How is Obamacare Working Out for You?

It's not that the rich are philanthropic. We don't read that at all. What it is is that the rich have the ability to make thousands of new tax-paying jobs. This is something that Obama just doesn't understand. He thinks a government job is as good as any other job. What a ditz. Government jobs need taxes. This puts further stress on the private sector. He made 16,000 new IRS jobs for people to track down young people who aren't signed up for Obamacare. And yet the jobs are less likely to be there for them than they were before this ridiculous entity popped his idiot face into the WH. Romney would on the other hand make a good climate for business and yet he was plentifully green, and even signed legislation in Massachusetts against windmills along the Cape Cod coast because he thought it would ruin the aesthetics. Money and energy have to come from somewhere. We could frack, or we could get oil from the Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia that want to murder us (almost all of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia), or we could get nuclear plants firing on every corner next to the local bar.

Obama is an impractical dreamer with a vengeance against capitalism. But even communism is capitalism. It's just state-run capitalism. Ever driven in a Russian car - a Lada? The doors fall off in the middle of the highway.

You want the state to determine where windmills get built? They shoot windmill protesters in China.

We are so provincial. I alone understand the world.
 
problemz said:
It's not that the rich are philanthropic. We don't read that at all. What it is is that the rich have the ability to make thousands of new tax-paying jobs. This is something that Obama just doesn't understand. He thinks a government job is as good as any other job. What a ditz. Government jobs need taxes. This puts further stress on the private sector. He made 16,000 new IRS jobs for people to track down young people who aren't signed up for Obamacare. And yet the jobs are less likely to be there for them than they were before this ridiculous entity popped his idiot face into the WH. Romney would on the other hand make a good climate for business and yet he was plentifully green, and even signed legislation in Massachusetts against windmills along the Cape Cod coast because he thought it would ruin the aesthetics. Money and energy have to come from somewhere. We could frack, or we could get oil from the Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia that want to murder us (almost all of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia), or we could get nuclear plants firing on every corner next to the local bar.

Obama is an impractical dreamer with a vengeance against capitalism. But even communism is capitalism. It's just state-run capitalism. Ever driven in a Russian car - a Lada? The doors fall off in the middle of the highway.

You want the state to determine where windmills get built? They shoot windmill protesters in China.

We are so provincial. I alone understand the world.
Click to expand...

Ramble ramble ramble ... No point.
 
problemz said:
It's not that the rich are philanthropic. We don't read that at all. What it is is that the rich have the ability to make thousands of new tax-paying jobs. This is something that Obama just doesn't understand. He thinks a government job is as good as any other job. What a ditz. Government jobs need taxes. This puts further stress on the private sector. He made 16,000 new IRS jobs for people to track down young people who aren't signed up for Obamacare. And yet the jobs are less likely to be there for them than they were before this ridiculous entity popped his idiot face into the WH. Romney would on the other hand make a good climate for business and yet he was plentifully green, and even signed legislation in Massachusetts against windmills along the Cape Cod coast because he thought it would ruin the aesthetics. Money and energy have to come from somewhere. We could frack, or we could get oil from the Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia that want to murder us (almost all of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia), or we could get nuclear plants firing on every corner next to the local bar.

Obama is an impractical dreamer with a vengeance against capitalism. But even communism is capitalism. It's just state-run capitalism. Ever driven in a Russian car - a Lada? The doors fall off in the middle of the highway.

You want the state to determine where windmills get built? They shoot windmill protesters in China.

We are so provincial. I alone understand the world.
Click to expand...
Firstly, yes, I HAVE driven a Lada...the doors fall off because they are so old and yet still run...a huge contrast to the shit that they sell us here, rigged to fail after 4 years so they can sell us another one.
Secondly, the New Deal actually did work problemz...The New Deal physically reshaped the country. To this day, Americans still rely on its works for transportation, electricity, flood control, housing, and community amenities. The output of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, represents a magnificent bequest to later generations. The WPA produced, among many other projects, 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings built, rebuilt, or expanded. Among the latter were 41,300 schools.

PWA built or helped build monumental projects from sea to sea. In Washington State, Grand Coulee Dam put 8,000 men to work starting in 1933 and used materials and equipment from 46 of the 48 states. In Southern California, PWA helped repair or replace 536 school buildings damaged or destroyed by the great Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933. Most of them, rebuilt to the most exacting seismic standards of the time, are still in use at this writing. In Florida, the exemplary project was the Overseas Highway, 127 miles of causeways and bridges connecting the mainland and Key West, built on the remains of a railroad line destroyed by hurricane in 1935, and transforming the latter island from a dismal outback of dispossessed relief recipients to one of America’s premier tourist destinations. In New York was built the greatest project of them all–the Triborough Bridge tying together three of the city’s five boroughs, rescued from insolvency in 1933 by a PWA grant and loan totaling $44 million, and dedicated in 1936 with FDR in attendance despite his loathing for the project’s municipal overseer, Robert Moses, whom the president had repeatedly tried to remove from the project, without success. But he swallowed his enmity for Moses long enough to bask in the nationwide publicity marking Triborough’s completion.
Federal deposit insurance, by eliminating bank runs even in times of economic crisis, cut the number of bank failures from the peak of 4,000 in 1933 to nine the next year. Bank failures would not exceed 5 in any one year until the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, and for a three-decade stretch beginning in 1943 never exceeded single figures. The importance of this record for depositor confidence and the safety of the nation’s monetary stock is incalculable.The reforms implemented under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which established the Securities and Exchange Commission, professionalized an industry burdened in the aftermath of 1929 with a reputation for insider transactions and sharp dealing. The transparency of financial reporting mandated by the act for public corporations and brokerages set the foundations for the explosive growth of the U.S. capital markets and corporate economy ever since.
The New Deal instilled in Americans an unshakable faith that their government stands ready to succor them in times of need. Put another way, the New Deal established the concept of economic security as a collective responsibility. As of this writing, Social Security, by any measure the outstanding domestic achievement of the Roosevelt administration, serves 54 million beneficiaries. Over the decades the program has kept many tens of millions of American workers and their families out of poverty. The promise of corporate pensions has largely disappeared from the employment contract and the investment markets have disappointed many workers’ expectations of comfortable retirements, but Social Security endures, providing retirees with benefits that grow with inflation and that cannot be outlived. Social Security began as an “awkward and insufficient” program, as Rexford Tugwell would observe; but it was expanded in succeeding decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, in a continuing effort to uphold its original promise. Its 1960s addendum, Medicare, sprang organically from that promise.

Four Things That Everyone Should Know About New Deal Taxation

1. The New Deal made liberal use of conservative taxes. Some of the most important elements of the New Deal tax regime were engineered by Herbert Hoover. Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1932 five months before Franklin Roosevelt won his bid for the White House. But key elements of the law -- including an array of regressive consumption taxes -- remained a cornerstone of federal finance throughout the 1930s.
The 1932 act imposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. Congress expected it to raise roughly $1.1 billion in new revenue, much of it from the rich. Lawmakers raised income tax rates across the board, with the top marginal rate jumping from 25 percent to 63 percent; overall effective rates on the richest 1 percent doubled, according to economic historian Elliot Brownlee. Meanwhile, estate tax rates also climbed sharply, while the exemption was cut by half.
For all its progressive features, Hoover's revenue swan song -- which passed with strong support from the Democratic majority in Congress -- also included an array of regressive excise taxes. The law created new levies (including taxes on gasoline and electricity), while raising rates for old ones. As a group, most of these consumption taxes fell squarely on the shoulders of Roosevelt's famous Forgotten Man. Yet once in office, the new president did nothing to reduce them. Indeed, excise taxes provided anywhere from a third to half of federal revenue throughout the 1930s.
2. Most New Dealers were not Keynesians -- at least not initially and not when it came to taxes. Why did Roosevelt tolerate regressive taxation? Because he needed the money. The president -- and most of his economic advisers -- believed that unchecked borrowing posed a threat to recovery. While English economist John Maynard Keynes was urging the president to embrace an aggressive program of debt-financed spending, many New Dealers clung to more orthodox notions of public finance.
Keynesians were a rare breed in the early 1930s. (Indeed, the word "Keynesian" didn't enter popular usage until 1938, when countercyclical fiscal policy began to attract a broader following.) Most policymakers believed that government spending could help spur recovery, but few endorsed wholesale fiscal intervention. "Despite enormous, if not profligate spending, the New Deal has never achieved the volume or kind of pump-priming expenditure which Keynes insists is necessary to start private enterprise going," The Washington Post observed in 1934.
Keynes himself said as much in a December 1933 letter to FDR. "The set-back which American recovery experienced this autumn was the predictable consequence of the failure of your administration to organise any material increase in new Loan expenditure during your first six months of office," he scolded the president. "The position six months hence will entirely depend on whether you have been laying the foundations for larger expenditures in the near future."
Pump priming did accelerate toward the middle of the 1930s, but it was never adequate to the task. As economist E. Cary Brown later concluded, stimulatory fiscal policy failed to end the Depression, "not because it did not work, but because it was not tried."
Spending never had a chance to spur recovery because taxes kept going up. Both parties worshiped at the altar of fiscal responsibility. In 1932 they had competed to see who could inflict more pain on the American taxpayer, with Democratic leaders even sponsoring a manufacturers' sales tax (ultimately defeated by a rank-and-file rebellion). With revenue in a free fall, policymakers across the political spectrum felt compelled to raise taxes.
FDR, for his part, remained deeply conflicted when it came to fiscal stimulus. On one hand, he was genuinely committed to the notion that budgets should be balanced -- someday, at least. His close friend and Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, was even more averse to red ink. But Roosevelt also wanted to spend. So he embraced regressive elements of the 1932 tax act, convinced that consumption tax revenue was indispensable. Later he championed a series of additional tax hikes in 1935, 1936, and 1937.
Most New Deal economists -- at least those working in the Treasury Department -- shared Roosevelt's orthodox inclinations. They worried about unchecked borrowing, even when it was used to finance expansionary spending. "The situation calls for more than merely drifting with the tide of expenditure on the assumption that no grave problems would be presented by a large increase in the present Federal debt," they warned in a key 1934 report.
Treasury economists remained deeply suspicious of countercyclical tax policy. "Talk of more ambitious attempts to use the Federal revenue system as a regulatory mechanism has been heard," they noted with some disdain. "The tax system, so the argument runs, may be employed to eliminate business cycles or at least to lessen their severity, by penalizing 'over-saving' and encouraging consumption, by checking speculation, by favoring certain geographical or social classes at the expense of others, by encouraging business initiative, by discouraging 'unwise' business expansion, and so on."
All of which struck these sober minds as more than a little dangerous. "The use of taxes for other than revenue purposes is not necessarily an evil," they concluded, "but in all such cases great care should be taken to consider all possible effects, some of which may be undesirable and contrary to the ultimate goal originally contemplated."
Eventually, most New Deal economists hopped aboard the Keynesian Express. But it would take the better part of a decade. In the meantime, they were more than willing to contemplate substantial tax hikes -- at least on some people.
3. New Dealers believed that heavy taxes on the rich were a moral imperative. Roosevelt was a vigorous champion of progressive tax reform, especially when it came to raising taxes on the rich. Since 1934, Treasury economists had repeatedly urged the president to lower taxes on the poor; they wanted to expand the income tax and use resulting revenue to pay for excise tax repeal. But the president cast his lot with a different group of advisers: Treasury lawyers more interested in soaking the rich than saving the poor.
FDR embraced this approach in 1935, driven by a keen instinct for political opportunism. The New Deal faced a challenge from the left, particularly in the colorful person of Sen. Huey Long. The Louisiana populist was making headlines with his tax plans to share the wealth, and Roosevelt was determined to steal his thunder.
But FDR was also motivated by moral outrage over tax avoidance. He considered taxpaying a pillar of citizenship, a civic responsibility that transcended narrow questions of legality. But in 1935, Treasury lawyers gave Roosevelt detailed evidence that rich Americans were successfully avoiding much of their ostensible tax burden.
This was hardly news, but Roosevelt used it to justify a series of dramatic soak-the-rich measures. Some, like the Revenue Act of 1935, were designed simply to raise statutory rates. Others, like the Revenue Act of 1937, tried to close egregious loopholes. And one, the Revenue Act of 1936, imposed a new tax on undistributed corporate profits, which supporters believed would curb tax avoidance among wealthy shareholders.
As a group, the New Deal revenue acts of the mid-1930s substantially boosted the tax burden on rich Americans. According to Brownlee, the income tax changes alone raised the effective rate on the top 1 percent from 6.8 percent in 1932 to 15.7 percent in 1937.
Some New Deal critics have questioned whether such changes were meaningful. High taxes on the rich didn't really compensate for regressive taxes on the poor. They were, in the words of historian Mark Leff, largely symbolic.
Leff is right: New Deal tax reform was largely symbolic (although it felt real enough for those facing higher tax burdens). But symbols can be important. Sometimes they even change the world.
4. To understand New Deal taxation, we have to understand World War II taxation. The New Deal experiment with soak-the-rich taxation ended with a whimper. In 1938, business leaders, Republicans, and conservative Democrats united to destroy the undistributed profits tax, Roosevelt's most ambitious but least durable tax innovation. For a moment, it looked as though progressive taxation had reached its high-water mark.
In fact, the tide was still coming. World War II changed the politics of taxation forever -- or at least for the next 50 years or so. Driven by staggering revenue needs, lawmakers in both parties agreed to raise taxes on everyone: rich, poor, and -- especially -- the middle class. Treasury economists got the broad-based income tax they'd been seeking since 1934; the number of people paying the levy increased sevenfold in just a few years. But New Deal lawyers got their high rates on the rich, too. The top marginal rate for individual income tax payers reached 94 percent in 1944, and effective rates on the top 1 percent reached nearly 60 percent the same year.
After the war, effective rates dropped substantially. But the income tax retained both its breadth and its steep nominal rate structure. What changed was the focus on loopholes. High rates made loopholes valuable, and lawmakers in both parties tacitly embraced them. As long as rates stayed high, members of Congress could do a brisk business selling tax preferences. Narrow ones could be marketed to well-heeled contributors. Broader ones could be used to assuage the worries of middle-class voters.



Don’t even get me started on Mitt Romney...that guy would have taken what little bit the the working class had left and sold it like a stolen kidney on the black market.
He doesn’t know how the economy work problemz...he knows how to make money via hostile takeovers and moving jobs overseas.
He’s a perverse douche who serves himself and his rich friends....no one else!
 
I liked the part about Hoover. It seems that you were quoting it from somewhere. Where?
 
Unfunded mandates continue to push America deeper and deeper into the red. If you count what we owe future generations on Medicare and Medicaid then it amounts to about 62 trillion dollars. Obamacare is yet another level of unfunded mandates. Obama has doubled the amount of public debt that we owe. Hoover was a knucklehead who got his reputation early on through his largesse to the Belgians in World War I. They were starving. He bailed them out. Belgians, mind you. He wanted the market to work in the Great Depression, but that's only part of the story. Unfunded mandates every where you look. Obama thinks money is something you can wave into existence like a magic wand. That you can make it jump out of a hat like a white rabbit. If every star in the sky was a dollar, we would owe all that and more. It's not all Obama's fault. It began with that idiot Hoover. But it keeps getting worse. Is it moral to bankrupt America? I ask you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
 
problemz said:
Unfunded mandates continue to push America deeper and deeper into the red. If you count what we owe future generations on Medicare and Medicaid then it amounts to about 62 trillion dollars. Obamacare is yet another level of unfunded mandates. Obama has doubled the amount of public debt that we owe. Hoover was a knucklehead who got his reputation early on through his largesse to the Belgians in World War I. They were starving. He bailed them out. Belgians, mind you. He wanted the market to work in the Great Depression, but that's only part of the story. Unfunded mandates every where you look. Obama thinks money is something you can wave into existence like a magic wand. That you can make it jump out of a hat like a white rabbit. If every star in the sky was a dollar, we would owe all that and more. It's not all Obama's fault. It began with that idiot Hoover. But it keeps getting worse. Is it moral to bankrupt America? I ask you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
Click to expand...

I see...but it’s perfectly moral to start TWO wars under false pretenses across the globe...spend how much money to KILL multiple hundreds of thousands (just so long as they are Muslim)... and spend millions of dollars
every...
single...
hour.
But we can’t help those who are sick and dying in our own country because they are poor and YOU have some ill-conceived idea that they don’t deserve it.
Poor doesn’t = Lazy.
Poor doesn’t = Worthless.
Poor doesn’t = It costs too much.
Poor doesn't = Drug addict.
Poor doesn't = Criminal.
Idealism costs too much? You call yourself a Christian?
Sickening.
 
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@problemz
I find it hard to believe that you teach the Bible and yet have leaned so little about what Jesus taugh in regards to feeding and clothing the poor...healthcare would be included in that.

1 John 3:17 But if someone who is supposed to be a Christian has money enough to live well, and sees a brother in need, and won't help him--how can God's love be within him ?

Prov. 14:31 Anyone who oppresses the poor is insulting God who made them. To help the poor is to honor God.


James 1:27 The Christian who is pure and without fault, from God the Father's point of view, is the one who takes care of orphans and widows, and who remains true to the Lord--not soiled and dirtied by his contacts with the world.

Prov. 21:13 He who shuts his ears to the cries of the poor will be ignored in his own time of need.


Prov. 28:27 If you give to the poor, your needs will be supplied! But a curse upon those who close their eyes to poverty.

Eph 2:10 It is God himself who has made us what we are and given us new lives from Christ Jesus; and long ages ago he planned that we should spend these lives in helping others.


Luke 12:30 All mankind scratches for its daily bread, but your heavenly Father knows your needs. Luke 12:31 He will always give you all you need from day to day if you will make the Kingdom of God your primary concern. Luke 12:32 "So don't be afraid, little flock. For it gives your Father great happiness to give you the Kingdom. Luke 12:33 Sell what you have and give to those in need. This will fatten your purses in heaven! And the purses of heaven have no rips or holes in them. Your treasures there will never disappear; no thief can steal them; no moth can destroy them. Luke 12:34 Wherever your treasure is, there your heart and thoughts will also be.

Luke 10:27 "It says," he replied, "that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you must love your neighbor just as much as you love yourself. Luke 10:28 "Right!" Jesus told him. "Do this and you shall live!" Luke 10:29 The man wanted to justify (his lack of love for some kinds of people), so he asked, "Which neighbors?" Luke 10:30 Jesus replied with an illustration: "A Jew going on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes and money, and beat him up and left him lying half dead beside the road. Luke 10:31 "By chance a Jewish priest came along; and when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. Luke 10:32 A Jewish Temple-assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but then went on. Luke 10:33 "But a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw him, he felt deep pity. Luke 10:34 Kneeling beside him the Samaritan soothed his wounds with medicine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his donkey and walked along beside him till they came to an inn, where he nursed him through the night. Luke 10:35 The next day he handed the innkeeper two twenty-dollar bills and told him to take care of the man. 'If his bill runs higher than that,' he said, 'I'll pay the difference the next time I am here.' Luke 10:36 "Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the bandits' victim?" Luke 10:37 The man replied, "The one who showed him some pity." Then Jesus said, "Yes, now go and do the same."


I can post many many more if you like problemz...let me know...


 
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Skarecrow, for every quote you can find about the poor I could find another one, like the famous one where he says you'll always have the poor with you. Jesus liked the poor, and didn't want them to get rich or satisfied. He wanted them to remain poor forever. Some people want to cut the poor in half. Obama said if he got elected he would cut the poor in half. Like a magic trick! Instead he's doubled the poor.

Poverty is a mental condition. It goes along with being a Democrat. Republicans are people who want to cure poverty by making people self-reliant and possessed of a work ethic.
 
problemz said:
Skarecrow, for every quote you can find about the poor I could find another one, like the famous one where he says you'll always have the poor with you. Jesus liked the poor, and didn't want them to get rich or satisfied. He wanted them to remain poor forever. Some people want to cut the poor in half. Obama said if he got elected he would cut the poor in half. Like a magic trick! Instead he's doubled the poor.

Poverty is a mental condition. It goes along with being a Democrat. Republicans are people who want to cure poverty by making people self-reliant and possessed of a work ethic.
Click to expand...

Below I have included an article from today actually...just an example of how the right-wing idea that the poor just need the right motivation, i.e. yanking all help they get from the Federal Govt. out from under their feet...doesn’t work. Poverty is not a mental condition you numb-nut...being so pretentious that you think the verbal diarrhea spewing from your own mouth tastes like honey is a mental condition. Saying that someone’s socio-economic situation is a mental condition while sitting smugly and supposedly “securely” in one’s own college office, while they are also supposedly teaching the Bible (and yet missing the ENTIRE point of the book) is a far worse “mental condition” than having less money than someone.
So your reasoning is that Jesus WANTS as many people as possible to be poor...so you are doing the Lord’s work? There is a HUGE difference between giving up one’s own possessions intentionally and NOT having that choice and not having enough to eat or stay warm.

Obama’s plan didn’t work because he didn’t have Congress behind him...listen, I could give a fuck all about the man personally...whenever you bring him up it is just pointless fodder...hate him, love him, secretly jerk-off to him at night because you are a “naughty” bible instructor - I don’t care.
All the Presidents are a front man. Hate Congress if you really want to hate someone.

Jesus saying you’ll always have the poor with you is not the end of the quote...he was telling them to do good to them, help them, because they would not always have Him (jesus) there. Nice try to twist something so kind into something perverse. Let’s cross reference that with -
[TABLE="class: maintable3, width: 100%"]
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[TD]Deuteronomy 15:11
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

[/TD]
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Just remember this one, the next time you decide in your heart to turn it cold...the next time you have a hateful thought about someone because of their socio-economic status -
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[TD]
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[TR]
[TD]Hebrews 13:2
Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

[/TD]
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​
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Why you can't "bootstrap" yourself out of poverty

"It’s a counterintuitive idea to say the least, but it costs a lot to be poor in the United States. When money is at its tightest, cost-saving choices are often impossible to make, digging impoverished Americans deeper and deeper into the pit of day-by-day living.

A common narrative in today’s political arena is that the nation’s least fortunate only need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – that they’re just not working hard enough. What often goes unnoticed, however, are the overwhelming barriers that those living below the poverty line face on a daily basis.

A car, for example, is a necessity for many jobs but the down payment can be insurmountably high. And even after the down payment poor drivers still face monthly payments, high gas prices, and the fact that low-income car buyers pay 2% more for a car loan than affluent people. Low-income drivers can also pay up to $400 moreannually than wealthier drivers to insure their cars (for a car of the same model and with the same driver risk).
A lack of capital can also make it impossible to afford the security deposit on an apartment causing those in poverty to live day-to-day in expensive hotels. Chris Arnade, a friend of The Daily Ticker, has documented this phenomenon. Those in poverty who are able to rent or buy homes are also more likely to get household appliances through rent-to-own companies and end up paying more due to added interest.

Even saving money is a burden for the poor, as banks often charge large fees for those who don’t have a minimum amount of capital in their accounts—this makes cash checking establishments, who charge incredibly high interest rates on pay-day loans, the only choice for many.

Ben Hecht, CEO and president of Living Cities, an organization that works to revitalize impoverished areas, joined The Daily Ticker to discuss why it costs so much to be poor.

“Many of us are salaried employees and many poor people, if they’re working, are hourly employees,” explains Hecht.
If you’re an hourly employee who needs to apply for benefits or even see a doctor, you’re missing out on vital pay, Hecht points out.
Another challenge that low-income Americans face is a lack of services. “If you walk in many neighborhoods they’ll have one store—it may even be a corner store and not a grocery store,” Hecht says. The competition that neighborhood stores typically face doesn’t exist in poorer areas, allowing them to charge more for goods.

High quality food and produce is also often hard to come by. “You can’t find fresh broccoli…and if you think about it, it’s a logical, rational and economic choice for people to pick fast food in cheaper and larger quantities,” Hecht explains. This leads to obesity and other health issues that end up costing individuals more down the line.
“In many cities there are food deserts where you can’t even go to get the fresh food that we’re used to everyday," Hecht says.

One of the biggest disadvantages that those in poverty experience is a lack of broadband Internet. “One of the fundamentals about poverty is a lack of access to economic opportunity,” says Hecht. “And we all know that the number one factor in economic opportunity is education and we know that in today’s world much education, even in public schools, is done online.”

Furthermore, the Internet provides social networks where we can exchange vital information. Hecht gives this example: “I gave a speech years ago to 500 folks who helped people get jobs and I said to them -- how many of you got your job by a reference? All of them. How many of you got your doctor by reference? All of them. The power of those networks is being shut out in these neighborhoods and without the access to those types of technology.”

Related: Poverty Is America’s “Only Growth Sector”: Howard Davidowitz
 
[MENTION=4235]problemz[/MENTION]


What It Took 20 Years On Wall Street To Learn
by Chris Arnade

I was always attracted to numbers.
In middle school my baseball card collection spilled into a second drawer, driven by my love of the statistics on the back. I would spend hours sitting on the floor searching for trends and hidden meaning in the batting averages. The players’ pictures and “personal detail” mattered little.
In high school I bought a telescope so I could track the moons of Jupiter. I kept a tiny notebook where I wrote details and figured out the patterns.
Numbers were comforting and relaxing. When assigned the odd problems for math homework I would do the evens as well, sucked in by the rhythm of the task.
In grad school I would jokingly tell people in bars that getting a PhD in Math required me adding immense numbers. I said that for my thesis I was adding together numbers so long that to write them down required a thousand yards of paper.
When telling this I saw myself joyfully working my way down a scroll the size of ten city blocks adding and adding and adding. The image made me happy.
After my PhD I went to Wall Street. Finance was becoming quantified and people who could find patterns and understand data were valuable. I was now being paid well for my love of numbers.
I spent the first few years there building huge spreadsheets and trying to explain what I thought the numbers said about the possible future.
Soon they suggested I gamble money based on my reading of numbers. I was decent at it. I could look at a country’s numbers, its GDP, its Current Account Deficit, its Primary Surplus, its Debt/GDP, its Nominal Rates, and so on, and tell you what I thought would happen. Russia will default. The US will grow. Indonesia will devalue its currency.
I did all this and really didn’t deal much with the people. I mean I thought I did. I went on international business trips. I ate in restaurants. I went out for beers at night. I talked to taxi drivers and bellhops and flight attendants. I spoke with others like me. We went to conferences where we argued and nodded at smart things being said.
Still I never got to know the people who were being affected the most. Wall Street really didn’t think it was the correct way to spend it resources. Business trips were about meeting politicians, economists, and investors. We sat at tables and sipped our drinks, discussing numbers.
We consoled ourselves: People are not logical, not at the individual level. At the aggregate level they were, or so we thought.
During one trip to Brazil, in the middle of one of its financial crises, I spent three days straight in an office tower watching computer screens. I would leave each night taking a taxi to the hotel.
That Friday I left early. The markets were in panic and little good seemed to be in the future. As I walked to the mall I was surprised: Why is everyone just being normal? Where is the hysteria that I saw on the market screens?
Instead I saw an average day, filled with small dramas: A mother upset with her kid who wanted ice cream. A young couple holding hands, both with shiny braces on their teeth. A cluster of old men on a bench looking judgmental.
I left Brazil that Friday night and flew home in first class. I went back to my job in New York and back to the comfort of my numbers.
After fifteen years trading on Wall Street I transferred to a job where all I did was look at numbers: Trading for the bank with their money. I didn’t even have to talk to anyone. Wall Street had shifted from using phones to using chat rooms. It was all just numbers and words on a screen.
In 2007 a financial crisis hit that affected me in a direct way. My company, Citibank, escaped bankruptcy only because of a government bailout.
It is also when I started photographing New York. I would go on long walks, to escape the crisis. For the first time in my life I let decisions be guided by unquantifiable things like empathy and curiosity rather than probability.
I let events and people take me wherever they did. It led me to some of New York’s poorest neighborhoods.
Three years later I was spending almost all of my free time in Hunts Point, the Bronx,photographing and writing the stories of addicts. I was finally looking beyond the numbers and interacting with people on a visceral level.
I was hearing gut-wrenching stories, going into crack houses, helping addicts shoot up, and watching as friends die. I was seeing just how messy life is, filled with ambiguity and unsolvable problems. I was also seeing how amazingly resilient people could be, how happiness can be found amidst pain.
I would still spend my days looking at numbers but they did not hold the same thrill as before. They seemed shallow and lifeless.
They had also been wrong. Deadly wrong. Wall Street’s faith in numbers had proven to be disastrous. That structured world had been co-opted and hijacked by greed and ego.
The world had handed numbers people the keys and we had almost driven the car off the cliff.
A year ago I left my job to focus on photography and stories.
Recently I came home from a day in the Bronx, exhausted by the cumulative effect of a thousand little dramas. I opened my computer and looked at my twitter stream. My old world reappeared. I read smart commentary on places like Brazil. I scrolled through tweet after tweet, all shouting the story of the day.
It was all logical and rational and clever. Everyone was throwing different numbers around to show they were right.
Few were telling the messy and complex stories of the struggles to navigate the illogical and absurd reality of life, about the consequences of the news on, you know, people.
One smart columnist, Matt Yglesias, was arguing why the death of 1,129 people in a clothing factory in Bangladesh was understandable and “OK.” Poor countries need lax labor laws before they can be rich . . . It went something like that.
The author had fallen so far down the wormhole of numbers and clever arguments that he had forgotten humans were involved. Like Wall Street and I had forgotten that it was humans we were loaning money to and that it was humans who we were foreclosing on and it was humans whose governments were defaulting.
I wanted to tweet back. “Go to Bangladesh. Talk to one of the children of the dead. Hell, don’t just talk to one. Spend two weeks listening.”
He hadn’t gone to Bangladesh. He had just read a few headlines from a competing columnist and decided to argue based on that.
After much thought I tweeted to him, “you are an idiot.”
Since I was a kid numbers have won. They took over baseball with the advent of moneyball. They have taken over finance and are starting to take over politics.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Rational arguments can trump emotions. Yet it can and has gone too far. We have become so intent on maximizing some efficiency function that we need to be reminded that the tiny data points being argued about are people with stories and tragedies and moments of joy
Yes it is trite, but it’s remarkable how much damage is done when we forget.
Postscript
In January of this year on of my subjects, Millie, passed away. Her unclaimed body was tagged #97 (the 97[SUP]th[/SUP] death in the Bronx during 2013) and shipped from Lincoln Hospital to the New York Medical Examiner’s office. After two months she was buried in a trench on Hart Island by the department of Correction.
She and the close to 900,000 others buried on Hart Island have no tombstones or a place for relatives to remember or lay flowers. Millie’s death notice was the gossip on the streets. Her life story, growing up in Puerto Rico the daughter of addicts, of twenty years of prostitution, homelessness, and drug abuse will not register beyond a close circle of friends.
I am thankful and fortunate that over the last two years I got to know her as Yafna Garcia, not just the 97[SUP]th[/SUP] death in the Bronx of 2013.
 
“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Funny how this was published in 1965.
 
The poor are a drag. I know not what to do with them. Obama said he would cut them in half. Did he have a chainsaw? Did he have an axe? Did he have a train with a sharp cow-bumper on the front? He did not. He had Obamacare, and the death panels they bring with them. He will abolish the poor.

I suffer when I think of their madness and their stupidity. I suffer when I think of the homeless.

I cannot stand to think of blind bats skittering about in wild circles for insects to devour. I feel sorry for the insects. They were born and had hopes. Why does everything need to eat?

I didn't make the world so hungry. Since it is all devouring itself without end, I think it is important to accept this, and say that if we wish to keep death at bay, death, an infinite problem, with insurance, having finite resources, we probably can't have bug hospitals for every bug that a semi drives over, or for every deer that a semi flattens, or for every raccoon and possum that is flattened by speeding bullet.

When it comes to people, too, we ought to distinguish between people who have paid in, and are paid up, and those that have not. This morning they had a program on NPR about hospitals in Detroit at which 350 million dollars are spent on the unkillable poor. Poor that just won't die, and yet are always getting shot up, or having bats fly out of their cranium.

What to do to assuage all this poverty, all this crying misery, the unkillable poor crowding around a water pump in Calcutta, licking their chapped lips and dreaming of a McDonald's franchise inside their cardboard hut?

We have infinite mercy as children of God, but finite resources. We need to keep the two kingdoms separate, or else they pollute one another. Jesus was talking about the next world, not this one. In the next world His Kingdom will assuage the sadness of all. This world for whatever reason is one of infinite suffering in which death stalks all and sundry. Obamacare is going to be one big bad death panel that will not only cut poverty in half, it will kill America, and incinerate the last great hope of Lockean liberalism and induce a scorched earth policy from Orono to Tacoma, with all points in between reduced to skeletal remains driven over by the ghosts of the semis and lard-laden loads of yesteryear. Aroint thee, witches, for there is a foul smell of death that cometh from thy cauldrons.
 
problemz said:
The poor are a drag. I know not what to do with them. Obama said he would cut them in half. Did he have a chainsaw? Did he have an axe? Did he have a train with a sharp cow-bumper on the front? He did not. He had Obamacare, and the death panels they bring with them. He will abolish the poor.

I suffer when I think of their madness and their stupidity. I suffer when I think of the homeless.

I cannot stand to think of blind bats skittering about in wild circles for insects to devour. I feel sorry for the insects. They were born and had hopes. Why does everything need to eat?

I didn't make the world so hungry. Since it is all devouring itself without end, I think it is important to accept this, and say that if we wish to keep death at bay, death, an infinite problem, with insurance, having finite resources, we probably can't have bug hospitals for every bug that a semi drives over, or for every deer that a semi flattens, or for every raccoon and possum that is flattened by speeding bullet.

When it comes to people, too, we ought to distinguish between people who have paid in, and are paid up, and those that have not. This morning they had a program on NPR about hospitals in Detroit at which 350 million dollars are spent on the unkillable poor. Poor that just won't die, and yet are always getting shot up, or having bats fly out of their cranium.

What to do to assuage all this poverty, all this crying misery, the unkillable poor crowding around a water pump in Calcutta, licking their chapped lips and dreaming of a McDonald's franchise inside their cardboard hut?

We have infinite mercy as children of God, but finite resources. We need to keep the two kingdoms separate, or else they pollute one another. Jesus was talking about the next world, not this one. In the next world His Kingdom will assuage the sadness of all. This world for whatever reason is one of infinite suffering in which death stalks all and sundry. Obamacare is going to be one big bad death panel that will not only cut poverty in half, it will kill America, and incinerate the last great hope of Lockean liberalism and induce a scorched earth policy from Orono to Tacoma, with all points in between reduced to skeletal remains driven over by the ghosts of the semis and lard-laden loads of yesteryear. Aroint thee, witches, for there is a foul smell of death that cometh from thy cauldrons.
Click to expand...
bird,finger,hate,jesus,middle,finger-05ab79dc6b058216e2e969d471e4d34c_h.jpg
 
Education vs...watch this video:
[video=youtube;PFb6NU1giRA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFb6NU1giRA[/video]
 
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First let me say its my opinion that Obamacare was never the solution to the problems with our healtcare system before the "Law" was passed. I dont like Obama and think he is remarkably adept at being the worse President in history.

Having said that here is my personal experience with Obamacare. I dont even have Obamacare and some of my prescriptions changed because laws that change when that law was implemented. I hope everyone is ready for the day you are forced to take preemptive medicine or have your insurance canceled. AND knowing our good politicians on the hill, it may be that you dont even need the medication but that they are throwing a bone to one of the pharmaceutical companys for supporting their party by getting as many people as possible prescribed on a certain medication they manufacture. Government controlled anything is not a good thing. Government controlled health for the people is down right deadly.
 
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