Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1322-1324

There is enough food in the world for everyone.
Introduction to food security
GLOBALCITIZEN

Of course, at that exact moment, I had, yes, a college degree and a coveted unpaid (because of course it was unpaid) internship at a public radio station. But I also had a minimum wage job to support myself, $17 in my bank account, $65,000 in debt to my name, and $800 in rent due in 24 days. I was extremely hungry, worried about my utilities being shut off, and 100% planning to hit up the dumpster at the nearby Starbucks when I was done there. I had no functional stove in my tiny apartment because the gas it took to make it work was, at $10 per month, too expensive. I was at WorkSource to find out if I qualified for literally any program to make my finances less crushing.

I had, like millions of other working Americans and many, many Millennials, no financial safety net.

In the United States, approximately 15% of residents live below the poverty line and another 10.4 million are considered “the working poor.” And yet, we have very, very concrete — and very incorrect — perceptions about how poverty actually looks. And it does not look like Millennial college grads. So we kind of keep ignoring it.

The disconnect is simple: Poverty doesn’t look the way we think it looks, so we don’t think people who are, in fact, poor “look poor,” so we assume that poverty isn’t really that bad. We also assume that by taking steps that have traditionally been associated with improved economy status, it will get better.

We are now seeing that it might not.

...

In 2012, nearly half of American households were just one emergency away from poverty or homelessness. Most Americans don’t have the savings for literally one — ONE — unexpected bill. There are more individuals considered “the working poor” than there are who are not considered as such. Over 1.5 million individuals were estimated to have been homeless at some point in 2014. In a country where people never agree on a damn thing, nearly ¾ of people can agree on the sentiment that the poor are getting poorer.

...

 going to college made me, at least in the years since I’ve graduated, more poor. More financially strained than I ever could have imagined. More crushed by the persistent weight of debt. More driven by income than almost anything else. This is not about a lack of fiscal responsibility; this is the fallout of a culture that says there is only one way to get ahead, and that way is a treacherous one.

Let’s Talk About Millennial Poverty

Hanna Brooks Olsen
[emphasis JS]

Data analyzed by the Pew Research Center concluded that more than half the world’s population remains “low-income,” while another 15 percent are still what a report issued by the center on Wednesday called “poor.”
...
The report defined as “middle” or “upper-middle” income those who lived on $10 to $50 a day. Fewer than one-fourth of the world’s population met that criteria. “Even those newly minted as middle class enjoy a standard of living that is modest by Western norms,” the report said, with barely 16 percent of the world’s population living above the official United States poverty line — $23,021 for a family of four in 2011.
Study Finds Low Incomes Constrain Half of World
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
JULY 8, 2015 
New York Times