This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps

[Warpy]

35. People tooling into the welfare office or cheap market that accepts their EBT card

and WIC vouchers in a Lexus or Mercedes are people who spent their money and paid cash for their cars and big TVs and other luxury items before they got mommy tracked or laid off in favor of some green kid right out of school or a hungry guy from India who will work for less. Poverty is poverty and it sucks even if you've got a big house full of neat toys you bought when you thought that big paycheck would last forever.

I know people who look at that stuff every day and wish they'd gotten something smaller or cheaper or done without just so they could buy some meat and a bottle of wine for their anniversary instead of eating a protein poor, starchy casserole like they always do.

And when something gets old and breaks down, it just goes unreplaced. After all, that big TV is a lot less fun when all you can afford are the broadcast channels, the cable being the first thing that got cut when the money stopped coming in.

Worse, there is just no way to make up this lost time and they're looking at retirement funded by Social Security, only, unless they work a patchwork of minimum wage jobs to supplement it because their savings went to keep their houses.

You can spot the new poor because they're the ones having garage sales on the weekend, in utter shock that a lightly used designer label handbag is only worth five bucks, less if it stinks of cigarettes they can no longer afford to smoke.

People need to wake up. The suburbs are now statistically poorer than the inner city. The New Poverty could affect them next because no one is immune from it.