Yesterday, I posted an article about growing income inequality in New York City. This morning, I posted an editorial from Bloomberg News claiming that the Census Bureau was overstating the extent of poverty by not counting transfers like food stamps.
A reader sent this story, which should remind us that it is no picnic to be poor in America.
Let me add a personal note. I am not poor. I have never been poor. But I hope I never reach a point when I stop caring about others less fortunate than I. I hope I never become so hard-hearted that I say, like some others do now, that the poor don’t know how lucky they are, or that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers, or that fixing schools (by privatizing them or firing their teachers) will fix poverty. Or that we don’t know how to end poverty so we shouldn’t do anything about it.
I think it is shameful that so many people live in desperate poverty in the richest nation in the world. I think it is shameful that so many children come to school hungry and so many families are homeless. I think it is shameful that we have so many billionaires. I don’t know how to reorganize the tax code. It doesn’t seem fair if it produces the society we have now, where some people struggle to survive while others count their yachts and helicopters. Something’s wrong with that.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, exactly right, vast poverty in a nation of vast wealth is sickening and disgraceful and totally unnecessary. The Occupy movement erupted because of this economic inequality, which both major parties allow. At this moment, there is a struggle over controlling the narrative, with the billionaires and Rhee-types advocating that vast child poverty is not the problem–no excuses!! Bad teachers are the problem, bad unions protecting bad teachers–a toxic story.
George Carlin said they call it the American Dream “because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Seems most Americans are walking in their sleep, because they’ve fallen for the self-made myth, as explained here: http://www.alternet.org/story/155149/the_self-made_myth:_debunking_conservatives'_favorite_–_and_most_dangerous_–_fiction
Everyone in the 99% should be outraged by the fact that American billionaires are the most fortunate super-rich in the world: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/charts-how-americas-billionaires-get-off-tax-rich-congress
Take this seriously. Worse than “no picnic”, the conditions for our sisters and brothers living in poverty are increasingly life-threatening.
“Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.”
White women without a high school diploma lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, thus achieving racial parity with their sisters of color, at last. The life expectancy for women overall in this country fell to last place for all developed countries in 2010.
Read the whole article for speculations about the cause of the tragedy, which has happened before our eyes on our watch. It jumped off the Google News page when I checked it after work, and I drove home fighting tears. This is the class I come from, and although I was the first to graduate, not many more have made it over. I’ve lost family members in Florida, and more are at risk. My aunts and older cousins had no health insurance, and they literally worked themselves to death for their children. I can only help them by supporting my younger cousins in their fight for an education.
It comforted me to get home and open my email to Diane’s story. We aren’t fighting it alone, colleagues.
Wait a decade or so. My guess is that research is likely to show that the life expectancy for female college graduates will decline as well.
As the first woman in my family to graduate from college, I am still the working poor, with no health insurance (and several physical ailments) and no pension. It is extremely stressful and disconcerting to have multiple college degrees and still be in poverty. I’m in my 60s and I will never be able to afford to retire, so I have no choice but to work until I die.
This article is even more disgusting when we realize that many American companies, especially Walmart, actual register their employees for food stamps in order to pay them below poverty-level wages. In short, our food stamp programs actually subsidize American’s biggest billionaires.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/20/1101630/-ATTN-GOP-SENATORS-Walmart-Is-The-Largest-Food-Stamp-Recipient-In-The-Country-Fine-Them
We’ve all heard the saying “There ought to be a law,” well this only exemplifies the idea that there ought to be taxes….we subsidize low wages with benefits the rich do not want government to provide. We need another Teddy Roosevelt. Now political engagement at the local and state levels will be even more important.
Poverty is like a devastating fire; but we are cutting funding for fire departments right and left, because fire departments are big government… This is the real story in Chicago–a fire burning out of control, no one doing anything about it, and the mayor blaming the teachers who are working amid the flames.
http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/09/chicago-fire.html