O-mama - Opinionated Moms

Our country will stay in the poor house until we start producing products here in America and assembled right here in the good ole' USA. When I was young,we had textile mills and assembly plants that kept America growing. Now everything you pick up, comes from China and our jobs have been outsourced to India. I am an Old Mama of 49 and have always lived below the national poverty level. I've worked three jobs at a time to raise my kids and walked to work and college many times. It's what us good old American Mom's do and we will continue to do. NurseMom has all her great facts and figures right, but when it all is said and done America was founded on the haves and have not's and there is ALWAYS going to be a poverty line. As long as one persons job is valued above another persons job. Exam a nurse over a server. Yes a nurse has extra schooling, I always wanted to be a nurse. I got my extra schooling as well, but in the real life classroom. I choose to be a mom, which changed my dream. I ended up working in restraurants and as a private caregiver. I couldn't afford insurance because I was busy putting a roof over my kids heads, food in their mouths and clothes, made in China on their backs. I worked like a dog since I was 15 and at 49 am now disabled due to working myself to death. I can't sit, stand, walk or even lay on my sides due to crippling arthritis, yet some rich insurance doctor last week denied me surgery. He is one of the haves and I am one of the have not's. Yet again, a case of that who have, keeps those who don't, down. Until this country gets more on an equal footing for ALL American's there will always be a high poverty rate. Me, I'll do my little part....I'm going after the insurance company, I've already started and I will have my much needed surgery next month. Then maybe I can climb up out of the ever decending hole of poverty myself, and that my friends is what good ole' American pride is all about. Take care of ourselves and forget the numbers. Each persons case is strictly a one on one story, not a set of numbers. Ask your friends, neighbors and families...We all have our money problems and always have. Now they just label it the "National Poverty Level".

Right now, the gap between rich and poor in this country is greater than it has ever been (since identified in the early 1900's). And it isn't just the current recession. The early 1900's were a time of no worker safety regulations, no worker employment/labor rights, no environmental regulation. Why, after passing all of these, do we still have such a disparity of rich and poor? I think we need to look at how we value work versus invested wealth and inherited wealth. We seem to say we value work and workers, but what gets enacted in tax policy shows we don't. To understand what has happened, we have to look at (for now)one part of the problem: Bush Tax cuts of 2000 that were enacted by the Republican House and Senate for 10 years and are due to expire this year. (Thank goodness). .................end of my thoughts-next is info and its source) The top tenth of a percent of people reported an average income of $5.6 million, up $908,000, while the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up nearly $4.4 million in one year. "As of 2005, The data that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980. Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability.* Source: * http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html