首页
登录
职称英语
It’s official: there are now more poor people in America than at any other t
It’s official: there are now more poor people in America than at any other t
游客
2023-12-22
6
管理
问题
It’s official: there are now more poor people in America than at any other time in the 52 years records have been kept. We knew that the 2010 poverty numbers, released by the Census Bureau on Sept. 13, weren’t going to be good. They turned out to be, in the words of Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins, "extraordinarily bad. " More than 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. The total rose for the fourth consecutive year. For a family of four, poverty means scraping by on roughly $22,000 a year.
The new poverty crisis has emerged in part out of the other economic crisis we are facing: unemployment. The fastest way to poverty is job loss, and 6. 5 million jobs were lost in the recession. Today, a full two years into the "recovery," more than 9% of Americans are stil out of work. But a fact that may be buried in the copious coverage of these new figures is that the poverty problem didn’ t start with the financial crisis and the subsequent downturn. Its roots go much deeper, possibly to the recession of 2,000, after which poverty levels didn’t drop back to their prerecession numbers as they typically do after a recovery.
Though it’s difficult to tease out statistically, that turning point is undoubtedly a legacy of the previous two decades of hyperglobalization, when millions of middle-income jobs were lost to outsourcing or replaced by technology and salaries became more and more compressed. The average earnings of a blue collar worker are lower today than in 1964.
But the poverty problem is also about the fracturing of the American Dream, specifically the dream of upward mobility. It’ s become increasingly hard for Americans to rise above the socioeconomic status of their birth, particularly compared with their peers in other rich nations. "Poverty is in many ways about a lack of social mobility," says Erin Currier from the Pew Charitable Trusts. And research shows that even before the current crisis, Americans had much less mobility than people in many European nations. "We have a belief system and an idea about ourselves that don’t always align well with the facts," notes Isabel Sawhill, a co-director, with Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings.
Now, in a world of high unemployment, lower wages and growing poverty, the fiction is becoming ever more difficult to sustain. This downturn marks the first period in 20 years in which employment as a percentage of population in the U. S. has fallen below the rate in countries like the U. K. , Germany and the Netherlands. Indeed, downward mobility is so much a part of youth culture today that the Census Bureau has come up with a whole new lexicon for it, including the term doubling up, which describes households in which adult children who can’t afford life on their own return to live with their parents. An additional 3 million of them would be below the poverty line if they couldn’t crash with Mom and Dad.
That’s unlikely to change sooa Most U. S. job growth since the 1990s has been in sectors like education and government, which are facing big cuts. Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 of the biggest occupations in America offer less than the mean hourly wage.(Think salesclerks and home health aides.)Indeed, the Boomerang Generation is likely to become as demographically defining in the next few decades as the baby boomers have been. The two groups may very well end up in a political war for dwindling government benefits, as the elderly fight to keep entitlements like Social Security that ward off poverty and younger people push for spending on education and retraining to avoid falling into it.
While there’s no doubt that investment in education, which creates jobs and improves worker competitiveness, is a long-run solution, the key short-term weapon in the fight against poverty is tax policy. Poverty numbers would be far higher without tax breaks for the poor. The Obama Administration should keep fighting to extend initiatives like the earned-income tax credit, the largest and most effective antipoverty program.(Ronald Reagan used it to take millions out of poverty.)President Obama should also continue the pressure on the richest Americans to carry a larger share of the load. Despite congressional resistance, many wealthy people see it’s in their interest to foster a less divisive society. While Americans historically haven’t been as inclined as Europeans to riot over inequity(witness the protests that have taken place from London to Athens), it’s hard to rule that out in a world in which the American Dream is increasingly becoming a myth. [br] According to co-director Isabel Sawhill(para. 4), ______.
选项
A、the Americans are less realistic in viewing themselves
B、the Americans are more practical about themselves
C、the Americans are quite romantic and idealistic
D、the Americans’ belief system is based on the American Dream
答案
A
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://www.tihaiku.com/zcyy/3295530.html
相关试题推荐
Manypeopleparticipatethiscompetitionbecauseitisconsideredthemost______
Americans,increasinglyconsumedbyfearswhatChinaposesacommercialandmili
Atatimewhenpeopleneedtokeepaneyeonothers,theusualeventscandisapp
Mostpeoplewouldbeimpressedbythehighqualityofmedicineavailableto
Mostpeoplewouldbeimpressedbythehighqualityofmedicineavailableto
Mostpeoplewouldbeimpressedbythehighqualityofmedicineavailableto
Mostpeoplewouldbeimpressedbythehighqualityofmedicineavailableto
Theworld,andnotleastits265mAmericans,hasan________beliefinAmericaas
Modernindustrialsocietygrantslittlestatustooldpeople.Infact,such
Modernindustrialsocietygrantslittlestatustooldpeople.Infact,such
随机试题
A.发散 B.条件收敛 C.绝对收敛 D.收敛性与α有关
若系统中有五个并发进程涉及某个相同的变量A,则变量A的相关临界区是由()
确因特殊情况需要移动事故现场物件的,需满足的条件不包含()。A.尽可能移动现场
研末服用比煎剂效果好的药物是( )。A.钩藤 B.木香 C.槟榔 D.吴
全身化脓性感染出现转移性脓肿的是A.败血症 B.菌血症 C.毒血症 D.脓
一般资料:求助者,女性,32岁,已婚,本科文化程度,某公司职员。 案例介绍:求
A.分布于双侧上颌123的腭侧黏骨膜及牙龈 B.分布于双侧下颌5678的颊侧牙
相比较向社会公众发行股票,下列特点中属于配股筹资的优点是( )。A.有利于社
常见模板中,具有制作、拼装灵活,适用于外形复杂或异形混凝土构件及冬期施工的混凝土
根据《建设工程安全生产管理条例》,施工单位应当对达到一定规模的危险性较大的(
最新回复
(
0
)