Surviving Survival

In the midst of the ongo­ing grand­stand­ing in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. between the dif­fer­ent fac­tions that make up the Repub­li­can party and the Democ­rats and the Admin­is­tra­tion (which we can only hope, given how quiet it has been in the cur­rent media exchange, is engaged in so behind-the-scenes nego­ti­a­tions), there have been many state­ment about liv­ing within your means. Many of the talk­ing heads that com­ment on the issue love to bring up how indi­vid­ual Amer­i­cans must live within a bal­anced bud­get and thus, in their opin­ion, so must the U.S. Gov­ern­ment. The Tea Party is also very fond of the point of view. Both groups also believe and very strongly remind us every chance they have that “Obama-Care” is the obvi­ous cause of much of our cur­rent trou­bles. Some­how these peo­ple believe that a good life in Amer­ica does not require much money and that a healthy life is some­thing that we all achieve just by liv­ing. Fur­ther, there are often insin­u­a­tions that any­one who finds them­selves in finan­cial dif­fi­culty must have done so through their own bad behavior.

Robert Rec­tor of The Her­itage Foun­da­tion does not even seem to believe that being poor in Amer­ica is a very bad life:

“… Their kitchen had a microwave, refrig­er­a­tor, and oven and stove. Other con­ve­niences included a clothes washer and dryer, ceil­ing fans, a cord­less phone and a cof­fee maker.

The home of the aver­age poor fam­ily was in good repair and not over­crowded. In fact, the typ­i­cal poor Amer­i­can had more liv­ing space than the aver­age Euro­pean. (That’s aver­age Euro­pean, not poor European.)

The aver­age poor fam­ily was able to obtain med­ical care when needed. When asked, most poor fam­i­lies stated they had suf­fi­cient funds dur­ing the past year to meet all essen­tial needs.

…

Need­less to say, most Amer­i­cans do not think per­sons liv­ing in such con­di­tions are ‘poor.’ So why does the Cen­sus Bureau insist that one in seven Amer­i­cans live in poverty, even though most do not appear to be poor? …”

Just so every­one under­stands, to be clas­si­fied as poor in Amer­ica a fam­ily of four has to earn $22,350 (£13,607, €15,562, C$21,351) or less in a year. Hous­ing, food, trans­porta­tion, cloth­ing, health­care, EVERYTHING on about $110 per week per per­son. Mr. Rec­tor and The Her­itage Foun­da­tion may not think that “per­sons liv­ing in such con­di­tions are ‘poor’”, there may be many other Amer­i­cans who do not think that per­sons liv­ing in such con­di­tions are “poor”, but I and, I hope a major­ity of Amer­i­can believe very strongly, that per­sons liv­ing in such con­di­tions are “‘poor”.

But what hap­pens if seri­ous ill­ness hits? What hap­pens if seri­ous ill­ness hits and the fam­ily of fours has earn­ings of $50,000 per year? It seems like so much money. But even if the fam­ily has been respon­si­ble and has not run up large con­sumer debt, ill­ness can put the fam­ily at sig­nif­i­cant risk. A study jointly car­ried out by Har­vard Law School and Har­vard Med­ical School found that over 60% of the per­sonal bank­rupt­cies were med­ically related because the indi­vid­u­als either had more than $5,000 (or 10 per­cent of their pre­tax income) in med­ical bills, mort­gaged their home to pay for med­ical bills, or lost sig­nif­i­cant income due to an ill­ness. What is of real con­cern is that the study also reported that three-quarters of the peo­ple with a med­ically related bank­ruptcy had health insur­ance. The peo­ple were bank­rupted any­way because there were gaps in their cov­er­age like co-payments and deductibles and uncov­ered ser­vices. Other peo­ple had pri­vate insur­ance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.

The Tea Party groups say we can­not afford the tax we pay now. They say the rea­son we have eco­nomic prob­lems is we have sti­fled busi­ness with the ram­pant enti­tle­ments that are drag­ging the coun­try into an early grave. Actu­ally, Amer­ica is one of the least taxed devel­oped coun­tries in the world. Just look at the graphs.

All I can fig­ure is that what they really want is to make the U.S. into a third world coun­try. Then they would not have to export all those jobs. And if they can just get rid of all the health­care pro­grams, those of us who get ill will die off early and then they won’t have to worry about what to do with us if we ever have the nerve to want to retire.

If those of us who have rea­son­able incomes don’t stop being so damn fuck­ing greedy, this coun­try is going to implode. You idiots in Congress,

RAISE OUR FUCKING TAXES! 

You do not have to break our backs but you have to pay to keep this coun­try as a worth­while place to live. It needs to be a place that cares for its peo­ple. not a place that treats those with prob­lems as cast-offs to be flushed down the sewer. Sure you should not just throw money away. But you have a respon­si­bil­ity to do the right thing and the right thing is to pro­vide for the gen­eral wel­fare and the gen­eral wel­fare is to make sure all peo­ple in this coun­try live a good healthy and safe life.

Is Still Here