A household must earn $37,105 a year to afford the national average two-bedroom fair-market rent of $928 a month. A full-time worker would have to make $17.84 an hour to afford the average 2 bedroom if no more than the recommended guideline of 30 percent of income is spent on housing.
The average American family of four spends 20% of their income on food and drink. (Roughly $8,000 per year.)
Clothing accounts for another $2000... Transportation another $8000... Entertainment (to keep your mind off of how poor you are) another $2500...
Hey, we're at $32260 - and we haven't even thought about medical insurance, or a host of other things people spend their hard-earned money on! That's $15.50 an hour! If you make less than that you are poor, and, without medical coverage, that poverty will lead to an early death!
A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call "the poor" who struggle to survive in the shadow of the over consumption and waste of that top one per cent.
Some facts: early in 2011, the US Census Bureau reported that 14.3 per cent of the population, or 47m people - one in six Americans - were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19m people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.
Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp programme, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don't tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959 and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the US poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.
Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them "debt poor". Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.
Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it's clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7 per cent in 2001 to 12.5 per cent in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49 per cent higher in the US than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.
In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilisation to reduce labour costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labour Board decisions became far less favourable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.
Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labour's share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn't earn even a poverty-level livelihood - and even that's not the whole of it. The poor and the programmes that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.
Corporate Capitalism would have every American worker living like a slave, the minimum wage as the norm, living in a cardboard box, eating one meal a day at MacDonald's, poorly educated, and without adequate medical treatment... That's the trend. That's where this country is headed...
Is this the life that you want for your children? Your family? Your self?
If not, you had better wake up.
And, that's the Truth!
No comments:
Post a Comment