We're often told in the news that increasing numbers of our country's children are living in poverty. This naturally provokes a strong emotional response and often the creation of more government spending programs. But what do they mean when they tell us that these children are living in poverty? What they generally mean is not that children are living in absolute poverty (deprivation of things essential for survival and wellbeing), but that they are living in "
relative poverty".
Call me unsympathetic, but only having one car and not being able to afford a holiday in Spain every year is NOT poverty. It's an insult to those who are truly in poverty to suggest that it is. What I find really absurd about this is that If you have two people, give twenty dollars to one, and ten dollars to the other, the latter is now classed as impoverished, despite the fact that he now has more then he originally did. Utterly ridiculous.
It's time people were honest, time they stopped dressing up socialism as humanitarianism, and time we dropped this abuse of the word poverty.