Poverty on increase

[Buzz]

What was McCain's stand on SS and Medicare? I forgot.

[Daiichidoku]

and what is it now?

isn't mccain an above-average flip-flopper among flip-floppers (politicians)?

[ruggbutt]

isn't mccain an above-average flip-flopper among flip-floppers

Yes he is. In fact, he's a RINO (Republican In Name Only). I didn't vote for Barack nor did I vote for John. In fact, in every election since 2000 I've voted against McCain.

[Wullie]

Senator John from AZ is not a RINO. He's just a fucking re-cycled Democrat.

[callmeslick]

Two Different Worlds
By BOB HERBERT
I didn’t notice much when a terrific storm slammed into parts of New York City on Thursday evening. I was working at my computer in a quiet apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The skies darkened and it began to rain, and I could hear thunder. But that’s all. I made a cup of coffee and kept working.
While I remained oblivious, the storm took a frightening toll in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. A woman who was trying to walk home with her 10-year-old daughter from Prospect Park in Brooklyn told me the next day that it had been the most harrowing experience of her life. “With the wind and the rain, it was like being trapped in a car wash,” she said. “And then a tree crashed down on a car right in front of us.”

They ran soaking wet up the steps of a brownstone and the owner, a stranger, let them come inside.

The winds reached tornadolike intensity. Trees were uprooted and blown into electrical power lines. Roofs were blown from buildings. One woman was killed, and several neighborhoods were devastated.

I eventually heard about it on the news.

The movers and shakers of our society seem similarly oblivious to the terrible destruction wrought by the economic storm that has roared through America. They’ve heard some thunder, perhaps, and seen some lightning, and maybe felt a bit of the wind. But there is nothing that society’s leaders are doing — no sense of urgency in their policies or attitudes — that suggests they understand the extent of the economic devastation that has come crashing down like a plague on the poor and much of the middle class.

The American economy is on its knees and the suffering has reached historic levels. Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty last year, which is more than 14 percent of the population. That is an increase of 4 million over the previous year, the highest percentage in 15 years, and the highest number in more than a half-century of record-keeping. Millions more are teetering on the edge, poised to fall into poverty.

More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor. More than 15 million children are poor.

The movers and shakers, including most of the mainstream media, have paid precious little attention to this wide-scale economic disaster.

Meanwhile, the middle class, hobbled for years with the stagnant incomes that accompany extreme employment insecurity, is now in retreat. Joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcy — pick your poison. Median family incomes were 5 percent lower in 2009 than they were a decade earlier. The Harvard economist Lawrence Katz told The Times, “This is the first time in memory that an entire decade has produced essentially no economic growth for the typical American household.”

I don’t know what it will take, maybe a full-blown depression, for policy makers to decide that they need to take extraordinary additional steps to cope with this drastic economic and employment emergency. Nothing currently on the table will turn things around in a meaningful way. We’re facing a jobs deficit of about 11 million, which is about how many new ones we’d have to create just to get our heads above water. It will take years — years — just to get employment back to where it was when the recession struck in December 2007.

If Republicans take over the policy levers, forget about it. The party of Palin, Limbaugh and Boehner — with its tax cuts for the rich and obsession with the deregulatory, free-market zealotry that brought us the Great Recession — will only accelerate the mass march into poverty.

The G.O.P. wants to further shred the safety net, wants to give corporations even greater clout over already debased workers, and wants to fatten the coffers of the already obscenely rich.

While working people are suffering the torments of joblessness, underemployment and dwindling compensation, corporate profits have rebounded and the financial sector is once again living the high life. This helps to keep the people at the top comfortably in denial about the extent of the carnage.

Millions of struggling voters have no idea which way to turn. They are suffering under the status quo, but those with any memory at all are afraid of a rerun of the catastrophic George W. Bush era. An Associated Press article, based on recent polling, summed the matter up: “Glum and distrusting, a majority of Americans today are very confident in — nobody.”

What is desperately needed is leadership that recognizes the depth and intensity of the economic crisis facing so many ordinary Americans. It’s time for the movers and shakers to lift the shroud of oblivion and reach out to those many millions of Americans trapped in a world of hurt.

[callmeslick]

I highlighted that one part to show why a chunk of the nation doesn't really feel the pain. I own stock in two different banking corporations. Both just upped their dividend. You all are seeing an economic recovery, it's just that the mechanics of the economy have been skewed so as to only benefit investors.
Newsweek had a good piece about this in the recent issue. The start of the article was about a Mott's Juice strike which came after the Mott's Corporation, despite record profits and margins, demanded an
11% pay cut from the workforce. The reason given? Company salary research showed that their workers were receiving wages higher than those in the local community, on average. Nice.

[CUDA]

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile.. private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.

This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson

[Pudfark]

Some what interesting.....Slick.

The easy questions to that are.....How many jobs do poor people create vs How many jobs the rich create? Everybody knows the answer to that.....
Why aren't the rich investing in "growth industries" that would potentially employ more folks? Now the fun begins, because they don't trust the system currently in place.
Why don't they trust the system? The system is widely believed to punish them financially, in increased costs for employees, mandatory health insurance and 1099 crap, not to mention the other liabilities of more employees. So, they do exactly what you said Slick....because there is no incentive for them to invest in the very things that will be our country's salvation and future. So, they are taking the safe way out. I say make the current investment trend less profitable in the form of increased taxes to promote investment, where it is needed.

So, the choices boil down to something like this...the poor folks need to grab their guns and rob the rich? or grab their votes and rob the rich? Or maybe, just maybe....Meaningful incentives could be placed on the table in the form of tax reduction for investment that creates new jobs and builds businesses and the punitive regulations lifted to allow this growth....

What is desperately needed is leadership that recognizes the depth and intensity of the economic crisis facing so many ordinary Americans. It’s time for the movers and shakers to lift the shroud of oblivion and reach out to those many millions of Americans trapped in a world of hurt.

This quote above, attributed to Slick, but not his words, just tickles the shit out of me....it sounds like a conversation that two gay guys might have.....after they've blown each other.....what a bunch of shit.

Old Pudfark sez: " Totally what Cuda quoted.... "

[callmeslick]

Jefferson's thinking was sound, but he didn't live to see an Industrial Revolution, nor see the United States have a major role in International affairs. In other words, his words ring very true for a limited, largely agrarian society. They have to be re-aligned for a modern, pluralistic society, in a global economy. What we have evolved that I think he would highly disapprove of is a society in which the individuals AND the government lack restraint, and a society which has allowed a very small number of citizens to control about 95% of the capital and reap essentially the same percentage of the benefits.

[callmeslick]

Pud, you're way off base, but I'm off to the movies.....will respond more fully later on this weekend.