Image by Vaguely Artistic via FlickrPoor people aren’t funny. I don’t mean they can’t tell a joke. I mean that it’s not funny that there are poor people. Even in a country with the richest poor people on earth.

But satire is often funniest when it takes on serious things. (For crying out loud, late night hosts and others tell jokes about the war and terrorists all the time.) And The Onion comes through with one such satirical article, Nation’s Poorest 1% Now Controls Two-Thirds Of U.S. Soda Can Wealth:

One canned individual cited in the study is can tycoon Will Dorsey, a 33-year-old Detroit resident who spent his childhood living off the funds collected from his family’s vast can holdings. At the age of 16, Dorsey inherited five carts and dozens of garbage bags overflowing with recyclables when his father passed away unexpectedly one cold December morning.

According to economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, people like Dorsey, who maintain an ultra-poor lifestyle that is vastly different from the rest of the population, are egregiously out of touch with the everyday economic realities of mainstream America.

“Dorsey is one of those select few who come from old can money,” Krugman said. “They’re just hoarding their assets so nobody else can benefit. And then they parade down the street with their carts full of recycling.”

But there is a serious point here. Those who moan loudest about the “gap between rich and poor” appear to far more concerned with how rich the rich are than with how poor the poor are.

I don’t care how rich the rich get.  Is my family’s weekly grocery bill going to go up because a tiny percentage of the population sees their net worth go up by a few billion dollars?  I don’t think so.