Low Vision Elderly

When most of us look at income statistics, we are not just being numbers junkies. We want to find out something about actual flesh-and-blood human beings — specifically what their standard of living is like.

But you cannot always just take statistics at face value — or, worse yet, with the spin that politicians and the media put on them.

Income, for example, is not the same as earnings, and neither is the same as the economic resources on which people’s standard of living is based.

Since most of us get our income by earning it, it might seem that any difference between income and earnings would just be some technicality that only economists or accountants would bother with.

In reality, the difference can be huge, depending on the income bracket and the age of the individual.

Most of the income received by people 65 years old and up is not counted statistically as earnings. Only 24 percent of their incomes are earnings. Most of their incomes are from pensions or other sources known as “unearned income,” such as returns on investments.

It should hardly be surprising that people who have been around a long time would have accumulated more money in the bank and maybe have a little nest egg in a mutual fund, each of which provides a stream of income during their retirement years, even if that income does not get counted as earnings.

Despite a drumbeat of political rhetoric depicting the elderly as being in dire economic conditions, the actual incomes of the elderly are more than four times what their earnings statistics might suggest — or what politicians can claim, citing those statistics.

When it comes to wealth, the average net worth of people 65 years old and up is several times that of people under the age of 45. The highest average net worth in any age bracket belongs to households headed by people aged 70 to 74.

Although income is often confused with wealth, as when people currently in high income brackets are referred to as “rich,” the elderly average lower income than middle-aged people, but more wealth.

Since 80 percent of the people who are 65 and up are either homeowners or home buyers, their housing costs tend to be lower. Among those 80 percent, their median monthly housing costs in 2001 averaged just $339 a month.

That includes property taxes, utilities, maintenance costs, condominium, and association costs for people with such living arrangements, and mortgage payments for those who do not own their homes outright.

There are of course some elderly people who are poor, just as there are some poor people in every age bracket. But statistics cited by politicians, journalists, and others who inflate the number of the poor need both scrutiny and skepticism.

The elderly are not the only people whose standard of living is grossly understated by those who cite statistics on earnings or income.

Those statistics do not include income received by low-income people as transfer payments from the government, such as welfare checks, much less various in-kind transfers, such as subsidized housing and subsidized medical care.

As of 2001, about 78 percent of the economic resources used by people in the bottom 20 percent of income recipients were in the form of either cash transfers or in-kind transfers.

To judge the standard of living of low-income people by income statistics is to leave out more than three-quarters of the economic resources used by them.

It is understandable that those who have either a political or an ideological vested interest in exaggerating the numbers of “the poor” would use statistics that greatly understate the standard of living of low-income people, as well as that of the elderly.

But that is all the more reason for the rest of us to be aware of what statistics do and do not mean — and beware of those who want us to believe the worst, whether for their own political advantage or because that fits their ideological vision

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won't hear you say "I get free lunch" when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is relying on people who don't give a damn about you.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she'll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually lazy.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn't bought first.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you're being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is deciding that it's all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

2007-11-22 08:27:50 by mission_viejo_california

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I worked at a company working with elderly women with mental retardation for over 2 years. I used 3 days and 2 hours of my sick time due to a corneal micro cyst on my left eye. 8/24 i seen my PCP, she gave me work note and advised that I do not wear my contacts or glasses until being seen by optometrist. 8/25 I seen my optometrist, who then referred me to an ophthalmologist. They advised I do not wear my contacts or glasses. 8/26 I seen the Ophthalmologist, they gave medication for my eye and referred me to an optometrist to get a new pair of glasses. For, the Cyst had lower my current vision. 8/27 I received my glasses and went into work at 5pm for my 3p to 11p shift. I returned to work. 09/02 I was called into the office and terminated. My company does not believe I was unable to work with my injury. Although I had doctors notes for each day and each specialist. Is this situation something I can fight against in court? I believe that I am not in the wrong. The handbook says that a doctors note for the missed day averts any disciplinary action. It also states that one must obtain 9 occurrences of lateness, call offs ect to be terminated, in which I have only obtained 2, unless including each day of sickness, 4. equaling 6. Any help please?
My state (PA) does allow an employer to fire an employee with no given reason. Although they were not cutting down on staffing, my position was getting filled prior to me getting fired. They basically knew they were going to fire me and began training a new hire and once that was completed fired me

At-will employment is a doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargain (i.e., has not recognized a union). Under this legal doctrine:
“any hiring is presumed to be "at will"; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all," and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work.

You should submit a claim for unemployment compensation if you have not already done so. You can go to http://www.dli.state.pa.us/landi/cwp/vie w.asp?a=355&q=235210 and file your claim online.

2009-09-03 11:06:30 by guppy

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This is mainly about illegal immigrants.

Does anyone else feel like they are someone of a help to the recession?..
aside of all the banks and such which actually caused the recession..

I'm talking about people who are being laid off work due to this but can't receive any financial aid. All programs who assist low income families due to being laid off by the recession along with other programs who aid no longer have room to help all these people.
For example medicare is riding of their free vision and dental programs because there is just too many people on this program.
So everyone has to suffer... People who truly need this aid.. disabled people and the elderly. They no longer have any vision or dental programs and have no way of paying for it on their own.

Now my next issue.
Illegal immigrants make up around half the percentage of people covered by welfare.
and now to get more into that... more than 30% of those illegal immigrants have families which they don't report their husbands working so they get that extra income. They get money for every child they have. plus wick.. and sometimes even the women work and down report that.
Along with that.. their garages are rented out as homes.

So they get at least 4 different sources of income coming in. Plus free medical from claiming medicare.

They break the law and see nothing wrong with this as long as they have enough money to put them into new 2 SUVs and a new truck.

Do your research before you bad mouth me.

Innocent americans who abide by the law who are being affected by the recession who have worked their whole life and are down to the last dime of their rainy day fund are suffering.. they can't get on any aid cuz it's full.
They lose their car and forced to drive an 85 corolla while these illegal people are riding pretty in their brand new rides, taking advantage of the system and not having to worry about anything.

When my great grandparents came to this country they made sure they got their citizenship asap! they lived by the law and were happy and thankful to do so. As did most of the immigrants in that generation. They were so happy to given the chance to be a free american. But it seems now days they don't care about America.

I think citizens should be first in line to receive any kind of aid. I mean it's only fair right?
I would never go to another country and take advantage of their system then expect to receive all these free benefits. It's just wrong!

Everywhere I go... I see illegals who can't even speak english driving these big new cars. They work under the table and have a legal family member sign for everything they own.
It's embarrassing to see them park next to honest americans who are driving a beat down car just because they were laid off too late to receive any help. They are forced to move in with a family member because they lost their house.
While illegals are living comfy in their house that they just remolded with all the money they cheated from the government.

I'm not against illegals but I'm against them abusing our system.
I'm not categorizing all illegals do it like that. But a fare enough percentage of them do...
It's like stereo types... they all came from something true right?

It has been past time. I am just glad more U.S. tax paying citizens have become aware of the actual destruction of illegals.

2009-06-13 14:46:15 by J HILL

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Hillary Clinton has identified a grievous flaw in the contemporary American economy: It leaves “it all up to the individual.” This hateful individualism is allegedly driving income inequality and destroying the American Dream.

Clinton calls it “the ‘on your own’ society,” displaying a liberal Democrat’s curious aversion to people doing things on their own. In contrast, she offers a collectivist vision of “shared responsibility for shared prosperity,” making the case for it based on a farrago of mistruths about the state of the economy. She actually is not interested in sharing anything, but instead hogging all the credit for economic growth in the 1990s for her husband and, by extension, herself.

Clinton cites figures to paint a picture of an immiserated middle class, but avoids the main event. As Democratic economist Stephen Rose notes in his new book, Social Stratification in the United States, once people outside their prime working years are excluded — the elderly and the young — the median income for an American family is $63,000. Which, in the words of the Washington Post, “in most parts of the country buys a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle.”

She maintains that corporations are taking more and more of national income for themselves, leaving workers in the cold. But according to Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, labor’s share of national income was a nearly constant 64.9 percent from 1960 to 2006. She says “the percentage of taxes paid by corporations have fallen,” when the percentage of taxes paid by corporations was 11.5 percent in 2006, higher than it was in 2000, at 8.2 percent.

Clinton portrays the 1990s as a Paradise Lost that only she and her policies can rediscover. She wants “to hit the restart button on the 21st century and redo it the right way.” Like not having a tech bubble burst after it grew to unsustainable proportions in the late 1990s? Like not suffering from corporate scandals that stemmed from loose practices in the same period?

No one can deny that the 1990s were good, but they wouldn’t hold up to the kind of demagogic critique of the economy Hillary makes now. She says we can’t “get tough” on China because of our debt, but President Clinton too was “soft” on China — all recent American presidents have had basically the same policy toward Beijing. She complains of CEO compensation increasing, but it grew right through the 1990s. In fact, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has made a Hillaryesque critique of the 1990s economy: “Most of the gains from the 1990s boom went to the people at the top.”

The real news from Clinton’s speech is the way she, in keeping with the leftward shift of her party, turns her back on her husband’s actual policies. It is too inconvenient for her to explain the sources of the deficit reduction in the 1990s besides his (relatively inconsequential) tax increase: first, Clinton’s huge cut in defense spending; then a budget deal with Republicans that reduced the rate of growth of Medicare and cut taxes on capital gains; then, a wondrous flow of revenue into the federal treasury from capital gains and the “rich getting richer.”

She doesn’t even mention welfare reform, although it is largely thanks to it that the bottom fifth of families had a 35-percent increase in income from 1991 to 2005. She talks of free trade as something to fear, when President Clinton courageously championed NAFTA and other free-trade initiatives, providing boosts to the U.S. and global economies. Of course, she leaves out all the deregulation and how important it was that President Clinton let Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan pursue his low-inflation policies without political interference.

None of this fits into her narrative of an economy needing wide-ranging government intervention to escape the nefarious consequences of individuals left to act “on their own.” One can only conclude that if you liked the 1990s boom, don’t elect this woman.

I equate her beliefs to Big Brother 1984 beware of that Billary Clinton!

2007-06-01 16:43:56 by GREAT_AMERICAN

A New Start for National Service

By JOHN MCCAINC AND EVAN BAYH
Published: November 6, 2001

Since Sept. 11, Americans have found a new spirit of national unity and purpose. Forty years ago, at the height of the cold war, President John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to enter into public service. Today, confronted with a challenge no less daunting than the cold war, Americans again are eager for ways to serve at home and abroad. Government should make it easier for them to do so.

That is why we are introducing legislation to revamp national service programs and dramatically expand opportunities for public service.

Many tasks lie ahead, both new and old. On the home front, there are new security and civil defense requirements, like increased police and border patrol needs. We will charge the Corporation for National Service, the federal office that oversees national volunteer programs, with the task of assembling a plan that would put civilians to work to assist the Office of Homeland Security. The military will need new recruits to confront the challenges abroad, so our bill will also improve benefits for our servicemembers.

At the same time, because the society we defend needs increased services, from promoting literacy to caring for the elderly, we expand AmeriCorps and senior service programs to enlarge our national army of volunteers.

AmeriCorps' achievements have been impressive: thousands of homes have been built, hundreds of thousands of seniors given the care they need to live independently and millions of children tutored.

Since its inception in 1993, nearly 250,000 Americans have served stints of one or two years in AmeriCorps. But for all its concrete achievements, AmeriCorps has been too small to rouse the nation's imagination. Under our bill, 250,000 volunteers each year would be able to answer the call -- with half of them assisting in civil defense needs and half continuing the good work of AmeriCorps.

We must also ask our nation's colleges to promote service more aggressively. Currently, many colleges devote only a small fraction of federal work-study funds to community service, while the majority of federal resources are used to fill low-skill positions. This was not Congress's vision when it passed the Higher Education Act of 1965. Under our bill, universities will be required to promote student involvement in community activities more vigorously.

And for those who might consider serving their country in the armed forces, the benefits must keep pace with the times. While the volunteer military has been successful, our armed forces continue to suffer from significant recruitment challenges.

Our legislation encourages more young Americans to serve in the military by allowing the Defense Department to create a new, shorter-term enlistment option. This ''18-18-18'' plan would offer an $18,000 bonus -- in addition to regular pay -- for 18 months of active duty and 18 months of reserve duty. And we would significantly improve education payments made to service members under current law.

Public service is a virtue, and national service should one day be a rite of passage for young Americans. This is the right moment to issue a new call to service and give a new generation a way to claim the rewards and responsibilities of active citizenship.

John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, are United States senators.

Sorry man, thats wayyyy to long and i dont really feel like reading it.

Peaaaccceee

<3 Jessie

2009-01-28 16:18:23 by theme2burn