This state of affairs is made even worse when large numbers of these people don't have any cash assistance or aren't eligible for any.
My only stable income is the $300.40 a month I get from Nevada PERS. I have had trouble trying to sub (as a special ed aide) this year because of the situation with gas. Almost all of the assignments for ESD are in Eagle Point, which round trip eats up about 1/8th of a tank of gas. There is no public transportation available to go there. The "favorite" subs are in Medford or Central Point, and many of these subs are ESD retirees who shouldn't even be stealing assignments from more deserving people. So what are left are the assignments nobody wants. The schools aren't the problem, just the commute now with $4-a-gallon gas.
I can thank that cunt (excuse my language, but it is the only word that really describes her) who fired me back in 2008 and the asshole former human resources chief officer for ruining my life, aided and abetted by the Washoe Education Association and the Dyer Lawrence law firm. I cannot get back on track financially no matter how hard I try. I will trash WCSD every chance I get and in every possible forum because it is not right their administrators ruin teachers on trumped-up or utterly bogus charges in order to protect themselves when they screw up. There are many more like me in this situation. Former teachers like the one who won 1.1 million in a civil suit are rare. Few lawyers will bother taking a teacher's case, and few teachers have the resources anyway to fight these assholes in court.
Back to the WSWS article:
A policy brief recently issued by the National Poverty Center (NPC) reveals that the number of households in the US living on less than $2 a day per person has increased by 130 percent since 1996, from 636,000 to some 1.46 million today.
This means that some 4 million people in “the richest country on earth” (according to US capitalism’s apologists) are surviving on less than $60 a month each, i.e., essentially on no income whatsoever.
The policy brief, authored by H. Luke Shaefer, University of Michigan, School of Social Work, and Kathryn Edin, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, studies the results of the fifteen years since the 1996 “welfare reform,” signed into law by President Bill Clinton, which fatally slashed the social safety net.
“This reform,” the authors comment, “has been followed by a dramatic decline in cash assistance caseloads, from an average of 12.3 million recipients per month in 1996 to 4.4 million in June 2011; only 1.1 million of these beneficiaries are adults.
Here's the report:
In sum, we estimate that, as of the beginning of 2011, about 1.46 million U.S. households with about 2.8 million children were surviving on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month. This constitutes almost 20 percent of all nonelderly households with children living in poverty. About 866,000 households appear to live in extreme poverty across
a full calendar quarter. The prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011. This growth has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform. Despite the presence of a substantial inkind safety net, a significant number of households with children continue to slip through the cracks. And it is unclear how
households with no cash income—either from work, government programs, assets, friends, family members, or informal sources—are getting by even if they do manage to claim some form of in-kind benefit.
I damned near didn't vote for Clinton for re-election because of his cynical attempt to triangulate the GOP while destroying the lives of the poor. I certainly didn't actively work on his campaign. Thanks for nothing, Bill.
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