Are you better off now?

By way of C.E. Petro, Mother Jones has a report on some statistics entitled "How the poor get dinged at every turn." Here is a random sampling:

Among the working poor, 13% of income is spent on commuting if public transportation is used, 21% if a private vehicle is used.

Workers who earn $45,000 or more spend 2% of their income on commuting.

Since 1983, college tuition has risen 115%. The maximum Pell Grant for low- and moderate-income college students has risen only 19%.

Nationwide, the number of payday lending outlets has risen 11,000% since 1990.

The average annual interest rate on a payday loan is more than 400%, costing borrowers $3.4 billion a year.

And so on. What's even more disturbing is how many working-class Americans who are hardest hit by failed right-wing conservative economic policies keep voting against their own interests, especially here in the Southern Red States.

(And yes, I realize some of these examples date back to the Clinton era and before. But the current single-party government has had five years to fix all those horrible Clinton mistakes. What's taking so long?)