Quote:
Originally Posted by tankdriver
Having air conditioning or a color tv is not an indication of wealth. And common sense tells you married people would be less poor since most often two incomes pay for the air conditioning and tv.
What about disposable income? Percentage of income spent of necessities of life?
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Exactly. It is misleading to use these items (colour TV, air conditioning, microwave oven, VCR/DVD player) as yardsticks for wealth measurement because the costs of those technologies have dropped dramatically over the time frame of the study. How many poor households today own 60" Plasma HDTV sets? Or satellite radio? Or other cutting edge technology? I'm sure 30 years from now these technologies will have worked themselves fully into the mainstream (if they're even around at all) and will be downright cheap to own. So poor people have cars, some of them even have two of them? Are they new cars? Are they 20 year old cars that are on life support? The statistics being used by this guy are deliberately misleading and are designed to be presented to people who will exclaim "hey, they got a/c and a car, what more do they need?" and never bother to look deeper.
The greatest indicator of poverty is the percentage of income spent on the necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, etc).