alt Hacker NewsYou’re arguing with a different person than you think you are.
I’m arguing about available resources, not willingness to use them.
If you want to define poor purely by percentage of people who are living below the poverty line instead of median income, average income, gdp per capita or tax revenue, go ahead. But in the context of whether the government has the resources to do something, that’s not a good metric.
And beyond this scope if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor, which is the metric I would use if I was going to call a group of people poor.
Okay I see your point; the state has money, even if a significant portion of the population doesn’t. That in itself is a problem. I was arguing, and many others here are arguing that the population of LA is poor, and you’re arguing that the state isn’t poor, and has options (whether or not it uses them). Both points are true - the state has resources, and the population has the greatest poverty in the US. Poverty rate is a valid objective metric of whether a state is “poor”, but it refers to the population and not the state budget, which is also a valid objective metric of whether a state is “poor” or not.
> if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor
This is one to be more careful with. Neither the average nor the median inherently tell you anything about the state’s poverty rate, and having a poverty rate that’s the highest in the US and almost twice the national average absolutely supports the viewpoint that LA is relatively poor. When it comes to median household income specifically, the LA Budget Project says “These numbers obscure stark racial disparities” and points out that the median Black income is around half that of White non-Hispanic household income. (Page 9 - https://www.labudget.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/LBP-Cens...)
It might seem like the median $60k household income isn’t poor, but 50% of households are below “ALICE” levels and having to compromise on basic necessities. This doesn’t support your claim that the median resident of LA is not poor. https://www.unitedforalice.org/introducing-ALICE/louisiana