A bit of micro economic data I'm just reporting on from my (Catholic) Knights of Columbus Men's Club meeting last night. I find it pretty telling that the recession is beginning to hit main street.
Our St. Vincent De Paul food bank served 256 families in July, 358 families in August, 425 families in September, 468 families in October, and 458 families in November. In the first 3 days of December, we served 100 families already.
You can see the rise in Q3-Q4 '08 pretty easily. Luckily the community has stepped up with the turkey drive program, so unlike other food banks in the region, we're sitting pretty good at least for Christmas boxes (which will be delivered on December 20th to at least 450 families). But the hunger is beginning to hit.
Council 3591 serves St. Anthony's and St.Clare's parish in Tigard and Southwest Portland, a reasonably wealthy section of the Portland Metro area. We're based at St. Anthony's parish.
Comments
poverty
I posted that earlier, a study which showed poverty is moving to the suburbs and Oregon unemployment is one of the highest, of course state Government will probably be more concerned about making sure illegal immigrants have social services, jobs as they did in 2002.
St. Anthony's is a very multi-ethnic parish
With both Spanish and Vietnamese masses every weekend. One thing we're seeing is suddenly more of an interest from the immigrant populations in the Knights, which fits our original charter (Fr. McGivney originally started it as a fraternal benefits society aiding new immigrants working in what today are positions held by illegal immigrants for exactly the same reasons of greed as he faced in 1876). I failed to ask what the demographic breakdown was.
They did report that somebody stole the food bank's computer- CPU, monitor & printer- from the office. Somebody's got to be awfully desperate to steal an outdated computer from the food bank.
The true value, of course, of such data is confirmation. Macro economics predicts, micro economics confirms.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Oregon policy
is pretty awful and I know this was happening in 2002-2003 time frame. The state was flooded with illegal labor, who were getting social services benefits, Oregon health plan, driver's licenses while the unemployment rate was over 8%. This is a pure cheap labor agenda in Oregon as well as special interests and yes they ignore the sad economic state of all immigrants, except the illegal ones. I'd like to see the estimate of the Oregon underground economy, I'll bet it's massive from their policies.
It's about $3.5 billion
When you consider that almost *all* of the rural area of the state now uses such cheap labor for agricultural interests.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.