Political Upheaval

Florida Fast Facts for Fiscal Budget Debate

Social Security: 3,784,225 Floridians receive S.S., of which 488,461 are disabled and 242,421 are children.

Medicare: 3,247,677 Floridians receive this health care coverage

Medicaid: 3,420,858 Floridians receive this health care coverage, including 1,735,771 children and 445,500 seniors

Total Florida population: 19,057,542

Total number of Floridians receiving government aid: 10,452,760

That’s 54.8% of Florida. Do you now believe the fiscal budget debate is important?

Sources:
Social Security Works, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Work state-by-state reports. Social Security beneficiary statistics are for 2010. Medicare and Medicaid are for 2009.

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thenewrepublic:

Why everyone overestimates American equality of opportunity.

Read an excerpt from Senior Editor Timothy Noah’s upcoming book, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, published in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine.

“Most of Western Europe today is both more equal in income and more econmically mobile than the United States. And it isn’t just Western Europe. Countries as varied as Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan all have higher degrees of income mobility than we do. A nation that prides itself on its lack of class rigidity has, in short, become significantly more economically rigid than many other developed countries. How did our perception of ourselves end up so far out of sync with reality?”

—Timothy Noah, “The Mobility Myth: Why everyone overestimates American equality of opportunity.”

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Serfdom.

Feudalism by the corporation; that is today’s society.

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plantedcity:

Solar energy: ‘Bringing light to the poor, one liter at a time’

From Reuters:

A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time.

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thedailyfeed:

Nearly 1 in 5 children lived in poverty in the U.S. in 2009. That’s 15 million kids. Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi ranked lowest on the study’s 10 indicators of child well-being. New Hampshire, Minnesota and Massachusetts ranked highest.

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Just showing how the tax breaks from the past have affected the working class. Good interview with 2 extremely wealthy men and their opinions.

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“There’s too much money here. Nobody should be hitting lotto for $36 million and we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that’s just real. […] There’s no way! There’s no way that these people should own planes and there are people that don’t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants! I know you’re rich, I know you got $40 billion, but can you can keep it to one house? You only need one house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it two rooms? Why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room! It just don’t make sense to me.”

“There’s too much money here. Nobody should be hitting lotto for $36 million and we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that’s just real. […] There’s no way! There’s no way that these people should own planes and there are people that don’t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants! I know you’re rich, I know you got $40 billion, but can you can keep it to one house? You only need one house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it two rooms? Why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room! It just don’t make sense to me.”

16,257 notes

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