Posts Tagged economic inequality

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By Sejal Singh • 5 years ago

Stat of the Day: 43% of American Families Can’t Afford Basic Expenses Like Rent

The official poverty rate in the United States is 12.7% — but according to a new study by the United Way ALICE Project, 43% of American families don’t earn enough on a monthly basis to cover basic expenses like rent, food, health care, child care, transportation, or a cell phone. 

The official poverty rate in the United States is 12.7% — but according to a new study by the United Way ALICE Project, 43% of American families don’t earn enough on ...
By Maya Dusenbery • 10 years ago

Chart of the Day: Life expectancy for poor US women is declining

According to a new analysis from the Brookings Institute, the life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor in the US is growing, especially among women.

Comparing life expectancy at age 55 between folks born in 1920 vs. 1940 found that men, overall, have gained an additional five years — with the richest men gaining six years and the poorest gaining less than two. On average, women still live longer than men, but their life expectancy has increased by less than one year overall during this time. While the richest women have gained a few years, life expectancy among the poorest 40 percent has actually declined from the previous generation. The WSJ sums it up in the chart above. 

According to a new analysis from the Brookings Institute, the life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor in the US is growing, especially among women.

Comparing life expectancy at age 55 between folks born in 1920 ...
By Verónica Bayetti Flores • 10 years ago

Toward a nuanced, feminist discussion on Venezuela

If you’re paying attention to international news, you may have noticed that there’s something happening in Venezuela. And depending on what news sources you’re reading, you might be hearing extremely different things. What you’ll have trouble hearing, though, is a nuanced perspective that doesn’t either dismiss or glorify my homeland’s socialist government. So I guess I’m gonna try to write it.

If you’re paying attention to international news, you may have noticed that there’s something happening in Venezuela. And depending on what news sources you’re reading, you might be hearing extremely different things. What you’ll have ...
By Chloe Angyal • 10 years ago

Quick hit: “The logic of stupid poor people”

I cannot recommend this piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom highly enough. It’s about why people who don’t have a lot of money spend money on luxury items. Spoiler alert: it’s because they are people, too, even though plenty of Americans struggle to remember that.

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a ...

I cannot recommend this piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom highly enough. It’s about why people who don’t have a lot of money spend money on luxury items. Spoiler alert: it’s because they ...
By Chloe Angyal • 10 years ago

Quick hit: Ta-Nehisi on why we have ghettos

Spoiler alert: It’s not by chance. You must read TNC’s piece at The Atlantic today, about housing policy in the 1950s and how it created and reinforced the racial wealth gap. It’s a story of legalized exploitation, of how the structures and policies of the United States government were not perverted, but used as intended, to create an economic underclass.

Jim Crow — Northern or Southern — is usually rendered to us as an archaic system in which people irrationally decide to separate from each other just based on skin color. There’s a reason that so many of us remember Martin Luther King’s line about little white boys and little black boys holding hands. It’s comforting to us. Less comforting ...

Spoiler alert: It’s not by chance. You must read TNC’s piece at The Atlantic today, about housing policy in the 1950s and how it created and reinforced the racial wealth gap. It’s a story of legalized exploitation, ...
By Chloe Angyal • 12 years ago

Step right up, job creators

Gwen Moore is a Democratic Congresswoman representing Wisconsin’s 4th congressional district, a staunch defender of reproductive freedom, a woman who school you if you try to couch your anti-choice views in faux-concern about “Black genocide,” and now, it seems, a poet. Here she is reading a poem of her own writing, called “Job Creators.”

Transcript below the jump.

h/t ThinkProgress

Gwen Moore is a Democratic Congresswoman representing Wisconsin’s 4th congressional district, a staunch defender of reproductive freedom, a woman who school you if you try to couch your anti-choice views in faux-concern about “Black genocide,” ...
By Maya Dusenbery • 12 years ago

Rosanne Barr speaks at Occupy Wall Street protest

Yesterday marked the fourth day of the Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan. Activists are speaking out against corporate power over the political system. Or, in the words of Roseanne Barr, who made a surprise appearance on Monday, the fact that “we’re all royally screwed.”

The actress, who is now officially running for president, spoke eloquently about the need for a new economic system: “I’m talking about a system that rewards hard work and ambition but cares for it’s weakest child–and being called a feminazi for saying these things will be considered treasonous.”

http://youtu.be/v_0riq6C8Kc

Transcript after the jump.

Although the crowd fell far short of the 20,000 organizers hoped for, Saturday’s protest drew about 2,000 people and by Tuesday night ...

Yesterday marked the fourth day of the Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan. Activists are speaking out against corporate power over the political system. Or, in the words of Roseanne Barr, who made a ...