Trouble on the horizon

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Wall Street. Main Street. Why No Mention of Side Streets and Alleys?

In the past few weeks, both from Republicans and Democrats, we’ve heard a great deal about the travails of Wall Street and the mythical Main Street in the acute economic crisis that has everyone who hasn’t already been downsized or foreclosed sitting on pins and needles. But far less – next to nothing, in fact – has been said about what’s going on elsewhere in America, in side streets and alleys where chronic structural economic problems dating back three decades continue to take a toll.

Today, about 20 percent of America’s children – 13.5 percent of all Americans – live in what is a very flawed federal measure of poverty whose parameters haven’t been changed in more than four decades.
Some 28 million Americans now receive some amount of help from the Food Stamp program, known since the beginning of this month as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Soup kitchens everywhere are in tough straits. That’s because food prices have increased at a time when the numbers of people in need have risen and the people who donate, hampered by economic difficulties of their own, are contributing less.

At the other end of the scale, crunched state budgets mean reduced aid to higher education at a time when still-rising tuition costs are making it ever more difficult for people at the lower ends of the economic scale to do what every politician, social reformer and statistic says is a way out of those lower ends: more schooling.
As economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz observed in The Race between Education and Technology: Sixty years ago, the average tuition at a private college was about 14 percent of the median family income, 4 percent at a public college. These percentages for both types dropped still more until 1980. At that time they began a steep rise. By 2005, the average public college cost 11 percent of median family income, a whopping 45 percent for private colleges. There is financial aid, but not enough, and the system "can be harder to crack than Fort Knox," Katz and Goldin write.
Consequently, an America that once led in the percentage of college graduates each year now falls into the middle of the pack of developing countries, and is dropping.

According to the United Nations Habitat survey released last week, there is growing inequality in U.S. cities that could lead to social unrest and increased premature mortality. The survey of 120 cities found New York to be the ninth most unequal in the world. Inequality levels in Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami were similar to those in Nairobi, Kenya and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, levels that are internationally recognized as the "alert" line used to warn governments. And not just cities:

"In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries," it said. ...
"High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies," said the report. "[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity."

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With this kind of BS going on, is it premature to ask exactly how long are we going to remain a first world country?

Comments

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

"The survey of 120 cities found New York to be the ninth most unequal in the world."

It is something to see it put like that. I guess a bit weird for me to conceptualize cus I've been to third world cities with more visible poverty...but I guess it wasn't measuring poverty as such but the level of extremity.