The word ‘poverty’ is not well liked. There are few words that can evoke as much tear-jerking grist for the political mill as this single, three syllable word. Say it aloud and then close your eyes. Some of us may imagine the smokestacks of Victorian London being scrubbed by scrawny children who have to wheeze into their shirt sleeves. Flick a penny at them and they will tip their frayed top-hats at you. Some see a tiny African boy with gray hair and a belly bloated by starvation. He won’t have long to live unless you pick up the phone and call now. Others think of Chinese peasants in black rags planting rice for fourteen hour days with bent and aching backs. Whatever your thoughts, whatever the images, none of them are good. Poverty is, by definition, a word signifying a grim reality.

The Random House Dictionary defines poverty as the state of “having little or no money, goods, or means of support.” This definition does not mince words. It clearly states that there is a lack of something, a scarcity, a relentless and enduring absence — much like what is in the heads of your average American voter.

We inhabit a material world and we therefore tend to think of more stuff as better; and, as such, the great lack of stuff caused by poverty will always be bad. Having a bathtub is a lot better than not having one, and certainly cleaner. Most would agree that having food to eat is considerably better than starving. Of course, there are some people who deem poverty a virtue but they’re all hare-brained hermits and Quakers so nobody takes them too seriously.

Maybe it is because of these holy, hermetical airs that the word ‘poverty’ is sometimes paired with lofty words like ‘noble’ and ‘hard-working’. At other times, in decidedly less religious company, we hear people speak of ‘crippling’ and ‘abject’ poverty. This is a powerful word and if our own eyes are to be believed, probably more powerful than poverty itself. It is a word that can shake the world.

In fact, it is so easy to tug people’s heartstrings with the word ‘poverty’, that the word has done far more to create poverty than cure it. The left has turned the word into a club which they can use to bludgeon the middle class. Rest assured that when the taxman comes to skim the fat off of your hard day’s work, he will claim to do it on behalf of someone else’s poverty. He will call it the first great step in the “war on poverty” or the “poverty relief act” or the “poverty prevention program.” If the left is feeling cryptic they will couch their legislation in roundabout terms that still suggest the old smokestacks and withering Kenyan babies: “affordable care,” “social security,” “supplemental nutritional assistance,” and so on.

It is plain to see that with the help of their clubs the leftists have turned poverty into a lucrative industry. This kind of theft is a perfectly good reason for Americans to stand up and complain while the club is a perfectly good reason to sit back down again. And that is exactly what white, middle class Americans have done for decades — we gripe quietly in our homes or in hushed tones around the water cooler at work, but not openly, and never so loudly as to attract attention. We raise our children on the supposed virtues of white-funded ethnic diversity so that we can continue to gripe with a forced smile; after all, the bitter pill is a lot easier to swallow if you convince yourself ahead of time that cyanide must be good medicine.

The success of this industry might be one reason why the left has been looking rather red faced and worried as of late: the meteoric rise of the Western world’s standard of living, thanks primarily to free enterprise, has stamped out genuine poverty. It is a lot easier to rob Peter to pay Paul when Paul wears a pair of dusty overalls and a straw hat; when he wears name-brand shirts, designer jeans, and two-hundred dollar shoes, Peter may start to get skeptical. And now Peter is getting very skeptical indeed; the water cooler talk is getting a little louder at work and the griping has roped in the neighbors. A growing sense of unease is spreading.

Poverty in America has transformed from soot-faced coal miners who live in a one room shack by the railroad to blubbery Jaquita who drives a Cadillac and has a thousand-dollar weave in her hair. By most estimations, when a nation’s poor live better than four-fifths of the world’s population, the nation has done well for itself. America should take a moment to straighten its tie and admire itself in the mirror. To the left, however, an affluent underclass is a disaster and being proud when they look in the mirror is not the leftist way.

The left needs to be able to promise ever increasing riches to rile up the poor; once the poor have grown sleepy and content, once their fridges are stocked with government-paid two liter sodas and their tables are laid with fried chicken or hamburgers each night, rioting becomes an afterthought since the TV will suffice for cheap entertainment. The left still riot — but the riots have become an amusement, a break from the monotony of being idle, rather than a means to fill their stomachs.

The foremost solution to this problem has been immigration. The left decided that if there are no more native-born poor, they can import genuinely poor people from poor nations. The European left has welcomed Muslims for this purpose. In the United States in particular, Latin America has been a fertile ground for cranky socialists who like to benefit from America’s working white majority. It also helps, I’m sure, that Pew Research released data which shows that the majority of Hispanics vote Democrat even three generations after their initial immigration, since after all, voting Democrat goes hand in hand with being a cranky socialist.

The second solution is much more insidious and subtle: the left has started to redefine poverty. Since the fence bothers them they have decided to dig up all of the fence posts. In Britain, the leftists recently started punching the keys of their calculators and gazed into some very magical crystal balls in order to redefine what constitutes poverty. They may have even consulted a few well-respected witch doctors in the London area. After much consideration and patient augury, they announced their own definition of poverty as 60% of whatever the year’s current median income is. The US Census Bureau uses similar alchemical formulas to determine poverty.

Most men’s jaws will not drop upon hearing news of this. This is because most men will not catch the sleight of hand employed by these bureaucratic hucksters. This is a very under the table definition. For those of you who have not yet figured out the trick, I will explain: the leftists have defined poverty as a percentage. This means that no matter how affluent a society becomes, no matter how much food the poor shovel in their mouths, no matter how many cars they have in their driveways, no matter how jammed packed their closets are with designer clothes — according to the left, these people are living in poverty. We have come a long way from chimney-sweeps and Chinese rice planters.

This is how we have arrived at the absurd situation where the US Census Bureau claims that 14% of America is living in poverty yet you would be hard pressed to find a poor person in America who doesn’t look like a blubbery land whale. We are some of the fattest people on the planet. You would be hard pressed to find a single mother who doesn’t have a TV in her home or a phone in her pocket. We are some of the most wired people on the planet. Analysts speak of American healthcare as being one of the most expensive in the world, and it is, if you are middle class. If you are poor, on the other hand, Medicaid ensures that healthcare is completely free. Compare the American so-called poverty to Haitian poverty and it is clear that there is no comparison.

We don’t have genuine poverty here. It has become an American pastime that the poor get to have all the benefits of welfare and none of the bother of work. Our welfare programs are so generous, and so discouraging of hard work, that we have a class of people who can cheerfully remain below the government’s percentage-based poverty line. They won’t be inconvenienced at all; or rather, they won’t be inconvenienced until they try to rise above the poverty line. Unfortunately, there is no incentive to make more money when making more money will make you liable to lose more of it.

Consider the absurdities of this situation. In most states, if you are single and make more than $22,000 per year, you will be liable to pay your own healthcare costs. Imagine that you earn $21,000 per year. Your greatest financial setback would not be to lose one thousand dollars per year; it would be to gain an extra thousand dollars per year. Once you make that extra thousand, you have to start shouldering your healthcare costs in addition to filing federal income tax. In effect, as a poor man who takes one step forward to get out of poverty, the government clubs whack you so hard that you have to take three steps back.

These wonky policies lead me to one conclusion. America is truly the best place in the world to be penniless, but only if you are penniless; if you end up saving too many pennies you will find the taxman coming around to divvy up his share. And why is he so eager to slice into your savings? After he takes his cut of your money, he doesn’t return the difference to you; no, instead he gives the scraps to those who haven’t bothered saving anything. Once again, we can see that in this system the fools are raised and the sensible are brought low. The extreme ends of the class spectrum, the tax-takers at the top and the tax-receivers at the bottom, are squeezing the cash out of all the workers in the middle. It is a scheme designed to transform the middle class into mules, and as such, it is America’s working white majority who suffer.

By rethinking the definitions of poverty, the left wants to convince you of a poverty that defies reason. They tell you that those bloated tortoises you see on the streets of America are comparable to spindly Ethiopians; that their state-funded drug fixes are no different than rural Indians who have no safe drinking water; that their leased Cadillacs with chrome-plated rims are the same as Bolivian horse carriages. America’s poor are not living in poverty. America is too rich to even conceive of genuine poverty anymore except among those who have traveled outside the country and seen this fabled poverty elsewhere.

Ours is a poverty in name only. Our poor are not working sixteen hours in the burning sun for a dime a day. Coal miners are not living in shacks beside the railway anymore. We have so much food that we not only eat three full meals per day, we can snack between the meals and complain about how we just can’t seem to lose weight. Yet the left has a vested interest in keeping the poor convinced that, despite their abundance, despite their jiggling potbellies, they are still in poverty.

It is a tactic that the left learned to use a long time ago. If a politician stands up to promise a chicken in every pot and a heater in every home, then once the chicken is boiled and the heater is red hot, then the politician has nothing more to do. Promising specific things is a dead-end approach. The left has learned that promising specifics is not half as effective as fiddling with words that allow them to always have more promises to make. Poverty is foremost among those words that the left loves to fiddle with: redefine poverty and you have a reawakened class struggle. This is the left’s cudgel that I mentioned before.

Gandhi once said that “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” which I imagine was said sometime before he was shot and killed by an assassin. He may want to revise that statement now. Or rather, maybe he was right all along but unintentionally so. If I were to edit his statement a little bit to accord with my own experience, I would say, “Poverty legislation is the worst form of violence.”