More Kentucky children go poor; government sits on ass

The Bush decade has been so much about advancing agendas that it's hard to grasp the degree to which Americans have been left behind.

In Kentucky, more children and families are going poor and more kids are behind bars than at any time in recent memory. The problem isn't limited to Kentucky, although the Bluegrass State has trended downward.

Strikingly, some 75% of Kentucky youths in juvenile detention facilities are being held for nonviolent offenses - which no doubt has to be a record for the juvenile "justice" system that's already awash in discrimination and other abuse.

The pervasive poverty that afflicts Kentucky and other states isn't just from unemployment either. It's also underemployment. Agencies that serve the poor say most of their clients work. But they're all in low-wage jobs. You know, the kind of jobs the freeposphere wants everyone except themselves to take.

This trend though didn't begin with Bush. He only aggravated it. When Congress spent most of the '90s bashing the poor and doing its damnedest to gut the economic safety net, what did people think was going to happen? You didn't seriously expect 100,000,000 job positions (many of which don't even pay a living wage) to support 150,000,000 households, did you?

If we want to help end this cycle of poverty, we can start by restoring the safety net to what it was before the mid-'90s.

(Source: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080612/NEWS01/806120402&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL)