Friday morning digest

- My hat goes off to this lady. I'm totally against capital punishment and I commend her for remaining so even after her husband was killed on 9/11.

- 33 year old professional student Harmeet Singh Sooden says that he thinks that his captors were paid off in exchange for his release. Not only that, he tells us that "I know where that money is going to go. I'd rather it went on to social work or feeding people who need food, not on killing people". The more I learn about Christian Peacemakers and their loony left worldview, the more I shake my head. It couldn't possibly be that the evil West decided that your lives were worth putting its soldiers into harm's way to save your asses, could it, Harmeet? It also couldn't possibly be that perhaps Western armed forces are capable of doing good in the world, either? Not when your captors are just victims, I suppose.

- Where do they find some of these guys? A rookie Tory MP from the BC Interior has suggested jailing journalists for inaccuracy. In a letter to nine newspapers, he wrote, “Maybe it is time that we hauled off in handcuffs reporters that fabricate stories, or twist information and even falsely accuse citizens”. I hate the media as much as the next bitter and cynical right-winger, but gimme a break.

- The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? Not in Canada. What's happening is that everyone is getting richer. Admittedly, those who are already comfortable are getting more comfortable at a faster rate than those who aren't, but that's to be expected. I also don't see anything wrong with that. I truly believe that a person's lot in life is largely determined by the circumstances they create for themselves. Sure, issues like culture, job loss and health crises certainly contribute but I think there is enough societal support to assist those people in getting back on their feet over the long term.

- On the issue of poverty, here's an interesting look at how we define "poor" from the New Yorker:

Rather than trying to come up with a subsistence-based poverty measure about which everybody can agree, we should accept that there is no definitive way to decide who is impoverished and who isn’t. Every three years, researchers from the federal government conduct surveys about the number of appliances in the homes of American families. In 2001, ninety-one per cent of poor families owned color televisions; seventy-four per cent owned microwave ovens; fifty-five per cent owned VCRs; and forty-seven per cent owned dishwashers. Are these families poverty-stricken?

Not according to W. Michael Cox, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Richard Alm, a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. In their book “Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think” (1999), Cox and Alm argued that the poverty statistics overlook the extent to which falling prices have enabled poor families to buy consumer goods that a generation ago were considered luxury items. “By the standards of 1971, many of today’s poor families might be considered members of the middle class,” they wrote.

Consider a hypothetical single mother with two teen-age sons living in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, a neighborhood with poor schools, high rates of crime and unemployment, and few opportunities for social advancement. The mother works four days a week in a local supermarket, where she makes eight dollars an hour. Her sons do odd jobs, earning a few hundred dollars a month, which they have used to buy stereo equipment, a DVD player, and a Nintendo. The family lives in public housing, and it qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. Under the Earned Income Tax Credit program, the mother would receive roughly four thousand dollars from the federal government each year. Compared with the destitute in Africa and Asia, this family is unimaginably rich. Compared with a poor American family of thirty years ago, it may be slightly better off. Compared with a typical two-income family in the suburbs, it is poor.

One of the Ten Commandments is "I shall not covet my neighbour's belongings". I think too much of what defines poverty these days is based on want more than need.