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The Annual Homelessness Assessment released in 2012 found that nearly 24 percent of the homeless residents living in shelters across the country are between the ages of 18 and 30.
若い人たちが失職し、ホームレスになり、シェルターで暮らす実態。
Nearly 24 percent of the homeless residents living in shelters across the country are between the ages of 18 and 30.
シェルターに住む２４％が１８歳から３０歳の若者である、と。アメリカ
SALON
TUESDAY, DEC 10, 2013 10:43 PM +0900
Look at the stats: America resembles a poor country
We're number one, sure, but in things like early onset diabetes and per capita incarceration
CJ WERLEMAN, ALTERNET
これも先ほどのイギリスの記事と同じで、指標をあげながら衰退するアメリカを嘆ている。
America has become a RINO: rich in name only. By every measure, we look like a broken banana republic. Not a single U.S. city is included in the world’s top 10 most livable cities. Only one U.S. airport makes the list of the top 100 in the world. Our roads, schools and bridges are falling apart, and our trains―none of them high-speed―are running off their tracks. Our high school students are rated 30th in math, and some 30 countries have longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant mortality. The only things America is number one in these days are the number of incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes
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Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada. In fact, the percentage of Americans who say they could not afford the food needed to feed their families at some point in the last year is three times that of Germany, more than twice than Italy and Canada.
Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that. Chuck Thompson, author of Better off Without Em, writes, “Like Mexico, the South has spent the past four decades systematically siphoning auto jobs from Michigan and the Midwest by keeping worker’s salaries low and inhibiting their right to organize by rendering their unions toothless.” Average wages for autoworkers in the South are up to 30 percent lower than in Michigan.
Obama’s speech clearly depicted an America losing touch with its ideals. Not only is the middle-class fast becoming the working poor, but upward mobility is becoming almost impossible to attain.
America is in urgent need of significant investment. We need to, as Obama said, “not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago. A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.”
That’s one part of the solution. The other part is a rejection of the Republican Party business model. A higher minimum wage; higher taxes on corporations and the rich; and a greater percentage of the labor force protected by collective bargaining will help restore the America whose middle-class was once the envy of the world, and whose people were among the happiest and healthiest on the planet.
アメリカが駄目な例として、世界で最も居住に適した都市にあがっていないことがあげられていますが、しかし、それは日本も同じ、道路などのインフラが老朽化して駄目になっているのも同じであります。
この論者も経済格差に注目しておりますが、民営化や自由化をその原因と考え、最低賃金の上乗せ、法人税や高所得者への税金の値上げ、組合の強化などを改善策として考えているようであります。
