| Politics of a Portlander |
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| The very first thing we must do in America is admit that poverty is a huge and growing problem in America, then we must find ways to try to reverse this problem. The official number is 35.9M (12.5%) Americans living in poverty including 17.6% of all children, 1.3M more than last year. This is awful and a disgrace in the richest country in the world and the country made up of some of the most compassionate people in the world. The following are some of the ways I think we should combat poverty. 1. The official poverty line should be updated to reflect the costs of all necessary expenses every year. A more accurate calculation has been determined by many studies, but has never been used by the government because it would show that since the last time we updated the official poverty calculation (the 1960’s) tens of millions more Americans have become poor and no one in power wants to admit it (here is an excerpt from “The Economist” that explains why the current number is ridiculous). 2. Tie the minimum wage to the poverty line. No one should put in a full week of hard work and not even be able to support themselves, much less their family. The minimum wage should be a wage that allows workers to keep themselves above the poverty line. 3. Everyone in a household that is living below the poverty line should be given free health insurance if they don’t get it from their employer, the same plan we give to the people in Congress. I know this will be expensive, but in point four below I have given some ideas of how to pay for it and I also think it is a major step in reworking Medicare/Medicaid. A. Nearly 20% of all children are living in poverty. More than 20% do not receive health care, lack of health insurance means that medical help is not reaching the people who need it most. To stop the tragedies that occur everyday, not because these people and their children are beyond help, but simply because they can’t get health insurance we have to reach out to the people living in poverty and get them the medical attention they need. B. Medical bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcy. The Congress just went through a debate over how to reduce bankruptcy so businesses could get the money they are owed. Well let’s get the people most likely to suffer this problem health insurance and prevent them from building up medical bills they can’t afford and keep them out of debt and bankruptcy. C. Medicare and Medicaid are the two entitlement programs that Bush is afraid to mention because they have much larger financial problems than Social Security, but cutting them means cutting health care from the poor. Let’s come up with another way to get medical attention for people who can’t afford it on what they earn. This program will take millions of people off of the Medicare roles and millions more off of Medicaid. We will put them into a program that works for our representatives in Congress that will keep them as healthy as possible. By providing quality options for people in poverty and educating them to the new benefits we can prevent so many illnesses and save so many lives. We all know that if people living in poverty went to checkups and got the preventative care that most of us with full health insurance get from the time we are children the astronomical rise in health care costs would take a dramatic dive. So let’s use this program to get good health care to the people who need it most and eliminate cost as a possible deterrent from getting preventative care. 4. Pay for health care for people in poverty by simplifying the tax code, closing major loopholes and ending billions of dollars in tax giveaways to the big business lobby. A. Bush asked for and got $40B in tax refunds for the largest companies ($8B for GE alone) in America by exempting the money they made from jobs shipped overseas. Stop this giveaway and you get $40B a year in revenue, plus more jobs in America stimulating our economy. B. Close the loophole that allow huge corporations like Tyco to setup a front office overseas and avoid paying American taxes. That is Billions more every year in revenue that could be used to help Americans get the quality health care they deserve. 5. Education and job training are tremendous advantages to children looking to make a better life for themselves. We should give tax breaks to businesses that create paid internships for local high school students that qualify for work-study and for adults living in poverty who are looking to improve their job skills through on the job training. This will create paying jobs, job training, and also great work experience for kids graduating high school and adults looking to work their way to career advancement. It would also give kids a reason to stay in school and avoid trouble since they won’t want to lose a paying job and hopefully they will find people at work they can look up to and follow in their footsteps. |
| Personal Ideology |
| Poverty in America |