printEver wonder why people who don’t have jobs are always chilling? “Only America has figured out how you get to be poor and have money at the same time,” explains that irrepressible exile Fred Reed. Listen up, America, to the lessons Mr. Reed learned from a chap (a prototype) called “Git-Some”:
When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’da give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the Wheeling Intelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.
That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’da been happy if I just went to the next country over.
When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.
Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. … The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stalmps … welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it.
Uncle Fred don’t lie. Ask Kristina Cogan, who receives $80,000 worth in government benefits for being “poor.”