Reading the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal is probably a mistake. Like listening to a speech by Pat Buchanan or Jesse Helms it is seldom informative and constantly infuriating. Under the headline "Defining Poverty Up" W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, who recently wrote a book called The Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think We Are, sound off about what great lives poor people have.

The issue of contention: In 1999 the Census Bureau is going to raise the poverty line for a family of four -- what once stood at $16,660 will now be $19,500 per year. That still means a husband, wife and two kids must survive for an entire year on just less than $5,000 each. To me, it seems that family could be called "poor."

But, our illustrious authors ask, what about their consumption? Two thirds of poor households had air conditioners in 1997 they write, their words dripping with scorn. Well, geez... that's just extravagant, isn't it? Never mind that hundreds of people died in last year's heat wave around the country when air conditioners and power plants broke down. How dare these poor people look out for their health and the health of their children. 97% of poor households have, get this, color televisions and 75% have VCRs. Some of them even own cars. Well, we'd hate to think that these poor people drive to work and they should certainly not entertaining themselves.

To Cox and Alm living in poverty means living under subhuman conditions. Anything more, they find extravagant. Poor Americans, they argue, are better off now than poor Americans the 1970s. They seem a bit disturbed by social progress. They're simply insulted to learn that poor people own microwaves (maybe because it's hard to find time to cook dinner in between two part time jobs) or that they have washers and dryers (as if these aren't cheaper than laundromats in the long run.) Most appalling to Cox and Alm are figures which detail spending by the poor. A low income household bringing in a measly $7,086 after taxes might spend up to $14,670 by the end of the year. Some of this, out authors argue, comes from poor perks like food stamps and Medicare and school lunch subsidies. How very posh. Of course, the poor are also spending a bunch on credit, spiraling themselves into debt to provide their children with decent lives.

According to Cox and Alm, the poor have a lot of discretionary income. More than they did in the 1920s and 1950s, at least. Again, they're irked by progress. They're also not dying of black lung disease and their children aren't working in factories. Whatever happened to the good old days?

Cox, by the way, is the Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Alm is a business reporter for the Dallas Morning News. They supplement their meager incomes by writing mean-spirited books for conservative illiterates. Neither of them knows anything about being poor, or about needing without being able to provide. Heading into the next century, it's not too much to ask that families of four people, two of them most likely children, shouldn't have to live on less than $20,000 as year without some form of assistance from society. It shouldn't be strange that these homes have televisions -- for better or worse, television is a communications method in our country, and it is a news source. It is also a form of entertainment and people of all economic classes should be able to unwind every now and then. What Cox and Alm believe, basically, is that the poor should be miserable and that discomfort and hardship are the just deserts of poverty. It's utter nonsense.

Why are the rich whining, anyway? For all their statistics about how great it is to be poor, it's also better to be rich today than it was in the 1920s. A 90s Bill Gates could buy and sell an early century J.P. Morgan hundreds of times over. So if things are better for the poor, they're much better for the rich. Maybe we should do something about that? If better lives for the poor implies we should start cutting services, then better lives for the rich means we should start raising taxes. By a lot. Like, anyone with over $10 million in annual income should give up 65 percent and the highest rate should be 80 percent for a billion dollars.

But Cox and Alms won't discuss the easy plight of the whiny rich. They'd rather drink martinis in posh restaurants, wondering why the poor have it so easy.

Michael Maiello had a privileged childhood compared to families trying to make it on $19,000 a year, but he wasn't rich either.