Gene Nichol: From silence to savagery, pain for the poor intensifies [View all]

[WorseBeforeBetter]

41 - The percentage of children of color living in poverty in North Carolina
5,000 - The number of children reported homeless by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District
9,000 - The number of homeless veterans in North Carolina
5 - Where North Carolina ranks in the country in number of hungry residents
11 - Where North Carolina ranks in the number of residents living in poverty

....

Rep. George Cleveland of Onslow County has claimed, now famously, there is no real poverty in North Carolina. He somehow missed the 10 percent of children in his own district living in extreme poverty (under $11,500 a year for a family of four) and hundreds of homeless kids in the Jacksonville school district.

....

House Speaker Thom Tillis hails from Mecklenburg County. I’m guessing he believes he’s had a successful run as he now prepares to campaign for the U.S. Senate. His track record, though, includes being either unaware or unmoved by the fact that, in the last decade, child poverty in Charlotte’s distressed census tracts rose from a demoralizing 42 percent to an astounding 54 percent, and that nearly 5,000 kids are now reported homeless by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District.

Senate President Phil Berger represents Rockingham and Guilford counties. Greensboro nearly leads the nation in hunger. Pete Brunstetter, outgoing Senate budget writer, comes from Winston-Salem, which the Food Research and Action Center deemed, if you’re a kid who needs to eat, the most dreadful city in the country. Neither Berger nor Brunstetter stirred. In last year’s session, they cut the food bank allocation by half.

And the sins don’t stop with silence. The governor and General Assembly, in 2013, launched a war against poor people unlike anything seen in our modern history. There’s no need to rehash its particulars in depth here – hundreds of thousands swept from Medicaid expansion; the steepest cuts to a state unemployment compensation program since they were created in the 1930s; the grim abolition of the earned income tax credit, requiring 929,000 low-income Tar Heels to pay more to the tax man; the headlong rush to become the first state to cut off welfare benefits during the government shutdown. Meanwhile, the wealthiest North Carolinians were treated to colossal tax breaks in a bold redistribution from the long-jeopardized poor to the richest among us – folks who already secure greater portions of our wealth and income than has occurred in a century.

....

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/12/28/3488213/from-silence-to-savagery-pain.html