Poverty up 12% under Bush administration

[unixronin]

Another report from Der Spiegel:

On the same day the levees broke, Charles Nelson of the US Census Bureau in Washington presented the most recent report on income and poverty in the United States.  The numbers and graphs he unveiled offered an appalling insight into the USA.

The number of those in America living in poverty climbed by 1.1 million to fully 37 million people - the fourth jump in a row.  While the official number of US poor dropped steadily during Bill Clinton's presidency, it has grown by 12 percent under George W. Bush.

But the economy is in great shape, and getting stronger every day.  The government keeps on telling us so.  I guess this is what happens when you rob Peter to pay Paul, especially when Peter never really had that much to start with.

Comments

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

A friend who watches economic macrotrends put it this way: what happens when two very large countries with nearly two billion people enter the markets en masse? The price of labor (wages) gets depressed, because they all want jobs, and capital appreciates because they need capital to develop.

Everyone applauds competition (yay! lower prices!) until it's their ox being gored.

This is not a good time to be an unskilled or semi-skilled laborer, particularly in manufacturing.

This is a good time to have capital to invest.

The only jobs relatively immune from overseas competition are those delivering services that must be delivered in situ, the more highly skilled, the better (after all, education/certification requirements are a barrier to entry).

For reference, HHS 2005 Poverty Line calculations (http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/05poverty.shtml).

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

makes me glad i'm a mechanic!

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Just watch out for the FRU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Replaceable_Unit)s. They keep getting bigger.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

~chuckles~ not as complex and crowded as most engine compartments are getting to be nowadays.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Yes, but as the FRUs get larger, the skill required on the part of the mechanic goes down...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"Sir, your car is ready."
"But ... but ... this isn't my car! My car is candy metalflake blue, not battleship grey!"
"All the replacement parts come in grey, sir. We had to swap out the entire car."

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

ROFLMMFAO, you rock!

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

that's the nice part, most new cars don't really have FRUs.

i don't think the average joe shmoe would be able to get an engine out and back in without major problems and leftover parts. engine removal requires high dollar specialty tools like engine hoists and vehicle lifts.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

This is what happens when formerly well-employed people can't find a comparable job because it's been shipped overseas. So they end up working for Wal-mart, which has made a big contribution to shipping jobs overseas so they can sell cheap...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And the headline says, "Wal-Mart creates 600 new jobs in Podunk, Nebraska!"

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

but destroys tens of thousands by buying overseas crap. when's the last time you saw a made in USA label on something?

we need to quit buyin cheap foreign crap, and the education system in this country is a joke, that's why 2 japanese car companies opted to put new plants in canada and not the USA.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, a lot of people buy the foreign products because many of the American products on the market are crap. For example:
TVs -- Quasar or Magnavox vs. Sony, Panasonic, Philips or Grundig.
"Consumer" audio equipment -- Fisher or Audiovox vs. Pioneer, Sony or Akai. ( think there's still one or two decent high-end audio companies left.)
Cars -- Ford or General Motors vs. Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW. (Or Volvo; I don't think Ford has managed to ruin Volvo yet.)
Motorcycles -- Harley Davidson vs. Honda, Kawasaki, BMW or Aprilia.

I always used to buy GM cars. I owned three Camaros in a row, until GM killed off the Camaro. The last one, the only one I bought new, fragged its transmission, fragged its rear-end, had a window motor drop dead after only 30,000 miles, and had a high-level brake light stupidly positioned in the dead center of the rear-view mirror line of sight. Then I bought a Dodge Intrepid R/T. It's had one electrical problem after another, after another, after another. The trunk light has been non-working almost as much as it's worked, and it took three dealers and almost the entire warranty period to get it fixed. Now all the available trunk remote opening options are dead, and the interior lights flicker on by themselves when you drive it.
The used Mercedes C230 I picked up in California while I was working there earlier this year has been a revelation. I've always asked things like, "If I can have one-touch express-down on the driver's window, why can't I have express-up, too? And why not on all four windows instead of just the driver's?" Well, the C230 has both of those. And all my motorcycles have been Hondas, and they've always Just Worked.
I've given the American auto industry plenty of chances to Not Fuck Up, and it's blown all of them. There's never been any decent American-made audio equipment on the market in my budget range at all. American TV manufacturers didn't stop building heavy, bulky, poor-performing crap until people stopped buying them. Most American-built home appliances are 20 years behind the same appliance on the Euro market.

Bluntly, much of the American manufactured goods industry's problems are its own fault. After World War 2, we went and rebuilt Japan, and we told them how to run modern industries. We told them about proper quality management, and design lifecycles, and efficiency.
The Japanese listened. And then they went and did something even more radical, that American industry had never done -- they took all these techniques and best practices, and they followed them. And that's why they ate Detroit's lunch -- because they built reliable, modern, fuel-efficient cars, when Detroit was still happy to churn out the same old antiquated, unreliable, 12mpg clunkers, selling 1950s technology in 1980, and thought they could get away with it forever because all the labor union workers would continue to buy them because even if they were complete junk, they were American-built junk.

Now, the generation that's willing to buy inferior products for twice the price just because they're American is no longer driving the market. Most of the consumers out there now are buying whatever's the best product for the least money, and that's seldom an American product.

You're 100% right, American jobs won't come back until American consumers start buying American-made products again. The trouble is, they're not going to do that until the Americal products are worth buying, and too many American industries don't get that. They're STARTING to -- Maytag, for one, has finally started actually building innovative products, but only in about the last seven or eight years -- but the $64,000 question is: Is it too little, too late?

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

yup, it's too little too late, even the american cars are bein built with foriegn parts. hell, yer lucky to get 200k miles from one of the new american cars, we have an 03 stratus sitting in the shop that self-destructed it's engine.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup ... our Intrepid only has 75K on it. The Z28 fragged its tranny in 58K, and the rearend within about another 10K.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

~sighs~ i miss my '69 Chevy pickup!