This Indiana church turned $1 contributions into $4 million. It stared with a Dollar Club–people giving a single dollar each quarter. The money helps foster families and people with health-cost burdens and others needing help. Then they teamed up with a charity, then with RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit that pays off crushing medical debt for people in dire need.
It’s an interesting story. Read more about it in this CNN article.
I’m really, really trying to evaluate both sides of the tax cuts. I’m so hopeful that they really WILL help struggling families without dragging our country into an impossible-to-climb-out-of debt hole. Of all the experts I’ve “consulted” (read, listened to), Tom Steyer (billionaire business leader/investor) crystallizes it for me in 3 short minutes. Take a listen.
Although I’d love to switch from an environmentally harmful gas car, I’ve had several concerns. One is that there haven’t been any electric mini vans made (I need one to carry my handicap scooter), but that’s changing, according to this morning’s news. Another is the slow-moving plans for long-lasting batteries that can adequately be recycled once they die. Price, obviously, has been a factor, as well, although competition is starting to have some effect there. And my monthly electricity bill has been a deterrent–until I learned that gas would have to go down to a dollar a gallon to be as cheap as electric power for vehicles.
I look at old faithful–my 2004 Dodge Caravan–and know she won’t last forever. Maybe I’ll eventually replace her with an electric van. In may garage, at least, if not in my heart.
Most of us work hard at our jobs, hoping to get ahead, watching for the next pay-raise, and looking forward to the day when our family is not only out of debt but comfortable enough financially so we can stop worrying about taking a nice vacation. We in America have a better chance of that, of course, than elsewhere. But where, exactly, is the world’s pot of gold going?
The Wall Street Journal sums it up like this: “The super rich are getting super richer.” According to Oxfam, an international anti-poverty coalition, by next year 1% of people will own more than 50% of the world’s wealth–those 1% will own more than the rest of us combined.
Meanwhile, poverty, malnutrition, disease, homelessness, and wars fought over who gets to use natural resources increase throughout the globe. And the average frustrated working person struggles to keep from experiencing those conditions.
What’s the answer? In all fairness, I don’t know. I wish I did.
The economy may be improving, but the rich are getting richer and the rest of us? Well…. Here’s an unnerving statistic: the gap in income is currently the largest that it has been since the early 1930s–yes, the Great Depression. Today, 1% of the people are getting 95% of the income.
This is having an effect on all of us, but especially the poor who are trying to climb up out of the well the recent bad economic years have put them into.
Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs. According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study found that the great majority of entrepreneurs come from middle-class backgrounds, with less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs coming from very rich or very poor backgrounds.
[Paul Buchheit, Common Dreams]