If you think president Obama is the one behind this record poverty in America like “certain folks” are touting. Here’s something to think about for a second. it might be a little bit wonkish, but anyway.
The Wonk Blog’s Brad Plummer writes:
Were high oil prices partly responsible for the uptick in poverty this year? Yes, say Trevor Houser and Shashank Mohan of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They pored through the 2011 Census data and found that “over one-third of the increase in the U.S. poverty rate in 2010 resulted from the rapid rebound in oil prices.” (Obviously most of the increase came because incomes are declining.) What’s more, “if oil prices had remained constant at 2001 levels over the past decade, there would be 2.6 million fewer Americans in poverty today.”
But why should oil prices matter here? After all, the Census Bureau adjusts its poverty index each year using the average price index for consumers. So if oil prices push up inflation, the poverty line should rise too, right? The problem, note Houser and Mohan, is that poor people spend a much bigger share of their income on both gasoline and a variety of products and services that use oil, as seen in the chart below, which shows oil expenditures as a share of after-tax income by quintile:
That means the poor get hit disproportionately hard when oil prices go up — and slip below a poverty line that rises more slowly. The researchers conclude: “In the absence of an upside surprise in income growth or a sudden collapse in oil prices in the months ahead, expect another round of depressing poverty numbers this time next year.”
Of course I know that all of this means very little to some of you. Truth is, there are “certain people” in America who are into the game of pin the tail on the Black president. Something tells me these are the idiots counting on Michele Bachmann becoming president and making that $2 per gallon at the pump a reality. Lord knows that and getting rid of the Black guy would make things easier.
Poverty in America and any place in the world first of all is an inhumanity. People of any country are not born poor; they are instead born into a society that has been able to sustain their respective parents into a state of poverty. Poverty therefore is a product of and a priority of government, otherwise, it, poverty could not exist in a human society. Poverty is a product of imperialistic thinking and reasoning. Classism is the base for poverty to exist in a country as those Citizens that see themselves as elitist or aristocratic, or privilege must maintain a group of Citizens as their opposites to maintain their lifestyle. Slavery, Discrimination. Racism, Social Economic Inequality, Poverty, Injustice. And the “haves and the have-nots” are all products of this trend in thinking.