More Americans are living in poverty now than in the entire 52 years that the US Census Bureau has been tracking this figure. According to the 2010 census, 56.2 million people in the US are living below the poverty line! That means that income of every sixth American is below $11,139!
Would you say that the best years of your life are your 20's and 30's? Well, think again... 45.3 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 are living below the poverty line! Consumer prices in US have risen by 150 percent since 1980 while people in America earn only about 11 percent more than they did then (those percentages are adjusted for inflation).
In 2009, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, with a price tag of $787 billion tried almost the same things that the new American Jobs Act features! The new plan is almost the same as the prior stimulus. It even extends the same tax breaks and social welfare spending from the 2009 act. There are some differences but, it remains remarkably similar to the failed 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.
This legislation will pass, I'm sure of that. Then, it will fail. The 2009 Act resulted in additional 2.6 million Americans dipping below the poverty line in 2010 alone! Median income for 2010, $47,715, is only within a few dollars of the 1973 statistic, adjusted for inflation. As for the rich, they did just fine! Households with annual income of more than $100,000 saw a raise in income compared to 2009. More than 60 percent of population saw their income drop drastically. Somehow, it makes you wonder... are job laws here to help only the rich?
Worse of all, there are now more than 1.7 million L.A. County residents living below the hunger line. According the U.S. Census Bureau and the Agriculture Department, 3.5 million children under the age of 5 are at risk of hunger in the United States. Well, nothing to be alarmed about, after all, there are 2.5 million people in Afghanistan living below the hunger line.
What's left to the average American?
"
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary,
Out by the gas fires of the refinery,
I'm ten years burning down the road,
Nowhere to run aint got nowhere to go."
(c)
Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen