Poverty in Johnson County, Kansas, you must be kidding?

I just listened to a discussion on poverty in Johnson County, Kansas on Up to Date with Steve Kraske on my local public radio station KCUR.   Kraske, whose conservative leanings often bleeds  through to his interviews, was shocked to discover that there is poverty in what was once one of the most prosperous counties in America. 

Kansas through the past few years became the playground of the great Republican experiment where a reduction of wages and an increase in taxes for the working class along with tax breaks for the excessively rich increased income disparity and created a state that can no longer fund even rudimentary education for its children.   Higher wage white collar jobs (middle management, IT, business and finance) disappeared and were replaced by benefit free, low paid, jobs often filled by foreign contract workers.  Of course those onetime well paid white collar workers, who looked down on union workers, never made the connection that when the working class can buy products produced by companies, companies can hire more people, profits increase and the economy grows.   Eliminate decent wages for the working class and the ripple effect destroys the middle class and the economy in general resulting in a SPIKE IN POVERTY.

The greedy billionaires David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch have bought and paid for the Kansas governorship and most of the seats in the Republican ruled Kansas legislature   The paid off officials are diligent in executing the Koch campaign to destroy union jobs, decent minimum wage legislation, education and the middle class. Increasing taxes on the poor and reducing them for the rich ensures that an uneducated easily manipulated workforce. All of this impacts Johnson County where salaries are decreasing and decent paying jobs are disappearing.

Poverty in Johnson County unthought-of a decade ago, is a fact of life today.   Left to the puppets that are currently at play in Topeka it will do nothing more than increase until the county becomes a mirror of Jackson County, Missouri.   Kansans can turn this around but it will take the will of heroes to take on the super-rich and overthrow a state government that is not working for the majority but for a very rich very few.

Note: In his article Wealth, Income, and Power,  G. William Domhoff writes “In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%.” (http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html)