Well America - How's that NAFTA and Deregulation doing for ya? 1 in 2 Americans now Poor or Low [View all]

[Yooperman]

income. As a 55 year old long term unemployed, now working a custodial job 15 hours a week to survive, I have seen a once prosperous almost self sufficient country in the 60s and 70s continually change from a manufacturing power to a 2nd rate service industry nation.

For over 200 years we had policies in place to protect our workers and their jobs. It seemed to have worked as we grew into a country the rest of the world only dreamed of. Now since deregulation starting in the 80's and NAFTA put into place in the 90s... it has been downhill ever since. Over 55,000 manufacturing companies have left the U.S taking with them 100s of thousands of jobs since NAFTA became the policy of the land. Now we have the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer as Americans try to complete with 3rd world countries and the dirt poor wages.

Read it and weep....

http://news.yahoo.com/census-shows-1-2-people-poor-low-income-054325860.html

>snip<

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

>snip<

Not bad for the "richest" country in the world.

YM