What poverty?

One way to get rid of poverty in the US is to make it impossible to quantify. That's ingenious.

Let me also remind you that the conservative "colorblind" assault that raged throughout the 1990s had the very same goal.

By getting rid of measures that differentiated socioeconomic achievement along avenues of race and ethnicity, the hope was that the means by which to identify poverty and inequality would essentially disappear. Then, we could all go back to living in that nice little fantasyland where there was no deprivation in the good ol' US of A. Gut the welfare state completely, hand out copies of Friedman/Rand, and we'll all live happily every after.

(via professor kim)