{"id":1262,"date":"2011-12-14T02:49:49","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T02:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoe.wordpress.com\/?p=1262"},"modified":"2011-12-14T02:49:49","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T02:49:49","slug":"a-15-ft-by-15-ft-room-living-on-9000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1262","title":{"rendered":"a 15 ft. by 15 ft. room; living on $9,000"},"content":{"rendered":"

I talked with Bluffton University professor Don Hooley.\u00a0\u00a0 Back from a sabbatical to India, he said it wasn’t uncommon to see a family of four there living in one 15 ft. by 15 ft. room, complete with a small kitchen, small bathroom, and electricity.\u00a0 What’s more, he said people in these situations consider themselves: “doing well.”\u00a0 On the other end of the spectrum, and on the other side of the world, we live like kings<\/em> by comparison, including people in, say, the lower-middle-class here.\u00a0 But this shouldn’t be about “counting our blessings.”\u00a0 This should be about going to things like house sharing, and the like, and taking the savings to help our brothers and sisters living in Third World slum dwellings without the kitchen, the bathroom, or electricity.\u00a0 We have become so<\/em> gluttonous about our “space” in this country.\u00a0 Note:<\/strong>\u00a0 On a campaign stop in Stamford, Connecticut, a couple years back, we met with an attorney who taught at a university in India for a time and was tremendously impacted by the poverty he saw in some of the slums there.\u00a0 So impacted, in fact, he came back and googled the “international average salary,” which was a little more than $9,000 at the time.\u00a0 He decided to live on this, and started by moving his family into a small trailer.\u00a0 He takes the rest of his income and gives it to humanitarian aid agencies working in India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I talked with Bluffton University professor Don Hooley.\u00a0\u00a0 Back from a sabbatical to India, he said it wasn’t uncommon to see a family of four there living in one 15 ft. by 15 ft. room, complete with a small kitchen, …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}