In Colorado, Grand Junction's city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June.
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking.
It costs at least three hundred dollars to cremate an indigent corpse, Tyler told me, and the price was going up. Anyone who dies without at least this much money, their body goes to an autopsy class.
Lonesome and indigent foreign women might take heart to note another discrepancy: they are still allowed to marry Cambodian men.
Sceptics believe that without a social safety net in the countryside the system will merely persuade indigent farmers to sell up cheaply to big agricultural conglomerates.
