DeeCee - 8:59 pm on Jan 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

Sorry, Sierra_Dad.. I forgot to list the full name.. "Washington" here meant "Washington, DC", where all the politicians roam. :)

The new measurements, published a few months ago, is a political thing.

To win re-election, Obama must have a problem to solve. Since his goal is more Government and more government ownership, he must document a problem "his government" can solve for everyone. Make everyone feel like they are horribly off, and surely deserve assistance. By suddenly bumping the calculations so more than 100 million people (~ 1/3 of the US population) now fall into either the poverty or the "near poor" class of income, it makes it popular to push for more government assistance. And the more people are on government assistance, the more public employees we will need, the more people will learn to depend on government help, and the more power Obama will have. Plus, to pay for all that new expense, we will have to tax the EVIL corporations, the EVIL rich people, and the surely bad self-employed people, who showed initiative on their own. They must all pay their "fair share", as Obama has called it about a million times in his speeches.

Simple math for a born polician. :)

So be careful.. If your web-sites ever start making money, that money should be used to pay for Earned Income Credits, cars, iPhones, Game-boxes, and similar for essentially your neighbors. :)

Never mind that all the "near poor" perfectly can afford the mentioned goods. That of course is a "human right" today. :)

I used to do taxes for several "low-income" families (army family among other). When I calculated their "tax-credits" from Earned Income Credit (essentially a check written directly out of other tax-payer's bank-accounts) and saw how much of my taxes paid was being written off directly to other people with only the IRS as a direct middle man, I was flabbergasted. About 30% of the taxes the IRS withdrew from my bank-account was transferred directly into these few other people's bank-accounts, and I got to watch it happen, having access to their online accounts. Horrifying. They paid not one dime in taxes, and I essentially got to write them very large check on top of that. Transferred from my account -> IRS -> other people. All within a couple of days.

Mean-while, the people I was helping do their taxes was sitting in my home-office, playing games on their iPhones.. (I stopped doing people's taxes after that. To prevent from suffering a heart-attack.)