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From e-mail:
Not Your Father's U.S.A.
You correctly point out that there are many great things about the United States.
Unfortunately, this generation will see much less of them than past generations.
Consider some seldom reported facts -
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Average family income (adjusted for inflation) doubled between 1947 and 1973, but rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003. That doesn't sound too bad until you consider that this touted increase was not due to increased wages, but primarily to wives having to get jobs and the hiring of low-wage immigrants.
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Meanwhile, the income of the wealthy (the top 0.1 percent) has tripled. Thanks to tax cuts and a multitude of incentives favoring big businesses and the wealthy, the rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer.
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Year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than before. All it takes is a bit of bad luck or bad health to plunge a family into poverty and even homelessness. Thanks to such things as new laws favoring those who hold the wealth, new restrictive bankruptcy laws, tax advantages for moving U.S. jobs to other counties, etc., it's now harder than ever for a family to get back on their feet. More and more, young people are finding themselves locked into the economic conditions into which they were born. And now the only lifeline that people had, social security, is under attach by those who would prefer to divert the money to private financial institutions.
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Partisans juggling the economic figures in new ways conclude that things are fine and that information like the above simply amounts to the "politics of envy."
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And finally, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it's rather revealing that a large percentage of U.S. voters still think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—just as they were led to believe.
Maybe your TV students should worry less about how they look on camera and more about their responsibility of informing the public.
Harsh words.
One of the problems with your last statement is that a large number of people don't like to hear these things, preferring to tune into news sources that "tell a different truth."
If you have a solution for that, we'd like to hear it.
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