Thursday, November 28, 2019

THE REAL "BOOMING" ECONOMY - CHARITIES DONATE THANKSGIVING MEALS TO 11,000 BOSTON FAMILIES - WHAT DO THEY DO THE REST OF THE YEAR??? "Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018 (Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday."


Charities Donate Thanksgiving Meals to 11,000 Boston Families

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The United Way and Catholic Charities of Boston said they are teaming up to give Thanksgiving meals to thousands of Boston families this year.

Michael Durkin, president of the United Way, said the two charities are distributing turkeys and other items found in Thanksgiving meals to more than 11,000 families— a 3,500 increase since 2018.
“What we know is it’s a tough time of year for people stretching their budgets,” Durkin told NBC 10.
Hundreds of volunteers passed out more than 200,000 pounds of food for holiday meals at 20 different locations throughout the state, including the Greater Boston area and beyond, WHDH reported.
The project, in its 20th year running, gives needy families the ingredients so they can create Thanksgiving meals of their own, according to a description of the project on United Way of Massachusetts Bay’s website.
The Thanksgiving bags from United Way include cans of corn, green beans, onions, cornbread mix, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, rice, beans, gravy, and an aluminum turkey pan.
Families also receive a turkey or a gift card to a grocery store to purchase a turkey depending on where they pick up their bags, Seacoast Online reported.
“I am really grateful to have this,” Mary Stover, of Dover, told Seacoast Online. “It’s a good program. I will cook Thanksgiving dinner for myself and my daughter Krystal.”


Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

Getty Images
 8 Oct 201918
2:46

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

  

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. 

Trump proposal denies free school meals to half a million children

The Trump administration has provided a new analysis of how proposed changes to eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, will impact children who participate in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. By the White House’s own admission, these changes mean that about a half-million children would become ineligible for free school meals.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has described the changes as a tightening up of “loopholes” in the SNAP system. But those affected by the changes are not corporate crooks or billionaires, but hundreds of thousands of children who stand to lose access to free meals. For many American children, free school breakfasts and lunches make up the bulk of their nutritional intake, and they stand to suffer permanent physical and psychological damage as a result of the cuts.
Children receive a free lunch at the Phoenix Day Central Park Youth Program in downtown Phoenix. (AP Photo Matt York)
The sheer vindictiveness of the proposed rule change is shown by the minimal savings that would result—about $90 million a year beginning in fiscal year 2021, or a mere 0.012 percent of the estimated $74 billion annual SNAP budget. Put another way, the savings would amount to two-thousandths of a percent of the $4.4 trillion federal budget. But while this $90 million might appear as small change to the oligarchs running and supporting the government, it will be directly felt as hunger in the bellies of America’s poorest children.
SNAP provided benefits to roughly 40 million Americans in 2018 and is the largest nutrition program of the 15 administered by the federal Food and Nutrition Service. Along with programs such as the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and school breakfast and lunch programs, SNAP has been a major factor in making a dent in the hunger of working-class families. But despite these programs’ successes, the Trump administration is seeking to claw them back, with the ultimate aim of doing away with them altogether.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the food stamp and school meal programs, says that the new analysis presented last week is a more precise estimate of the impact of rule changes in SNAP the USDA first announced in July. The main component of the rule change is an end to “broad-based categorical eligibility” for the food stamp program. Food stamps are cut off for households whose incomes exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $33,475 per year for a family of four, calculated after exemptions for certain expenses.
Under “broad-based categorical eligibility,” which is currently used by over 40 states, households can be eligible for food stamps based on their receiving assistance from other anti-poverty programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Under this rule, which has been in effect for about 20 years, states are allowed to raise income eligibility and asset limits to promote SNAP eligibility. This prevents many households from falling over the “benefit cliff,” which happens when a small increase in income results in a complete cutoff of benefits, leaving a family worse off than before the rise in income.
According to the USDA, the rule change on broad-based eligibility would throw more than 680,000 households with children off SNAP. About 80 percent of these households have school-age children, amounting to about 982,000 children. Of those, 55 percent, or about 540,000, would no longer be eligible for free school meals, although most would be eligible for reduced-price meals. About 40,000 would be required to pay the full meal rate.
However, this does not paint the full picture. Households thrown off SNAP would be required to apply separately for access to free or reduced-price school meals. The USDA admits that its cost estimates “do not account for potential state and local administrative costs incurred due to collecting and processing household applications … and also do not account for any increased responsibility placed on the households to complete and submit a school meals application.”
While the Trump administration claims that the proposed changes to SNAP eligibility are aimed at closing up “loopholes” and stopping people from claiming benefits they’re not entitled to, the reality is that there is no evidence that broad-based eligibility has allowed significant numbers of people to supposedly “game the system.” A 2012 Government Accountability Office investigation found that only 473,000 recipients, or just 2.6 percent of beneficiaries, received benefits they would not have received without the broad-based eligibility offered by many states.
There is consistent evidence that SNAP contributes to a decrease in food insecurity, a condition defined by the USDA as limited or uncertain access to adequate food. By one estimate, SNAP benefits reduce the likelihood of food insecurity by about 30 percent and the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20 percent. Census data has shown that SNAP also plays a critical role in reducing poverty, with about 3.6 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, being lifted out of poverty in 2016 as a result of the program.
The EconoFact Network reports that SNAP has improved birth outcomes and infant health. When an expectant mother has access to SNAP during pregnancy, particularly in the third trimester, it decreases the likelihood that her baby will be born with low birth weight. There is also evidence that the benefits of nutrition support can persist well into adulthood when access to SNAP is provided before birth and during early childhood. This can have a long-term impact on an individual’s earnings, health and life expectancy. Conversely, food insecurity in childhood correlates with greater risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease later in life.
The proposed threat to school lunches for half a million children has elicited little response from Democrats in Congress, who are obsessively focused on the Trump impeachment inquiry. Critical issues such as the health and nutrition of school children are of little consequence to the Democratic Party, which instead gives voice to those sections of the military intelligence apparatus that sees Trump’s actions, particularly his sudden pullout from Syria, as endangering the global interests of American imperialism.
The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. At $94.6 million, the cost of one of the US Air Force’s newest and most technologically advanced fighter jets, the F-35A, would cover the $90 annual savings from depriving half a million US schoolchildren of free meals.




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