...and then, get this, I told them how to avoid poverty.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) recently attended a Rotary Club meeting in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. During this meeting he spoke on several topics, but what was most notable were his comments about poverty and how to
avoid it:
[T]hose who want to stay out of poverty have the best chances of doing so if they graduate from high school, don’t get addicted to drugs and alcohol and don’t get pregnant out of wedlock.
Keep in mind this is coming from a man whose
net worth is well over $23 Million so he really knows what he is talking about. Of course as a guy who has lived paycheck to paycheck I have some advice I would like to add to Sen. Johnson’s on how to avoid poverty.
- Choose your parents well. Almost half (49 percent) of children who are born into poverty are persistently poor.
- Don’t let your parents get divorced. If they do get divorced, statistically speaking, you are better off living with dad, not mom.
- Don’t lose your job.
- Only bad workers make minimum wage, so don’t be a bad worker.
- Don’t get a major illness.
- Don’t be a minority.
- If you chose your parents well you can borrow money from them to start your own business.
- Don’t be junior enlisted in the military and have a family.
- Marry well. It worked for Sen. Johnson.
Sen. Johnson giving advice about how to avoid poverty is about as useless as a parka and electric socks at Lambeau Field on the 4th of July. He has no idea of how it feels to have a job yet you still have to lurch from paycheck to paycheck. What it is like to eat ramen noodles for weeks on end because you don’t have the money to go grocery shopping. He has no idea of what it is like knowing you will be homeless if you miss just one paycheck.
It must be nice to live such a simple life like Sen. Johnson. A life where the solution to avoiding poverty is pretty much, don’t fuck up, ever. Too bad it isn’t that simple in the real world where you can do everything right and still struggle just because of who your parents were or because of random chance.