Drazzil wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 6:45 pm
I think this is going to be a huge Huge HUGE topic in the upcoming midterm elections. It shows the bare faced cowardice and stupidity of the Democrats. We have one party bent on destroying "democracy" and another party that colludes with the GOP to let it happen.
Michael Moore wrote something along the lines of "The two party system is like two 300 lb gorilla's pounding you in the ass, only one wears a mask and whispers "I love you" into your ear when they do it"
This right here is why you can't turn out more then fifty percent of the population to vote.
No amount of hair on fire dire predictions about "sav our democracy plz!!!11!!" from the Democrats is going to get people to turn out and vote if the Donothing's keep... well. Doing NOTHING to help people who work for a living.
The
US poverty rate dropped from 13.9% before the pandemic to a projected 7.7% thru the end of this year, and child poverty fell from a projected 30.1% to just 5.6%. That's not nothing.
However...
The report finds that by the end of 2021, governments at the federal and state levels will have plowed more than $1 trillion dollars in benefits into the bank accounts of low-income Americans, far more than the $237 billion they paid out in 2018.
“The average person below poverty is getting almost two and a half times more from the government in 2021, than they did in 2018,” Wheaton said. “And so that really makes a difference.”
The majority of the additional support injected into the economy this year is expected to disappear in the near term. Stimulus checks have been distributed and no additional round of payments is on the horizon; expanded unemployment insurance is scheduled to sunset by later this year -- and has already been canceled in some states; likewise, expanded SNAP payments are ending. Most of the subsidy programs were financed through deficit spending.
Capitalism's dirty little secret is that it needs a large underclass in order to function. People won't take shitty jobs if they aren't faced with hunger and homelessness.
“Often, we think of poverty as an inevitable social problem; but this is indicating how it's actually a policy choice in many ways,” said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a professor in the LaFollette School of Public Affairs and the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At the most basic level, she said, the major lesson here is simple: “Policy works. If we give folks money, they will end up above the poverty line. That, I think, is the most fundamental lesson.”
Indivar Dutta-Gupta, the co-executive director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law School, agreed, saying, “The central takeaway from the Urban Institute report...is that poverty is a choice, but not by the people who experience it so much as it is by national policymakers.”
We obviously can't afford to extend all of the pandemic support indefinitely, but now we have some very good data on what works best. And "what works best" seems to be the libertarian ideal of just giving people money and letting them work it out for themselves. Washington (both parties) needs to define the optimum level of poverty and dole out just enough money to maintain it.
We should get a good look at the Dem reconciliation bill very soon. Let's reserve judgment until we see it.
