A Piece of Me

Steve Harvey taunts Flint resident, Little Miss Flint responds

Steve Harvey’s recent jokes about the tap water in Flint, Michigan, have landed him in hot water with city activists.

During a radio interview on The Steve Harvey Morning Show Wednesday morning, the comedian aused Flint’s ongoing water crisis in a retort against a caller arguing about the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Melissa Mays — an organizer with the grassroots coalition Flint Rising — said that Harvey’s Wednesday comments making light of Flint’s “brown water” are nothing short of “heartbreaking.” Read more (6/16/17)

$7.25 x 40 hour full time work week: $290

$290 x 4 weeks per month: $1,160

That weekly check comes to, according to you, 290. Most places DO NOT pay for your half hour lunch that is required by law. So your beginning number was wrong. $7.25 x 7.5 hours a day x 5 days a week only gets you $271.88.  Most people in America get paid bi-weekly, so let’s double it to get the budget. $543.75. That’s GROSS, not NET. Out of that comes anywhere between 10% and 15% taxes depending on state so we’ll low ball it at 10%. Automatically down to $489.38 a pay check. Now health insurance. Usually anywhere from 70-100 a pay check for the cheapest plans. Again, we’ll low ball and go $70. So now we have $419.39 a paycheck. x 2  = $839. 

Eight hundred thirty nine dollars. A MONTH.

But again, you seem to think that’s fair. So let’s proceed. You say rent is $500? Okay. This person now has $339 left to buy groceries for the whole month, pay utilities, car payment, car insurance, and gas money to get to work. 

Those are the bare needs. You have to eat. You have to pay for heat, water, garbage removal, gas and or electricity because apartments do not always include things and rarely all of the above. Most cities in America do not have public transportation. Mine doesn’t despite the fact that our population is over 15,000 people, not counting a taxi. If you have a car, you have to pay that. If you have a car, legally you have to have car insurance. You have to pay that. You have to have gas in that car to get to work to make that money.

Now if you can tell me you can get all of that out of $339 you’re lying.

You are so focused on rent that you aren’t thinking about everything else people have to pay for. Rent was an example. This is a breakdown of the budget you gave me and it’s not possible to live off that in 2017 America. 

And BECAUSE this person makes over $800 a month, they probably won’t qualify for financial aid or food stamps. $800 is the line in my state where they won’t help you. No food stamps, financial aid, or government housing if you make more than $800 a month. 

“I knew my husband very well.  We’d been living together for twenty-one years.  So it was obvious that something was going on.  Suddenly he started playing guitar and writing songs.  The songs were OK, but I read some of the lyrics and they clearly weren’t written for me.  He started wearing cologne.  He started liking new foods that he’d never even tried before.  So I was suspicious.  Then one night he came home crying.  I said: ‘What happened?  Did you kill someone?’  He told me that he’d gotten a girl pregnant.  She’d just had the baby and didn’t want to keep it.  Then he asked me if I would raise it!  I said: ‘Sure, give it to me.’  I arranged to meet the woman in the park, and she handed me the boy.  He was only three days old.  He felt like my son the moment I held him.  I got rid of my husband a few months later.  But I kept the baby.  He’s sixteen now.”