Hi and welcome to Planet Finance, where we, the millions of people left out of the trillion dollar bailout, can offer up brilliant ways of speeding the economic recovery along. I hope this takes off. Can you imagine having Joe Six-Pack and George Soros debating how to rescue the housing market?
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December 2, 2008 at 12:31 am |
The state assistance programs have long been famous for unrealistic income guidelines. When I lost my job in January, the last thing I thought was that I wouldn’t qualify for the food stamp program. On unemployment I grossed $400/week. Which is equal to $10/hour. To my surprise, I was making way more than the maximum for food stamps. $10/hour even if it was after taxes isn’t enough for a mortgage, utilities, food, etc… I received more help from The Christian Caring Center here than I will ever get from the state of NJ. What makes it even worse is that up until this year, The state of NJ had been supplying about 30 or so turkeys for needy familes through places like Christian Caring Center. Due to budget cuts, they cut out the turkeys altogether. Didn’t reduce it, but cut it out all together! If your poor in NJ, you are just out of luck! The turkeys would have cost $3500. Corzine could have easily paid that out of his savings account (something I don’t even have anymore), and he never would have even felt a pinch. I doubt very seriously that his Thanksgiving dinner suffered at all from “the cuts”. I think Corzine, his family, and aides should spend their Christmas dinner at a local soup kitchen. And not one in Far Hills either!
January 13, 2009 at 5:01 am |
Jen -
I’m impressed that you had a savings account.
Our tax system does everything it can to discourage saving and encourage borrowing to where we run up interest. Why else would it let us deduct interest paid, yet make us pay tax on interest earned from savings? And this despite the fact that we usually do our savings with dollars we’ve earned and already paid taxes on!