poverty

Faith based supply-side ‘trickle down’ economics has made Arizona one of the poorest states in the country

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Follow up to So how’s that faith based supply-side ‘trickle down’ economics working out for you, Arizona?

That faith based supply-side “trickle down” economics has made Arizona one of the poorest states in the country. Arizona remains among worst in poverty:

trickle downStarting from the top, an estimated 21.2 percent of all Arizonans in 2014 were at or below the federal poverty line.

Nationally, it was 14.8 percent.

That was bad enough to rank third-worst in the nation. Only Louisiana and Mississippi had higher rates.

Perhaps more worrisome, Arizona’s poverty rate went up in 2014 while the nation stayed the same.

The last time Arizona’s rate looked like the nation as a whole currently does was 2007, when Arizona ranked 10th-worst in the nation with 14.3 percent of its residents in poverty.

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Pope Francis at the White House

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pope_whitehouse_09There has been a great deal of speculation and conjecture in recent weeks by reporters and pundits about what Pope Francis would say when he was welcomed to the White House, and in his address to a joint session of Congress.

I prefer to wait to hear what “Papa Fancesca” actually had to say. A number of pundits were suggesting that Pope Francis would be political, but after listening to both speeches, anyone familiar with Catholic teachings knows that the Pope was being pastoral, teaching by homily from Catholic doctrines.

Pope Francis at the White House:

Mr. President, I am deeply grateful for your welcome in the name of all Americans. As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families.

In his opening comments Pope Francis, the son of Italian immigrants in Argentina, reminds Americans that we are a nation of immigrants, the “great melting pot” of many people and many nationalities. E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

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The Flimflam Man’s war on the ‘war on poverty’ exposed as a fraud

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EddieMunsterThe GOP’s alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fanboy Rep. Paul Ryan, the “zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin,” is a classic example of being blinded by ideology.

The Flimflam Man, as Paul Krugman dubbed him, has said since his failed 2012 vice presidential bid that he is working on the issue of poverty — which really means that he is working on writing a revisionist history of the “war on poverty.”  See, The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later | Budget.House.Gov (.pdf). Professor Krugman laid waste to this report in The Hammock Fallacy.

With the recent unrest in Baltimore, the Sunday morning bobblehead shows this past Sunday wanted to talk about the issue of poverty, so naturally the media villagers invited The Flimflam Man to talk about poverty, because he is the GOP’s alleged boy genius, and he says that Baltimore is stuck in ‘poverty trap’ and The war on poverty ‘not getting the results we need.

Ryan appeared on CBS’ “Face The Nation” and said that ““After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates – 45 million people in poverty.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler examines Paul Ryan’s slick use of poverty rates to declare the ‘war on poverty’ a failure:

There was [Paul Ryan] on one show saying the war on poverty launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson had left the nation with “the same poverty rates” and 45 million people in poverty. And, then, there was a [Chris Van Hollen] saying that without that effort, 40 million more Americans would be in poverty.

This is a classic example of how politicians pick the best statistic to make their case. But the case for Van Hollen’s stat is stronger. Let’s take a look.

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The root causes of urban violence in America are poverty and lack of economic opportunity

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President Obama held a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Abe, who is in Washington, D.C on a state visit.

President Obama was asked about the situation in Baltimore by Chris Jansing of NBC News. He provided a lengthy response, but I want to focus on his sixth and final point. Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan in Joint Press Conference:

And I’ll make my final point — I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, but this is a pretty important issue for us.

We can’t just leave this to the police.  I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching.  I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching.  But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching.  This is not new.  It’s been going on for decades.

baltimore-cover-finalAnd without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college.  In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem.  And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.

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hanger

Restricting Access to Care Will Kill American Women, Children

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DIY abortions will increase as women's rights decrease.
DIY abortions will increase as women’s rights decrease.

Today, five men on the US Supreme Court ruled that closely held, for-profit businesses can deny birth control coverage to women employees on the grounds that the corporate person’s religious freedom has been somehow diminished.

The SCOTUS decision on two cases– Burwell vs Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialities vs Burwell– is just the most recent assault on women’s rights and reproductive freedom.

In recent years, hundreds of bills passed by red state legislatures have chipped away at women’s rights to the extent that lives will be lost as more women are denied access to affordable contraception, women’s health services, and legal abortions. Although the south has been particularly hard hit, many states (including Arizona) have been working diligently to restrict access by burdening clinics with unnecessary regulations. Republicans in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are shutting down nearly all of their clinics.  Ohio Republicans want to stop women from using IUDs— one of the most effective forms of birth control.

In many states, women now are forced to drive hundreds of miles to have legal abortions or  drive to Mexico for a dangerous backroom deal or buy do-it-yourself drugs at flea markets or have children they cannot physically, financially or emotionally care for. Several states that have curtailed women’s health services– like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Louisana–  have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. These Republican strategies will result in pre-mature death– especially for poor women and their children.

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