Are you better off now?
By way of C.E. Petro, Mother Jones has a report on some statistics entitled "How the poor get dinged at every turn." Here is a random sampling:
(And yes, I realize some of these examples date back to the Clinton era and before. But the current single-party government has had five years to fix all those horrible Clinton mistakes. What's taking so long?)
Among the working poor, 13% of income is spent on commuting if public transportation is used, 21% if a private vehicle is used.And so on. What's even more disturbing is how many working-class Americans who are hardest hit by failed right-wing conservative economic policies keep voting against their own interests, especially here in the Southern Red States.
Workers who earn $45,000 or more spend 2% of their income on commuting.
Since 1983, college tuition has risen 115%. The maximum Pell Grant for low- and moderate-income college students has risen only 19%.
Nationwide, the number of payday lending outlets has risen 11,000% since 1990.
The average annual interest rate on a payday loan is more than 400%, costing borrowers $3.4 billion a year.
(And yes, I realize some of these examples date back to the Clinton era and before. But the current single-party government has had five years to fix all those horrible Clinton mistakes. What's taking so long?)
1 Comments:
$23,776 The average yearly income of the soldiers killed in Iraq.$45,000, the tax break given to someone earning 1 million dollars yearly. Less than 0.1% of these millionare's children serve in the U.S. military yet they continue to get the rewards, why? Please check these numbers for accuracy, I believe they are estimates and I haven't been able to get exact numbers. Another thought: How come you never hear about the 1405 Texans that were murdered in 2005? Thats more than all the military deaths in Iraq in the same time period. Let's fix our country before we fix other countries. Still, I digress....
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