Are you still poor if you own a television? →

Did you hear this nugget of wisdom from the Heritage Foundation that found out that – gasp! – people below the poverty line often own televisions! How dare they?!

Well, The Awl did some digging in to that, looking at the adjusted cost (in today’s dollars) of your average television. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s the prestige:

So we have the prices of a lot of television sets since their inception, and we’ve converted them to current price levels. They are as follows:

1939: $9,773
1948: $9,524
1953: $8,480
1968: $2,270
1977: $1,840
1986: $1,115
1996: $490
2011: $319

Wow.