I've been thinking about poverty

The poverty rate for 2005 was 12.6 percent. 'Bout the same as the year before. And it's been steadily increasing for the last 5 years. The poverty threshhold is set in the same manner as it was in 1967: three times a nutrionally adequate food budget scaled for family size. No rent, no health care, no transportation expenses. No taxes, no insurance, education expenses. No credit card interest.

In 2004 spending by the poorest 1/5 of Americans exceeded their income by a staggering 95%. The poor get poorer. And there are concerns that are established for the purpose of separating the poor from their money. Pay day lending operations routinely charge $15 or so as a "finance charge" and then they charge 390+% APR. Jesus. Legal theft. The original 1874 Arkansas constitution forbade charging more than 10% APR on any loan. That's why your parents didn't have credit cards. They were almost impossible to get from Arkansas banks. In 1982 we passed Amendment 60 that was so goofily worded it had to have interpretation by the state Supreme Court. They ruled that banks in Arkansas could charge 5% above the federal discount rate. In 1994 Congress gave out-of-state lenders the right to charge their home state interest rate if they chose. You can see how Arkansas bankers would have been a bit pissed. So in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act was passed. It was written specifically to affect Arkansas only. It allowed in-state lenders to charge the same interest that out-of-state lenders were charging. So the idea of "usury (17% in Arkansas)" lost any importance in Arkansas law and nearly every bank in Arkansas began to make enough money to be snatched up by the big east coast banking concerns. All of that was banking legislation. In 2000 Congress fixed it so that non-bank lenders could charge the same ridiculously high rates. The goal of all this legislative work was supposedly to give Aranksas banks a chance to make the same money as out-of-state banks. Such bullshit was actually swallowed by some. The goal of all this legislation was to increase bank profits. Any impact this might have on local economies was gravy.

So. We've got 1 in 8 (or so) Americans living below the federal poverty threshhold ($19, 350 for a family of 4 in 2005). That's something approaching 37 million people. Note that if you are working full-time for minimum wage (as say, a janitor, a food service person, a data entry clerk, etc) you will make $10, 712 (calculated using a year-round employment figure of 2,080 hours). Note that if you are working as construction labor, for instance, you won't have year-round work; there'll be rain out days and such. And the minimum wage hasn't been raised since 1997, a record long stagnation.

Next, premiums for employer-based health insurance rose by 9.2 percent in 2005, the fifth consecutive year of increases over 9 percent. All types of health plans -- HMOs, PPOs, and point-of-service plans (POS) -- all went up. The average employee contribution to company-provided health insurance has increased more than 143 percent since 2000.The annual premiums for family-of-four coverage is about $10,800, higher than the total earnings of a full-time, minimum-wage worker. So, obviously, minimum wage employees don't have family health care insurance. I realize that most employers don't pass all the rises in insurance costs on to their employees but they certainly don't absorb it all, either. And it is not a vanishingly small number of companies that are no longer offering health care insurance; insurance costs are seriously eating into their profits.

Profits. That's the money that they get to take home and spend on their own families.

Anyway. You can work full-time and make half of the poverty level. Anybody paying minimum wage to people trying to make a living ought to be ashamed. The employers are stealing food from the mouths of children. Any employer who isn't doing everything he can to make sure that his employees have the same health care coverage that he has is a monster, tending to the health of his children at the expense of his employees' children.

It is conventional wisdom in political circles that nobody ever lost an election by saying "Fuck the poor." But, as we move away from Republic and on to Empire, I'd like to remind the powers-that-be that peasant revolutions are always very, very bloody for the non-peasants.