Poor people are supposed to be skinny, like Honey Boo-Boo's family

“When we think of true poverty, the famous picture of the migrant mother in the Dust Bowl comes to mind, but today’s poor look more like Honey Boo Boo’s mom. They live in big houses or subsidized apartments. They play video games. They watch TV on a massive screen and they stuff their faces.”

http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_poverty_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz2k5ZnDmV1

At maggiesfarm.

Quite a few tens of thousands of Americans can tell growing up stories about being much, much poorer than today’s welfare families. Unlike a lot of people today, we got out and did something, through the Army or college or just finding a job that led to another job and another, learning a skill or trade that eventually paid enough for a wife and kids and a house. Way back then there were stories of people at the food stamp place driving away in a brand new Buick or a Cadillac (when a Buick was a real car).

One morning in 1969 the Penn-Central local train crew (of which I was brakeman) went to the track-repair crew dining car in Anderson, Ind. Our conductor knew the cook. Repair crew lived in a passenger car, each man with a bunk and place for storing clothes and such. The cook had some food left over from breakfast – gravy, biscuits and sausage – and he cooked eggs to order for the four of us. As we ate, the cook mentioned “those Kentucky boys” who “get up here and work for a while and then decide they can make more from welfare back home.” All the blame couldn’t go to them, though, “since their grandfathers and fathers had been on welfare, too.”