half of america lives officially at poverty-level

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That's only because government intervention keeps people from dying in the streets.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Only half? I thought it might be higher, considering the people I live around. A lot of my family members are in or close to living in poverty as well. I was like that for a while as well, until my mom divorced my dad.

As a Socialist, I'm looking at both the Democrats and Republicans to blame. They're the same faction who differ slightly on civil issues. They're paid off by the same people. Mark my words, these Corporationists are going to send us into another depression and all Americans are going to do is fight each other instead of fighting them.

Immigration isn't a major problem as politicians make it out to be. There's several problems. One is that with new technology, jobs have been replaced by machines. For example, back in the 1920's at grocery stores, it took several people to keep track of products sold and to order more to refill inventory. Now it's automatic. You scan the product and the computer does everything. Another problem is that it's really easy, really cheap and really quick to get millions of tons of products from places like Taiwan to places like the US. Much cheaper than, lets say, paying workers a far wage and having them work in properly built factories. So the Capitalists go, "Well, screw Americans/Canadians/British/Westerners. We can just pay this 18-year-old from Bangledash $38 a month to work in a factory and ship the products back to America. Then we keep the profit." The factory is, of course, a sweat shop and it isn't structurally built to handle the mass machinery used in manufacturing. Then things like this happen (this is a link).

Don't get me wrong. The "Liberals" and "Conservatives" have been doing it together hand-in-hand, skipping into the sunset. They dangle irrelevant issues (gay marriage, abortion, immigration, gun control) in front of us and tell us to fight each other, so we don't notice them snogging Apple, Inc in the corner. FYI, they're doing a lot worse things than snogging Apple. You should see what they're doing to S.S. I'll have to find the video where economist Richard Wolff talks about it.



pov·er·ty
/ˈpävərtē/
Noun
The state of being extremely poor.
The state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount

There are people starving and freezing. Remember the foreclosures? Occupy Wallstreet made a ruckus about it. The banks kicked thousands of people out and onto the street. A lot of them illegally! Students with $20,000+ (if lucky) worth of loans, who were promised a great job if they went to college (Ever see the movie 'Accepted'? "If you want get a good job, you go to college."), are forced to work minimum wage jobs. Jobs that were designed for high schoolers. Worse yet, they can't even declare bankruptcy and they pay outrageous amount of interest. Jobs that are just under full-time, require a college degree and pay minimum wage (aka "We'd pay you less if we could, a**hole!")

We're have more than insufficient amount of cash. We, the people, are in debt!

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Here's some videos of interest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uo3aiHBLBM
http://video.pbs.org/video/2327953844/

Did you know that half the people in the U.S. live below the median income? How about that?

ruveyn

If the average person’s wages had kept pace with the economy since the 70s, most people would be making $92,000 per year.

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... der-charts
http://www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p60-191.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/busin ... c=rss&_r=0
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=746
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/17/140554967 ... an-in-1973

You are in a serious case of denial if you really think you're not being shafted.

Real wages stopped increasing just about 1970. Since then they have stayed flat or decreased a bit. Which explains why there is so much credit card debt among middle class working families. The only way to respond to flat wages (using the inflation adjusted value of the dollar) is 1. Send the wife to work and 2. Get a piece of plastic and go into hock.

ruveyn

nobody wants to go back to living as they did before WW2 [IOW in a depression-era mode of frugality, like putting found cardboard inside shoes to patch up the sole holes].

Unfortunately, belief in the American dream has people believing they can live like their parents had - when wages and benefits were fitting for an industrial power. And thus, people live beyond their means.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

the American dream is just that, a dream, nothing more, for the working and lower-middle classes.

In my parent's day, the dream was more real for them, when that dream meant being able to live a comfortable middle class life. Unfortunately, today the American dream means the few get way ahead of everyone else. The rest of us are left in the dust, and are told it's our own fault for not having the initiative to get rich.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

^^^
the problem is, the lower classes have totally bought into this viewpoint, as expressed by some rap artist in a song, "get rich or die trying."

I thought the number was a little bit lower then that, but yes as much as some people like to ignore it poverty is an issue even in the U.S. I don't think it really has much to do with conservatives or liberals though, its probably more to do with the corporate involvement in the government.

Conservatives say that there is no poverty in the United States.

Then maybe they should get their collective heads out of their arses and take a real hard look at what their policies have done to this country.

No ****. All the links I posted showed that. Just a couple of posts ago you were in denial there was a problem.



That and unfair interest rates designed to suck you drier than dry.



You assume 1) that everyone is married and 2) that wife isn't working. Working mothers have been in the workforce since WWII. I don't know a single couple where only one partner is working and the other is a housewife/househusband. They're not common anymore. Also single people with no dependents and who are working fulltime are among the impoverished.

That's one defeatist attitude you got there. We can do a lot more than to fix the flat wages than just "working harder" (Americans are the hardest working out of all the 1st world countries and we're getting none of the benefits). The government can pull a Franklin Roosevelt and start re-implementing socialist ideals such as implementing single-payer health care system like Canada, which would help small business. We can tax imports and punish companies like Wal-Mart for abusing the welfare system by encouraging their employees to be on it. We can destroy the loopholes where the federal government takes money from the S.S. program and force them to pay back every single dollar they took out of it.

The 1% and corporations are getting their socialism with their bailouts and subsidies. We should get ours.

^^^
QFT