WASHINGTON—Claiming that no other feasible option exists for the United States’ legions of destitute citizens, a panel of the nation’s top economists convened Wednesday to advise America’s poor to extricate themselves from poverty by inventing the next Facebook. “As unemployment holds steady and lower-class income plummets, the best and, frankly, only option for the country’s working poor is to try and come up with a new service like Facebook that forever changes how people communicate with one another, and then monetize it,” said Brookings Institution socioeconomics expert Richard Reeves, emphasizing that the nation’s approximately 50 million men, women, and children currently living under the poverty line will only be able to save themselves from lifelong misery if they somehow conceive of some kind of innovative website that permanently alters the world’s social and technological landscape. “To be honest, with the gap between rich and poor only getting wider, there’s really no middle ground here. Either invent another Facebook or languish in the gutter until you starve to death. Those are pretty much your options. So, you know, good luck.” Reeves added that a good name for one of these revolutionary game changers that delivers its creator from a lifetime of hardship and suffering might be BuzzConnect.

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