Showing posts with label Rising Costs. Show all posts

Thursday, October 29, 2015

England : Malnutrition and Cases of Victorian-era diseases including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have increased since 2010

Malnutrition and 'Victorian' diseases soaring in England 'due to food poverty and cuts'

Dean Kirby
Tuesday 27 October 2015

While cases of malnutrition doubled in the four years to 2014, there has been a rise in diseases that were rife in the Victorian era such as scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough Corbis

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Malnutrition cases in English hospitals almost double in five years

Admissions to hospitals have soared as poorer families struggle to afford food

Charlie Cooper, Kunal Dutta
@charliecooper8
Sunday 17 November 2013

The shocking impact of recession and austerity on England’s poorest people has come to light again in figures showing the number of malnutrition cases treated at NHS hospitals has nearly doubled since the economic downturn Rex

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Friday, October 23, 2015

How Rising Rents Are About to Crush American Spending Power

Alex Lozupone

Rent Is Too Damn High Party car

Wikipedia.org

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We just learned America’s rental affordability crisis is as bad as it’s ever been. Unfortunately, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

The American Community Survey for 2014, released a few weeks ago, found that the number of renters paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing – the standard benchmark for what’s considered affordable – reached a new record high of 20.7 million households, up nearly a half-million from the year before. Despite the improving economy, the increase was nearly five times bigger than last year’s gain.

That means about half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable. And the latest increase comes on top of substantial growth since 2000 that has seen this number climb by roughly six million households over the period, an increase of about 41 percent.

Related: More Americans Struggling to Pay the Rent

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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Rent is so high in San Francisco that I’m a software engineer and I live in a van

QUARTZ

Written by

Katharine Patterson

October 17, 2015

About a year ago, I was having lunch with a friend when I made a throwaway comment: “Have you seen the rent in San Francisco? If I get a job in the Bay Area, I’ll totally live in a van.”

As I sit in darkness writing this, I’m trying to keep my typing quiet, lest a real inhabitant of the neighborhood I’m parked in should walk by and wonder about the sounds coming from the rusty bus loitering on their block. Yes, you understood that correctly: Today, I work in a multi-million dollar office complex, and I live in a van.

This summer, after receiving a job offer in Silicon Valley, I went on Craigslist and began sifting through housing listings: “verrrrrryyy cheap bedroom ;),” “great deal on rent!” A single room with a shared bathroom? Two thousand per month on the low-end. A small studio apartment, you ask? If your startup wasn’t recently bought for seven figures, forget about it.

I perked up after finding a listing for $1,000 per month. Now this could work. Clicking through to the details section however revealed the offer was for a single bunk in a room with eight people, a set-up referred to as a “hacker house” by an (evil) marketing genius.

Even if I was to spend the huge majority of my salary on rent, I knew I would likely still be in a grim living situation, resenting every penny I handed over that could have gone towards paying back my student loans. And as a software engineer, I’m one of the lucky ones! Imagine those who aren’t lucky enough to be on the tech payroll.

Anyway, three weeks ago I took the equivalent of three months’ rent and bought an old red bus. It’s a 1969 VW camper van with a hole in the floor and a family of spiders that has more of a right to be here than I do (sleeping in your car on public land in California is illegal).

(Katharine Patterson/blog.thinkkappi.com)

But with the help of Ikea and an army of cleaning supplies I was able to get the bus into livable condition.

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Monday, October 19, 2015

Many Low-Income Workers Say ‘No’ to Health Insurance

MSN News

Many Low-Income Workers Say ‘No’ to Health Insurance

The New York Times

By STACY COWLEY 6 hrs ago

An employee at Golden Corral taking clean cups from the kitchen. Some Golden Corral restaurants began offering health insurance to employees, but few have opted in.

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — When Billy Sewell began offering health insurance this year to 600 service workers at the Golden Corral restaurants that he owns, he wondered nervously how many would buy it. Adding hundreds of employees to his plan would cost him more than $1 million — a hit he wasn’t sure his low-margin business could afford.
His actual costs, though, turned out to be far smaller than he had feared. So far, only two people have signed up.

“We offered, and they didn’t take it,” he said.

Evidence is growing that his experience is not unusual. The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, which requires employers with more than 50 full-time workers to offer most of their employees insurance or face financial penalties, was one of the law’s most controversial provisions. Business owners and industry groups fiercely protested the change, and some companies cut workers’ hours to reduce the number of employees who would be eligible.

But 10 months after the first phase of the mandate took effect, covering companies with 100 or more workers, many business owners say they are finding very few employees willing to buy the health insurance that they are now compelled to offer. The trend is especially pronounced among smaller and midsize businesses in fields filled with low-wage hourly workers, like restaurants, retailing and hospitality. (Companies with 50 to 99 workers are not required to comply with the mandate until next year.)

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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Tennessee district closes schools over lack of funding, blames Obamacare

Published time: 13 Oct, 2015 00:27

A school district in Tennessee voted to cancel classes and shut down its schools as a result of a budget problem that has left the government unable to fund the facilities. The school director blamed Obamacare for its problems.

Clay County, Tennessee operates three schools total – one high school and two that cover pre-kindergarten through eighth grade – on a $9.5 million budget. However, now more than 1,100 students are sitting at home while officials try to figure out how to reopen the doors. A school board meeting last week saw the board voting 6-4 to close the schools. A separate vote to keep them open failed.

Notably, the county’s financial issues are not new. Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong told Associated Press that officials have been struggling with the budget for three years, and blamed county obligations such as state and government mandates, particularly the Affordable Care Act, for the monetary hole.

"Clay County's inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what's caused this to come to a head," he said.

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Thursday, March 20, 2014

A new study by Bankrate.com shows that about one third of uninsured Americans are going to remain without coverage and opt to pay the penalty. You can also legally opt out, explore eight options you may find interesting.

One Third of Uninsured Won’t Sign Up for Obamacare

By Brianna Ehley

The Fiscal Times

March 17, 2014

As the White House scrambles to get people signed up for health insurance before the March 31 deadline, many uninsured Americans say they are still planning to take their chances and remain without coverage.
A new study by Bankrate.com shows that about one third of uninsured Americans are going to remain without coverage and opt to pay the penalty.
The survey results suggest that the administration’s outreach to uninsured people may be falling short, with more than half of people without insurance unaware of the March 31 deadline—and even more unaware of subsidies that could make their policies more affordable.
Related: Obamacare May Be Failing the Uninsured
Bankrate surveyed 3,005 people and found that 41 percent of those who were uninsured said they plan to stay uninsured because they think that health insurance is too costly. Meanwhile, about 70 percent said they were unaware of subsidies available under the new law that could make their health plans more affordable.
The study’s findings are worrisome for the Obama administration since the key goal of the president’s health care law was to extend access to health coverage for the uninsured.
A separate study by the McKinsey consulting firm found just 27 percent of Obamacare enrollees were uninsured. That means that the majority of those signing up for Obamacare had previous insurance of some kind—whether they were kicked off their old policies, or they found a better deal on the exchanges. Though not confirmed by the White House, if accurate, that could mean the law is failing to meet its intended goal.
Related: Gallup: Employment, Obamacare Lower Uninsured Rate
Gary Cohen, an official for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the administration has not been tracking how many of the Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured.

Read More Here
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Breitbart

Eight Ways to Opt Out of Obamacare

by Dr. Susan Berry 25 Dec 2013

With the deadline to sign up for Obamacare having come and gone, many Americans have decided to “opt out” of President Obama’s signature health care reform law, choosing instead to pay the $95 penalty for sidestepping the individual mandate.

“For many Americans opting out of Obamacare is the best decision they can make, but it's important that they do it the right way—just refusing to buy health insurance and not having another way to pay for catastrophic medical expenses is a mistake,” Sean Parnell, author of the newly-released The Self-Pay Patient, told Breitbart News. “People who want to opt out should be looking at alternatives to conventional health insurance, such as joining a health care sharing ministry or purchasing a fixed benefits policy."
Parnell also strongly advises Americans against opting out and simply paying the “list” price for medical visits and prescription drugs without shopping around, or by relying solely on the local hospital emergency room for routine medical care.
“This approach leaves people who opt out vulnerable to sky-high medical expenses at inflated ‘list’ or ‘chargemaster’ rates, and can result in an inability to obtain needed care because of cost,” Parnell writes on his blog, selfpaypatient.com.
Instead, Parnell recommends the following eight options for those who have opted out of ObamaCare:
1. Join a health care sharing ministry, which are voluntary, charitable membership organizations that share medical expenses among the membership.
Parnell states that Samaritan Ministries, Christian Healthcare Ministries, and Christian Care Ministry are open to practicing Christians, while Liberty HealthShare is open to those who are committed to religious liberty.
Healthcare sharing ministries “operate entirely outside of ObamaCare’s regulations, and typically offer benefits for about half the cost of similar health insurance,” says Parnell. “Members are also exempt from having to pay the tax for being uninsured.”

Read More Here
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Friday, February 21, 2014

Hmmmm Factor : Obama plan: Cut tax breaks for richest retirement savers. Wants to spur saving among low and middle-income earners.

The legitimate questions to ask at this point in time would be .......

Exactly what money would the low and middle-income earners be putting aside for savings?

Considering the unemployment rate and the rising number of the homeless how realistic or honest would this proposal be?

In a world where the working middle class are disappearing and the poor can barely feed themselves and their families , are retirement savings accounts truly an achievable reality?

~Desert Rose~

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New Geography . com

The U.S. Middle Class Is Turning Proletarian

by Joel Kotkin 02/16/2014

The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility.
The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it has widened significantly under his watch. Not only did the income of the middle 60% of households drop between 2010 and 2012 while that of the top 20% rose, the income of the middle 60% declined by a greater percentage than the poorest quintile. The middle 60% of earners’ share of the national pie has fallen from 53% in 1970 to 45% in 2012.
This group, what I call the yeoman class — the small business owners, the suburban homeowners , the family farmers or skilled construction tradespeople– is increasingly endangered. Once the dominant class in America, it is clearly shrinking: In the four decades since 1971 the percentage of Americans earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has dropped from 61% to 51% of the population, according to Pew.
Roughly one in three people born into middle class-households , those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of income, now fall out of that status as adults.
Neither party has a reasonable program to halt the decline of the middle class. Previous generations of liberals — say Walter Reuther, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, Pat Brown — recognized broad-based economic growth was a necessary precursor to upward mobility and social justice. However, many in the new wave of progressives engage in fantastical economics built around such things as “urban density” and “green jobs,” while adopting policies that restrict growth in manufacturing, energy and housing. When all else fails, some, like Oregon’s John Kitzhaber, try to change the topic by advocating shifting emphasis from measures of economic growth to “happiness.”

Read More Here

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Feb. 21, 2014, 5:00 a.m. EST

Obama plan: Cut tax breaks for richest retirement savers

Plan designed to spur saving by low-, middle-income earners

By Robert Powell, MarketWatch

President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress in early March, as part of his fiscal 2015 budget, to reduce some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, according to published reports.

Plus, the president wants to limit the value of all tax deductions, defined contribution exclusions and IRA deductions to 28% of income — and include an overall cap on all retirement accounts, including pensions, that could bring in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue, according to a Pensions & Investments report. Read Companies bracing for 1-2 retirement punch .

According to the report, the proposals are designed to direct more of the tax preference for retirement savings toward getting more low- and middle-income people into the habit of saving.

Based on current tax brackets, Pensions & Investments reported that the 28% limit would reduce the tax advantages of retirement savings for people earning more than $183,000 or couples earning more than $225,000. And the overall cap for all tax-preferred retirement accounts would limit them to providing an annual retirement income of $205,000, which would currently cap tax-preferred accounts at $3.4 million, but could go lower as interest rates rise.

So, who might feel the effects of this proposal? Largely, the top 5% of tax payers. According to the Tax Policy Center, a partnership between the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, there are about 6.07 million Americans who earned above $200,000 in 2011 and they make up the top 4.2% of taxpayers, according to published reports. Read more about the president’s tax proposal here: Who makes more than $250k, and are they rich?

And what do experts have to say about what the president might propose? In the main, they say the rich need not worry that their tax breaks for saving for retirement will be cut.

“We’ve heard these kinds of proposals being discussed in policy circles for a couple of years now,” said Skip Schweiss, president of TD Ameritrade Trust Co. and managing director of TD Ameritrade Institutional. “It would not surprise me to see these ideas become more formalized through President Obama’s 2015 budget proposal.”

But even though experts expect the president to propose reductions to some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, few expect any congressional action. “Given the congressional divide, it’s hard to see something like this becoming law, but of course one never knows,” said Schweiss.

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Monday, December 2, 2013

Walmart Workers, Community Supporters Join Nationwide Protests : Walmart collecting food donations to feed employees

Washington DC Area Walmart Workers, Community Supporters Join Nationwide Protests

Published on Nov 29, 2013

Walmart workers and community supporters in the Washington, D.C. area today protested against Walmart—the nation's largest retailer—joining 1,500 protests across the nation in one of the largest mobilizations of working families in American history. Workers in the Washington, D.C. area were joined by tens of thousands of Americans in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, Sacramento, Miami, Minneapolis and other locations who called on Walmart to end illegal retaliation and publicly commit to improving labor standards, including providing workers with more full-time work and $25,000 a year. At a protest at the Walmart store located on Richmond Highway in Alexandria, Va., nine people, including one Walmart worker, were arrested in an act of civil disobedience calling for an end to the exploitation of Walmart workers by their company.

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Published on Monday, December 2, 2013 by Common Dreams

Fast Food Giants Starve Workers' Wages, Gorge on Taxpayers: Report

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

Demonstration outside McDonald's in Times Square in support of employees on strike New York November 29, 2012. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly)As the nation's largest fast food giants continue to push back against the ongoing fight for better wages by fast food workers across the country, a report released Monday reveals a world in which those companies are "pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies" as they feed their CEOs' growing paychecks.
According to the report, Fast Food CEOs Rake in Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, current tax code allows corporations such as Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's "to deduct unlimited amounts from their income taxes for the cost of stock options, certain stock grants, and other forms of so-called 'performance pay' for top executives," meaning that the more corporations pay their top earners, the less they pay in federal taxes.
As IPS reports, over the past two years, CEOs of the top six publicly held fast food chains brought home over $183 million in deductible "performance pay," which in turn reduced their companies' taxes by an estimated $64 million.
As Sarah Anderson from IPS points out in an op-ed Monday, $64 million is enough to cover the average cost of food stamps for 40,000 American families for a year.
Fast food profits, in this way, come at the taxpayer's expense from two sides: while CEOs' paychecks expand and corporations pay less in taxes, those companies have simultaneously worked "to keep low-level workers' wages so low that many must rely on public assistance."
As another report from UC Berkeley recently showed, low-wage fast-food jobs currently cost the American public nearly $7 billion a year, as 52% of fast food workers, including those who work full-time, are payed so little they must rely on safety net programs including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
"What makes all this even more galling is that these fast food giants are pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies for their CEO pay while fighting to keep their workers’ wages at rock bottom," writes Anderson.
"All of the big fast food corporations are members of the National Restaurant Association," Anderson writes, "which is aggressively working to block a raise in the federal minimum wage to a level that would let millions of fast food workers make ends meet without public support."
Meanwhile, across the country workers are fed up with low wages and have embarked on a series of local and national strikes against their fast food employers over the course of the past year.
On Thursday, fast food workers organized by groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, with backing from unions such as the Service Employees International Union, will strike in one hundred cities across the U.S. at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurant locations, demanding a $15-an-hour wage.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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Respect WALMART Workers - San Diego Light Brigade 11-27-13

Published on Nov 28, 2013

Walmart is facing protests on Friday 11/29 at 1,500 locations across the country. Employees and activists will be pushing for higher wages, more full-time jobs and an end to employer retaliation. Please Stand With Walmart Workers and join a BLACK FRIDAY PROTEST near you!

To learn more please visit: http://forrespect.org/

71% of Wallmart Workers will be working on Thanksgiving! Don't you think they deserve a holiday too? And Christmas off too?
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ss...

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A volunteer loads food at the Capital Area Food Bank, Nov. 14, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Walmart collecting food donations to feed employees

11/18/13 04:45 PM Updated 11/19/13 08:15 AM

By Ned Resnikoff

Organized labor, protesting workers and other activist groups have been saying for years that low-wage Walmart employees can’t afford to meet basic needs like food. Now, one Cleveland, Ohio, location is doing something about it: soliciting food donations from other workers.
In an employees-only section of the store, management has placed two bins underneath a sign reading, “Please donate food items here so Associates in Need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” local paperThe Plain Dealer reported on Monday. Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg told the newspaper that it is for employees “who have had some hardships come up.”
“This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” said Lundberg.
The majority of Walmart employees reportedly make less than $25,000 annually, and many of them rely on food stamps. A case study compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that employees in one Walmart location received between $96,007 and $219,528 in food stamps over the course of a single year.

Read More Here
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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Fast-food workers went on strike and protested outside McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants in 60 U.S. cities demanding a living wage

U.S. fast-food workers protest, demand a 'living wage'

Strikers march outside a Wendy's restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts August 29, 2013, as a part of a nationwide fast food workers' strike asking for $15 per hour wages and the right to form unions. REUTERS-Brian Snyder

By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

NEW YORK | Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:52pm EDT

(Reuters) - Fast-food workers went on strike and protested outside McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants in 60 U.S. cities on Thursday, in the largest protest of an almost year-long campaign to raise service sector wages.
Rallies were held in cities from New York to Oakland and stretched into the South, historically difficult territory for organized labor.
The striking workers say they want to unionize without retaliation in order to collectively bargain for a "living wage."
They are demanding $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25. The median wage for front-line fast-food workers is $8.94 per hour, according to an analysis of government data by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an advocacy group for lower-wage workers.
"It's almost impossible to get by (alone)," said McDonald's worker Rita Jennings, 37, who was among about 100 protesters who marched in downtown Detroit Thursday. "You have to live with somebody to make it."
Jennings said that in her 11 years at McDonald's, she has never received a raise above her wage of $7.40 an hour.
In Atlanta, about 20 fast-food workers at two different chains presented their managers with "strike letters" before walking out, Roger Sikes, a coordinator with the nonprofit group Atlanta Jobs With Justice, told Reuters.
And in Oakland, about 80 fast-food workers from various restaurants and their supporters rallied outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.
"I'm doing it for the respect for myself and for my other coworkers," said Ryan Schuetz, 20, who works at McDonald's. He said his work hours have been reduced recently and that he was struggling to keep a roof over his head.
Several politicians came out in support of the protesters on Thursday.
In New York City, mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn joined several hundred demonstrators outside a McDonald's in midtown Manhattan, holding a sign that read "On Strike: Wages Too Damn Low."
"Better pay will put more money into local businesses and spur economic growth," Democratic Representative George Miller of California said in a statement.
Robert Hiltonsmith, a policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank, said that if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity and inflation, it would be closer to $17 per hour.

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