Most people are unaware that $21,720 is the poverty line for a family of three.
If you make $22,000 a year, it’s about $1833 a month. If you work for $10 an hour, you’ll make about $19,000 a year. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Those are a lot of numbers, eh.
I’ve been asked to head to Washington, D.C. this week to testify in a Subcommittee meeting for the Office of Oversight and Reform, and the issue at hand is the Trump Administration’s proposal to change the calculation method for Federal Poverty Guidelines.
As I was writing my testimony, my head was swimming with facts and figures. It’s hard to think about changing the way the guidelines are calculated. If it goes through, the poverty line will increase more slowly, which I suppose is the government’s way of making sure less qualify. You can boast about having less people living in poverty if you manipulate the way poverty is calculated.
Government Pay
I decided to research how much senators make a year. Senate.gov says that the salary for senators, representatives, and delegates is $174,000 a year. That wasn’t too far off from my guess, but did you know that they receive a $40,000 office furniture allotment? Yeah. They receive 40 grand for furniture while WV’s median income is $43,000 and some change. That amount changes with inflation, by the way, and it’s also for 5,000 square feet; additional money is given if the space is bigger than that.
I honestly can’t imagine that type of luxury. Who needs office furniture that costs 40 freaking thousand dollars?!? In the meantime, I’m worrying about my nails being done when I walk into that room on Wednesday because I know the things people say about poor women having their nails done. I’m worrying about what I’m going to wear into that room because I don’t want to look too nice.
I won’t be believable, right? Even though I’m not wrestling with that poverty line anymore, I don’t dare look as if I might go home and sit in an office with $40,000 worth of furniture because then they might not believe my story.
Poverty
I was told today that I am an incredible person and turned out all right, so why shouldn’t people assume that folks living in poverty will turn out the same way? Seriously. I am not even sure how to answer that question. What does that even mean?
There are 46 million people living in poverty in the United States. One in three West Virginia kids under the age of five are living in poverty. Nearly 100,000 kids in our state are living in poverty, and yet our elected in the nation’s capital are allotted $40,000 for office furniture.
Think about that for a minute. Who’s really living off the system?
Mashed Potatoes (and Bad Policy)
