Never in American history has the debate over income inequality so dominated the public square, with Democratic presidential candidates and congressional leaders calling for massive tax increases and federal expenditures to redistribute the nation’s income. Unfortunately, official measures of income inequality, the numbers being debated, are profoundly distorted by what the Census Bureau chooses to count as household income.
The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.
State by state detailed infographics on how much illegals burden you and your state:
Thanks to Sandra Sauer-Bernard of Virginia for sharing. This is a real eye-opening account of how refugee resettlement is changing one small town in New York State. Nancy
thermidormag.com/my-hometown-is-gone/
My Home Town Is Gone by Loretta Brady
Hi! This is a blog post I threw together in response to the recent increase in refugee numbers by Trump’s State Department, in order to convey what it is like living in an Islamizing area. I gave a talk at a luncheon a few months ago that was basically relating my story of how my hometown has been Islamized by refugee resettlement. So it makes sense to do a blog post.
I’m from the Utica, NY area. Utica is the city nicknamed by the UN “the city that loves refugees!” Soon every American city will be a city that loves refugees! Get ready! So I would like to tell you what it is like living in an area where the major city is about 25% (or more) refugee, mainly Muslim
I was born in Utica, a “faded industrial town” along the Mohawk River/Erie Canal corridor, and lived there until I was 8-years-old when my family moved to a nearby small college town. I loved living in Utica because there were lots of families on my block, big Catholic families with lots of kids. You could yard-hop, checking out who was available for play. You could bike around the neighborhood. There were block parties in the summer. My grandmother lived up the street. Life was good.
My father and his father were born and lived in Utica, NY. My father was a judge in Utica, like his father before him. The Catholic school my father attended is now a community center for refugees. After I moved back to the Utica area as an adult I used to recite “Full fathom five” to the children as we drove by my father’s former Catholic school. (Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.)
When I had my first child I was living in New York City. Her father and I divorced when she was a baby, and when she was two-years-old, I beat a hasty retreat back home to Upstate NY. There I met my husband. We got married, we had babies (in that order, ahem), and we settled down outside of Utica.
When I moved back home one of the first things I noticed was that an old Methodist church was being converted into a bright shiny white new mosque. The local paper touted this as immense progress and featured a local woman who had attended the church as a child and was positively brimming with joy it was being turned into a mosque. If that is the general sentiment, then it’s odd that my county went for Trump, right? There are at least two mosques in the city now. They just built another.
Where do I start? Utica had always been “the city that loves refugees” but under Obama things accelerated. Muslim immigrants were suddenly in these local bureaucratic positions where they had power over you. This, in what is probably one of the most corrupt states in the union, where the power of the state is everything.
The social worker at my daughter’s school was a Muslim immigrant. I looked for her profile on the school website, I googled her, I could not find information on her background, resume, qualifications, or educational attainments.
Let’s see, $4.1 Billion each year for refugee resettlement- don’t we have real needs in this country for rebuilding our inner cities, educational retraining programs that train our citizens for the jobs that will be returning, highways, bridges, dams, airports, securing the border, modernizing our depleted and outdated military, taking better care of our veterans, paying our military members more, providing for our homeless, etc ?. What about putting a little away to start paying down on our national debt ? The list of our needs here at home is endless and we are bringing in more people to add to our cost burden. That is crazy ! Nancy
On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. “This administration today, here and now,” he thundered, “declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”
Fifty years later, we’re losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren’t spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that’s not the problem. In reality, we’re losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: “to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities.”
President Johnson, promoting a new campaign to help the poor, visits sharecropper William David Marlow and his family on a farm near Rocky Mount, N.C., in May 1964. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (That figure doesn’t include Social Security or Medicare benefits.) Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.
LBJ promised that the war on poverty would be an “investment” that would “return its cost manifold to the entire economy.” But the country has invested $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years. What does America have to show for its investment? Apparently, almost nothing: The official poverty rate persists with little improvement. (more…)
By STEPHEN MOORE
Posted 02/13/2014
Republicans in Congress are being accused of fighting a “war on the war on poverty,” in part because of a tiny cut in the food stamps program last week. Democrats charge that these “cuts” will take food from the mouths of hungry children, and they claim this is an example of how Congress has shred the safety net for the poor.
Never mind that this is the food aid program that has tripled in cost and doubled in participation in just the last decade. Even during the economic recovery, the number of recipients — one in seven Americans — continues to grow.
Federal budget data confirm that rising enrollment and cost is the real untold story of almost all welfare programs in America today.
Just 18 years ago Republicans and Clinton Democrats joined together to pass landmark legislation to “end welfare as we know it.” But today, welfare has been redesigned and expanded, not reformed.
The traditional cash welfare program, once known as AFDC, has shrunk — thanks in part to strict work requirements. But the new-age welfare is a conglomeration of dozens of income-support programs — some aren’t even labeled welfare — as generous and costly as ever.
In 2011, the latest year for which we have complete spending data, federal outlays on all means-tested welfare programs targeted for the poor hit $746 billion, according to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service.
But this doesn’t include two of the fastest-growing taxpayer-funded cash subsidies: unemployment insurance and disability, which are not based on one’s income level, so are not considered anti-poverty programs. That’s another $250 billion a year. All told, federal income transfer programs (not including Social Security and Medicare) have hit $1 trillion. (more…)
