It's time for policy makers to put American working families first. As more families drop from the middle class, the number of working families that are low-income increases. The latest Census numbers show that the percentage and number of American low-income families who are working -- yes working despite the country's significant job loss -- has increased for the third year in a row. Now, more than one in three working families has earnings below 200 percent of poverty. These families are the backbone of the economy -- caring for our children and seniors, preparing our food, working the cash registers, and keeping our homes and businesses clean. Policies at both the state and federal levels can help change this trajectory of a shrinking middle class and a growing number of working families who struggle to make ends meet.
This week, the Working Poor Families Project released a new report, Overlooked and Underpaid: Number of Low-Income Working Families Increases to 10.2 Million that provides national and state level data on the number and conditions of low-income working families in America. Using the latest U. S. Census data for 2010, the report notes that the U.S. has over 10 million working low-income families. Some of these families were formerly middle class, but pay cuts, job loss, and reduction in work hours have taken an economic toll. There are noteworthy and disturbing details in these numbers. Families with at least one minority parent are twice as likely to be low-income as white families. Also, poverty is not equally distributed across the country; geography plays an important role. In 21 states, most in the South and West, a third or more of all working families are low-income.
Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that 23 million children, more than one in three of all American children, live in these families. In just one year, from 2009 to 2010, the number of children in low-income working families increased by more than 500,000. While these children see their parents work, they also see that work doesn't pay. It's often assumed that children are poor because their parents are not working, but in 2010, more than 70 percent of all low-income children were members of working families. The sense of hope and opportunity is certainly challenged for children in low-income working families.
What can policymakers do to change this decline for working families? We know that higher education and skills result in lower unemployment and higher average earnings. Our knowledge-based economy and the economy of the future, requires higher skills. A national study forecasts that 63 percent of all job openings occurring by 2018 will require workers to have some level of post-secondary education.
Policy makers can help expand the number of low-skilled adults who enroll in education and skills development programs and obtain post-secondary credentials that can facilitate economic mobility; eliminating the ability to benefit provision of the Pell Grant Program is a policy going the wrong way as it will limit economic opportunity for parents in working families. Policy makers can also work to improve wages, benefits, and supports like child and health care for low-income working families. Finally, we know that more good jobs are needed. State and federal officials can stimulate the creation of more good jobs. American policy makers and families need to structure a future that increases opportunity and supports economic mobility. We can not wait for an economic recovery to invest in our families.
Your sugardaddies that are the basis for all of these destructive projects are also falling.
Time to learn to think. Time to learn to create things, ideas of value.
Time to realize that by helping such a large part of our culture, you are actually destroying.
Time to put away this "Progressive Persecution Posse" and get on with a *productive* life. No more grants. No more "movements". We can't afford such luxuries.
Any minimum wage that is pegged at less than a living wage is nothing more than government-sanctioned theft committed by the businesses of this country, and it's not just the low-wage workers that are being stolen from, it's every taxpayer, because often wages are SO low that full-time workers still qualify for government assistance.
Splendidly said.
There is a minimum value to a person giving up a *HUGE* chunk of their life and time -- which is irrecoverable -- to the benefit and enrichment of another.
That value, from an ethical standpoint, *MUST* be livable, or it is stealing and slavery.
The complete, total lack of a trace of human ethics leaves me speechless. All that matters is money. Humanity counts for *ZERO*. At least the Religious Right has a *LITTLE* feeling for humanity.
They literally see human beings as meaningless things whose sole purpose is to serve an ownership/controlling class. They literally see human beings existing only to work, all day, all evening, all their lives, and doing so to the service of this controlling class. Nothing else matters -- we are taught that we have a lifetime responsibility to work for *THEM* -- while they have *NO* reciprocal responsibility to the rest of us whatsoever.
That is the mindset of the worst plantation owner.
Capitalism was working great when it had a decent, human ethical system guiding it. That ethical system is gone, replaced by something cold, empty, and mechanical.
Keep this up, people, and if you think Occupy is a pain in the rear, wait until you have to deal with a mob 80,000,000 strong every day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/nyregion/senator-carl-kruger-pleads-guilty-in-corruption-case.html?pagewanted=2&hp#
2 gay gynacologists (hmm) & a corrupt ny senator
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10082010.html
Paul Craig Roberts: America's Third World Economy
"For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services.
This economy was taking the place of the old “dirty fingernail” economy of industry and manufacturing. Education would retrain the workforce, and we would move on to a higher level of prosperity.
Time after time I reported that there was no sign of the “New Economy” jobs, but that the old economy jobs were disappearing. The only net new jobs were in lowly paid domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, health care and social assistance (mainly ambulatory health care services), and, before the bubble burst, construction.
The facts, issued monthly by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had no impact on the ”New Economy” propaganda. Economists continued to wax eloquently about how globalism was a boon for our future.
The millions of unemployed today are blamed on the popped real estate bubble and the subprime derivative financial crisis. However, the US economy has been losing jobs for a decade. As manufacturing, information technology, software engineering, research, development, and tradable professional services have been moved offshore, the American middle class has shriveled. The ladders of upward mobility that made American an “opportunity society” have been dismantled..."
many frugal hard working less privideged struggle from pay check to paycheck. but no they are bums cos they didnt have your advantages &/or luck
I bet many former middle class repubs have become more empathetic now they are on the bottom rung.
Housing, transportation, heating, education, and medical costs have all continued to increase
as wages remain stagnant.
The majority of the nation's poor are children. And the vast majority are white.
Have you EVER been poor?
Working poor?
Sometimes people have goodies from when they were working OR making better wages.
Sometimes they save up.
Sometimes they buy on credit.
Many cell phones are cheap.
Some people scrimp to pay for cable and internet....since there is no money for movies, etc.
Often several adults in the family are underemployed.....family and friends are doubling up because there isn't enough money to live separately.
Eat out?
Cheap take out Chinese?
A take out pizza once in a while?
Even a beer or two occasionally?
Of course, the right wing think tanks have no idea what it is like to live in poorly maintained apartments, deal with roaches, put up with drug dealers and prosti tutes who don't hide like in better neighborhoods.......
The right wing think tank experts have NO idea what it is like to live in the inner city or in some poor rural area.
****They talk about the poor, most are the working poor, like they have any idea what the life is like.
From one who KNOWS (been there, done that) those "experts" do NOT know what they are talking about most of the time.
Notice it says "WORKING poor." To hear it from the RepubliBillys these people are all lazy. Most of the working poor vote for RepubliBillys themselves and as such, vote for the very people who constantly humiliate and ridicule them.
Question for the working poor of the Republican party (in the SOUTH esp)..when are you going to quit supporting them and let them know you are NOT going to take it anymore?
Imagine his suprise when the backlash started and he realized that the majority of those welfare recipients where his FORMER GOP supporters!
To the modern GOP, work is the *LEAST* favored way to make money.
If the modern GOP had its way.....
Inheritances, even those approaching a billion dollars in liquid assets, would fall into the recipient's lap tax-free -- while the working stiff continues to pay Federal, State, and FICA taxes.
Capital gains would be realized tax-free, while the working stiff would continue to pay Federal, State, and FICA taxes out of his hard-earned paycheck.
Dividends would be realized tax-free, while the working stiff would continue to pay Federal, State, and FICA taxes on the sweat of his brow.
The moral of the story is: if the modern GOP had it's way....
Work for your money, pay taxes on it. Have it fall into your lap without lifting a finger, and you get it tax free.
(But never fear, we'll still tax your unemployment benefits. That privileged treatment of un-worked income was written to benefit the elite class.)
Thank you for writing this.
The problem isn't so much capitalism per se -- it's the horrid, amoral system of assumptions that so many of us have been duped into incorporating into our current *practice* of capitalism.
The worker is evidently not a human being to whom a reciprocal moral responsibility exists, but is merely an asset, a "human resource," that exists solely to produce for the controlling/owning class, in exchange for as little as we'll take -- in an artificially depressed labor market.
The "corporations' *only* obligation is to themselves and their shareholders" is taught as Gospel in so many business schools. But it is a profoundly amoral concept that completely eliminates the "humanity factor" from economic metrics.
When combined with the fact that the working class is being told that *WE* have a "moral responsibility" to protect the interests of the controlling/owning class, it's a complete racket -- we shoulder *ALL* of the moral responsibility in our economy, and they shoulder none.