Now there's nothing funny about being poor. What is funny, however, is the way the folks at the Census Bureau decide who is poor and who isn't. 

It all began in 1980, when employees of that agency arbitrarily (and I want to emphasize the word “arbitrarily”) selected a dollar amount of income for that year, which they then termed the "poverty line." Implied was the notion that everyone with income for that year below the line was poor while those with income above it were not. 

Since then, the line has been upgraded every year to reflect inflation. 

However, and this is a big however, the poverty line includes only cash income; it completely ignores income in other forms, such as medical benefits, subsidized housing, and food stamps. 

Now how can we raise millions of people above the poverty line every year merely by changing the meaning of a single word? Very simple. 

All we have to do is agree that the word “income” means all kinds of income, not just cash. 

To give you an idea of how potent this change of language would be, had the folks at the Census Bureau done this in 1993, the latest year for which such figures were available at the time of this writing, some 8 million people would no longer have been poor. 

Imagine! Not a single additional crumb of food would have been put on any one's table, not a single additional stitch of clothing would have been put on any one's back, not a single additional cubic foot of shelter would have been made available to anyone. Yet all these 8 million souls would have been raised from poverty. 

You know, I've always thought that words were powerful. But I never thought that they were that powerful! 

Think about it.