Four years ago??!! How about eight years ago? One of the great (and highly accurate) gripes about the way the Republicans run things is that since the days of Ronald Reagan their economic policies have consistently enriched the top 1% of earners while reducing the well-being of the rest of us. It isn’t a questionable assertion, but one that is easily supported with U.S. government data.
This morning’s paper carried a little AP article that went a long way, in my mind, toward pinpointing the economic woes we currently face thanks to trickle-down economics.
The Christian question to ask about the effect of economic policy is, “What does it do for the least of us?” The answer is it slaps them upside the head with an inability to meet necessary expenses. Oh well, the poor will always be with us, so that excuses it – right?!
> There has been no change in the overall poverty rate of 12.5% of the population, but more Latinos, children and foreign born Americans have joined that level.
> While the article contends that middle class incomes have “edged up” to $50,233, that rise of $665 was only from 2006 to 2007. In 2000, the median household income was $50,557. A rise in the past year to a level below that of 10 years ago doesn’t look to me like a rise at all.
> The first line of the article says that the number of people without health insurance fell by 1 million in 2007 and represents a gain in the number of insured people under G.W. Bush. It doesn’t say how many of that 1 million were insured through government programs.
I’m one of that million, but it sure wasn’t because my income increased. I just became Medicare eligible, or I still wouldn’t have any insurance. The article doesn’t say how many of the million got Medicare or Medicaid, but it does say that the increase was “largely because more people were covered through government programs”.
And now for the Whitehouse spin. These numbers, says Tony Fratto, are “definitely good news”. Sure they are. They’re good news if you want to ignore what they mean.
Yes, I’m happy to have Medicare, but I would have been happier to have been capable at some point in my life to have been able to afford health care coverage that paid for anything other than a catastrophe. It doesn’t help much to see your income rise by $665 a year if it costs you $2,500 more to live during that year. It particularly doesn’t help if that increase only brings you up to a level below where you were ten years ago. Claim all you want to that more people are insured today than last year, but the fact is that private coverage paid for by employers and individuals continues to decline while enrollment in Medicaid grows like Topsy.
You can pin all the roses you want to on that pig, but it still stinks.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry
Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi
The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle
Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR
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