We Are The 1%

This cheeky response to the Occupy Wherever movement is all over the net...

Photo taken from Google Images; original source may be this twitter account.

And on a slightly different note the thread on Southern Sister's Facebook account (from which Southern Man has been banned) has this juicy tidbit from none other than Southern Sister's SO:

The wealth of some has grown greatly in the last 40 years yet our calculation/definition of poor has not: poor is a family of four making less than $22,350/year...that's not poor that's starvation.

Southern Man suspected that this actually makes a point he's been hammering at for some time (that the "poor" in the USA are middle class in Europe and wealthy compared to most of the world) so he typed "world income" into Google and the top hit was the Global Rich List into which you enter your income and it tells you your rank for the entire planet. Two results of interest are:

USA Poverty Level of $22,350 - just inside 10%.
Southern Man - just inside 1%.

So someone explain how an intelligent, college-educated person can call a top-ten-percent income - and, mind you, people at this income level in the USA live in constructed homes with indoor plumbing and clean running water and have refrigerators and televisions and air conditioners and cable television and cell phones and iPods and pay other people to prepare their meals for them on a regular basis and otherwise live like kings compared to much of the world - "starvation." Does she really believe that 90% of the people on the planet are starving to death? And consider that any family of four who actually earns $22,350 as income is almost certainly drawing another half that in direct government aid (for example, in addition to a variety of assistance programs they'll pick up about 4K in Earned Income Credit alone) - and that puts them in the top 5% of global incomes, right there. Witness the power of capitalism and the free market, which has created a nation of such wealth that our poor are in the very highest echelons of world income. To be poor in the USA today is to be richer than 99% of the humans who ever lived. And no other nation is as generous about sharing that wealth. Southern Man can't count the number of times he's been in line behind someone at a convenience store who's got iPod earbuds hanging around their neck and is chatting on a smartphone while buying beer and cigarettes along with their food-stamp-subsidized groceries. That's what we call "poor" around here.

And Southern Man is pleased to join the Chicago Board of Trade as part of the 1%. It's good to be on top. Lord, you have blessed this nation beyond measure. Let us not forget the source of our blessings. Amen.