Autism and "Fuck Your Shit"

abaldwin360:

While the U.S. economy was recovering from the Great Recession, Reyes, 52, a casino dealer from Minneapolis, was dining on $1.67 cans of soup and searching for a way to keep her house, which was foreclosed on last October.

“I went backwards,” Reyes said. “Two years ago, three years ago, I didn’t know I’d be looking at being homeless.”

Stephen Hemsley’s salary has been frozen too. His income hasn’t.

The chief executive officer of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based health insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) earned $1.3 million in salary every year since 2007. Still, as the economic recovery took hold from 2009 to 2011, Hemsley, 60, exercised stock options worth more than $170 million and made at least $51 million from share sales, making him the object of an “Occupy Lake Minnetonka” protest on the ice outside his lakeside home each winter.

The divergent fortunes of Reyes and Hemsley show that the U.S. has gone through two recoveries. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent — those that made less than $101,583.

The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data.

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This is what especially pisses me off when people start talking about “personal responsibility” and how people who are struggling financially “just aren’t working hard enough.”

I’ve been in the IT/Customer Service field for over 16 years, it used to be I made a pretty good living at it too. Somewhere around 2008,  it seemed like while everything else kept getting more expense, my income stayed about the same. I know exactly what they mean in the article by “going backwards”.

It’s fucking bullshit to work your ass off at a thankless fucking job for years upon years only to be rewarded jack shit for it. 

I like the job I have now, but $20 an hour doesn’t go as far as it used to just a few years back, and if you complain about things being tight, there will always be some fucker that wants to say shit like, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have had kids you couldn’t afford.” and various other dismissive bullshit.

I’m sick of that kind of bullshit. The working class is getting shit on and everyone just wants to dismiss it like it’s our own fault.