Could You Live on $7 a Day?

Could You Live on $7 a Day?
by Tula Connell, Nov 30, 2006

Seven dollars a day. That’s not the income of impoverished residents of a lesser-developed nation. That’s the average income of the poorest 60 million of Americans.

That shocking statistic was buried deep inside a New York Times article Tuesday that detailed our nosediving national incomes.

Seven dollars a day. Why isn’t that stunning revelation screaming from newspaper headlines, the top story on the national network and cable TV and in the e-mail of every news outlet’s breaking alerts?

The United States spends $2.5 million a day on the war in Iraq while 48 million adults and some 12 million dependent children each live on $7 a day, according to an analysis by the Times. It’s not just that Bush has the worst job growth record of any president in the past 40 years. (Just today the U.S. Department of Labor reported 357,000 newly laid-off workers filed jobless claims, a rise of 34,000 from the previous week.) It’s also that the jobs being created do not pay family-supporting wages nor do they provide the type of health and pension support that has sustained our traditionally vibrant middle class.

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The AFL-CIO union movement is pushing the new Congress for immediate action on a series of pocketbook issues. In addition to raising the minimum wage, we want lawmakers to restore workers’ freedom to form unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, overturn the ban prohibiting Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for more affordable prescription drugs and reverse the cuts in student loans made by the Republican Congress. In addition, we want policies enacted that will stop giving companies taxpayer dollars for sending our best jobs overseas and instead reward them for creating jobs at home.

Continued @ http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/11/30/could-you-live-on-7-a-day/

Analysis of the I.R.S. data by The New York Times found that average reported incomes fell or were virtually flat at the end of the period at every level of income except for the poorest 26 million taxpayers, the bottom fifth. Those impoverished taxpayers made less than $11,166 each in 2004 and had an average income of $5,743, up $135 or 2.4 percent, from the year 2000.

A taxpayer can be a single individual or a married couple. The poorest taxpayers consist of nearly 48 million adults and about 12 million dependent children. This means that the poorest 60 million Americans reported average incomes of less than $7 a day each.