Being Poor's the Real Crime as Cops Nab Trash Thieves
These poor people think they can waltz up and down our alleys, eat food out of our trash containers and then make off with our most valuable garbage, aluminum cans that have a street value of 75 cents a pound.
People who dress up in nice suits and work in tall buildings don't work anywhere near as hard as someone who spends all day hauling enormous bags filled with cans up and down alleys.
Let's see. At 75 cents a pound, you only have to collect a hundred pounds to earn a whopping $75. You could live on that for days.
Kin Hubbard, one of those homespun humorists in my home state of Indiana, used to say that being poor is no crime, but it might as well be.
Increasingly, we criminalize the act of being poor.
We haven't quite reached the point of Mexico City, where entire families live in an enormous dump outside the city waiting for the garbage that sustains them to be delivered.
So our poor people have to go out and get their own garbage. You could call that entrepreneurship and the American way. Or you could call it a crime.