500 bucks is alot of money when you are poor, at least Bush did something for us.
Corporate greed. Deregulation. Sell out of jobs. A desire to continue using low paid illegal workers to boost the numbers in service jobs. A debt of trillions...TRILLIONS..of dollars with suggestions of forcing the middle and lower classes to pay a military tax to pay it off - instead of taxing the top income earners and ceasing all offshore tax free accounts. Screwed the seniors by increasing their medicare rates via private corporations, cutting back on education and health services - including veterans, so that now 25% are homeless (great patriots our government) - the list goes on and on. We won't bother with all the lying, the greed ie Blackwater, Haliburton...occupation and destruction of another country for oil and on and on.
A great suggestion - for everyone in the USA that supports the war in Iraq (which seems to be linked somehow to supporting the troops) - I think there should be a box that you tick off on your income taxes. It should say - 'do you support our troops? - if so - please check this box to have your taxes increased by 10% per year as a reflection of that support. By checking this box, any future refunds will be deposited into our military funds - and thank you for your contribution'.
How many 'patriots' will there be out there in the big leagues do you think?
The report below was from 2003 - it's gotten far worse now than it was then - last month's report showed that 30 million people in the USA went without food. They've torn down all the low income apartments in LA now and are replacing only 28% of those for low income - the rest will be at a cost of about $450,000. a condo. The number of people without the ability to pay for health insurance now runs close to 50 million and 1 out of every 31 people in the USA is either in prison or on parole. Thats about 5 million in total......
For further proof that wealthy Americans are getting richer while the poor multiply, watch for a report by the Census Bureau on Sept. 26 that will show the poverty rate and income gap rising. A preliminary survey by the Republican-led federal bureau reported earlier this month that some 1.4 million more Americans fell into poverty last year. About 12.4 percent of all Americans - almost 35 million people - live under the federal poverty rate, which was up from 11.7 percent in 2001.Under President Clinton, the U.S. poverty rate dropped from 15.1 percent in 1993 to 11.3 percent in 2000, close to the record low of 11.1 set in 1973. In the initial year of the Bush regime, the poverty rate climbed for the first time in eight years. With tax cuts for the wealthy and cruel budget cuts for social safety net programs, some believe the poverty rate for 2002 is really closer to the Bush I regime figure, that the Republicans are playing with figures and that the bureau's estimates fall far short of reality.
Some 12.2 million children - or 17 percent - lived in poverty last year. Many people in the U.S. love to beat their chests and call their country the best in the world, but the fact is that the child poverty rate in their nation is among the highest of major industrialized countries. I don't know about you, but that's not a fact of which this American is proud.
Jay Shaft, editor of the Coalition For Free Thought In Media, wrote in an excellent article earlier this year that homelessness and poverty in the U.S. has grown by more than 35 percent since the end of 2000. Cities like Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago reported increases of around 50 percent between January 2001 and July 2003. Homeless shelters are overcrowded; in 2002, the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that 30 percent of all requests for shelter went unmet.
Those trends particularly increased in the first six months of 2003, as Bush's cruel budget cuts and tax increases for the poor took greater effect, Shaft wrote. Some 60 percent of new homeless cases targeted single mothers with children in 2003.
The lack of affordable housing leads the list of causes, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. The Ford administration requested more than 400,000 Section 8 vouchers to help poor families obtain housing in 1976. The Bush regime's 2003 budget request was for 34,000, despite a growth in poverty and homelessness since the 1970s.
Other causes are the continued onslaught of corporate layoffs, which have slowed only slightly this year over the torrid pace of 2001 and 2002, and the decline in value of the minimum wage, which has fallen by 25 percent since 1975. Workers with families who make the minimum wage just cannot afford the rising costs of housing, food, medical care and other necessities. More families seek governmental assistance that is dwindling.
At the same time, well-paying jobs are declining in favor of service jobs that often pay no health insurance and other benefits. Some 46 percent of the jobs with the most growth since 1994 paid less than $16,000 a year, hardly a livable wage, according to the homeless coalition.
For another look at our economic trends, see Forbes magazine's annual list of the fastest-growing companies released this month. The top spot is by a firm that produces airport security devices. The list is dominated by oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical firms, and other businesses friendly to Bush. More companies are outsourcing jobs to contractors who get no benefits. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to grow, and what is Bush and other Republican leaders doing about that? Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Another indication of Bush's inability to help the poor is that the number of Americans suffering from hunger rose from 8.5 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Soup kitchens and similar places report huge increases in needs.
Following years of decline, participation in the federal food stamp program substantially rose in 2001 and 2002. In December 2002, some 20.5 million people received food stamps, an increase of 3.6 million people from July 2000.
To make things worse for the homeless, a growing number of cities are criminalizing their very existence. Almost 70 percent of cities surveyed by the National Coalition for the Homeless passed at least one new law targeting homeless people since January 2002, according to an August 2003 coalition report.
"Instead of the compassionate responses that communities have used to save lives in the past two decades, the common response to homelessness [these days] is to criminalize the victims through laws and ordinances that make illegal life-sustaining activities that people experiencing homelessness are forced to do in public," said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless and a former homeless victim himself.