Having the best high paying job is no insulation from poverty anymore. One illness & you can be instantly ruined financially for life.

What part of rising uninsured does Timmy not understand?

See Bush has a nice one-two punch going here. Drop health insurance & block research into cures for disease. Translation just roll into the ditch & die after expending yourself in a low paying sweat shop as outsourcing increases.

Why should God bless America when she behaves like this? Have these phony right wing religious fanatics ever bothered to read the beatitudes. Guess the cherry picking is not limited to warmongering & intelligence data manipulation.

I pointed out that the phone wasn’t made in America, and that when he needed help he used a call center in India where few or no Americans had jobs, and that his lower computer prices were the result of outsourcing labor and outsourcing environmental damage to China and Malaysia.

He grunted, put his phone away, and changed the subject. He also believes that anyone who doesn’t want a job at the local Wal-Mart (here in rural Nowhere, Illinois) for $9.00 an hour (”and they get health care after six months!”) “can just go work somewhere else.”

Some people are really dense. I mean, this guy is a rock-solid Republican who thinks he’s a true patriot–but he deals strictly in the black market because he doesn’t want to pay taxes. His philosophy is “I take care of my buddies, and my buddies take care of me,” which sounds distinctly tribal, corrupt, and dare I say it? non-Western.

This country is collecting tax dollars from most everyone including the uninsured, underinsured and the uninsurable and using those tax dollars to assign greater value to some lives than to others.

I can make no case that what we as a nation are doing is moral.

I am in the Medicare system and cannot make a case that my life should be assigned a greater value than the life of a six year old, a thirty year old or anyone else. I challenge anyone in the Medicare system to make a case that it is moral for grandparents to have a greater assigned value than their children and/or grandchildren.

Yes, challenging what we have is long overdue.

All it takes is a bit of backbone.

Solution? Realistically, there would be a LOT more opportunity loose in our nation, if we imposed 100% estate tax on everything beyond $5 million, and I could argue that lower would be better. That move alone would alleviate the deadwood boards and management in our corporations; and if coupled with some further moves toward merit-based rewards, we might overcome the inbred mediocrity which has bequeathed us Bungle – er, Bush – as our selected leader.

If you want ALL the available information that built these graphs, GO TO THE SOURCE YOURSELF.

You will note, if you check, that this is the standard “troll derailment” argument when a graph or similar data is presented: attack the data, ignore the conclusion. And it seems to work.

The CONCLUSION, which is what SHOULD be the topic of discussion here, is that the Bush administration has increased the general poverty level of America and increased the amount of uninsured Americans. One could discuss the how’s and why’s of that, and tangent into the corporate welfare and corporate entitlement state that America has become. Or, one can argue to infinity that any presentation of data is a flawed presentation. So, if the graph starts at “0″, then what? Well, how about the middle and upper classes? They are not represented, and in order to have a “complete” and “accurate” (subjective terms) graph of poverty, it needs to show the ‘above poverty’ lines to offer perspective. Then how about comparing corporate wealth to personal wealth? Is this just liquid assets, or does it involve investments? Does it take into account untaxable income? Etc. to bloody infinity, people. You can ALWAYS argue that the data is incomplete and thus inaccurate.

The current regime ruling America (and anyone note Bush’s recent comment that (I paraphrase) most Americans may want out of Iraq, but he ‘ain’t gonna do it ‘cuz he’s the Czar… I mean ‘president’.’ He likes the thought of being a “democratically elected dictator who has no need or desire to follow the will of the people”, and has become more and more brazen about that attitude.

i got my food stamps (i grow weary of caviar, but who am i to complain?) and my housing, but wheres my suv? u got a contact number for that, or are you merely full of shit?