Last April, Melissa Ortiz, a low-income mother of four, gave testimony to a committee of the California Assembly detailing her life on the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program, or CalWORKs, the state’s welfare program. “When we first had the twins, the only person in my family getting…
Source: www.slate.com
In states like Louisiana with large gaps between the the poorest households and middle earners, students are less likely to graduate high school.
While a little bit of inequality might motivate some students to study harder, a lot of it might kill their motivation entirely.
Source: www.slate.com
Also, has the child been encouraged? Has the child been told the importance of an education in today’s U.S. economy?
Do the teacher’s tell the children that they have potential?
And is there a class that explains in detail the importance of college? If the children know how important college is, then they would be more likely to finish high school
Some of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams have certainly come true. But when it comes to closing the economic gap between black and white Americans, we’ve got a long way to go.
See on www.huffingtonpost.com
Document income inequality where you live by taking a photo of a dividing line (real or symbolic) between rich and poor.
Take photo – share story.
See on ireport.cnn.com
President Obama called it “the defining issue of our time” in his 2012 State of the Union, but he did so without ever uttering the phrase “income inequality.”
See on www.cnn.com
Dreams can fade quickly for many in Lake Providence, Louisiana, where the level of income inequality is greater than in any county or parish in the U.S.
See on www.cnn.com
“In America when we speak of poverty we hear terms such as poor and lower class. These words by themselves mean relatively little but once they are coded they take on the connotations such as unwanted, unusable, unable, less than, bad, and/or unworthy. These coded terms then become concepts unto themselves that when used inspire ideas and notions. For instance often when hear about people being poor and lower class we think of them through the connotations attached and we develop ideas such as the thought that those people to whom these terms may refer are in such a place because they are stupid, undeserving, uncivilized, and/or lazy.”
I know I’ve posted quite a few petitions about fast food workers and the minimum wage. I do so because I think it’s so important that people who work hard get treated with respect and dignit…
If companies do not pay their workers fairly, then us, the tax payers, will make up the difference in their salary by subsidizing the cost of their grocery bill with food stamps and the cost of their health care bill with — subsidized health care payments.
It seems like a popular business model in the U.S. is to pay your emplyees so low that the government picks up part of the cost of taking care of the emloyee’s basic needs.
