Monday, August 27, 2007

Poor in USA...

From Robert Rector at Heritage Foundation:
The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from a variety of government reports: 46% of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio. 80% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36% of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning. Only 6% of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person. The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.) Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31% own two or more cars. 97%of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions. 78% have a VCR or DVD player. 62% have cable or satellite TV reception. 89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Military History teaches us...by V.D. Hanson

a must read at this site

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars—or threats of wars—put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Minimum wage...

When will Philippine government officials learn that minimum wage is not a poverty remedy!
'simplify the wage structure by incorporating an existing P50 cost of living allowance (COLA) to the minimum wage. the full P362 daily rate will be used in computing 13th month pay and other benefits. the new minimum wages for Metro Manila are either P325 or P362.