The Kevin Trudeau Show: 10-6-12

Today, Kevin gives you even more proof that the economy is getting worse and that your standard of living is deteriorating! Plus, the creator of the Resolve mineral detox, Dr. Ray Lala, stops by to explain how his mineral detox can virtually cure you from any viral infection, including herpes and HPV.

Self Help:
Second Stream Of Income
The Secret To Perfect Health
Resolve The “Unresolvable”

Economy:
Recovery Job Growth Concentrated In Low-Paying Occupations
Protesters ‘Liberate’ Foreclosed Homes

Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Stand with KT!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become A Fan of Kevin on Facebook

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

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The Kevin Trudeau Show: 9-1-12

Today, Kevin reveals how the government is ‘helping’ the economy by letting you get sick and why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Self Help:
Avoid Skin Cancer
Safe Sunscreen
Get Rid Of Gut Bacteria
The Good Stuff

Health:
EPA Still Evades Zonolite Warnings
Toxin From Receipts May Lurk in Cash
HIV-Positive Porn Actor Wants Mandatory Condoms
Non-Melanoma Skin Cancers On The Rise
Gut Bacteria & Obesity May Be Linked
People Consume Up to 46 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day!
Swimming Pool Disinfectants Linked To Cancer
Americans Bombarded With Cancer Causing Chemicals

Big Brother:
Government Seeking to Track Cell Phones
Big Brother To Track Medication Compliance

Wealth:
Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become Kevin’s Friend on Facebook
Kevin’s Film Club
Kevin’s Book Club

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

Click Below to Watch the Kevin Trudeau Show LIVE!

7 Worst International Aid Ideas

March 9, 2012

Matador Change

By Richard Stupart

“How much foreign aid should the US really be involved with? Shouldn’t the citizens of the US should be getting aid before anyone else?” –KTRN

1. One million t-shirts for Africa

Aid circles employ the cynical acronym SWEDOW (stuff we don’t want) to describe initiatives like Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts project. Sadler had admittedly never been to Africa, and had never worked in an aid or development environment before. But he cared a great deal, and came up with the idea to send a million free shirts to Africa in order to help the people there.

Like some sort of lightning rod for the combined venom of the humanitarian aid world, Jason found himself pilloried across the web in a matter of weeks. Everyone from armchair bloggers to senior economists spat fire on his dream until it eventually ground to a halt. In July 2010, Jason threw in the towel and abandoned his scheme. And somewhere in Africa, an economy sighed in relief.

Why was the idea so bad?

Firstly, it’s debatable whether there is actually a need for T-shirts in Africa. There is practically nowhere that people who want shirts are unable to afford them. Wanting to donate them is a classic case of having something you want to donate and assuming it is needed. Just because you have a really large hammer does not mean that everything in the world is a nail.

Secondly, dumping a million free shirts is inefficient. What it would cost to pack them, ship them, and transport them overland to wherever it is that they are meant to go would cost close to the manufacturing cost of the shirts in the first place. That’s just incredibly wasteful. If you wanted to get people shirts, it would be far more cost effective to simply commission their manufacture locally, creating a stimulus to the local textile economy in the process.

Which brings us to the third critique of free stuff. When people in the target community already have an economy functioning in part on the sale and repair of the stuff you want to donate (shirts in this instance), then dumping a million of them free is the economic equivalent of an atom bomb. Why buy a shirt anymore when you can get a five-year supply for free? Why get yours repaired when you can simply toss it and get another? And in the process everyone who once sold shirts or practiced tailoring finds themselves unemployed and unable to provide money for themselves or their families to buy anything.

Except shirts. Because those are now free.

And before you think dumping free shirts is the sin of an uneducated maverick, Jason’s poor logic was subsequently repeated by World Vision, in accepting 100,000 NFL shirts to dump on some poor, shirtless village in Africa.
2. TOMS Buy-One-Give-One

Bearing in mind all of the criticisms above, TOMS shoe brand has built a brand on the premise that buying one pair of their shoes automatically includes the provision of another pair of shoes to an underprivileged child in a developing nation somewhere. Three months after Jason abandoned sending a million shirts to Africa, TOMS celebrated sending a million pairs of shoes to the underprivileged. It continues to do so.

While there are possibly more people in the world who need shoes than might need shirts (though this is debatable), TOMS can be (and has been) broadly criticised for the same kinds of unintended consequences of dumping shoes in places where people might otherwise be employed to make them.

Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.

Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes.

The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it.

It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.

Click here for the full report.

In Startling Job Trend, Unemployed Need Not Apply

October 12, 2011

Fox News

By: Mike Tobin

The latest national hiring numbers were better than expected but still not enough to get that unemployment rate to budge lower than 9.1 percent. In the face of that, lawmakers and activists say employers are reaching out only to job candidates who already have jobs.

They call it discrimination against the unemployed.

“What you do is create a permanent class of unemployable people, and to me that is totally unacceptable,” said Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar, who is proposing a city law to ban the practice.

The trend was spotted with online ads and highlighted by the National Employment Law Project.

“We were really surprised to find well over 100 ads that explicitly stated that the unemployed won’t be considered. … Certainly, if you see a hundred ads, it’s probably happening in thousands and thousands more,” organization spokesperson Judi Conti said.

Activists say that discrimination against the unemployed hits blacks and Hispanics harder than whites.

“Black Americans are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as White Americans,” says Rashad Robinson, with Color of Change.

Legislators jumped into action. Chicago is proposing a city law to combat the practice. Illinois legislators are working on a bill, and New Jersey already passed one. The U.S. House and Senate have jumped into action, and President Obama is including discrimination against the unemployed in his American Jobs Act.

But cue another set of critics: Michael Saltsman with the Employment Policies Institute says the claims of unemployment discrimination are overblown. All the legislation is a knee-jerk reaction when the National Employment Law Project only produced 150 examples from a sea of roughly 3 million want ads that get posted online every month.

“I think the problem is more spin than substance,” Saltsman said.

On top of that, Saltsman said, the new laws could turn the unemployed into a protected class on par with disabled people and minorities.

“If legislation is passed like this, that actually ends up preventing employers from hiring because they’re scared if they don’t give someone the job they’ll be sued for discrimination against the unemployed,” Saltsman said.

Click here for full report from Fox News

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: Long-Term Unemployment A ‘National Crisis’

September 29, 2011

The Huffington Post

By Martin Crutsinger

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that long-term unemployment is an American “national crisis” and suggested that Congress should take further action to combat it. He also said lawmakers should provide more help to the battered housing industry.

Bernanke noted that about 45 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months.

“This is unheard of,” he said in a question-and-answer session after a speech in Cleveland. “This has never happened in the post-war period in the United States. They are losing the skills they had, they are losing their connections, their attachment to the labor force.”

He added: “The unemployment situation we have, the job situation, is really a national crisis.”

Bernanke said the government needs to provide support to help the long-term unemployed retrain for jobs and find work. And he suggested that Congress should take more responsibility.

Responding to a question, Bernanke said long-term unemployment, budgetary discipline and housing policy were the three most important areas where Congress could contribute to an economic recovery.

“There are certainly some areas where other policymakers could contribute,” he said.

Bernanke’s comments were his latest in a public effort to get Congress to act further to rejuvenate the economy. He suggested that the Fed can achieve only so much through policies that seek to lower long-term interest rates.

“The Federal Reserve has made enormous efforts to try to help this economy recover and stabilize” though its control of interest rates, or monetary policy, he said. Those policies have driven rates to record lows.

“Monetary policy can do a lot, but monetary policy is not a panacea,” Bernanke said.

On the housing crisis, Bernanke said strong government programs to help the industry recover would aid the Fed’s own efforts to boost housing by driving mortgage rates to their lowest levels in decades.

In his speech, Bernanke said the United States and other rich nations could re-learn a few lessons from fast-growing developing nations.

He said the successful emerging economies such as China had adopted disciplined budget policies, embraced freed trade, made public investments and supported education.

“Advanced economies like the United States would do well to re-learn some of the lessons from the experiences of the emerging market economies, such as the importance of disciplined fiscal policies,” Bernanke said.

But in the question-and-answer period, Bernanke cautioned U.S. lawmakers against cutting deficits too quickly to reduce budget deficits. He has said that could put the fragile economy at risk.

Bernanke noted in his speech that emerging markets such as China account for a large and growing share of the global economy, so they need to act accordingly.

“With increasing size and influence comes greater responsibility,” Bernanke said.

Emerging nations will be challenged in the future by their reliance on exports to drive growth, he said..

The Obama administration has been pushing the Group of 20 major economies, which includes traditional powers such as the United States and emerging economies such as China, Brazil and India, to boost domestic demand rather than relying so heavily on exports to rich nations.

Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post

Coming To A Dumpster Near You

September 15, 2011

Inforwars

Have you ever thought about getting your food out of a trash can? Don’t laugh. Dumpster diving has become a hot new trend in America. In fact, dumpster divers even have a trendy new name. They call themselves “freegans”, and as the economy crumbles their numbers are multiplying. Many freegans consider dumpster diving to be a great way to save money on groceries. Others do it because they want to live more simply. Freegans that are concerned about the environment view dumpster diving as a great way to “recycle” and other politically-minded freegans consider dumpster diving to be a form of political protest. But whatever you want to call it, the reality is that thousands upon thousands of Americans will break out their boots, rubber gloves and flashlights and will be jumping into dumpsters looking for food once again tonight.

So is this actually legal?

In some areas, dumpster diving is considered to be legal. In other areas, dumpster divers are technically breaking trespassing laws. Although in most areas the police have so many other problems that they aren’t really concerned about cracking down on dumpster divers.

One of the biggest issues facing dumpster divers is safety. Crawling around in back alleys and side streets in the middle of the night is not exactly the safest thing to do. But the lure of large amounts of free food is enough to keep some people coming back over and over again.

During the recent economic downturn, the popularity of dumpster diving has exploded. Today, there are dumpster diving meetup groups, dumpster divingFacebook groups, and even entire organizations such as Food Not Bombsthat openly encourage their members to go dumpster diving.

If your family was going hungry, would you go dumpster diving?

You might be surprised at who is doing it. Dumpster diving is not just for the homeless and the unemployed anymore. A lot of people that have decent jobs have picked up on the trend.

Just check out the following example from a recent MSNBC article….
A programmer by day, Todd takes to the streets of North Carolina by night, digging through Dumpsters at drug stores and grocery stores all around his rural neighborhood.
“You would be simply amazed at what businesses throw out,” he said. “I’ve only had to buy two loaves of bread all year. … Last week I had a trunk full of cereal, cookies, chips and ramen noodles.”

Todd slinks in and out of smelly places with low-light flashlights to evade rent-a-cops who will shoo him away. Most nights, his 14-year-old son comes along.

Dumpster diving has become such a prominent trend that even big television news networks are doing stories about it….

The truth is that dumpster diving is just another sign of the times.

Food prices continue to rise and this is putting incredible stress on the budgets of average American families. We just saw another huge rise in food prices during the month of August. Just check out the following data from a recent article posted on The Economic Policy Journal….

The index for finished consumer foods jumped 1.1 percent (13.2 percent annualized) in August, the third straight rise. Over thirty percent of the August advance can be traced to meat prices, which climbed 2.4 percent (28.8 percent annualized). Higher prices for processed poultry and eggs for fresh use also were major factors in the increase in the finished foods index.

If you are married and have a couple of children it can cost a lot of money to feed them every single month. It is not hard to understand the allure of dumpster diving for people that are having a hard time making ends meet.

Other Americans are choosing to dumpster dive because they believe that it helps them live a simpler lifestyle. There is a growing movement of people in America that are rejecting all of the “consumerism” that we see all around us.

Today, the average U.S. household has 13 different credit cards. We are constantly being bombarded with ads that tell us that we need more stuff in order to be happy.

Well, a lot of people have decided that is a lot of bunk and they are doing whatever they can to simplify.

Other dumpster divers are absolutely horrified by how much food is wasted in America.

It has been estimated that 263,013,699 pounds of food is thrown out in the United States every single day.

Can you imagine?

We are probably the most wasteful nation on the planet. With the number of hungry people in the world, it is absolutely criminal how much food that we waste.

So in that sense, it is probably a good thing that dumpster divers are saving some of that food from the landfills and are finding positive uses for it.

But what is going to happen when the economy gets even worse and we start seeing fights over the food that has been left in dumpsters?

In my recent special report about poverty in America, I noted that 46.2 million Americans are now living in poverty. For now, the U.S. government is helping feed over 45 million Americans through the food stamp program, but what is going to happen once the social safety net starts to break?

The number of good jobs in America continues to decline, and thousands more Americans fall into poverty every single day. Things have gotten so bad that other countries are actually making videos that make fun of our poverty.

This country is rapidly losing confidence in our leaders and hopelessness is spreading like wildfire. Today it was revealed that Barack Obama’s disapproval rating has now set a new high of 55%. Not only that, 62% of the American people disapprove of the way that he is handling the economy. It turns out that they don’t really think much of the Obama jobs plan after all.

Unfortunately, even though our economy is rapidly falling apart and most of our leaders are either deeply corrupt or completely incompetent, most Americans are still way too apathetic. If you can believe it, the American people spend a whopping 53 million minutes a month on Facebook.

Hopefully we can get more Americans to wake up. Hopefully we can get them to understand that they need to get active, that they need to prepare and that they need to get their priorities in order.

Right now, dumpster diving is cute and fun and an interesting way to save money, but in the future there will be millions of Americans digging around in trash cans if we don’t get this economy turned around.

This country is rapidly changing, and not for the better.

Click here for the full report from Infowars

Unemployment Rate Looks Much Lower Than It Actually Is

September 7th, 2011

The Huffington Post

By: Paul Wiseman and Christopher Leonard

The job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate suggests.

America’s 14 million unemployed aren’t competing just with each other. They must also contend with 8.8 million other people not counted as unemployed – part-timers who want full-time work.

When consumer demand picks up, companies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, economists say. It means they have room to expand without hiring.

And the unemployed will face another source of competition once the economy improves: Roughly 2.6 million people who aren’t counted as unemployed because they’ve stopped looking for work. Once they start looking again, they’ll be classified as unemployed. And the unemployment rate could rise.

Intensified competition for jobs means unemployment could exceed its historic norm of 5 percent to 6 percent for several more years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the rate to exceed 8 percent until 2014. The White House predicts it will average 9 percent next year, when President Barack Obama runs for re-election.

The jobs crisis has led Obama to schedule a major speech Thursday night to propose steps to stimulate hiring. Republican presidential candidates will likely confront the issue in a debate the night before.

The back-to-back events will come days after the government said employers added zero net jobs in August. The monthly jobs report, arriving three days before Labor Day, was the weakest since September 2010.

Combined, the 14 million officially unemployed; the “underemployed” part-timers who want full-time work; and “discouraged” people who have stopped looking make up 16.2 percent of working-age Americans.

The Labor Department compiles the figure to assess how many people want full-time work and can’t find it – a number the unemployment rate alone doesn’t capture.

In a healthy economy, this broader measure of unemployment stays below 10 percent. Since the Great Recession officially ended more than two years ago, the rate has been 15 percent or more.

The proportion of the work force made up of the frustrated part-timers has risen faster than unemployment has since the recession began in December 2007.

That’s because many companies slashed workers’ hours after the recession hit. If they restored all those lost hours to their existing staff, they’d add enough hours to equal about 950,000 full-time jobs, according to calculations by Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

That’s without having to hire a single employee.

No one expects every company to delay hiring until every part-timer is working full time. But economists expect job growth to stay weak for two or three more years in part because of how many frustrated part-timers want to work full time.

And because employers are still reluctant to increase hours for part-timers, “hiring is really a long way off,” says Christine Riordan, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. In August, employees of private companies worked fewer hours than in July.

Some groups are disproportionately represented among the broader category of unemployment that includes underemployed and discouraged workers. More than 26 percent of African Americans, for example, and nearly 22 percent of Hispanics are in this category. The figure for whites is less than 15 percent. Women are more likely than men to be in this group.

Among the Americans frustrated with part-time work is Ryan McGrath, 26. In October, he returned from managing a hotel project in Uruguay. He’s been unable to find full-time work. So he’s been freelancing as a website designer for small businesses in the Chicago area.

Some weeks he’s busy and making money. Other times he struggles. He’s living at home, and sometimes he has to borrow $50 from his father to pay bills. He’s applied for “a million jobs.”

“You go to all these interviews for entry-level positions, and you lose out every time,” he says.

Nationally, 4.5 unemployed people, on average, are competing for each job opening. In a healthy economy, the average is about two per opening.

Facing rejection, millions give up and stop looking for jobs.

Norman Spaulding, 54, quit his job as a truck driver two years ago because he needed work that would let him care for his disabled 13-year-old daughter.

But after repeated rejections, Spaulding concluded a few weeks ago that the cost of driving to visit potential employers wasn’t worth the expense. He suspended his job hunt.

He and his family are getting by on his daughter’s disability check from Social Security. They’re living in a trailer park on Texas’ Gulf Coast.

“It costs more to look than we have to spend,” he says.

Eventually, lots of Americans like Spaulding will start looking for jobs again. If those work-force dropouts had been counted as unemployed, August’s unemployment rate would have been 10.6 percent instead of 9.1 percent.

Emma Draper, 23, lost her public relations job this summer. To pay the rent on her Washington apartment, she’s working part time at the retailer South Moon Under. She’s selling $120 Ralph Lauren swimsuits and other trendy clothes.

Her search for full-time work has been discouraging. Employers don’t call back for months, if ever.

“You’re basically on their timeline,” Draper says. “It’s really hard to find a job unless you know somebody who can give you an inside edge.”

Retailers, in particular, favor part-timers. They value the flexibility of being able to tap extra workers during peak sales times without being overstaffed during lulls. Some use software to precisely match their staffing levels with customer traffic. It holds down their expenses.

“They know up to the minute how many people they need,” says Carrie Gleason of the Retail Action Project, which advocates better working conditions for retail workers. “It’s almost created a contingent work force.”

Draper appreciates her part-time retail job, and not just because it helps pay the bills. It takes her mind off the frustration of searching for full-time work.

“Right now, finding a job is my job,” she says. “If that was the only thing I had to do, I’d be going insane. There is only so much time you can sit at your computer, sending out resumes.”

Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post

Is the Welfare System Making Americans Incompetent?

August 23rd, 2011

The Huffington Post

By: Janell Ross

Sasha Mandel says she never imagined going on welfare. But her plans for a career and the independence she craved ran headlong into a pair of unforeseen developments — an unplanned pregnancy at 18, and the worst job market since the Great Depression.

In April 2009, freshly unemployed and devoid of savings, Mandel reluctantly walked into a state office in Phoenix to apply for welfare. Her caseworker was sympathetic, swiftly arranging emergency food aid along with cash assistance. But she was also clear on the limits of that relief: Under the terms of Arizona’s welfare program, Mandel could draw a welfare check for no more than three years.

That timeframe was about to get shorter. This April, cash-strapped Arizona tightened the limit on welfare payments to two years. Mandel learned about the change when she received a letter from the state in June. She was only a few weeks away from exhausting her benefits.

“That letter,” she said, “it just said to me that they decided to change the rules when the game for single mothers is already really, really hard.”

Fifteen years after President Clinton joined with congressional Republicans and affixed his signature to a law that “ended welfare as we know it” — imposing a five-year time limit on federal cash assistance for poor families, while allowing states to set shorter limits — the social safety net is failing to keep pace with the needs of struggling Americans, many experts say. Millions of single mothers are falling through the cracks, scrambling to support their families with neither paychecks nor government aid.

Welfare reform, one of the hallmark events of the Clinton presidency, was supposed to be a healthy tradeoff: Single mothers who had grown dependent on government checks would instead go out and work. The federal government gave the states lump sums of money, known as block grants, to create programs that would prepare, prompt and push poor single mothers accustomed to living on welfare into the workforce, providing job training, resume-writing tutorials and subsidized child care.

But the time limits on cash aid were enacted in the mid-1990s, in the midst of one of the most vibrant job markets in modern times. Today, with nearly 14 million people officially out of work and jobseekers outnumbering available positions by more than four-to-one, the logic of those reforms is being overwhelmed by the reality of a stark shortage of paychecks, experts say.

“Today, everybody is expected to work,” said Sheila Zedlewski, an economist at the Urban Institute and co-author of an institute study released last week that examines the consequences of welfare reform during the recession. “The problem is finding a job is incredibly hard.”

Since the beginning of the recession in late 2007, the nation’s unemployment rate has increased by 88 percent, while welfare caseloads have grown just 14 percent, according to the Urban Institute report.

Experts say this disparity reflects the inadequacy of remaining welfare programs in the face of a veritable epidemic of joblessness. During a period of national distress, fewer and fewer people have been able to secure help to meet their basic needs, according to the report.

Between 2007 and 2010 — just as the economy was contracting and joblessness was rising, generating greater demand for public assistance — welfare caseloads dropped in 13 states, according to the Urban Institute report. In Arizona, which faced a particularly powerful blow to its finances in the form of a sustained plunge in housing prices, the welfare caseload dropped by 48 percent during that timeframe.

Many of those who advocated for ending welfare as an unlimited entitlement say the change has been beneficial — the share of single, never married mothers in the workforce climbed from 62.9 percent in 1996 to 72.4 percent a decade later, according to federal data.

“Poverty rates are still lower and work rates still higher than before welfare reform,” said Ron Haskins, who played a key role in shaping the policy as a senior Republican congressional adviser, and who is now co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. “In that sense, welfare reform has been a success.”

But as Haskins acknowledges, the reforms have never managed to address the barriers confronting a small subset of welfare recipients with very limited education, significant physical and mental health problems, or unhealthy children, preventing them from entering the workforce.

The share of people who both live in poverty with no reported income and lack welfare assistance has changed significantly since welfare reform. In 1996, 1 in 8 single mothers fit this profile, according to Zedlewski. By 2008, the most recent year for which this data is available, that figure had climbed to 1 in 5, she said.

In the early days after welfare reform, many states enacted stricter time limits, Arizona included, and beefed up programs offering subsidized child care — a crucial component for single mothers required to work. The budget crisis assailing states has prompted many states to effectively roll back these programs.

States around the country are slashing cash benefits, reducing time limits and, in some cases, imposing strict work requirements on welfare applicants, said LaDonna Pavetti, an expert on welfare who works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The practices also make it very hard for parents already dealing with a job crisis, a disability or other complications to qualify for cash aid, she said.

In the 2000s, states also began shifting federal funds that could be used for cash benefits for single mothers to cover other costs. Some of the money went to cover the cost of child care or transportation assistance. But large shares were also used to fund state child welfare agencies, which frequently don’t get all the resources they need from states.

In 1997, the first year the reforms took effect in most states, Georgia used 73 percent of its federal welfare block grant to provide cash aid to poor families, according to data the state reported to the federal government. By 2009, the most recent year for which complete data is available, Georgia spent just 11 percent of its block grant on cash aid. Spending in Florida, Texas and Arizona plunged by similar margins.

The impact of these cuts is easy to discern: Far fewer poor families are being given cash assistance. In 2009, Georgia and Texas each provided cash aid to less than 10 percent of poor families, according to the Urban Institute report.

“You have so many people who were pushed off welfare who didn’t find work in the beginning, and today there are so many people who can’t get welfare at all,” said Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who resigned from a senior position in the Clinton administration to protest the President’s decision to sign welfare reform into law. “As an anti-recessionary tool, welfare as we know it today is useless.”

Edelman compares the paltry expansion of the nation’s welfare rolls during the recession — from about 3.9 million families in 2007 to about 4.4 million families in 2010 — to what happened to the food stamp program. During the same time period, food stamp program participation rose from about 30 million households to 44 million, reflecting real levels of economic need.

“What we’ve done is make things worse,” Edelman said. “There are now people who cannot find work, and who can not get welfare.”

Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post

Don’t Worry! Social Security Is Safe!

August 2nd, 2011

CNNMoney.com

By: Tami Luhby

Social Security is safe…for now.

The debt ceiling deal hammered out on Sunday doesn’t touch the entitlement program in the first round of spending cuts that total more than $900 billion over 10 years.

What happens after that would remain to be seen. A committee of Republicans and Democrats would be tasked with finding another $1.5 trillion in savings, and changes to Social Security could be part of the deal.

If the committee fails to reach agreement, however, automatic cuts kick in and Social Security would be exempt.

Meanwhile, a whole host of safety net programs could also be whacked as part of the debt agreement, which was approved Monday night by the House. The Senate is scheduled to vote Tuesday.

The largest ones, including Medicaid and food stamps, are also protected in the first round of spending cuts. But others, such as housing assistance, child care subsidies, job training and Head Start, could fall under the knife.

Debt ceiling cost to taxpayers: $1.7 billion

Policymakers have not revealed just what cuts are under discussion, other than $391 billion will come from discretionary spending. Other items that could see their spending curtailed include food inspection, worker safety and highway repair, said Craig Jennings, federal fiscal policy director at OMB Watch, which monitors federal spending.

Everything would be on the table for the Congressional committee to consider later this year. Members could slash spending for the poor, the elderly, the unemployed and the disabled. And they’d likely have to reach the required spending cuts without raising taxes, experts said.

“These programs are vulnerable to deep cuts that won’t allow them to meet caseload even as the need grows,” said Melissa Boteach, an anti-poverty specialist with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning group.

Among the changes to Social Security that the committee would likely consider is reducing the cost-of-living adjustments that recipients receive annually.

Some of the more drastic changes, such as raising the retirement age or amount of wages subject to payroll taxes, would probably not come up because it would take longer than 10 years to see the cost-savings, said David John, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. That’s the time-frame the committee would be concerned about.

But other programs would need to be slashed to reach $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions over 10 years. The Social Security change would net only $112 billion, John said.

Federal spending on the 70-plus anti-poverty programs comes to about $700 billion annually, said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at Heritage. Only a small sliver of it is considered discretionary and thus subject to the initial spending caps.

But all would be up for grabs for the committee. And that means Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, federal unemployment insurance and other assistance programs could get hit hard.

“You have to start talking about these large programs if you want to get to the numbers on the spending side,” said Christian Weller, senior fellow with the Center for American Progress.

But if the committee failed to agree on the larger deficit reduction plan, Social Security would be protected. Spending would be cut automatically, with half coming from the defense budget.

Safety net programs, including Medicaid, federal unemployment benefits and programs for the poor, would be spared. The impact on Medicare would be limited to hospitals and other health care providers, though some argue patients could feel the ripple effects.

Click here for the full report from CNN

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 7-27-11

Today, Kevin gives you even more proof that the economy is getting worse and that your standard of living is deteriorating! Plus, the creator of the Resolve mineral detox, Dr. Ray Lala, stops by to explain how his mineral detox can virtually cure you from any viral infection, including herpes and HPV.

Self Help:
Second Stream Of Income
The Secret To Perfect Health
Resolve The “Unresolvable”

Economy:
Recovery Job Growth Concentrated In Low-Paying Occupations
Protesters ‘Liberate’ Foreclosed Homes

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