How a Wealthy Country Lives

From the health care debate everybody now knows that the US, a very wealthy country, has roughly a quarter of its population without health insurance.

From a NY Times article entitled "Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools", you now know that a very wealthy country, one with literally hundreds of billionaires, thousands of $100M-aires, tens of thousands of $10-aires, there is a homeless problem that is getting worse.

Funny, just as the rich were getting enormously richer from the Reagan "trickle down" economy, the streets of America started filling up with homeless people. And now that the greedy have crashed the economy, you get a really big surge in homeless:

While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.

There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.

With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.

I'm sure glad that Bush could push through that trillion dollar tax cut for the super-wealthy back in the early part of this decade. Some might balk at giving that much to the deserving rich given the explosion of the homeless and hungry.

Since the US is a Christian nation, I guess everybody will just have to pray harder. No right thinking Patriot would dare suggest that taxes be raised to support the poor. That would be blasphemous. The poor deserve what they get. If only they worked as hard as those billionaires on Wall Street, then they too could live in gated mansions. But they insist on lounging around in their cardboard boxes rather than getting busy cramming mortgages into Collatoralized Debt Obligations that are timed to blow up and wreck the economy. If only they would only find useful work like the financial engineers at AIG, these noble workers came up with nifty new finance formulas that could fake risk and allow Wall Streeters to sell trillions in junk bonds as AAA bonds to the rest of the world and tank the world economy.