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The reality is that the economic elite in this country control the media (and government for that matter), they fund the think-tanks and push for a narrative that constantly advocates for their economic interests. Why? Because they make up only 1% of the population. They don't have the voting numbers, so they use their immense wealth to manipulate a huge portion of the population to support their agenda and vote on their behalf.
I'll keep reading the link because I am interested in what this UN rep had to say. But this stood out almost immediately from Paragraph 2:
The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world
Difficult to take the report seriously after reading that.................
The U.S. does have one of the most unequal societies, so I don't know what you mean.
The U.S. also now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.
The United States has the highest child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world.
"Then there are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market."
I wonder why the UN suddenly is taking an interest in American poverty.
They didnt seem to care much during the last 8 years, and its not like it has suddenly gotten worse.
It has gotten worse.
"In 1981, the top 1 percent of adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50 percent.
Declining wages at the lower end of the economic ladder make it harder for people to save for times of crisis or to get back on their feet. A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker, often employed in a dead-end job, falls below the poverty threshold for a family of three and often has to rely on food stamps."
The current tax bill promises to further exacerbate the problem by providing generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, modest tax cuts for many middle-class families and decreased spending on programs that help the poor, which currently constitute only 1.5 percent of federal outlays."
The poverty rate is actually just a measure of income distribution and not poverty. A bs statistic.
Are you saying poor people aren't poor? Like the people in Alabama with raw sewage in their backyards and suffering from hookworm, a third-world disease, thought to have already been eradicated in developed nations?
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States, and documented "homelessness, unsafe sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor.
The rise in poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and women, but also large swaths of white Americans.
The report concluded that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality “are shockingly at odds with [the United States’] immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.”
From the report;
"I have been struck by the extent to which caricatured narratives about the purported innate differences between rich and poor have been sold to the electorate by some politicians and media, and have been allowed to define the debate. The rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic, and the drivers of economic success. The poor are wasters, losers, and scammers. As a result, money spent on welfare is money down the drain. To complete the picture we are also told that the poor who want to make it in America can easily do so: they really can achieve the American dream if only they work hard enough.
The reality that I have seen, however, is very different. It is a fact that many of the wealthiest citizens do not pay taxes at the rates that others do, hoard much of their wealth off-shore, and often make their profits purely from speculation rather than contributing to the overall wealth of the American community. Who then are the poor? Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface. The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’. The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks.
The poor people I met from among the 40 million living in poverty were overwhelmingly either persons who had been born into poverty, or those who had been thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages, or discrimination in the job market."
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States, and documented "homelessness, unsafe sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor.
The rise in poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and women, but also large swaths of white Americans.
The report concluded that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality “are shockingly at odds with [the United States’] immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.”
From the report;
"I have been struck by the extent to which caricatured narratives about the purported innate differences between rich and poor have been sold to the electorate by some politicians and media, and have been allowed to define the debate. The rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic, and the drivers of economic success. The poor are wasters, losers, and scammers. As a result, money spent on welfare is money down the drain. To complete the picture we are also told that the poor who want to make it in America can easily do so: they really can achieve the American dream if only they work hard enough.
The reality that I have seen, however, is very different. It is a fact that many of the wealthiest citizens do not pay taxes at the rates that others do, hoard much of their wealth off-shore, and often make their profits purely from speculation rather than contributing to the overall wealth of the American community. Who then are the poor? Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface. The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’. The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks.
The poor people I met from among the 40 million living in poverty were overwhelmingly either persons who had been born into poverty, or those who had been thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages, or discrimination in the job market."
Are you saying poor people aren't poor? Like the people in Alabama with raw sewage in their backyards and suffering from hookworm, a third-world disease, thought to have already been eradicated in developed nations?
I am saying the poverty rate is simply based on a percentage of median national income so it cannot be used to compare nations poverty problem. Nor does someone making 20k in NYC live at the same standard as someone making 20k in Biloxi.
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