Poor in America

Here's an article discussing something that I think we all instinctively know -- that there are very, very few truly poor people in America. For instance, how can you be poor if you own a house? 76% of them have air-conditioning. Shoot, even the writers of the report in question agree:

If poverty means lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, relatively few of the 35 million people identified as being "in poverty" by the Census Bureau could be characterized as poor.

The other fun thing about this issue is how the poor are defined. If you define poor as the bottom 20%, then you can't solve poverty, even if all the poor people sit on gold-plated toilets.