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People at work were talking about getting to work and back home the other day. In the conversation, they mentioned the toll roads in Austin, Texas and the cost thereof. I was in shock. The amount per month spent on toll roads for people ranged from $300-600 per MONTH. Then it hit me! The poor can not afford to pay those charges. So, the regular roads in Austin are in bumper-to-bumper traffic overload. The well-to-do go to and fro with great convenience while the lower classes suffer pretty badly with some having a 2-hour trip EACH WAY from home to...

Retailers have blamed the weather, slow job growth and millennials for their poor results this past year, but a new study claims that more than 20 percent of Americans are simply too poor to shop. These 26 million Americans are juggling two to three jobs, earning just around $27,000 a year and supporting two to four children — and exist largely under the radar, according to America’s Research Group, which has been tracking consumer shopping trends since 1979.

This seems like a good cause, a new organization started by a friend of mine, Colonel Brian Sperling. Ever since I took part in my first mission trip, over a decade ago in Zimbabwe, my heart for missions, for the homeless, and for the poor all over the world has grown. My name is Brian Sperling, a career Army officer, and I have reached a time in my life and achieved a conviction where I am taking steps to do something more than I have been. I have moved 14 times in my 27-year career and have seen financial needs,...

Terri Clark, 96. A breakout for daughters of the slotted Vail...

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is calling for infrastructure projects he says can help revitalize urban areas and close gaps in economic inequality. The new Department of Transportation (DOT) push will place a greater emphasis on projects that connect people who live in low-income and minority neighborhoods to “areas of opportunity” and prioritize projects that encourage investment in underserved communities. It's part of a fight against the tendency for highway projects to be routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods. Foxx on Wednesday said that, after the interstate highway system began, bulldozing urban areas to build roads that bypassed the communities they...

Miami (AFP) - The richest Americans tend to outlive the poorest by almost 15 years, and that gap has grown since 2001, said a major study of income and life expectancy this week. The findings, published Sunday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, were based on more than one billion tax records from 1999 to 2014, as well as government mortality statistics. The gap in life expectancy between the richest one percent and the poorest one percent was 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women, said the study led by Raj Chetty, an economics researcher at...

Bernie Sanders Doesn't Care About Poor White People in Vermont March 7, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Bernie Sanders has no idea that poor white people exist. So much for the whole Socialist "fighting for the poor" routine. "When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor," Bernie Sanders said at the Flint debate. While Bernie Sanders may not encounter them in his rallies at college towns, plenty of poor white people exist. And the situation has actually become critical in some parts of the country...

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Monday that he has invited two representatives of Little Sisters of the Poor to join him at President Obama's last State of the Union address Tuesday night. Little Sisters of the Poor is an order of Catholic nuns who serve the elderly poor. It's also the group that sought protection from Obamacare's mandate to offer birth control and other drugs in violation of their religious beliefs. Ryan was part of a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of a case filed with the Supreme Court by the Sisters...

The latest dilemma facing economists is why "unequivocally good" low oil prices haven't sparked excuberant consumer spending across America. We have discussed the simple (though awkward for the establishment) answer many times - soaring costs for 'shelter' and healthcare have hoovered up every penny saved (and more); and now, a new study proves it- exposing the reality that many Obamacare customers pay more than 10 percent of their incomes toward coverage (and some paying considerably more). The shocking findings show that, as CNBC summarizes, One in 10 Obamacare customers who earn between just two and five times the federal poverty...

Congress should consider buying firearms for low-income people so 100 million Americans could be part of state-based militias to fight “Islamists,” Colorado’s former 6th District Congressman Tom Tancredo wrote Dec. 4 in Breitbart. “Terrorists and criminals already know how to obtain guns, so why not help the defenseless? If we can afford food stamps and housing subsidies, why not gun stamps to help urban citizens survive the next Islamist assault?” Tancredo, who supports a second civil war if Barack Obama or any other president ever confiscated guns, has a long track record of objecting to government paying for food or...

When President Barack Obama addressed the nation Sunday night about the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, he was careful to build a wall of separation between the terrorists who had murdered 14 Americans and the religion they claimed to embrace. "But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West," Obama said. Were the president to exhibit this same zeal in defending the integrity of Christianity, he would drop his administration's legal pursuit of the Little Sisters of...

If I could change one thing about Christianity today, I would make Jesus the God of the poor. If this sounds as if I've forgotten all the passages about the meek inheriting the earth and camels going through the eye of a needle, some explanation may be necessary. Whatever the Bible says about the poor being blessed, their blessing may rest entirely on the fact that Christians today aren't placing them under any obligations. They're blessed because they do inherit the earth, but only in the sense that they don't have any rules to follow, and only because they don't...

Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.When you’re poor, you can’t buy your food in bulk, buy high quality stuff that will last, or own your own tech instead of renting. It costs money up front to save money over the long run. Worse yet, being poor often comes...

SANKUYO, Botswana — Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow. Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk. The hunting ban...

Hillary Clinton just spoke, along with Republican presidential contender and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, at the National Urban League Conference. She preceded Bush on stage and used the moment to seize his campaign slogan, "Right to Rise," and give it her own spin to attack the governor before he could speak. According to Clinton, "I don't think you can credibly say everyone has a right to rise and then say you're for ... repealing Obamacare. People can't rise if they can't afford health care. They can't rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on. They can't...

Americans are eager to see the government "spread the wealth around" through heavy taxes on rich people. This, according to Gallup, is a relatively new phenomenon, with a clear preference for soaking the rich really only emerging in the past four or five years. On a different polling measure, Gallup finds that at least since the mid-1980s a large majority of Americans have expressed a preference for a flatter distribution of income. But that's something that could, at least hypothetically, be achieved in a whole variety of ways. Taxing the rich in order to redistribute income to the working class...

The big Agribusiness corporations are some of the most corrupt corporations in America. The New York Times had an article in 2013, on the Agribusiness corruption in the $1 trillion farm bill. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/richer-farmers-bigger-subsidies.html?_r=0 The Food Stamp programs and free school lunch programs, are a means by which Agro-business corporations can increase their revenues, by selling food to the Federal and State governments at above market prices. The food stamp program was never intended to help the poor. Even the USDA website admits that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was intended to help Agribusiness corporations sell surplus food that they were...

Kudos to Pope Francis for calling a conference, scheduled for tomorrow, emphasizing the moral dimensions of climate change. It’s about time we took a clear and sober look at an issue that can cause so much harm to so many, especially the poor and downtrodden. The core problem for the conference is to balance the costs and benefits imposed by climate change against the costs and benefits of a major reduction in the use of fossil fuels, with the understanding that there are only two other sources of dense energy that can effectively replace them, nuclear power and large hydroelectric...

When liberals look at the poor, first and foremost, they see people who will vote for them in exchange for goodies. This gives liberals a perverse incentive to keep as many Americans mired in poverty as humanly possible. This is why liberals are always willing to make a government handout a little bigger, easier to qualify for, or to make sure as many people as possible are using it. They want poor people to remain poor – and no wonder. Show me a ghetto in America and I will show you an area that votes heavily Democrat despite the fact...

Lexus liberals ignore how their climate change agenda hurts the less fortunateBarack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and the whole gang of Democratic leaders claim that one of their highest priorities is to lift up the middle class and reduce the income gap between rich and poor.That goal collides with what they admit is their very highest priority: stopping climate change. Their agenda is driven by the millionaire and billionaire Democratic donors who make the party possible. But the agenda also involves making energy, home heating, transportation and just about everything else less efficient and more expensive to the middle...