I'm trying to think like a lib, and now my head hurts.

There is no sense in being stupid, if you can't prove it! - my dad V

Have'nt we been bombarded the last few years with the news that "America is overweight"? I wish these people would make up my mind.............

He He, Clay, He He, $14 an hour and 38 years old.

If there was ever an argument for a 'living wage' I guess this is it, huh?

Let's see.  At 38 he would have been out of High School twenty years ago.

That would make him a 1987 graduate.  Schools have sure come a long way since then huh?  I believe Public Education was crappy back then too.

In twenty years of working age life he makes $14 an hour.  Pretty skilled guy, huh?

I on the other hand just bought a William Jefferson Freezer and it was delivered today.  I'm having to rent a forklift just to carry the $90K bundles of cash it generates every thirty minutes or so.  I'm leasing a new warehouse for the money, but until then I'm having to pay $15 an hour to drop outs with shotguns to protect the pile accumulating on my front lawn.

My wealth isn't invisible at the moment to my neighbors who have started a pretty big crowd and forced me to call the cops.

The governor says he might have to send in the National Guard if I don't find a bank with the staff capable of handling this kind of dough.  Most of them are mumbling about vault size and too many $100 bills.

But, I'm sure it'll all work out.

ACA

...

Hillary Clinton says:  "I want to take those profits."

If things are so bad, how come we still have the fattest poor people in the world?

From the article:

The suburban poor defy stereotypes about how and why people slip into
poverty. Howard and Jane Pettry, of Middleburg Heights, Ohio, see
themselves as working-class—just facing hard times. In December, Jane
was laid off from her job at a local supermarket, and a week later
Howard had a heart attack and missed a month of work from his job at a
grain mill. Now Jane's collecting unemployment and they're staring at
the poverty line as they struggle to pay the mortgage and the bills.
"I've worked all my life and paid my taxes," says Jane. "Now we're
living off credit cards. It's terrible."

Wait a minute? So a family is in the middle of a difficult time financially that's existed for about two months, and Newsweek finds that sufficient to declare that they've "slipped into poverty".

I sympathize with the Pettry's situation, but I also have no doubt that if Newsweek revisited this couple a year from now (which they won't) most likely they would find that they rode it out, found new jobs (possibly after having to move), recovered and are now doing fine.

I wonder how many of the 700 families Newsweek is referring, are free-loaders???  I used to work for a food bank and so many people would come in with their SUV's to collect food it was ridiculous. 

Clay, you and I must have the same freezer.

We see these stories all the time around where I live. Funny, they never seem to mention one aspect that seems to be consistent in all of these stories:

If Mr. Forklift operator had bothered to avail himself of the educational opportunities that exist in this country, there is a pretty good chance that he would not have found himself in that situation.

I can empathize with the job loss, however, as on the morning of 9/11 I was working as a designer for a multi-national engineering outfit that had an office here in Atlanta. Unfortunately, one of their largest clients, The Port Authority of New York, representing twenty-five percent of their total corporate revenue, was essentially wiped out in the attack. The office closed within 6 months.

It took a month, but I managed to find an equivalent position at another engineering firm doing highway design.  Due to the down-turn in the economy and unfortunately for me, our governor killed a huge highway bill that had been passed prior to the attack and I was layed-off yet again. It wasn’t easy, but I kept beating the bushes until I found another job. It got to the point where had I gotten an offer I would have jumped all over it.

The fact that our forklift operater refused a job offer says a great deal about him. You do what you have to do, even if the commute sucks, until you are in a position to do something else.

I hate newspapermen.....I regard them as spies.....If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast. -William T. Sherman

Did they find any tv's, stereos, or cell phones in the home.

In Bias, Bernard Goldberg remarked how these kind of stories always seem to creep up more often during Republican administrations.

I thought the story started going downhill as soon as I read "Lavelle, 38, was a forklift operator in a steel mill making $14 an hour."  I think this story stinks worse than the rotting food in Lavelle's unfrosted freezer.  I grew up in Pittsburgh so I know a few things about working in steel mills and how the unions and environmentalists had a LOT more to do with running big steel out of the country than any foreign competitor or ruthless corporation.

Lavelle was probably an employee at LTV Steel that closed down in 2001 after years of union issues, and after most investors were scared off by environmental liabilities and didn't want to invest in the plant.  I think Lavelle's biggest problem (other than wasting away his life being the Al Bundy of the steel industry) is summed up by a news piece that  90.3FM WCPN did in 2001, which started "The idling of LTV Steel in December put more than 3,000 people in the Cleveland area out of work.  That's a major blow to a city like Cleveland, which was already trying to cope with a regional manufacturing recession even before the national economic downturn became official."  In short... if you're living in an area where work is becoming more and more scarce... MOVE!  I hate hearing people whining about high costs of living, or low wages, in an area, but they refuse to move somewhere that working/living conditions are better.

Let's see.

Mayor Frank G. Jackson - Democrat
Cuyahoga county - DOMINATED by Democrats

How is it that a Democrat congress is going to solve this?  Sounds like more of the same "failed strategy" that got them into this mess in the first place.

I think we need an exit strategy and a date for withdrawal from Cleveland.

OH THAT PICTURE IS AWESOME!  Funny story, my wife and I both combined make a very good living, and our refridgerator looks just like that.  We usually joke if HHS came to our house and we had kids, we'd be in jail and the kids would be in foster homes.  Usually, you open our fridge and there's a case of Miller Lite and a block of chedder cheese.  We work and commute into the city and just don't have time to shop/cook.  But still, our fridge is pretty pathetic.