After reviewing the latest economic news and the Oxford study conducted on the poverty level, I think that the only appropriate responses are as follows. Congratulations! You ignorant liberals who vote based on envious idle-minded delusions of “fair” collectivist societies have been living in an alternate reality. But now it is time to wake up, that is if it’s not too late, because your allergy to truth and reason has destroyed the middle-class.
Never mind that there has never – ever – been an instance when your fantasy has become a successful reality, but you just continue to blindly hold to your imagined utopia while real Americans suffer. I have been sounding the alarm on the predictable evaporation of the middle-class under the nation’s most leftist president in history. If you were to read any number of the columns I have written immediately after the release of the BLS monthly jobs reports over the last two years, then you would know how and why there are only two types of jobs in the Obama economy: 1) “professional” high-income jobs (i.e., for rich people) and, 2) “service” sector jobs that are mostly part-time (i.e., serving rich people).
The data released by the Associated Press revealed that 4 out of 5 American adults struggles with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, “a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.” I understand it is not entirely your fault ignorant liberal, because the media incredibly continues to refuse to cover the economic news truthfully.
There are three reasons given by the report for the predictable economic catastrophe that results from collectivism. USA Today wrote verbatim, “Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.”
Firstly, 2 out of the 3 reasons are not reasons at all, or causes per se, they are results; results of progressive policies.
The only actual reason that was given – globalization – is a major cause for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Decades ago, liberal internationalists resolved to give away American wealth and economic potential to less fortunate countries with the misguided logic that the world would be a safer place if we give away our money, or rather your money, because it certainly didn’t belong to the politicians. Beginning with the Marshall Plan following World War II and culminating with NAFTA, progressive politicians have sacrificed large sectors of the American economy that were the engines of traditional middle-class producing jobs, such as the manufacturing sectors.
As the gap between the rich and poor grew wider, which again was a result not a cause, politicians increased reliance on the welfare nanny state even though the tax base reduced (i.e., Detroit). That gap saw a larger than usual expansion rate following the subprime mortgage crisis, another inevitable byproduct of progressive policies backed by both parties. Instead of breaking the cycle of madness and reversing the rapid decline of the American dream, you dig just dig our grave faster and deeper.
President Obama, while he was on vacation nonetheless, announced he was going to unleash the already rabid EPA on the coal industry. Again, congratulations, you saved a squirrel, but you destroyed families who see no light at the end of the tunnel.
“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, VA, a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.” But I guess to you liberals think drugs are cool anyway, so that doesn’t translate into the same message of despair that it does to me. Perhaps some new confidence indexes will.
The Conference Board, an industry group, said its index of consumer attitudes slipped to 80.3 from an upwardly revised 82.1 in June. The drop was not expected by economists. Gallup, too, reported that their Economic Confidence Index is falling back down to alarming but now normal levels in your Obama economy, after briefly pulling their pants up for a month. Americans’ net rating of current economic conditions was -16 last week, representing 19% who say the economy is “excellent” or “good” and 35% who say it is “poor.” This rating is on par with -14 from the prior week, but is the lowest since early May. Consumers’ perceptions of current conditions have fallen by seven points since early June.
Buchanan County, which is in southwest Virginia, is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24%. The county is mostly white, as are 99% of its poor.
More than 90% of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. Now that Barack Obama has destroyed much of the coal industry residents get by on odd jobs and government checks. If the goal was social retribution, then again, I say congratulations genius.
Salyers’ daughter, Renee Adams, 28, grew up in the region and has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend’s disability checks to get by. Salyers said it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn’t even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5. Many of us who have children understand exactly where she is coming from, especially those who remember the prosperity of a once free (at least more free than it is now) American economy.
But for those of us who aren’t mentally handicapped by the mental disorder that is liberalism, we know what awaits the next generation, our children. Even CNN opined on the “mooching millennials” we are raising today, a true portrait of idleness by many who wouldn’t take a job even if they could find one in the Obama economy. “The U.S. has more than 2 million missing households, thanks largely to 18 to 34-year-olds stuck living with the parentals,” they noted. Without this generation prospering enough to purchase homes, the housing market will collapse again, because the Fed and the FHA cannot hold it up indefinitely.
Because of the government artificially propping up the sector, despite no one having money to buy them, home prices in 20 major U.S. metropolitan markets climbed 2.4% in May on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller report. Prices were up 12.2% from the year prior, the biggest jump since March 2006. Normally that would be positive news, but when an entire generation is forced to live in their parent’s basement it cannot be sustained.
Gallup recently reported that fewer young adults are holding full-time jobs this year than last. It is a concerning trend that has become customary under Obama, but now we are even seeing the negative trend include those with higher education. That should and will make for an enormous student loan bubble, another “fair” but false promise from big government champion Barack Obama.
The problem with the next generation of intelligentsia is cultural as much as it is structural. Maybe it comes from being promised rewards without results, but in the U.S., higher educational attainment is not related to workplace engagement. In fact, American workers with a college or postgraduate degree are less likely than those with a high school diploma or less to be engaged at work.
College-educated American workers’ lower engagement mainly stems from being less likely to strongly agree with the statement “at work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” Are you kidding me? There is your stupid esoteric “feel good” mentality come to manifest in a little thing we conservatives like to call “the real world.” You do a job, which is a blessing to have by the way, and you do it well because that is a direct reflection of your character, integrity and bond.
Ivory Tower liberalism seems to take pride in attaching an unsubstantiated backward stigma to the traditional values rightist population in this country, but there is nothing forward about progressivism, whatsoever. In my research on the prosperity of America, it was evident to anyone who picks up a book that secular progressivism is killing productivity in this country. In the traditional Protestant ethic, it was glorious “calling” to work and labor, no matter the trade, and it pleased God to fulfill your work-duty obligation to Him, yourself and society. Now that we have progressed past the need for God, and outright mock the universal principles of religion, how is it working out for us? Read a book for crying out loud.
Hardship is growing particularly fast among whites, based on several measures conducted in the survey. Pessimism among whites about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63% of whites called the economy “poor.”
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150% of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79%. Marriage rates, even though scoffed at by progressives, are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones. William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty finds a real cause for concern as far as societal unrest. “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” Wilson said.
Still buying the “Barack Obama as the Great Unifier” garbage?
For those of you who do not believe you are delusional and perhaps just buy into the lies you think are reasonable, let us look at two very different economic philosophies and their results.
Now I know you have been told that this recession was deeper than average recessions. Firstly, that’s not true in and of itself, but it wouldn’t matter even if it was, because the deeper the recession the more robust the recovery. It’s economics 101, even for progressives who mistakenly think markets operate in a bubble. Furthermore, Reagan had a deeper long-term unemployment problem to overcome. He did.
Despite nearly a trillion dollars spent each year on welfare, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15% of the population. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41% of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed “the invisible poor” by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60% of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Incredibly, even the man who crunched the numbers is clueless as to the solution, so don’t think you are the only one in the ignorant boat. The numbers come from Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them’, it’s an issue of ‘us’,” says Mark Rank. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.” Another government program? No wonder Gallup released the findings on our young adult workforce that they did. If the mindset of our higher educators is the same as the definition of insanity, then you have about as much chance at the truth as an inner-city black male has at graduating from Harvard.
If you would stop being a cowardly, self-centered superficial individual for a sec, you may be able to answer the following questions truthfully. Do you really think Barack Obama and his collectivists friends give a damn about you, or is his agenda really just to control your behavior? Do you really think Nancy Pelosi cares about your job or “reproductive rights,” or just corrupt union contracts and those who profit from the abortion industry that fund her campaigns? Do you really think Rev. Al Sharpton cares about dead black teenagers, or is it a way to gain notoriety to sell more copies of his new books?
I will leave you will some more data to mull over and you decide if you want to break free of the ignorance, or just remain a psychological slave willing to let your children’s future go down the drain because you are too much of a coward to take responsibility for your own.
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In 2011, that snapshot showed 12.6% of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17% risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23% during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8% to 17.7%.
Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79%, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76% enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85% of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
Among the findings:
—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11% as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23%.
—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30% or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17% of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13% in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43% to 37%, while the share of Latino children went from 38% to 39%.
—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
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Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted at the University of Chicago. Just 45% say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49% say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67% of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36% of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36% of those non-college whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. “In 2016, GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for ‘the middle class’ and ‘average Americans,'” Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
“They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them,” Goeas said.
