the very poor with the exception of hobos, who wanted that life style. I wonder if there is any correlation?

It seems almost too good to be true, but it would be a very interesting point of reference.

pushing a cart and panhandling. I saw plenty of it in South America which was my other home, but I never saw it here in the USA until 1980 and I had this awful sense of déjà vu. I realized that we had turned into a banana republic overnight.

I also knew plenty of poor people, kids I went to school with, my own relatives in some cases but not a single one didn't have a place to call home, no matter how shabby it was. One of my uncles, an alcoholic could only manage to do day labor when he needed money, yet he had a small room in a downtown hotel, he was able to pay for.

just on the north side of my home town. It was immediately across the river from the city dump. I don't think that positioning was only due to the tracks being abandoned. I think the "bums" scavenged in the dump for things that the salvage yard would buy.

As kids we fished along the river bank and encountered those guys...pretty rough looking. It frightened our mothers, but we never had any real problem. "Nick the bum" was locally well known and a year round homeless resident, he died when his knocked together shelter burned with him in it.

In the mid-60's the state hospital that was in town got into cutting beds and 'mainstreaming' its patients. Suddenly there were a dozen or so homeless people on the downtown streets during the day (it was a town of ~30,000), mostly then went into a couple of church basements at night.

They were supposed to be housed in a flophouse sort of hotel, but lots of them didn't like that place.

The thing was back then it was a choice to drop out of society and if they wanted to they could get a job and drop back in. A minimum wage job at a gas station would pay enough to rent a room.

a person could say they liked the life-style, though I wouldn't be surprised if people said that about them

skid row bums had a room someplace. A study was done about this in the sixties. They study found the bums had some kind of day work they did besides panhandling and they had rooms in the fleabag hotels. The only reason they sometimes slept in the street was because they were too drunk to get home and had to sober up so what first.

were paid for by the state if they needed hospitalization. Now they seem to have nothing to fall back on but the streets. I knew a poor old guy a WWII vet who had PTSD who was thrown out in the street after prop 13 was passed in California. He was a willing resident of a home that tended to his needs.

The whole way that mental health has been handled in this country is barbaric. The attitude is that one is free to be as crazy as they want, no matter what damage this does to themselves or the ones who love them. The only forced alternative is jail.

incarceration in a hospital with nurses, clean sheets, pottery and basket weaving classes and nice grounds to stroll through? Also didn't it require some kind of court document to put someone away? I mean people weren't locked up in a mental institution without some need for it put before a judge?

Surely we need to find a better way to do this.

But it is the screwed up situation we find ourselves in.

I heard him say it.

but that must be met by closing loopholes. I agree. The corporations are always screaming that the top tax rate is the highest among OECD countries, blah blah blah. Of course, the public remains uninformed because the rate of taxes they pay after deductions is closer to 12%. We can't allow that b.s. to continue. We must reduce the corporate rate and close the loopholes and the deductions. How much sympathy would the corporations have if they announced they needed to lower the 12% or 15% tax rate?

either before or after deductions, loopholes and schemes are reformed.

Thanks for the thread, xchrom.

talks about federal revenue. I know the corporate tax contributions are nothing compared to the past, but I wonder why they used different language? Also, The tax revenue generated from tariffs and the "miscellaneous" category have dropped sharply. I wonder if that's part of the equation.

I think raising that rate is more important than the corporate rate. Lots of progressive countries have corporate rates similar to the US. What makes them different is that their personal income taxes are highly progressive.

If lower, that would make a great stat to debunk the argument that companies will create jobs if only their taxes were lower.