Sterile wealth, romanticized poverty, and mindlessness about sleevelessness.
1. The family of 5: "'Money right now, there’s not enough. Literalmente,' said Ms. Torres, speaking Spanglish. 'Sometimes I feel bad, like I can’t do enough for my kids.'"
2. The Biebers: "The 2,792-square-foot apartment has two kitchens — an open-plan kitchen for entertaining, with marble counters and Scandinavian larch wood cabinetry, and a secondary chef’s kitchen with stainless steel and matte aluminum cabinetry. The primary suite looks out to the Hudson River..." The living room, I see, looks out onto a big TV screen and turns its back on the uninspiring skyline of New Jersey.
3. The presumed dearth of sleeves: "In all of the discussions about body positivity and loving the different parts of you, including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms, especially the upper arms, are often overlooked...." The letter writer is urged to "rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."
Posts
46 comments:
"...including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms...."
Facts not in evidence, example not provide. These are the mighty arms of a straw man.
You can still be very wealthy even if you have a low income. Plenty of people have their wealth tied up in real estate and the stock market. These investments may not provide regular income, leading to a disparity between wealth and reported income.
I think this is the reason behind Democrats' mania for a wealth tax. The woman making $ 46,000 per year? She still might be wealthy and that is going to irritate Elizabeth Warren, the squad, NGO's who "protect" Somalis from White Supremacy and a lot of Mamdani voters. These people don't hate the billionaires, they hate their cousins or their sisters or their neighbors because they have a couple of million dollars in the stock market and a nice house.
"rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."
That's what I tell people about guns.
The overwhelming feature common to all alleged news sources is the nearly wholesale abandonment of actual news, important facts and human events. Nothing in the drudgetaposition Althouse captured is “news fit to print” that fits the working definition we were taught in J class.
Learn to love the 2nd amendment.
Single mom with 4 kids? Is it another "living in poverty" article that relies on a broken family to Say Something Important About Capitalism?
"How a Family of 5 Lives on $46,000 a Year in Wakefield"
A fair telling of this story would also added the amount this family receives from government programs to their total "income". I have no idea about this specific family, of course, but as is pointed out from time to time in editorials and analyses, there are federal and state benefits programs for the poor. To not include that money in any telling of how much a family "lives on" is misleading.
Hillary Clinton says she deserves to go bankrupt because her business is undercapitalized. Tim Walz says she's a sucker for thinking she needs children in her daycare in order to get paid.
It looks like those kids in the bedroom each have bigger TVs than we have.
Who all saw Sophie Cunningham’s arms when she was the ad-hoc ring girl? That’s how she dressed for just attending the event as a spectator. I’m not seeing the problem with her arms.
Bob Boyd said..."rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."
That's what I tell people about guns.
Maybe a renaming would help. I like to think of them as cordless hole punchers.
"Single mom with 4 kids? Is it another "living in poverty" article that relies on a broken family to Say Something Important About Capitalism?"
No. There's a father. Is this another assumption that the man should be the center of any story?
Really trying to come up with something to say about any of this. And I have nothing. Just more NYT slop-fill. I'll try to do better.
“A fair telling of this story would also added the amount this family receives from government programs to their total "income"”
Right. All of these inequality examples skew the data. They NEVER add transfer payments like government assistance or employer provided service like healthcare that aren’t taxed , they measure incomes pre-tax rather than post tax. Often they look at tax units rather than households when considering income as well, skewing further…
If you went 200 years in the past and showed a random sampling of 100 people the family of 5's home without commentary, and showed a different random sampling of 100 people the Bieber's home, also without commentary, what percent of each group would say that the home was luxury living? I'm assuming a significant majority of both groups would say the homes were luxury living.
Larch wood!
Ah, good. Something to write about.
"Is this another assumption that the man should be the center of any story?"
Might just be social priming. We read so many articles about single moms working past their daily issues, or not working past anything and struggling. Or becoming Goddesses or becoming invisible to society. We read a lot about single moms because there are so many single parent households in the US and most of them are moms.
So, yes, it might have been an assumption by the commenter (CJinPA) but it is clearly an understandable one. CJ has been trained by the facts on the street and the articles that follow. At this point there are 9.8 single family households in the US with 75% of them led by a single woman. That is about 8% of all US households. (and I'm sure that's not counting illegal immigrants).
In the United States is we expect illegal aliens to support families of five at $46K per year or less. Yes there is a lot of subsidies, and fraud, but the average Mexican laborer is hired for a few very basic reasons. 1) Businesses can underpay them. 2) Health insurance does not have to be provided. 3) They can be hired through temp agencies, so they can be laid off and discarded instantly. 4) They show up to work.
Manufacturing, farming, and construction. Who doesn't know this??
Teacher's Assistant is a career? Wow
Danno, cordless long-distance hole puncher.
Wakefield has always been a neighborhood of immigrants. My father grew up there, the oldest child of six--his parents were newly arrived from Ireland (actually had to wait a year in Canada because of enforced immigration laws in the 1920's). Most of the neighborhood was associated with the nearby subways yards where my grandfather was a motorman. In the 1970's it saw a new wave of Caribbean immigrants which changed Wakefield's character again. Now it is a landing spot for non-nuclear families with considerable welfare assistance, something unconceived of a century earlier.
"There's a father. Is this another assumption that the man should be the center of any story?"
Absolutely not. My comment was based on two things:
I've tracked these 'struggling to make ends meet' stories for years when I was in journalism and after. A disproportionate number rely on single-parent families to dishonestly frame the struggle.
Also, the Times made the decision to exclude the father from the photo and sub-headline, strongly implying the family relied solely on the mother's income. (Perhaps he can't work?)
When the article is about family and household income and you exclude a key family member and income earner, you invite assumptions.
Temujin said...
"CJ has been trained by the facts on the street and the articles that follow."
Ha. You put it better than I.
I want to post what ai thinks... but, it wouldn't be prudent... at this juncture.
those are tv's? I thought they were bed boards.
I stopped paying any attention to the use of the word 'poverty' in any media story, when I learned that the US had been classified by the UN with an inordinately high 'Poverty Rate', and the reason for that was because they counted only household earned income in that metric, and disregarded any SNAP benefits, any housing or transportation allowances, any child care benefits, any Medicaid health care, etc. And of course to the skilled welfare surfer, these state-provided benefits can easily amount to well over $25K per year. Which would effectively double them out from any 'Poverty Rate' metric. It has become a fake word, used for intentional misdirections.
I'll just say that I looked up ai because justaposition the word struck my curiosity.
to recap:
arm sleeves bad? leg sleeves good?
Is this $45k a result of the income sacrifice of the business startup, the ild teacher assistant job? Without seeing the story I have to assume NYT takes the most manipulative route….When we started a business we lived off of savings and ate ramen most nights for a few years…
Sun's out, guns out.
ramen done right is a Japanese delicacy. Just saying.
The Professor’s choice of NYT articles frequently makes me glad that La Señora and I dropped the pop culture years ago. For example, I searched Justin Bieber’s net worth. It is $200-300 million and I have never heard a song or watched an interview. I read somewhere he’s supposedly a Christian and that his bodyguards have had to save him from his contentiousness. Nothing else. The deprivation is not distressing us. In that vein, this is lengthy, but pretty cool: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/to-boss-ourselves
Single mom got to be receiving child support. Just saying.
I read the comments here first, then got a completely different impression of the family of 5 by reading the story. The adults strike me as hard-working and enterprising. They rent two apartments in the building from the same landlord. One for living and one for a daycare business. When the landlord heard she got into NYC's 2-K program, which was going to bring in 8 students to her operation, he gave her four months of free rent because he wanted the family as long-term tenants.
I expect there will be considerable skepticism about the NYT's veracity on almost every point, but this is a link to the story. I tried to make it my gift link, but who knows if that will work.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/13/nyregion/nyc-budgeting-affordability-torres.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xVA.WYMM.Orrckd1iRzMp&smid=url-share
…ours was ten for a dollar packs from the wonder bread thrift. I suspect that is not Japanese for done right…
I'm so old I can remember when 'toned arms' were all the rage...
Thank you the summary, Steve.
A large percentage of the world would give their left nut to live in housing like these people. The fact that they are enterprising and working to get ahead is pleasing.
Newspapers are dying and the Times has time to worry about sleeves? But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. If a paper can be involved in every little detail of its readers' lives and world maybe it has a better chance of surviving. That's going to change, though, as AI becomes the place people go to with their concerns about sleeves and bare forearms.
I thought I was going to learn a new word - Juxtapoistion. But no.
It sounds like in the telling of this family's story, the NYT decided to tell A story, not The story. Entirely expected.
My guess is that Justin was supposed to complete the Spring ritual of moving the tree out onto the deck but it was too heavy and Hailey wouldn't help.
Spiros--re: the wealth tax thing.
When (as Rich/IEE, or whatever he is calling himself today, has been telling us for years) the stock market collapses and Elon and many other ordinary billionaires are wiped out, will they get a refund from the government for taxes paid on "wealth" which was manifested only as predicted value?
Yes, rhetorical question.
This is the reason why there are significant estate tax floors/exemptions (and why arguably there should be no estate tax at all)--because in order to pay the tax the estate often has to dissolve the asset which constitutes and produces the wealth. Typically family farms and businesses.
@Rabel. Thanks. I would never have noticed that. Fixed.
Ann Althouse said...
No. There's a father. Is this another assumption that the man should be the center of any story?
Are they married?
I assume they are not married so they don't have to declare his income and the woman can soak up those juicy taxpayer dollars they take from me.
Should my wife and I divorce so we can get some of that free money?
Women who are raising children without a man and men who raise children without a woman should get nothing from taxpayers until they get married again.
My wifebeaters are back in style?
"Women who are raising children without a man . . . should get nothing from taxpayers until they get married again."
My mother was widowed in her mid-30s and left with four sons (13 and under) to raise.
Can you imagine what sort of man would volunteer for that gig?
At any rate, and as she said for the rest of her long widowhood, she was a one-man woman.
We got monthly payments from SS until we turned 18, and VA survivors benefits until 22 as long as we were in school. My bother said recently that he had found some bank records from those days, which I am anxious to see--I'm pretty sure I was getting $40-$50 a month from the VA but have no memory of what the SS stipend was (those went to ma's account and she paid the bills).
She worked part-time and temp jobs until my youngest brother got out of elementary school (which took longer than six years due to a disrupted home life).
It would be cool to say she then went back to college and into law or med school, but she just learned speed-typing and got a data-entry job at Teh IRS. I think she was a high grade GS-6 when she retired after twenty years.
She was severely diabetic and even had a bout of Non-A Non-B Hepatitis to deal with in the last few years on the job.
It might be said that she had a hard life, but it's undeniable that she had a lot of shitty things happen to her.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.