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Every year, new estimates of the incomes of the “top 1 percent” are reported with the requisite fanfare from Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. And every year the press gets the numbers all wrong. “Worry Over Inequality Occupies Wall Street,” writes Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal. An odd worry, when stocks keep hitting record highs. In reality, top income shares always rise and fall with the stock market because of capital gains, stock options, and bonuses and fees tied to stocks. “Messrs. Piketty and Saez,”...

The continuing attention devoted to the blunders, incompetence, and lies surrounding the Obamacare rollout is much deserved. But we shouldn’t forget that the President’s health-care monstrosity is merely the latest and biggest of scores of government entitlement programs suffering from the same flawed progressive assumption––that government “experts” armed with coercive power alone can solve problems better left to the states, civil society, and the free market. In reality, such programs relentlessly metastasize, increasing as well fraud, waste, abuse, and costs. One such program is SNAP, the kinder and gentler name for what we used to call food stamps. Apparently the...

Did you know that the number of people on food stamps has grown over the past 13 years by nearly 30 million, which accounts for almost 20% of households receiving taxpayer-funded food subsidies? At the same time, the federal government is spending more per household than ever before – in fact, a 152 percent increase since 1965. Our middle class is shrinking – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, due in large part to insanely complex government rules and regulations that only those with resources can bypass. In fact, the top 7% of households own...

A record-breaking 49.7 million Americans--one in six--now live below the federal poverty line, newly revised 2012 census data shows. The new figures, which take into account medical and living expenses, are three million higher than the government's official number. The Obama Administration instituted the new metric two years ago but has not replaced the original methodology, which has been used for over a half-century. Only Congress could change the government's official calculation method. "When so many citizens are worse off year after year, with food insecurity and health care insecurity, there's no way you can say that's a successful economy,"...

Some rich brats at Salon were recently bitching about the “GOP-shredded safety net” they claim has forced moms into the workplace. In a typical example of bourgeois naiveté, they assume it’s the libertarian lack of government that’s keeping us poor and tearing apart families. This is false for at least three reasons. One, the government can’t create wealth. It can only make people poorer. Two, the poorest we have are single moms, Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid...

The number of poor people in America is 3 million higher than the official count, encompassing 1 in 6 residents due to out-of-pocket medical costs and work-related expenses, according to a revised census measure released Wednesday. The new measure is aimed at providing a fuller picture of poverty, but does not replace the official government numbers. Put in place two years ago by the Obama administration, it generally is considered more reliable by social scientists because it factors in living expenses as well as the effects of government aid, such as food stamps and tax credits.

In the 22 years that Swami Durga Das has managed New York’s River Fund Food Pantry, he has never seen hunger like this. Each Saturday, hundreds of hungry people descend on the pantry’s headquarters, an unassuming house on a residential block. The first people arrive around 2 am, forming a line that will wrap around the block before Das even opens his doors. “Each week there’s new people,” Das told MSNBC.com. “The numbers have just skyrocketed.” The new clients are diverse—working people, seniors, single mothers—but many of them share something in common: they represent the millions of Americans who fell...

Food stamp recipients face a massive benefit cut set to kick in when stimulus funds expire Friday. The nationwide cut “is equivalent to about 16 meals a month for a family of three,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis using the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan.” CBPP called the roughly $5 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.” “If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New...

“Shocked” wouldn't be accurate, since we were accustomed to our uninsured patients' receiving inadequate medical care. “Saddened” wasn't right, either, only pecking at the edge of our response. And “disheartened” just smacked of victimhood. After hearing this story, we were neither shocked nor saddened nor disheartened. We were simply appalled. We met Tommy Davis in our hospital's clinic for indigent persons in March 2013 (the name and date have been changed to protect the patient's privacy). He and his wife had been chronically uninsured despite working full-time jobs and were now facing disastrous consequences. The week before this appointment, Mr....

The phrase “waving the bloody shirt” grew popular in the South as a description of Republicans’ alleged exaggeration of the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary division of the Democratic party. It is an irony of history that waving the bloody shirt has in the Age of Obama become the Democrats’ primary mode of discourse. Oppose the Affordable Care Act? Racism. Like the Second Amendment? Racism. Black Barbie is on sale for half off, but white Barbie is full price? Racism. Black holes sucking the energy out of your quadrant? Why single out the black ones? Racism! Waving...

If you were a resident in the state with the nation’s highest poverty rate, wouldn’t you think you’d be aware of that fact? That a higher percentage of your family, friends, neighbors and others in your community struggled to make ends meet than the same folks in any of the other 49 states? Of course. But here in California, where the incompetence of the media can scarcely be exaggerated, almost nobody is aware that the Golden State is no. 1 in economic misery. This malpractice is nothing new. ... on poverty, why isn’t the fact that California is worse off...

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 2013 (IPS) - Near the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown Washington, just a few blocks away from the federal district, dozens of homeless men and women wait for the evening shuttles that will take them to their dinners at one of many food shelters around the city. They can get by during the day with the few dimes and quarters spared by passersby, but the only daily meal they can really count on is the one they will get at the local food shelter, and so for them, hunger is a very real problem. Two...

To those people paying only casual attention, the Occupy movement has become nothing more than a footnote in history. Their ragtag encampments have been removed for the most part, and there is little to indicate they made much of an impact. In Madison, Wisconsin, however, the Occupy movement has suddenly resurfaced, but with a totally new mission: addressing the basic needs of people who are homeless. As issues around collective bargaining rights for public employees and other significant alterations to the social contract were initiated by Governor Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature, Madison became famous for very loud and angry...

More than 1.5 million people converged on the Philippine capital on Monday for a powerful Christian sect's evangelical event, causing traffic chaos that shut down large parts of the megacity. The gathering of the secretive and politically influential Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ) in the historic district of Manila forced all schools and some government offices to close. See your ad here The Supreme Court, as well as some basketball games in the highly popular college league, were also suspended, while Manila's governing authority urged private employers to give their staff a paid day off to avoid the traffic....

KNOXVILLE (WATE) - A temporary increase in food stamps expires October 31, meaning for millions of Americans, the benefits that help put food on the table won't stretch as far as they have for the past four years. Food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, go to 47 million Americans a month. Almost half of them children and teenagers. The monthly benefits, which go to one in seven Americans, fluctuate based on factors including food prices, income and inflation. Those could affect people right here in East Tennessee as 1.3 million Tennesseans receive food stamps at a cost of about...

<p>Lawmakers from both parties in Washington spent their Friday exchanging blame for the government shutdown, even as they were heading home for the weekend with no new negotiations scheduled.</p> <p>Sen. Marco Rubio, (R ) Florida, took to the senate floor to blast the president for his personal exchanges with House Speaker John Boehner.</p>

Conservative Republicans have officially made it their mission to end food stamps as we know them. Such was evident last week, when the House GOP voted to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps are now known, by $39 billion over a decade and begin bulking up its work requirements, along the lines of welfare reform in the 1990s. Whether you believe this a good or humane idea probably boils down to your take on a single question: why don't the poor, who make up the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients, go to work? In 2012, more...

India's government still struggles to provide reliable basic services to a majority of its citizens, trapping hundreds of millions of them in poverty. Now the country's richest firms have been told they must help. Under the new amended Companies Act passed last month by parliament, large businesses have been asked to spend 2.0 percent of their profits each year on "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR). "The idea is that if we could divert some corporate energy and the corporate way of doing business into our development sector, for a country like India it could help enormously," the head of the Indian...

Do you consider yourself to be "lower class"? Most Americans wouldn't dream of thinking that way. Even at the toughest times of my own life, I always considered myself to be "middle class". Traditionally, the vast majority of Americans have described themselves as either "middle class" or "working class", but now we are witnessing a huge shift. According to survey results that were just released, the percentage of Americans that identify themselves as "lower class" is now at an all-time high. It is still only 8.4 percent of the country, but the fact that this number is rapidly growing shows...

A privileged white South African family is under public scrutiny after slumming it in a poor black squatter camp for a month in an attempt to see how the other half lives, the New York Times reported Monday. In August, Ena and her husband, Julian — with daughters Julia, 4, and Jessica, 2, in tow with no toys — put themselves on a strict budget and left their gated estate for a tin shack with no electricity or running water, next door to where their housekeeper lives. And while it seems from the family's blog that they learned many lessons...