Tag Archives: Public Transit

Convenient Tales About Riches Within Reach

Posted on by
3

By Sam Pizzigati

Source: OpEdNews.com

The world at large knew virtually nada about Sylvia Bloom for 96 years. Then she died in 2016. Now, just a little too late, Sylvia Bloom is getting her belated — yet richly deserved — 15 minutes of worldwide fame.

The New York Times has just published a heart-warming story of the caring, upright life Sylvia Bloom lived, and the remarkable — and hidden — fortune she quietly accumulated over the course of her 67-year career as a Manhattan legal secretary.

That fortune totaled, in the end, over $9 million. The bulk of that wealth, the Times account reveals, is going — per Bloom’s wishes — to help students from poor families advance their educations.

None of Bloom’s surviving relatives or law firm colleagues or fellow volunteers at the Henry Street Settlement, the social services agency set to get $6.24 million from her bequest, had any idea that their unassuming loved one and friend had saved anything remotely close to multiple millions.

Counting Pennies

Bloom lived frugally all her life in Brooklyn and commuted, by subway, to her job. The “high life” never interested her in the least. She led a simple existence. She counted her pennies. In the end, she put them all to good use.

Stories like Bloom’s have been popping up regularly over recent years. Leonard Gigowski, a Wisconsin shopkeeper, died three years ago at age 90, and left behind a “secret $13 million fortune” that’s currently funding scholarships. Grace Groner passed away in 2010 at age 100. She spent most of her life in a one-bedroom Illinois home, shopped at thrift stores, and left $9 million for her alma mater.

Convenient Tales

Our popular culture can’t seem to get enough of these life-affirming tales of modest multi-millionaire seniors. These stories make us feel good. They also, unfortunately, reinforce a message that our society’s richest — and their cheerleaders — find enormously convenient.

You don’t have to be money-hungry, commit vile acts or have remarkable talents to become wealthy, the tellers of all these stories of hidden millions suggest. You just have to be frugal; almost anybody, in other words, can become rich.

And if you don’t happen to become rich, the media coverage of these stories not so subtly hints, just look in the mirror for the reason why. You, too, could have resisted temptation and counted your pennies.

You, too, could have built a huge personal fortune. Shame on you. You chose not to.

The Millionaire Next Door

A couple of decades ago, two academic researchers — Thomas Stanley and William Danko — made themselves not insignificant personal fortunes by wrapping up that same theme in reams of statistics. Their 1996 book, The Millionaire Next Door, has so far sold over 4 million copies.

That thrifty fellow down the block with a six-year-old Ford, The Millionaire Next Door related, could well be worth millions. And those millions, the book stressed, all begin with frugality.

Conservative pundits have always loved this basic frugality-pays thesis. Stanley and Danko, the argument goes, have served up the ultimate secret to getting rich. “Hardly any” of the self-made rich the pair profiled in The Millionaire Next Door, as one commentator noted a few years ago, “had expensive tastes.” Instead, these millionaires avoided “new homes and expensive clothes” and “often invested 15 to 20 percent of their net income.”

Any of us could follow that lead, this analyst would add, so long as we understand “that building wealth takes discipline, sacrifice, and hard work.”

Reaping Rewards

But if “discipline, sacrifice, and hard work” build wealth, why do so many millions of disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working Americans today have so little of it? Why is the “millionaire next door” — especially for our millennial generation — becoming a vanishing species?

Sylvia Bloom’s life offers some clues. Yes, Bloom lived frugally, sacrificed, and worked hard. But she also matured in a society — mid-20th century America — that endeavored to help disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working people.

That help came in many different forms. Sylvia Bloom attended Hunter College, part of a system of free public higher education in New York City. She and her husband, a firefighter and later teacher, lived in a rent-controlled apartment. She commuted, for just a few dimes per day, on the world’s most extensive public transit system.

Sylvia Bloom’s young adult counterparts today? They confront a totally different reality. The sky-high costs of attending college have turned 21st-century young adults into life-long debtors. To find an affordable place to live, they squeeze into tiny apartments close to their jobs or plop themselves in distant exurbs, fighting traffic jams all the way to work — if not paying big bucks daily for scarce transit options.

Austerity Trumps Frugality

These millennials aren’t living the frugal life. They’re living the austere life — and not by choice. Our elected leaders have thrust this austerity upon them, with decades of public policies that have rewarded the rich with tax cuts at every turn and whittled away public services at every opportunity.

If Sylvia Bloom had been born a millennial, she’d be pinching pennies today to pay off her college debts. She’d be looking forward to years of hard work and sacrifice, with no hope of ever saving up enough to become a significant invester.

In her actual life, Sylvia Bloom had the good fortune to live her early adult years in a society much more caring than ours. She cared back — and chose to devote her own financial good fortune to helping others to the same support that so helped her.

Sylvia Bloom’s life does indeed offer up inspiration. Let’s not let our rich turn that life into a rationalization for their riches.

Five Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country

Posted on by
2

Some+of+the+90,000+abandoned+and+derelict+homes+of+Detroit

By Nathan Wellman

Source: U.S. Uncut

The United States of America is possibly the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. However, many third-world countries actually surpass America in many of the most vital gauges for measuring human development.

Here are five of the most jaw-droppingly unforgivable ways in which America is lagging behind the rest of the world:

1. America’s criminal justice system is broken

The U.S. represents only 5% of the world’s population, but this one country comprises 25% of the world’s prison population. According to the NAACP, a disproportionate 58% of America’s prisoners are African-American or Hispanic despite these demographics only adding up to about 30% of the U.S. population.

The only nation that imprisons a greater percentage of its citizens than America is North Korea. The U.S. jails 716 people for every 100,000 Americans, according to the International Center for Prison Studies. That’s nearly twice as many as Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000), and far more than Iran (284) or China (121). For context, the U.S. only jailed around 100-200 people per 100,000 citizens in the 1970s, and the incarcerated rate is only getting worse today, even as crime rates fall. A staggering 60% of prisoners are in jail for nonviolent drug charges.

Inside prison, about 600 victims are raped every day, according to an estimate from the Justice Department. An in-depth DOJ investigation found that of the approximate 217,000 prisoners raped each year, 17,000 were juveniles.

2. Gun Violence is an epidemic

America has 20 times more murders when compared to the average rate of the developed world. Even terrorism-plagued Iraq has half the murder rate of the U.S. Over half of the deadliest mass shootings from the last 50 years happened in America, and 79% of those shooters got ahold of their guns legally. Some American cities, particularly New Orleans and Detroit, even surpass many Latin American countries, which suffer from some of the highest gun violence rates in the world.

3. Healthcare costs too much and delivers too little

America is the only developed country that does not ensure healthcare to all of its citizens. Even in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, millions of poverty-stricken Americans have no medical insurance because Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government is paying the cost and the simple measure would actually save money for their states.

Life expectancy in many American counties is lower than Nicaragua, Algeria, or Bangladesh. The U.S. is unusual among developed countries in that Americans die in the tens of thousands as a direct result of a lack of health insurance. America also spends twice the percentage of our GDP on healthcare than the average wealthy country for these substandard results.

America also suffers from the highest infant mortality and teen pregnancy rate in the developed world.

4. Inequality is rampant

Researchers have shown that economic inequality directly correlates to public distrust in government representatives, as well as a decrease in health and well-being.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has the worst rates of income inequality in the world, according to the 2015 Global Wealth Report conducted by Allianz. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own nearly half of the nation’s wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds, and the overall gap between rich and poor has only grown since the recession, with almost all income gains going to the top 1% since 2009.

Despite the idea of America being a meritocracy, those born in the poorest 20% of the American population have less than a 3% chance of making it to the top quintile.

5. Infrastructure is crumbling

America is quite literally falling apart.

One study concludes that the U.S. needs to invest $3.6 trillion into infrastructure over the next six years. One out of every nine American bridges (66,405 bridges) have been labeled “structurally deficient.”

Water runs through dilapidated wooden pipes in certain parts of South Dakota, Alaska, and Pennsylvania. Some of Detroit’s sewer lines still used today were originally constructed in the mid-1800s.

A whopping 45% of Americans have no access to public transit, and the construction of the infamously still-incomplete Second Avenue subway line in New York City has been hit with delays dating all the way back to World War II.

 

America certainly has and continues to achieve greatness in many ways. But if we want to truly earn our oft-proclaimed slogan of “Greatest Country in the World,” these fatal flaws in our system must be acknowledged and addressed. Otherwise, the emperor will continue to parade about with no clothes, and we run the risk of being completely surpassed by a world marveling at our oblivious nakedness.