Patrinos
Amicus
Peloponnesos uber alles
Posts: 4,763
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Post by Patrinos on Feb 2, 2010 15:42:29 GMT -5
Is that why US is the leading economy? fragments, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/19/usa.paulharris: " Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening"
.......... ....... .. "A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.".......... .......... ........ " But, in fact, Edwards was right. While 45.8 million Americans lack any health insurance, the top 20 per cent of earners take over half the national income. At the same time the bottom 20 per cent took home just 3.4 per cent. Whitaker put the figures into simple English. 'The poor have got poorer and the rich have got richer,' he said.""An America divided
· There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. That figure has increased by five million since President George W. Bush came to power.
· The United States has 269 billionaires, the highest number in the world.
· Almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it. But for whites the figure is just 8.6 per cent.
· There are 46 million Americans without health insurance.
· There are 82,000 homeless people in Los Angeles alone.
· In 2004 the poorest community in America was Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Unemployment is over 80 per cent, 69 per cent of people live in poverty and male life expectancy is 57 years. In the Western hemisphere only Haiti has a lower number.
· The richest town in America is Rancho Santa Fe in California. Average incomes are more than $100,000 a year; the average house price is $1.7m."
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Post by danceswithpoodles on Feb 2, 2010 16:15:14 GMT -5
Yes, if they took all that money that was used on other countries...eg. All the aid pouring into Haiti now, and used it on their own citizens...
Makes me mad how some of my friends in Iraq tell how everytime a school, hospital or other new building is built by us...just gets bombed the next day. What a waste!
Obama isn't any better. He's eliminating the middle-class.
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Post by bordura on Feb 3, 2010 0:28:51 GMT -5
its true America's line between have and have no's is shifting toward an unpleasant direction, but poor in America might not be as same poor as in some other western countries. You have to compare apples to apples and oranges with oranges. 85 000 thousand homeless in California!!! Wow what a surprise... you forget California it is as big as a western European country on itself.
read this article from TIMES EUROPE: What's even more scary is that 3 million is almost certainly an underestimate: most European countries simply don't know where to look or how to count the homeless. Government data are as confusing, and about as reliable, as Big Sid's stories. Austria and Spain have no official statistics at all. Germany, France, Italy and the U.K. have what are best described as estimates, many of them regarded with skepticism by voluntary organizations that work with the homeless. INSEE, France's national statistics agency, admits that its official count of 86,500 is only based on the number of adults that went at least once to a soup kitchen or an accommodation service. FEANTSA estimates that the real number of French homeless is closer to 200,000, but many aid organizations claim that even this figure is too low. The British government claims there are just 596 rough sleepers across the country, but those who work in London's shelters say there are more than 1,000 in the capital alone.
It doesn't help that different European governments (and indeed different voluntary organizations) have varying definitions of homelessness. In Italy, only rough sleepers qualify — there are around 17,000 of them, according to the official count. At the other end of the spectrum, Finland includes as homeless people staying temporarily with relatives and friends, and even prisoners about to be released who have no homes to go to. FEANTSA, the closest thing to a pan-European authority on the subject, uses a combination of official statistics, data from voluntary groups and its own research to make educated guesses. "They have come to the capital hoping to scrounge a living on the fringes of the fantastic wealth they have seen depicted on TV"
Inconsistent definitions also explain why some homelessness groups express surprise at the comparison between homeless numbers in Europe and the U.S. "This is such a difficult phenomenon to quantify, and it's hard to know whether the Americans use the same yardsticks as we do," says Jeremy Swain, chief executive of the London homeless charity Thames Reach Bondway. But even if the calculations are imprecise, experts say, they've seen enough anecdotal evidence in recent years to know that Europe's homeless population is enormous, and growing all the time.....
when it comes to Western Europe people do cherry picking, but reality it sint so rose there..
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Post by leshte on Feb 3, 2010 1:00:54 GMT -5
In the early 80's regulations on the financial system that had been in place since the Great Depression started to be removed. From after WWII till the early 80's is the time when middle class wages where increasing steadily and the gap between the rich and the poor decreased steadily. It is also the period where there was a boom in the production of goods in the US. America produced and exported. In other words the financial system was subservient to the production economy. The financial system produced the means to make production and manufacturing a profitable and lucrative bussines. With the removal of regulations there was more money being made in bets in a casino style financial system than by investing it in the real economy, one that produced things. This coincides with a decrease in production and export but also in an increase of the gap between the rich and the poor and the shrinking of the middle class. It went from bad to worse when NAFTA was passed. Millions and millions of manufacturing jobs were shipped to places like China and India. Millions of good paying jobs where lost. The financial economy was no longer subservient to the real production economy. The bets became wilder, the profits bigger, but that was only an illusion, a bubble that could no longer be sustained. This is how things are now. If there is no regulations put in place, if NAFTA isn't changed, and if China manipulating its currency so it bankrupts manufacturers elsewhere in the world isn't dealt with; it seems like things won't be moving so fast in the right direction. EU is in the same $hitty situation as the US.
P.S I took a little trip to Europe a couple of months ago in places, like France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium etc. While I see many homeless people here in the states it seemed like the concentration in some of those places was higher or maybe thats because most of them seem to gather around the train station with their dogs and $hit all over the place. It seemed like some of these places where hit really hard from the crisis. But then again having been through a whole lot of US states there's a lot of states where you can see that they have been hit really hard.
P.P.S Those of you in NYC check out PBS on Thursday at 9. It has a documentary about the Balkans and its natural beauties.
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Post by EriTopSheqeri on Feb 3, 2010 2:47:11 GMT -5
My best (ex) friend was from the US, and she used to inform me on the situation over there, everytime finance news websites weren't clear enough. Honestly, EU and USA are overall in the same situation. Just like there are richer states in the USA, so do in Europe. Central and north European countries are far better to live in rather than South and eastearn ones. Heck, even Italian fruits are cheaper in Germany. Don't get me started on house prices.
What leshte said about US companies moving to foreign countries to increase profits by empolying poor workers is just as true here. That's why I barely buy any Made in Italy outfits, shoes and so on. Most of them are manufactured in China and other asian countries, heck even in Croatia and Albania. But production in Italy keeps falling and more workers join the protests. Here in Chieti alone, 2000 workers have lost their jobs when factories who produce car parts were no longer wanted by FIAT, due to negative trend in car sales. In a city of 60,000.
It's all about greed. Pointing fingers towards the US is nonsense.
Also, considering Greece's financial state, a Greek posting a US-bashing article is really amusing.
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Patrinos
Amicus
Peloponnesos uber alles
Posts: 4,763
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Post by Patrinos on Feb 3, 2010 5:37:05 GMT -5
Also, considering Greece's financial state, a Greek posting a US-bashing article is really amusing. What about an Alvanos posting about Greek and US economy...??
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Kanaris
Amicus
This just in>>>> Nobody gives a crap!
Posts: 9,589
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Post by Kanaris on Feb 3, 2010 6:34:31 GMT -5
The Greek State might be broke but it's people are not.
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Post by danceswithpoodles on Feb 3, 2010 14:41:30 GMT -5
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Post by Kassandros on Feb 3, 2010 15:32:37 GMT -5
Also, considering Greece's financial state, a Greek posting a US-bashing article is really amusing. What about an Alvanos posting about Greek and US economy...?? ;D ;D .. priceless answer! ;D ;D
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Post by leandros nikon on Feb 4, 2010 16:16:43 GMT -5
balkan cavemen have always a big big mouth,eager to insult other people in times of crisis...the truth is that they cannot survive without this "parasitic country" as they call us...no greece,no psomi (bread) what so ever...
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Post by todhrimencuri on Feb 4, 2010 22:15:22 GMT -5
There is a very good talk about this. Those in America who do not have homes, who are in the impoverished class, are often those that the American state ignores simply because it does not need them. They have no real place in the American system. A major part of this is the Black community, one of the historically most ignored communities in America. The White middle class of the country is sufficiently separated, protected and powerful enough to ignore them and let them to their... business.
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