Source; Sent from a friend..............
“The Third Way, the intervention of the state into private enterprise, an amalgam of big-business and big-government and big-law firms, does not combine the best features of either socialism or capitalism. There is no evidence that when it was tried it met the expectations of the planners or improved the conditions it set to correct."---Ludwig von Mises
"A free society cannot coexist with a redistributive state-there is no 'Third Way'; people must be vigilant to ensure that majorities are prevented from violating the rights of minorities in the name of distributive justice."---J. A. Dorn
"Perhaps the most painful aspect of reforming a socialist society lies in the values, attitudes and habits of the work force. For years, people will have been taught that private property means exploitation and that socialism means a welfare state, an egalitarian distribution of income, permanent job security, and low prices. In other words, people will have learned to let government take care of them."---G. Schroeder
"Socialism needs an unending series of crisis's to justify the taking away of our liberties and controlling our lives, which never returns to its previous fullness, if at all. And when there isn't even a scent of a crisis, the socialist will work to create the perception of one."--John Lefler
The bottom 50%, generally households with net worth of $166,000 or less before the pandemic, now hold a bigger share of the nation’s wealth than they’ve had for 20 years, the Federal Reserve estimates. Their collective net worth, $3.73 trillion, has almost doubled in 2 years and is more than 10 times higher than in 2011, the nadir after the last recession, according to bloomberg.com.
Who is poor in America? This is not an easy question to answer. It's hard because there's no conclusive definition of poverty. Low income matters, though how low is unclear. Poverty is also a mind-set that fosters self-defeating behavior -- bad work habits, family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births and addictions. Finally, poverty also results from lousy luck: accidents, job losses, disability.
Despite poverty's messiness, we've tended to measure progress against it by a single statistic, the federal poverty line. It is the Agriculture Department's estimated cost for a bare-bones -- but adequate -- diet and multiplied it by three. That figure is adjusted annually for inflation. In 2008, the poverty threshold was $21,834 for a four-member family with two children under 18. It has stayed in a narrow range for decades. In 2007 -- the peak of the last business cycle -- the poverty rate was 12.5%. In 1969, another business cycle peak, the poverty rate was 12.1% percent. The apparent lack of progress is misleading for two reasons.
1st, it ignores immigration, which has increased reported poverty. Many immigrants are poor and low-skilled. From 1989 to 2007, about 75% of the increase in the poverty population occurred among Hispanics -- mostly immigrants. The poverty rate for blacks fell during this period, though it was still much too high (24.5% in 2007). Poverty "experts" don't dwell on immigration, because it implies that more restrictive policies might reduce U.S. poverty.
2nd, the poor's material well-being has improved. The official poverty measure obscures this by counting only pre-tax cash income and ignoring other sources of support. These include the earned-income tax credit (a rebate to low-income workers), food stamps, health insurance (Medicaid), and housing and energy subsidies. Spending by poor households from all sources can double their reported income. Although many poor live hand-to-mouth, they've had rising living standards. In 2005, 91% had microwaves, 795 air conditioning and 48% cellphones.
The existing poverty line could be improved by adding some income sources and subtracting some expenses (example: child care). Unfortunately, BObama’s proposal for a "supplemental poverty measure" -- to complement, not replace, the existing poverty line -- goes beyond these changes. The new poverty number would compound public confusion. It appears that this is being done for a political agenda. The "supplemental measure" ties the poverty threshold to what the poorest third of Americans spend on food, housing, clothes and utilities. The actual threshold -- not yet calculated -- will almost certainly be higher than today's poverty line. Moreover, the new definition has strange consequences. Suppose that all Americans doubled their incomes tomorrow, and suppose that their spending on food, clothing, housing and utilities also doubled. That would seem to signify less poverty -- but not by the new poverty measure. It wouldn't decline, because the poverty threshold would go up as spending went up. Many Americans would find this weird: People get richer but "poverty" stays stuck.
What produces this outcome is a different view of poverty. The present concept is an absolute one: The poverty threshold reflects the amount estimated to meet basic needs. By contrast, the supplemental measure embraces a relative notion of poverty: People are automatically poor if they're a given distance from the top, even if their incomes are increasing. The idea is that they suffer psychological deprivation by being far outside the mainstream. The math of this relative definition makes it hard for people at the bottom ever to escape "poverty." This is simply the liberal ideology of socialism being applied through the tactic of class warfare
The new indicator is a propaganda device to promote income redistribution by deceptively claiming that poverty is stubborn or increasing. The In 2008, the traditional poverty rate was 13.2% percent; estimates of the new statistic range up to 17%. The new poverty statistic exceeds the old, and the gap grows larger over time. To paraphrase the late democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: BObama is attempting to define poverty up. It's legitimate to debate how much we should aid the poor or try to reduce economic inequality. But the debate should not be skewed by misleading statistics that not one American in 100,000 could possibly understand. Government statistics should strive for political neutrality. This one fails.
"If you're a typical American, the truth is that poverty, for you, will be a short-lived experience. The U.S. Census, whose job it is to count all Americans regardless of their economic situation, says so!...That's not to say that poverty isn't a problem. For the vast majority of Americans, it is however best described as a very temporary condition. The only way it could become permanent is if the government acts to put well-intentioned barriers in the way of those seeking to leave poverty behind. And how do we know that isn't what's kept those chronic 2.8% of the U.S. population in their impoverished conditions"---Political Calculations
"We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, cell phones, DVD players, and own either a car or a truck. Why are such people called 'poor'? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. ... Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in 'poverty' to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going." --Thomas Sowell
Nicholas Eberstadt points out that America's official poverty rate-for over 4+ decades, the main indicator for the Trillions of tax dollars spent on antipoverty programs, is an outdated and badly broken index. Its built-in defects make it incapable of providing accurate information about poverty trends. Poverty has become a relative, rather than an absolute, concept, unsatisfied wants are usually no longer physical needs but the results of civilization.
Essentially the data matches a family's reported annual income against a "poverty threshold" -a hypothetical bare-bones budget, based on household size and composition, which is adjusted with the inflation rate. The government's aim is to track absolute poverty rather than relative poverty or inequality.
What is wrong with the official poverty rate? It measures the wrong thing and always has. That thing is income. Poverty is not a matter of income; it is a matter of consumption. “Rich” people can and do live in poverty. However, a huge gap separates income and consumption at the lower strata of our income distribution.
But let’s review the data. The latest data, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, show purchases by the poorest 20% of U.S. households were more than twice as high as their income. In fact the surfeit of spending over income among poorer U.S. households has increased dramatically since the 1970s-making income an ever less dependable predictor of living standards. Indeed, while the official poverty thresholds are meant to be constant over time, data confirms the fact that material conditions for our population in "poverty" have been steadily improving. The limited data Official statistics gather is incapable of documenting-or even recognizing any changes in living standards among America's poor.
According to official figures, America's poverty rate was 11.1% in 1973, at 11.4%; in 2020. This is nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that a smaller fraction of Americans lived in poverty in 1973 than today?
The poverty threshold, in inflation adjusted dollars, for an individual 2020 is 9% lower than 1973, for a median family its 7.5% lower. But, according to the Census Bureau, real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income was 180% higher in 2020 than in 1973. Median family income was over 16%. There are fewer families being formed.The unemployment rate-a key driver of poverty was lower in 2019 (2020 was Covid) than in 1973 (3.6% versus 4.9%). Educational attainment (productivity potential) for the adult population was significantly higher in 2020, and government anti-poverty spending is now way more than 1973. In 2020 41% of those living in poverty were white, 28% were Hispanic, 24% were Black, and 4% were Asian.
All this in the wake of welfare reform that occurred under the guidance, work and effort of the Republican Congress in 1996, who forced b. j. clinton to sign the legislation reform they enacted. They believed that the results of moral decay that our broken welfare system fostered, including not only poverty but, hunger and unemployment too, could be reversed if the rules that encouraged them were changed. In other words, “Change you can believe in”. All the data show that not only poverty, hunger and unemployment dropped, but those on welfare too.
Yet once again, liberalism must intervene and regulate and undo the heart of welfare reform that gave us all the success identified above, to bring back all the aspects on welfare that helped cause all the problems discussed above. It is the idea at the core of that action, that an act of will can reinvent the human condition, which lies at the heart of ideologies that have caused untold human misery. A vision in truth of hopium and chains.
“Philanthropy, charity, voluntarism, activism, and care for the family and the poor are all related to the same impulses that drive the free-market: the peaceful and free association of people in the service of others...What happens when we are no longer able or inclined to defend the institutions and ideas that have enabled our prosperity and that still guarantee of freedom?”---Rev Robert Sirico
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