Some unpleasant truths about the land of the free due to the policies of successive democrat and republican administrations. Set to worsen after trumps tax cut handout to the super rich paid for by cuts to basic social services.
Claiming that the war on poverty has been won, Trump administration works to gut social programs
By Shelley Connor
19 July 2018
A study released by the White House Counsel of Economic Advisors earlier this week declared, “Based on historical standards of material well-being and the terms of engagement, our War on Poverty is largely over and a success.” Starting from that clearly erroneous assumption, the report goes on to recommend instituting work requirements for non-cash social programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and housing assistance.
The report doubles down on perhaps the one consistent theme of the Trump administration: the idea that the poor are imagining their poverty, that all they lack is self-sufficiency and the impetus to work.
The report begins with an obvious fiction: that poverty doesn’t exist in America to any large degree, because welfare programs, which they count as income, have allowed people to overcome what they call “material poverty.”
The document is riven with obvious contradictions. For example, SNAP benefits and housing vouchers positively influence children’s health and academic performance, but, the report claims, they would fare better if work requirements forced their parents off of those programs. The authors assert simultaneously that social programs have helped people out of poverty and that they are responsible for people remaining impoverished.
Life expectancy has declined two years in a row—something that has not happened since the 1960s. So-called deaths of despair—suicides, overdose and alcohol-related mortality—are higher than in any other wealthy nation. Suicide rates in children have risen significantly for the first time in recorded history.
Compared to their counterparts in other wealthy, industrialized countries, American babies are three times more likely to die before they turn a year old, and over two times more likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Had the US kept pace with other rich countries in this area, over 300,000 babies would have survived infancy over the past 50 years.
Mothers die giving birth at a higher rate in the United States than they do in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and that rate is rising. In 2015, there were 26.4 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. By comparison, the UK had a rate of 9.6 deaths per 100,000 births, the highest in the European Union, and Finland had a rate of 3.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 births.
The US has also failed to address its comparatively high illiteracy rates. An estimated 32 million Americans cannot read at all. Over 14 percent of the population have below-basic reading skills. Twenty-nine percent of Americans have basic reading skills—that is, they can read at a fifth-grade level.
These are not the signs of a country with a three percent poverty rate. They are hallmarks of deep inequality and crisis, and no matter how the CEA chooses to define poverty, these numbers show their report for the slanderous fiction that it is. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/19/pove-j19.html
