The most (1)>>DANGEROUS threat to the United States as a whole is not Russia , the Islamic State , or even Iran . When one views poverty and income inequality they are more pervasive is erosion from with our nation. They should be viewed as a threat .Income disparity is the root cause of many social evils. Something needs to be done to address this issue. The American economy has not worked for the average family since the end of (2)>> the Clinton administration. Adjusted for
inflation, median earnings of men working full-time year-round are where they were in 1980. That’s unfair because productivity has been rising for two decades but the benefit has been confined to the already well-off. Today, income inequality in the U.S. exceeds any other democracy in the developed world. Two-thirds of American families earning less than $30,000 a year are often in crisis mode when the bills come in, but the misery is conspicuously not shared. In 1944 the top 1 percent earned 11 percent of all income. By 2012, it was 23 percent of the nation’s income. The mismatch between reward and effort makes a mockery of the American dream.According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Senator Marco Rubio says that America has “never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it.” Sure, we love a good rags-to-riches story, but perhaps we tolerate such inequality because we think these stories happen more than they actually do.
There are few "rags to riches" stories .This is a well established trend. During the last recession, wealthy people were in a position to take advantage of the downturn, for example, buying enormous amounts of real estate at rock bottom prices. They can afford to sit on the properties until the market recovers and then make a tremendous profit.Some of the middle class and poor on the other hand lose their jobs and go through their life savings, if they have any, so that when the recovery happens, they spend the rest of their working lives trying to regain houses, cars and rebuild savings and retirement. The poor end up renting the houses they once owned from the rich. The rich are simply doing what anyone with good management skills would do. This cycle happens over and over and the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer". It's almost inevitable. The Great Bush era Recession from 2007 to 2009 seems to have initiated an era of 2 percent annual growth, well below our historical average. Even prolonged low interest rates have not enticed a new consumer credit cycle. Nor have capital gains in the hands of the wealthy generated meaningful growth in spending. Though productivity has outpaced wages, it has not been that great. Right now the predictions are that productivity will stay in the low range of around 1.6 percent annual growth, even with the explosion of the digital world . The number of people living in concentrated poverty has grown staggeringly since 2000, nearly doubling from 7.2 million in 2000 to 13.8 million people by 2013—the highest figure ever recorded. This is a troubling reversal of previous trends, particularly of the previous decade of 1990 to 2000, where (3)>>Jargowsky’s own research found that concentrated poverty declined. Now the public has moved beyond the plaintive cry of “feel our pain” to the more angry pronouncement of “you are causing our pain,” as one commentator put it. The pessimism is not confined to the poorest. It is shared by many in the middle-income range. The couple who graduate from high-school to earn college degrees can expect to see their income jump by approximately $58,000 per year, but hourly real wages have stalled even for college-educated Americans, and it is only those with advanced degrees who are seeing gains. Today, domestically, income inequality is the most important issue of our generation. And the only way the gap in income inequality will lesson is if corporations place people over profits. Some criticize the President for being too professorial; for leading from behind; for not being able to work with others in Congress - whatever you think of Mr. Obama - as a patriot you have to respect the office and concede there is only so much one man or woman could do in that office -- and with a Congress that's more dysfunctional than ever- with Washington D.C. more ruled by special interest groups than ever -and with a country more uneducated and turned off to politics than ever - it's harder than ever to put faith in our elected leaders.
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1). Poverty is more Dangerous than all world enemies America could have . Its a slow creeping erosion of our Democratic values. More than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday. The percentage of Americans in poverty fell from 15 percent in 2012, the biggest such decline since the year 2000. But the level of poverty is still higher than 12.3 percent in 2006, before the recession began. (2)>>Inequality in the US has absolutely exploded since we started down this path of implementing trickle down economics in 1980- http://politicsthatwork.com/blog/inequality.php You can see at that URL what your income would be if we still had even the same- already highly unequal- distribution of income as we did even just in 1980.Then one day (in the early 1980s) things began to change rapidly in this exceptional country. The promise of a dream slowly began to fade away into a fantasy as those who rose to the top decided they liked the view and space was limited and sharing the view wasn't so ideal really.(3)>> The new Century Foundation study from Paul Jargowsky, director of the Center for Urban Research and Urban Education at Rutgers University, reveals the devastating growth of geographically concentrated poverty and its connection to race across America. To get at this, Jargowsky used detailed data on more than 70,000 Census tracts from the American Community Survey and the decennial Census to track the change in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2013. Concentrated poverty is defined as neighborhoods or tracts where 40 percent or more of residents fall below the federal poverty threshold (currently $24,000 for a family of four). The study looks at this change across the nation as a whole and within its major metropolitan areas.
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