According to census data released this month, 3.5 million Americans were able to raise their chins above the poverty line last year. More than seven years after the recession ended, employers are finally being compelled to reach deeper into the pools of untapped labor, creating more jobs, especially among retailers, restaurants and hotels, and paying higher wages to attract workers and meetnewminimum wage requirements.
“It all came together at the same time,” said Diane Swonk, an independent business economist in Chicago. “Lots of employment and wages gains, particularly in the lowest-paying end of the jobs spectrum, combined with minimum-wage increases that started to hit some very large population areas.”
Government programs — likeSocial Security, the earned-income tax credit and food stamps — have kepttens of millions from sinking into povertyyear after year. But a main driver behind the impressive 1.2 percentage point decline in the poverty rate, the largest annual drop since 1999, was that the economy finally hit a tipping point after years of steady, if lukewarm, improvement.
Here’s something for Republican presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio. Forget lying about welders making more money than philosophers, that is just a lie and you know it. Instead, tell your people that they could make more money if they quit their jobs and beg. Not only would that fit the Republican platform of austerity, but you could be telling the truth for a change.
A panhandler outside Grand Central Terminal says he rakes in up to $200 an hour from kind-hearted New Yorkers.
And the 43-year-old former theater stagehand is only one of a legion of beggars in the city hauling in big bucks and a smorgasbord of food doing nothing but sitting on the sidewalk with hands out.
“On a Friday morning, I make $400 in two hours,’’ said Will Andersen, who was with his 9-year-old dog, Rizzo, on East 42nd Street between Vanderbilt and Madison avenues on Tuesday.
As Andersen was talking to The Post, another beggar told him gleefully, “I got three breakfast sandwiches today! And they were all meat! I’m putting on pounds out here!”
The beggars’ comments came a day after Police Commissioner Bill Bratton urged New Yorkers to simply not give if they want to get vagrants off the streets.
He is a Republican Representative from California named, Tom McClintock. And in an interview with C-SPAN on Thursday, McClintock went there with his Republican ideology in public, saying that the minimum wage is for “minorities,” teenagers and other unskilled people no work experience. And those people do not deserve more than $7 an hour.
He was answering a question from the host who asked if he would support Mitt Romney in 2016 seeing that Romney has flipped and is now calling for a raise in the minimum wage. Yes folks, Romney is now pushing to raise the minimum wage! The New York Times reports that Romney is vowing a campaign to “end the scourge of poverty” if he runs for president a third time, has backed raising the minimum wage over the wishes of congressional leaders.
“It’s not supposed to support a family. The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history. That’s how you get into the job market, that’s how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion.”
“If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable,” McClintock says. “That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy.”
Yeah, she grew up poor alright. So poor that Sen. Joni Ernst, the Republican Senator who gave the Republican’s official response to the State of The Union Address, said that as a kid, she had to put “plastic bread bags” over her “one good pair of shoes” to keep them from getting wet when it rained.
Reports now shows that Senator Ernst family collected almost half a million dollars in farm subsidies from the United States government.
Farm subsidy records indicate that the freshman senator’s father, Richard Culver, has received $38,395 in commodity subsidies and conservation payments, with all but $12 of the money being used for support of his corn crops. Ernst’s uncle, Dallas Culver, has reportedly received $250,000 in federal corn subsidies and $117,141 in additional aid. And her paternal grandfather, Harold Culver, got an additional $57,479 in aid between 1995 and 2001.
Ernst did not mention her family’s use of federal programs during her response to the State of the Union. Instead, she said she was raised “simply” and taught to live within her means.
“I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry,” she said. “But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet. Our parents may not have had much, but they worked hard for what they did have.”
She later promised that the new Republican-controlled Congress would “propose ideas that aim to cut wasteful spending and balance the budget.”
And the Republicans rejoice. They have been working for this outcome for decades!
Middle- and low-income Americans are facing far higher state and local taxes than the wealthy, according to a new report assessing tax data from all 50 states.
In all, the analysis by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) finds that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).
ITEP researchers say the incongruity derives from state and local governments’ reliance on sales, excise and property taxes rather than on more progressively structured income taxes that increase rates on higher earnings. They argue that the tax disconnect is helping create the largest wealth gap between the rich and middle class that has ever been recorded in American history.
“In recent years, multiple studies have revealed the growing chasm between the wealthy and everyone else,” Matt Gardner, executive director of ITEP, said. “Upside-down state tax systems didn’t cause the growing income divide, but they certainly exacerbate the problem. State policymakers shouldn’t wring their hands or ignore the problem. They should thoroughly explore and enact tax reform policies that will make their tax systems fairer.”
The number of homeless residents in New York City, the largest city in the United States, reached a record high this month at more than 56,000 people. Halfway around the world, another metropolis recently hit a homeless record of its own: just 1,697 people are currently homeless in Tokyo, also its country’s largest city and the most populated city in the world, a record low since surveys began in 2002, ThinkProgress reports.
What’s even more surprising than the discrepancy in homeless populations between the two cities is the fact that Tokyo, at 13.4 million people, is larger than New York City (8.4 million people) and Los Angeles (3.9 million people) combined. While the rate of homelessness in New York is currently 67 for every 10,000 people, in Tokyo there is just one homeless individual for every 10,000 city residents.
From 2011 to 2012, the number of New Yorkers who were at or near poverty levels remained constant at 46%. According to a new report [PDF] released by the City’s Center for Economic Opportunity andobtained by the Times, “nearly half of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a figure that describes people who are struggling to get by.”
Being gainfully employed does not necessarily keep you from “struggling to get by”: 17% of families with a full time worker remained in poverty, as did 5.2% of families with two full time workers.
Mayor de Blasio’s first deputy mayor Anthony Shorris says that the new administration “got elected almost entirely on this question,” and vowed to fight “this stubborn undercurrent” with paid sick leave, a living wage law, municipal ID cards, and universal pre-K.
The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit.
Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.
“So many of these Fousey videos try to portray people as bad or heartless if they don’t stop and help anyone, but like seriously, people have their own problems to worry about and their own mouths or families mouths to feed… they can’t go giving money to every beggar they see. You can’t judge someone based on the fact of whether or not they give money to the poor. Good on the people who DO help, but nothing wrong with the people who don’t.”
That was a comment from one Anna Kruger, left on the latest YouTube video from FouseyTUBE. The video in question was originally based on one from Europe, which highlighted the best parts of human nature by showing the ways in which many stopped to help a similar homeless child posed on a very similar street. But Fousey found something very different when he set up the same film in America — the one place on Earth whose front-door sign reads “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”
One would think that most Americans, just out of simple human kindness and concern would stop for a moment to help this “homeless” child — or even to ask him what he was up to, or where his parents were. But you would be wrong. Fousey found that most people didn’t even give him a second glance. And those who did kept walking. The total take for the day: $2.19.
There is always a new war for these Republicans to engage in, but rest assured, you will never, never, never, ever, ever see a Republican war on tax loopholes for the rich, or subsidies to the rich, or anything involving the rich. But if it benefits the poor, they declare war!
Republicans never miss the opportunity to tell you that poor people are leaches, sucking the life from the economy with their greed through the welfare system. But they never mention their millionaire friends and businesses, who are milking the system even more than the pocket change going to the poor.
State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.
Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.
Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.
The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.
It’s about a sad little boy who didn’t want a school lunch. He wanted his lunch in a brown paper bag just like all the other boys and girls who got that brown paper bag of love from their parents.
“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”
The problem? This never happened. Its from a 2011 book called The Invisible Thread. So, Ryan gets four Pinocchios.
In this case, apparently, the story was too good to check. We appreciate [Ryan] is regretful now. But a simple inquiry would have determined that the person telling the story actually is an advocate for the federal programs that Ryan now claims leaves people with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” So he also earns Four Pinocchios.
It seems that when Chris Christie’s mentor asked this question – “is that what you want in your president?”- he was not only talking about Christie’s possible involvement in the BridgeGate crisis. It is quite possible that he got a glimpse of this report.
Poverty in New Jersey continued to grow even as the national recession lifted, reaching a 52-year high in 2011, according to a report released today.
The annual survey by Legal Services of New Jersey found 24.7 percent of the state’s population — 2.1 million residents — was considered poor in 2011. That’s a jump of more than 80,000 people — nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels.
“This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation,” said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help to low-income residents in civil cases. “This is the worst that it’s been since the 1960 Census.”
And it may get worse: The report warned Census figures for 2012 to be released this month may be higher. Those numbers are expected to show some of the impact from Hurricane Sandy, which took a bite out of the state’s economy and destroyed a large amount of affordable housing.
The numbers for New Jersey — one of the wealthiest states in the nation — mirror a national trend. In 2011, the federal poverty rate was the largest it had been in 18 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“The Great Recession was the worst major economic event since the early ’30s,” Miller said. “It’s taken longer for the U.S. to come out of it.”
The report — the seventh issued by Legal Services — defines being poor in New Jersey as a family of three making less than $37,060. That’s twice the federal poverty rate because New Jersey’s cost of living is among the highest in the nation.
The report found:
• A record high of more than 630,000 children — 31.2 percent — lived in a household defined as poor.
• The percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds living in poverty rose from 26.9 in 2007 to 32.8 in 2011.
• Of families headed by single mothers, 22 percent were poor compared to 3.6 percent of families headed by a married couple.
• African-Americans and Hispanics had poverty rates at least three times higher than whites.
• Boosted by the consistency of Social Security payments, the percentage of elderly who were poor dropped from 26.7 in 2007 to 26.2 in 2011.
• Six counties — Passaic, Cumberland, Hudson, Essex, Atlantic and Salem — had more than 30 percent of their population living in poverty in 2011.
• Among cities, nearly 65 percent of Camden residents lived in poverty, and 79 percent of children lived in poor households. Poverty topped 50 percent in Passaic, Lakewood, Paterson, Trenton and Newark.
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