Four in 5 Americans Face Near-poverty, No Work Under Obama

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

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As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."
"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."
___
Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

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Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."
The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.
—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

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Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for 'the middle class' and 'average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

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White House Press Secretary Hasn't Known the Answer 1,905 Times

Jay Carney — former Time reporter, current White House Press Secretary, and weekly punching bag — has spoken for President Obama and his staff during the most fraught period of Obama's presidency. He was installed in February 2011, less than a month after a fresh class of Tea Party politicians settled into office, and stayed on through the following summer's debt-ceiling crisis; the attacks in Benghazi, Libya; the overheated 2012 election; the Democratic push for increased gun control; and, most recently a spate of scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, and the Department of Justice. That might explain why, in the 444 press briefings Carney had held since, he has so often deflected questions from reporters. To place one number on his frequent prevarications, Yahoo News determined that Carney indicated he "did not have the answer" to journalists' questions exactly 1,905 times since he began flacking for the President, a subset of nearly 10,000 instances when Carney declined to answer, passed off the question to a subordinate, or claimed ignorance about the subject matter. The entire report forms a brutal dossier of Carney's tenure.
The compilation certainly delivers a sting, in part because Carney is sui generis among his contemporary predecessors. Unlike, say, Robert Gibbs (who recently opened PR firm) or Ari Fleischer (now a sports publicist), or even George Stephanopoulos (who became an ABC News anchor), Carney worked as a journalist at Time for twenty years before becoming the mouthpiece of powerful politicians. (He served as spokesman for for Joe Biden during the 2008 election before Obama tapped him to deal with reporters.) The only recent predecessor who followed a similar career track, Tony Snow, edited opinion pieces for a series of newspapers before joining the first Bush White House as a speech writer, and later the second Bush White House as a press secretary in 2006. Unlike Snow, Carney was perpetually concerned with seeking out the factual truth, especially from those in power. It must at least slightly pain him, then, to inform his former cohort, over and over and over again — literally thousands of times — that he, and by extension the President himself, doesn't know the answer to this or that question. At the same time, he must know how it feels to be told the same.

Are media buying into ‘phony scandal’ claim?

Conservative leaders allege the media are trying to ignore the once high-profile scandals overshadowing the Obama administration, as President Obama and his aides aggressively push the claim that these controversies are "phony."
The "phony scandal" line was the unofficial talking point of the week in Washington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made it his fallback retort from the podium -- when asked about the president's new wave of speeches on the economy, Carney explained Obama was trying to refocus Washington away from "fake" controversies.
For three speeches in a row, Obama hammered this refrain: "With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball."
But, at least on the IRS targeting scandal, both the Obama administration and the mainstream media took that controversy quite seriously when it broke in May. MSNBC's Chris Hayes called the selective screening of conservative groups a "genuine abuse of power" at the time.
Fast forward two months. As Obama hit the trail to talk economy, two CNN anchors this week described the controversies that had dogged him as "so-called scandals."
The conservative Media Research Center also calculates that on the Big Three network news channels -- NBC, CBS, and ABC -- the number of stories on the IRS scandal has plummeted.
The evening and morning shows did 96 stories in the first two weeks, according to MRC. The coverage steadily disappeared, and between June 28 and July 24, the center recorded "zero stories" on the matter.
When a major development broke last week -- testimony by a retired IRS worker that an Obama appointee was involved in the screening process -- only CBS Evening News gave the issue a mention.
Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, and other conservative leaders issued a statement Thursday decrying the alleged blackout.
"No fair, objective journalist can look at the facts of this flagrant abuse of power and not conclude that it is a massive political scandal deserving of constant, merciless scrutiny," they said in a statement.
Even before Obama and his team began pushing the "phony scandal" line, a few media outlets and personalities were making that case. Salon published an article on the IRS issue earlier this month asserting that, in the end, "the entire scandal narrative was a fiction."
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell made the same argument.
But given the attention their own networks gave the IRS and other scandals just a few weeks earlier, a number of journalists and media personalities refused to go easy on the president this week.
On MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough ripped into Carney on Wednesday after the press secretary claimed the attention on "phony scandals" had all "come to naught."
"Do you think the IRS scandal is a phony scandal?" Scarborough asked.
Carney described it as "inappropriate activity," claiming that the press got "extremely excited" about the potential for scandal only to drop it when the "facts came out."
Scarborough, getting heated, pointed out new allegations that the controversy went all the way up to the IRS counsel's office, led by a political appointee. After Carney accused the host of pushing a GOP talking point, Scarborough said: "Stop your games with me. ... I'm not playing your games. I'm not somebody you talk ... down to from your podium."
Carney closed by asserting the IRS controversy was not a scandal because the White House was not involved.
Congressional Democrats have tried to downplay the IRS scandal lately by pointing to emerging evidence that liberal groups may have been singled out in IRS criteria as well. The matter is still being investigated. However, as Republicans note, liberal groups have not come forward to say they actually were targeted -- as conservative and Tea Party groups have done, by the dozens.
And the other so-called "phony scandals" continue to churn in Washington.
After the Obama administration took heat for seizing phone and email records from journalists, the Department of Justice earlier this month released new guidelines for investigations involving reporters -- in response to the outcry. The administration continues to battle with Congress over the surveillance power of the National Security Agency -- narrowly defeating a House bill this past week that would have reined in the NSA.
And on the Benghazi terror attack, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and others continue to raise serious questions about what happened that night and why lawmakers have not been provided access to the survivors.
Becky Gerritson, a Tea Party activist whose group was stalled by the IRS and who testified about it on Capitol Hill, took umbrage at the administration's "phony scandal" line.
"I think it's like the captain of the Titanic calling the icebergs phony," she said. "I think the only phony thing going on is the narrative that the White House is trying to push off on the American people."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/27/are-media-buying-into-phony-scandal-claim/#ixzz2aLFEO85E

Welfare

Welfare: SNAP, the U.S. food stamp program, has become a conduit for redistributing wealth and fundamentally transforming America, as welfare recipients now send food overseas and the White House markets to illegals.

While the administration laments the distraction of "phony" scandals like Benghazi and Fast and Furious that leave real Americans dead, it trots out phony statistics about how well the economy is doing.
"And what is absolutely true is that we have come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said at a recent press briefing. "We've created over 7.2 million private-sector jobs." How many of those jobs are part-time is one of the many things Carney left out.
Since February 2009, the first full month of Obama's presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million working-age Americans are not working today. Doing the math, 1.3 Americans have dropped out of the labor force for every job the administration claims to have created.
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Excuse me, Mr. President

680,000 Workers to Pay the Price for this Bloated Government

12 July 2013 / 33 Comments

It’s not like you haven’t read many other stories just like this one, since the mention of ‘sequester’.   But, it does highlight the complete audacity of a government spinning out of control.
680,000 civilian Defense Department employees are going to be furloughed.    The word ‘employees’ means that these people actually have jobs.  They’re not sitting at home on the government dole.  They earn a salary, and they pay exorbitant taxes to fund this ridiculous, monstrosity of a government.   How does the administration show appreciation for their efforts?   Furlough!
Just who does pay the price for bloated government, out of control spending, billions in objectionable foreign aid, and a ‘President’ who thinks he’s royalty?  Well, 680,000 civilian Defense Department employees are going to be feeling it in their pocket books…

The Pentagon began furloughing the vast majority of its civilian employees as part of an effort to generate billions in savings required to address budgetary constraints.

To meet the mandates of the so-called sequestration, 680,000 Defense Department employees will be forced to take a day of unpaid leave each week over the next 11 weeks. The move is expected to save about $1.8 billion, but it’s frustrating many of those affected.

“This is exactly the wrong way to balance the budget, to arbitrarily furlough everybody,” said Professional Services Council President Stan Soloway, whose organization represents government contractors whose work will be disrupted when large numbers of their government counterparts are forced into mandatory leave. “It’s unfortunate and unfair.”

As badly as the lost income will sting those who are furloughed, the Pentagon had originally expected it to be much worse. The current plan is a reduction from the 22 furlough days the department thought would be necessary.

Read More:  http://washingtonexaminer.com

Read more: http://MinutemenNews.com/2013/07/as-if-paying-taxes-wasnt-enough-680000-workers-to-feel-the-cost-of-this-bloated-government/#ixzz2aFAiWCOz

Enough of Trayvon

David Lawrence

Enough of Trayvon

On the cover of the “Daily News” we have the usual protestors—Beyonce, Jay Z, and AL Sharpton.  Add the really aggrieved, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton.

It’s not my party.   It’s not my death.  But I don’t like long faced grievers trying to publicize, glamorize and get ego satisfaction out of misfortune. 

The court said Zimmerman was innocent.  Let it die.  Let Trayvon die peacefully rather than be tossed up in the air as a political cause. 

I didn’t know Trayvon.  I wouldn’t have wanted to know him.  Not because he’s black.  But because he’s an uneducated kid.  And those thousands of demonstrators who act like Trayvon was their best friend didn’t know him either. Jay Z is not a poor kid from the streets; he’s worth millions.

If you really need to breathe in the sadness of the dead, go up to Chicago and mourn some of the nameless murders of black on black crime.  Don’t pick and choose your wailing according to Presidential whim.  As the rappers say, stop biting out of Trayvon’s lyrics.

When my mother died I didn’t even invite any guests.  I’m not a wake person.  I don’t like parties over the dead.  I think it’s disrespectful and digressive. 

If Trayvon is to rest in peace he should not have 101 demonstrations around the country shaking up his bones.  Let him go with dignity, not with anger and vituperation.

Let the Jay Z’s of the world wipe those blank mindless expressions from their faces and mourn their own previous contributions to crime and the drug culture. Let them look for solutions rather than to wail, cry and complain. 

Benghazi