{"id":491,"date":"2012-03-30T23:01:56","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T04:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/toppun.com\/blog\/?p=491"},"modified":"2012-03-31T13:31:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T18:31:36","slug":"reality-television-poverty-grows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toppun.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/30\/reality-television-poverty-grows\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality Television: Poverty Grows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n

\"Reality<\/a><\/h2>\n

Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This cool design is linked to a button, but other great Top Pun products like T-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, caps, key chains, magnets, posters, and sticker sheets can be accessed by scrolling down the product page.<\/span><\/p>\n

View more Political Buttons<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While many seem obsessed with reality television, it seems that many more important realities are being overlooked.\u00a0 I’m amazed by Western civilization’s capacity to distract.\u00a0 I would hope that the chasm between reality television and reality would be something that most people could discern; though my optimism may be showing through.\u00a0 While this is disturbing enough, I find myself increasingly surreal state when we propose one thing and live truly do the opposite, and then had the audacity to call these opposite the same.\u00a0 Now I’m a fan of paradoxes as much, probably even more, than the next guy, but holding fast to literal contradictions seem to be an unnecessary grasping of the absurd.\u00a0 Let me offer an example.\u00a0 The above design references the reality that poverty grows.\u00a0 This can be taken as one half of the proverbial the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.\u00a0 However, poverty is not something that we can discuss in polite company in America.\u00a0 For instance, Pres. Obama in his State of the Union address this year was the first president since Harry Truman to not even use the word poverty in his State of the Union address.\u00a0 Now, this might not be so unusual if we were in a period of expansive economic growth and poverty was receiving, but, alas, we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and poverty is growing.\u00a0 But, let’s back up to our most recent period of apparent untrammeled economic growth.\u00a0 Democrats like to call them the Clinton years.\u00a0 I can’t help but notice that the same Clinton cronies that Obama hired to get us out of the most recent economic crisis are exactly the same people who led us into the crisis.\u00a0 But back to Clinton.\u00a0 One of the so-called crowning achievements of the William Jefferson Clinton presidency was his so-called welfare reform, which I prefer to call welfare deform.\u00a0 Here is where holding fast to a literal contradiction comes into play.\u00a0 President Clinton used the language of reducing poverty as the ultimate goal of his proposed welfare reform.\u00a0 In other words, the ultimate success of this policy was supposed to be measured by how much it lifted people out of poverty.\u00a0 However, virtually every analysis of the policy from left to right, governmental and nongovernmental, concluded that Clinton’s welfare reform legislation would result in more poor people, more poverty.\u00a0 And sure enough, more people were pushed into poverty.\u00a0 Unfortunately, a new measure, perhaps actually the original measure, was how many people were on welfare rolls.\u00a0 This actually went down.\u00a0 Surprise, surprise!\u00a0 When poor people received less help, they became more poor.\u00a0 Oh yeah, that idea that generous Americans and the church folk would feed, house, transport, tutor, and provide jobs for poor Americans without government involvement turned out to be a pipe dream. Wow, and I didn’t have to mention the Bush administration, one or two, Papa or Junior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON This cool design is linked to a button, but other great Top Pun products like T-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, caps, key chains, magnets, posters, and sticker … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,55],"tags":[274,563,384,91,307,538,577,148,388,200,71,266,37,594,17,215,107,112,530,601,309,308,106,186,470,67,723,571,85],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-and-philosophical-musings","category-top-pun-design-commentaries","tag-absurdity","tag-america","tag-church","tag-cool-design","tag-depression","tag-dream","tag-economic","tag-government","tag-hope","tag-jobs","tag-obama","tag-optimism","tag-paradoxes","tag-play","tag-political","tag-politics","tag-poor","tag-poverty","tag-president","tag-reality","tag-reality-television","tag-recession","tag-rich","tag-state","tag-success","tag-surreal","tag-top-pun","tag-welfare","tag-western-civilization"],"yoast_head":"\nReality Television: Poverty Grows | Political and Philosophical Musings, Top Pun Design Commentaries | Top Pun's Poetry, Funny Puns, Free Posters, Public Health Radio Show! 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