EDITORIAL

Forty-five million people are currently receiving food stamps under SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). Forty-six million people are now living in poverty, 14 million Americans are unemployed and the prospects of any meaningful middle-class jobs gets dimmer every day.

Manufacturing, construction, trade and transportation are flatlined, and reports of impending layoffs of postal workers and the banking industry are hanging like a guillotine over the heads of thousands.

The only reason there are no bread lines or soup kitchens, as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, is because of the social programs like the above-mentioned food stamps and unemployment payments.

President Barack Obama is on the move again pushing the latest “job bill” in a country where jobs just aren’t there. Since the bill calls for spending on infrastructure projects, it certainly will not pass a Republican-led House determined to resolve the national debt.

Looking at the dire economic straits our country is currently in, it almost seems as if this is some kind of elaborate plot to decimate the middle class and transform them into a welfare-type mindset where the only thing that matters is who wins on American Idol or what Kim Kardashian is wearing this week on her latest reality show.

Decades ago, lawmakers in Washington gave huge tax breaks to companies which allowed them to ship their production lines over the ocean to places like China. Seemingly no one on Capitol Hill today is calling for new legislation and rewritten trade agreements that will bring some of those jobs back to this country and level the playing field.

Leaders of labor unions are in the news railing against government cutbacks against public work forces. Where the hell were they when their members in the private sector lost their jobs as American businesses were exported to points overseas?

Over and over again, Americans are told that these manufacturing and garment-making jobs are gone never to return again. People are told they have to be retrained in the job market, but no one says what they’re supposed to do after being retrained.

Elected officials, in their eternal wisdom, made it possible to have everything manufactured abroad at a cheaper price, but the consumers in America are out of work and can’t afford to buy even if it’s dirt cheap.

And the icing on this rotting cake is that the millions of unemployed people in this country are competing with millions of illegal immigrants for the pittance of available jobs that offer close to nothing as a salary.

The American economy is in a death spiral. Our industrial and manufacturing base was sent overseas, millions were thrown into poverty and past failures to jumpstart the economy have given federal lawmakers an excuse not to do anything about these problems.

The richest nation on Earth is quickly turning poor, and no one is doing a damn thing about it.