Rolling Forward

abaldwin360:

I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that the entirety of the GOP message relies on the economy not recovering - along with making our current president look like “the worst president ever”.

Good news is bad news for the GOP, and in turn Fox News.

More at the link …

In the last 30 years, these trends have only gotten worse. Southern states have steadily increased the tax burden on their poorest citizens by shifting the support of the public sector to sales taxes and fees for public services. After California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property-tax increases, in 1978, Western states began to move in a similar direction. Sales taxes on clothing and school supplies and fees for bus fare and car registration take up, of course, a far bigger slice of a poor household’s budget than they do from the rich.

Over the same 30-year period, some Northeastern and Midwestern states moved in the opposite direction. They mimicked the federal government by passing their own earned-income tax credits (and making them refundable, as the federal government has done, so that very low-income earners get a check after filing their returns), preserved progressive state income-tax rates, and either exempted food and other basics from sales taxes or gave sales-tax rebates to low-income households. No Southern state provides refunds to its poor citizens through the tax code, no matter how little they earn.

There are many reasons to worry about the growing regional divide. But even leaving aside basic fairness — why should a poor child in the Northeast have greater life chances than one in the South? — the divergence exacerbates poverty itself, driving households deeper into distress and lowering social mobility.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

abaldwin360:

learnthinkact:

The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation’s growing economic inequality: Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward, reaching 78.5 years in 2009, a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder.

The sick part is how many people will see something like this and say, “That’s what they get for being poor, they should have made better decisions with their money, they shouldn’t have been so lazy, bla bla bla bla.”

It is absolutely disgusting that in a society as advanced and with access to as many resources as we do that healthcare isn’t a public service.

bolded for emphasis. 

stfuconservatives:

motherjones:

Incidentally, this is also Paul Ryan’s old plan.

Ryan’s plan is also written under the premise that Obamacare will be repealed. Seeing as that’s not going to happen (hey Paul, who won last November? j/w), his entire budget is a farce.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)