by Slad
Nearly 51 Million Households (43% of the people) In The United States ‘Can’t Afford Basics Like Rent And Food’
May 18, 2018 in News by Slad



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via: Freedom4um
If the U.S. economy is performing well, then why can’t 51 million households in the United States “afford basics like rent and food”. A stunning new report that was just put out by the United Way ALICE Project shows that the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country is perhaps the biggest that it has been in any of our lifetimes. In some of the wealthiest areas of the nation, homes are now selling for up to 100 million dollars, but meanwhile tens of millions of families are barely scraping by from month to month. Many believe that this growing “inequality gap” is setting the stage for major societal problems.
In general, the U.S. economy seems to be performing better than expected so far in 2018, but the ranks of the poor and the working poor just continue to grow. The following comes from CNN…
Nearly 51 million households don’t earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That’s 43% of households in the United States.
The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what’s needed “to survive in the modern economy.”
If 43 percent of all Americans cannot even afford “the basics”, what does that say about the true state of the U.S. economy?
Of course the biggest reason why so many American families are struggling is the lack of good jobs.
In America today, 66 percent of all jobs pay less than 20 dollars an hour.
66 percent.
Just let that sink in for a minute.
You cannot support a middle class family on 20 dollars an hour. As a result, many Americans are working more than one job, and in many households both the mother and the father are working more than one job.
Housing costs account for the biggest item in most family budgets, and the fact that housing costs have just continued to soar is putting a huge amount of financial stress on hard working families. Just today we learned that there is a tremendous rush to buy homes as mortgage rates rise rapidly…
Today, according to the latest Freddie Mac mortgage rates report, after plateauing in recent weeks, mortgage rates reversed course and reached a new high last seen eight years ago as the 30-year fixed mortgage rate edged up to 4.61% matching the highest level since May 19, 2011.
But while the highest mortgage rates in 8 years are predictably crushing mortgage refinance activity, they appears to be having the opposite effect on home purchases, where there is a sheer scramble to buy, and sell, houses. As Bloomberg notes, citing brokerage Redfin, the average home across the US that sold last month went into contract after a median of 36 only days on the market – a record speed in data going back to 2010. If you will remember, we witnessed a very similar pattern just before the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008.
History is repeating itself, and we never seem to learn from our past mistakes.
Housing prices in some cities are absolutely obscene right now, and many working families find themselves completely priced out of the market. That has some people asking one very simple question…
Many San Francisco renters I met while reporting an article on affordable housing lotteries had responded to the region’s housing crisis by putting up with great discomfort: They crammed in with family; they split apartments with strangers. Some even lived out of their cars.
Why, lots of readers wanted to know, didn’t they simply move away instead? Yes, some people are moving, and this is something that I plan to do an article about very soon.
But for most hard working families, moving across the country simply is not an option. Moving out of state is very expensive, it can be very difficult to find a similar job in an entirely new area, and many families are very dependent on the social networks where they currently live…
People who struggle financially often have valuable social networks — family to help with child care, acquaintances who know of jobs. The prospect of dropping into, say, Oklahoma or Georgia would mean doing without the good income and the social support. Those intangible connections that keep people in places with bad economies also keep people in booming regions where the rent is too high. In the end, moving is just not an option for a lot of people.
We need to structure our economic system so that it works for all Americans – not just a few. Unfortunately, it is probably going to take another major crisis before people are ready for such a restructuring.
And such a crisis may not be that far away. In fact, even Pope Francis is now warning about the dangers of derivatives…
In a sweeping critique of global finance released by the Vatican on Thursday, the Holy See singled out derivatives including credit-default swaps for particular scorn. “A ticking time bomb,” the Vatican called them. The unusual rebuke — derivatives rarely reach the level of religious doctrine — is in keeping with Francis’s skeptical view of unbridled global capitalism.
“The market of CDS, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007, was imposing enough to represent almost the equivalent of the GDP of the entire world. The spread of such a kind of contract without proper limits has encouraged the growth of a finance of chance, and of gambling on the failure of others, which is unacceptable from the ethical point of view,” the Vatican said in the docuмent.
I have written about derivatives extensively in the past, and Pope Francis is 100 percent correct when he says that they are a ticking time bomb which could absolutely devastate the global financial system at any moment.
We don’t know exactly when it will happen, but we do know that such a crisis is coming at some point.
Sadly, most of the population is completely asleep, and they will be completely blindsided by the coming crisis when it does
finally arrive.

http://republicbroadcasting.org/news/nearly-51-million-households-43-of-the-people-in-the-united-states-cant-afford-basics-like-rent-and-food/

There's three solutions to this. Raise wages, free trade school/apprenticeships and declare neutrality/get out of the wars.

• If you're the CEO of a big company in this nation, you can pay your employees a decent wage, probably $14-16/hr. Especially the CEOs of Target, Walmart, any of these national retailers who sit pretty on company bonuses and make in 4 hours what the average American makes in a year.
• Make trade school free. We could always use more electricians, plumbers, mechanics, pipe-fitters. Not everyone needs to go to a 4-year university.
• Get out of the endless wars we're in and divest that money into America. Create public sector jobs, jobs in healthcare and government, construction and not overseas in the hands of the military to fund greater Israel.

There is nothing stopping us from being the next Switzerland - a strong economy with a powerful free market that has a comfortable living for all. Switzerland has the capacity to do this BECAUSE it's not married to regime change and threatening world peace like we are.

I certainly agree that the US could become the next Switzerland.  With regrets it will not happen as most Americans
are asleep.
The War Party also known as Neocons need their wars and more wars and a possible WW3.  They insist that the
taxpayers pour more and more trillions into the military industrial complex and planning and funding wars.
The Democratic and Republican politicians if they want to be reelected must satisfy the ever growing war machine. 
The mass media also known as the brainwashing machines that spill lies and propaganda is controlled by the
war machine and will continue to lure Americans into a false paradigm.
The Neocons does not care about the average American since they are globalists and one worlders. Their goals
is to use the American Military to bring about a one world government under a Marxist communist system.

University degrees could be done in 1.5 years or less, if the major was all that was taught. Universities make their money by extending your time by requiring courses that are not major related, a repeat of High School courses. Moreover, these majors could be taught on the job, apprenticeship system by the employer while you are being paid as little as minimum wage instead  of paying a fortune to universities for even majors courses which will never be used.

The educational system is there to make money, not to educate.

A

Also the educational system is to make money, not to educate., and indoctrinate into anti-Catholic, anti-Christian,
pro-marxist socialist communist hedonistic lifestyles and attitudes.  The educational systems makes their money by selling
so called government guaranteed student loans in which all the students after graduation have to pay back
if they have a job or not. Unable to pay back student loans cannot be included in bankruptcy.
It will be great if all the money spent in foreign wars be used on the people. Way things have been for years. This will
not happen.

I didn't that. Are you sure it is not included in bankruptcy?

Aye. This is from when a nursing school graduate - a noble profession if there ever were one - died and her parents could not file bankruptcy to rid them of their daughter's nearly mortgage-level debt.

They can't afford to pay rent or buy food, but I'll bet nearly 99% of them have iPhones (probably multiple smart phones), cable and/or streaming internet, and other "necessities" of that nature.

If this stat was true we would have 43% of our population living on street corners begging and we do not.

They are living on credit.

Did you read the original article from the OP, Matthew? The statistics come from CNN via the United Way, neither of which I trust. The article also quotes Pope Francis saying that global income inequality is a ticking time bomb. Classic leftist envy drivel. 

The article also states that 66% of all jobs pay less than $20 an hour, which they claim is insufficient to fund a middle-class standard of living.

Well, who says that people have the "right" to a middle-class standard of living? I don't have a middle-class standard of living. I don't have a house (anywhere, much less in the 'burbs), don't own an SUV or a giant pickup truck, don't go running to the doctor every time I have the sniffles, am not a "foodie" or a "vegan" that has to eat out 5 or 6 times a week and buy expensive gourmet food items. I don't go out drinking, to concerts or professional ball games, or recreational parks. I have an $80 smart phone which I recently purchased after years of using a $30 flip phone. I don't feel that I "deserve" to have a way of life more luxurious than that of 90% of the rest of humanity. I just give thanks to the Lord that He permits me to continue existing at all. I chose my life, I chose not to go after money, and now I live with the consequences. It's that simple. Most of these people want a "middle-class standard of living" without having made the sacrifice of working, studying, saving, and doing without sometimes that it takes to acheive that. 

I believe, as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno clearly declare, that all honest work is dignified and deserving of a living wage. 

Living wage is something quite different from living in luxury, which so many of our fellow citizens demand as a birthright. 

So, how many kids to you have?

Whoa, you gonna pull that one on me? I saw what was coming a long time ago, back in the 70's. I knew I didn't want to have to deal with a modern woman or fight my way to the top of some corporate ladder. So I didn't marry or have children. 
If you did, don't come crying to me. You made your bed, now lie in it. We're not living in pioneer days when you could just kill a few Indians, clear off some land, and make a farm. It's a challenge to have a big family today no matter where you are. It probably always has been tough, in any time period. My grandmother was one of eleven children. Her parents were immigrants. But we don't live in those days anymore. Our country is no longer expanding geographically and no longer dominates the world economically. Trump is trying to bring some jobs back and having some success but we're not going to return to the nineteenth century. 
 
What exactly do you propose? Massive government intervention? Government forcing prices to go down, rents to go down, creating jobs just to keep people busy like every other giant pharahonic project from the pyramids to the USSR? That won't work in the long run, you know that. 
Hey, if you feel you were called to have a large family, then do whatever it takes to raise them. If you aren't willing or capable of doing that, then keep it in your pants.