Hey, If President Obama Can Say It, So Can I: Fuck The Poor!

Overwhelmingly, in this country, the majority of smokers are either poor, or lower-middle-class.

To illustrate this, let me do some math magic for you.

The population of the United States is approximately 305, 000, 000.

Of those, 21% are smokers; that's 64, 050, 000 smokers in this country.

How's that break down by income?

Well, Gallup has a nifty bar chart, but I'll just bust down the numbers from their poll for you, by combining their percentages with the IRS's figures on how many tax returns were filed on how much income, so you can see the disparity here. (Bearing in mind that Gallup divides the income by a bit different numbers than the IRS does, so this won't be quite exact, but close enough for *AHEM* government work.)

• 30% of people under $5K income: that's 4, 292, 689 (point 2) smokers.
• 34% of people between $5k and $10K: that's 4, 007, 493 (point 98) smokers.
• 30% of people between $10K and $25K: that's 9, 768, 490 (point 5) smokers.

 Note that this is slightly better than 28% of all the smokers in the country, so far, and we're not even to $30K a year yet.

• 26% of people between $25K and $35K: that's 4, 114, 674 (point 98) smokers.
• 21.7% of people between $35K and $60K: that's 5, 491, 200 (point 58) smokers.
• 16% of people between $60 and $90K: that's 2, 879, 551 (point 2) smokers.

Note that we're now up to 48% of all smokers.

• 13% of people between $90K and "billions and billions," which is 2, 679, 231 (point 126) smokers.

Now, is that 64, 000, 000? Nope; it's 52%, 33, 306, 000.

The rest didn't file income taxes.

The polling figures didn't take tax returns into account, and all I had to go on for the income figures was the IRS, which tracked 138, 394, 754 individual tax returns for 2006, the latest year for which they have data available on their website.

At any rate, so where does my "Fuck the poor" bit come from?

Well, Obama & Co. are talking about a 61-cent-per-pack cigarette tax to pay for S-CHIP expansions that will give government health coverage to "teh childerns" of families up to $85K per year in income.

That's a tax on the poor, to pay for the kids of the... not poor.

Which translates to, as I said: Fuck the poor!

...And if President Obama can say it, so can I; that's how free speech works.

So.

Exercising my freedom of speech, and speaking as someone hovering right around the poverty line myself:

Fuck the poor!