Thursday, March 13, 2014

We have to change the world

According to the New York State Comptroller’s office, Wall Street firms handed out $26.7 billion in bonuses to their 165,200 employees last year, up 15 percent over the previous year. That’s their third-largest haul on record. The $26.7 billion Wall Streeters pocketed in bonuses would cover the cost of more than doubling the paychecks for all of the 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

 One in six Americans is now listed by the Census Bureau as "officially poor." But the reality is far worse. Based on wage figures, the IRS estimates that fully half the people in the richest country on earth are living in poverty.

As many as 17,000 Americans will die directly as a result of states deciding not to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, according to a new study. Researchers from Harvard University and City University of New York have estimated that between 7,115 and 17,104 deaths will be "attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states" in a study published in Health Affairs.  Samuel Dickman, one of the authors, said, according to the Morning Call. "Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal." They projected that 423,000 fewer diabetics would receive medication to treat their disease. If opt-out states had expanded Medicaid, 659,000 women who are in need of mammograms and 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears would have become insured, the study found.

Well-intentioned leftists actually nurture poverty by refusing to acknowledge that it is found in the nature of capitalism. There exists an  inescapable relationship between poverty and capitalism. The ‘War on Poverty’ is unwinnable if you do not actually identify the enemy. The right-wing imagine it as a byproduct of human nature and an individual, moral failing. They forget that the “rags to riches” story which forms the core of conservative poverty policy, for there to be riches, there must be rags. The reality of the motive for such a story is so that a worker near the poverty line and in pursuit of that rarely achievable American Dream will reward a millionaire.

No comments: