Stop Predatory Gambling

New U.S. Census report shows poverty rate at its highest level in fifty years; Government responds with a failed policy that further shrinks the middle class

by Les

The New York Times reports today that another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

So what is government’s daily voice to most citizens during this dire situation? What is the big thinking to help America’s working people? What will be the goose that lays the golden egg for America?

In today’s Boston Globe, a Massachusetts legislator answers these big questions by offering a vision shared by dozens of public officials across the nation: “You can kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and our job is to keep that goose healthy,’ he said.

The goose he is referring to is government’s policy of legalizing and expanding casinos- a revenue model based on citizens losing enormous sums of money and leading them into deeper personal debt.

How does a government program based on milking existing wealth create new wealth? Whatever happened to the government message below from as recently as 35 years ago?