Some American News

Making the poor pay
According to Gov. Chris Christie if you live in the state of New Jersey and are earning $118 a week you have escaped the bonds of poverty and no longer are in need of the state’s Medicaid program. $118 a week is but a fraction of the poverty line as defined by the United States of America. New Jersey battles California for the mantle of having the highest cost of living of any state in the nation.

Adults with a family of four who earn more than $6,000 a year would no longer qualify for the state’s Medicaid program. Currently, the cut-off to qualify is $30,000. A single mother raising three kids on a weekly salary of $118 will no longer be eligible to take advantage of the medical social safety net should she fall ill.

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/06/12/gov-chris-christie-says-earn-6000-a-year-no-medicaid-for-you/

Women at risk
Elderly women risk outliving the retirement funds they need to maintain their lifestyles. Older women depend on Social Security to provide as much as 90 percent of their income when they can no longer sustain their normal lives with the retirement money they have left. Because women live longer, Social Security is the only thing standing between as many as 40 percent of area women 65 and older and poverty. Since women tend to live more years in retirement than men, they have a greater chance of exhausting all sources of income except Social Security

Researchers said the trend of women outliving their retirement savings, which is largely attributable to differences in work history and life spans, can carry significant economic consequences. Women, on average, accumulate less income than men for retirement because they are more likely to work part-time jobs, interrupt their careers to care for elderly family members and take an extended break from work to raise children, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Women also earn about 77 percent of what men earn. As a result, women, on average, work 12 fewer years than men, which gives them less time to save money, receive promotions and raises and pay into Social Security. Since women also live longer than men ( average life expectancy of women 65 years old is about 20 years, compared to 17.7 years for men of the same ageIn 2008, 76 percent of women over the age of 85 were widowed, compared to only 38 percent of men), it means they often incur more medical costs and have more time to deplete their retirement savings. Women live longer and have chronic illnesses that are far more expensive.

http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/springfield-news/more-women-outlive-savings-1183606.html

Black and white unite
Intermarriage triggers awareness about racial assumptions and thoughts and beliefs and culture. Yesterday was the anniversary of the legalization of interracial marriage in all American states after Mildred and Richard Loving who in 1958, five weeks after the couple — she black, he white — married in Washington, D.C., had sheriff’s deputies burst into their bedroom of their rural Virginia home and arrested the pair for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The couple fought back in court, and on June 12, 1967, the Lovings won a Supreme Court decision that finally overturned the right of states to enforce bans on interracial marriages.

Laws banning the marriage of blacks and whites go back to Colonial days. In 1661 in Maryland, for example, a free English white woman who married a slave was required to become a slave herself — usually enough to discourage a relationship. With slavery’s end and Reconstruction, new lines were draw on sex and marriage between black and white. By 1930, 30 states banned interracial marriage. Rarely did opponents of the bans advocate racial intermarriage outwardly.Over time, some states ended anti-miscegenation laws on their own. But not even the 1960s leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement, who indirectly helped pave the way for acceptance of interracial marriage, made a public priority of eradicating the remaining anti-miscegenation laws. They feared that openly promoting interracial romance would drain support from civil rights.

The total number of black-white married couples stood at 550,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Current Population Survey. That’s one in four of the 2.4 million interracially married couples, itself a fraction of the 60.8 million married couples in the United States. blacks and whites marrying remains the least common type of interracial union. Asians, it turns out, are most open to marrying whites. Asian Americans are the most willing to date outside their group. Sociologist George Yancey of the University of North Texas has looked at interracial intimacy through the prism of Internet dating preferences. He found that blacks who as a group may support interracial marriage in principal — preventing intermarriage was a goal of segregation — remain more reluctant than other groups to date and marry whites. While fewer than six out of 10 blacks were open to the idea of just dating a white person slightly fewer than half of whites were willing to date blacks, while six out of 10 whites were willing to date an Asian American. Blacks were the least-desired dating partners, Yancey found.

What makes black-white marriages so costly? A combination of ethnic pride, family and peer pressure and alienation. “The distinct alienation African Americans experience likely leads to a comparatively lower level of trust of majority group members as romantic partners,” Yancey suggested and that black-white interracial marriage and assimilation won’t by itself create a new age or racial harmony. “The freedom to intermarry is a positive thing we need to have in society, but I’m not of the opinion that this is the solution. I think if we do deal with racial animosity more intermarriages will be the result.”

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/could-more-black-white-interracial-marriages-cure-inequality-32140/