Barbara Ehrenreich

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty — inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious — qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique “culture of poverty,” a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We” — the always presumptively affluent readers — needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man’s obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter — since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.

In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the “twisted” proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a sometime-liberal and one of Harrington’s drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village — blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the “Negro family,” clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:

“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment… Impulse governs his behavior… He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”

In the “hardest cases,” Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in “semi-institutions… and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”

By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”

In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)

Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug-testing. Lawmakers in 23 states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding warrants.

Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for all government benefits, presumably including Social Security. If granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.

What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the “culture of poverty” theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he’d have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase “the culture of poverty.” Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because “he didn’t want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.”

The ruse — if you could call it that — worked. Michael Harrington wasn’t red-baited into obscurity.  In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he had fatally botched the “discovery” of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves — disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.

Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).

This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print at the Nation magazine.

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Ralph da Costa Nunez

When U.S. attorney general Eric Holder described the United States as a “nation of cowards” when it comes to openly discussing race, he was lambasted. But he was absolutely right. And one area where race has long been an issue spoken about in hushed tones is the racial disparity among homeless families in the United States.

But a report by The Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness, “Intergenerational Disparities Experienced by Homeless Black Families,” highlighting disparities among black and white families in the United States, has gotten people talking about this topic.

The response has been overwhelming. From newspapers in many of the 37 cities across the country where statistics show black families are greatly over-represented in shelters to CNN.com, BET.com and right here on The Huffington Post the conversation has started. And the report continues to go viral on Facebook and Twitter with people of all races and backgrounds sharing the facts.

It’s no wonder. The statistics are stark: In 2010, 1 in 141 black family members stayed in a homeless shelter, a rate 7 times higher than for white families. Black people in families make up 12.1 percent of the U.S. family population, but represented 38.8 percent of sheltered people in families in 2010. In comparison, 65.8 percent of people in families in the general population are white, while white family members only occupied 28.6 percent of family shelter beds in 2010.

Homelessness is primarily a poverty issue. In 2010, nearly one-quarter (23.3 percent) of black families lived in poverty, three times the rate of white families (7.1 percent). But the issue goes deeper than that. And there is more to it than that. Understanding why blacks are over-represented in homeless shelters requires an examination of the longstanding and inter-related social and structural issues facing the black community.

As the report noted, and CNN.com highlighted in its analysis of the report, in 2009, the median wealth of white households was 20 times that of blacks ($113,149 versus $5,677). Financial assets serve as a crucial buffer in times of economic hardship, covering unexpected health expenses and preventing loss of housing when unemployed. Access to additional funds improves living conditions at present and during retirement. Intergenerational wealth transfers can enhance the economic circumstances of younger relatives, for example through investments in children’s education, inheritances, and monetary gifts.

Lower educational attainment among blacks, in particular black males, is a barrier to gaining any employment and especially to qualifying for jobs in well-compensated sectors. Black males earn bachelor’s degrees or higher at half the rate of white males (15.6 percent compared to 32 percent). Employment disparities rooted in subtle forms of discrimination persist even with educational advancement.

In 2010, blacks with an associate degree experienced a higher unemployment rate than whites with a high school diploma (10.8 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively). Furthermore, a male black employee with a bachelor’s degree or higher was paid one-quarter (25.4 percent) less on average in weekly full-time salary ($1,010) in 2010 compared to a male white worker ($1,354) with the same level of education.

And throughout U.S. history, housing discrimination has been ever-present, both in the form of official government policies and societal attitudes. Federal policies that reduced the stock of affordable housing through urban renewal projects displaced a disproportionate number of poor blacks living concentrated in cities to other substandard urban neighborhoods.

Residential segregation, which affects black households to a greater extent than other minorities, perpetuates poverty patterns by isolating blacks in areas that lack employment opportunities and services, and experience higher crime and poverty rates. Blacks are also overrepresented in the criminal justice system, which increases the risk of homelessness and developmental delays among affected children.

This report raises the question of why family homelessness is a racial issue. This phenomenon is not new, but is rarely discussed. Although government-sanctioned racial discrimination may be a relic of the past, the finding that blacks are overrepresented in shelter when compared to whites demonstrates that blacks continue to face prejudice and substantial access barriers to decent employment, education, health care, and housing not experienced by whites.

It takes a community to end homelessness. Family shelters can — and do — function as part of the front-line combating bias and providing opportunities for families who fall through the cracks. However, it will take more than a few service providers to call attention to the elephant in the room. It will take all of us as a nation to voice our intolerance of policies that make it difficult for some to rise out of poverty.

Follow Ralph da Costa Nunez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@ICPH_homeless

Robert Reich

Let Santorum and Romney duke it out for who will cut taxes on the wealthy the most and shred the public services everyone else depends on.

The rest of us ought to be having a serious discussion about a wealth tax. Because if you really want to know what’s happening to the American economy you need to look at household wealth — not just incomes.

The Fed just reported that household wealth increased from October through December. That’s the first gain in three quarters.

Good news? Take closer look. The entire gain came from increases in stock prices. Those increases in stock values more than made up for continued losses in home values.

But the vast majority of Americans don’t have their wealth in the stock market. Over 90 percent of the nation’s financial assets – including stocks and pension-fund holdings – are owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans. The top 1 percent owns 38 percent.

Most Americans have their wealth in their homes – whose prices continue to drop. Housing prices are down by a third from their 2006 peak.

So as the value of financial assets held by American households increased by $1.46 trillion in the fourth quarter, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans became $1.3 trillion richer, and the wealthiest 1 percent became $554.8 billion richer.

But at the same time, as the value of household real estate fell by $367.4 billion in the fourth quarter, homeowners – mostly middle class – lost over $141 billion (owners’ equity is 38.4 percent of total household real estate).

Presto. America’s wealth gap – already wider than the nation’s income gap – has become even wider. The 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together.

Given this unprecedented concentration of wealth – and considering what the nation needs to do to rebuild our schools and infrastructure while at the same time saving Medicare and reducing the long-term budget deficit – shouldn’t we be aiming higher than a “Buffet tax” on the incomes of millionaires?

There should also be a surtax on the super rich.

Yale Professor Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott have proposed a 2 percent surtax on the wealth of the richest one-half of 1 percent of Americans owning more than $7.2 million of assets. They figure it would generate $70 billion a year, or $750 billion over the decade. That’s half the savings Congress’s now defunct Supercommittee was aiming for.

Instead of standing empty-handed while Santorum and Romney dominate the airwaves with their regressive Social Darwinism, Democrats need to be reminding Americans of what’s happening in the real economy – and what needs to happen.

The wealth gap is widening into a chasm. A surtax on the super rich is fair — and it’s necessary.

Wendell Potter

If I were trying to persuade the Supreme Court later this month that Obamacare should not be declared unconstitutional, I would tell the story of the woman who was the original named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by the National Federation of Independent Business, one of the fiercest critics of the health care reform law.

The NFIB thought it had found the perfect person when one of its members, Mary Brown, a 56-year-old owner of an automobile repair shop in Panama City, Florida, volunteered to lend her name to the lawsuit.

Brown was outspoken in her belief that Congress had gone beyond what the U.S. Constitution allows when it included in the reform law a requirement that, beginning in 2014, most Americans will have to obtain health insurance or pay a fine to the IRS. She said she was uninsured and was that way by choice.

“She firmly believes that no one should have the right to tell her she has to use her own money to pay for health insurance,” Karen Harned, executive director of the NFIB legal center, said when the NFIB filed its lawsuit in 2010.

She turned out not to be such a perfect choice after all.

Last year Brown shuttered her business and filed for personal bankruptcy. Among her debts: nearly $4,500 in medical bills. More than $2,000 of that was owed to the Bay Medical Center in Panama City. The rest was to doctors in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi.

The NFIB had to scramble to find another small business owner to replace Brown’s name at the top of the lawsuit. It settled on Kaj Ahlburg, a retired New York investment banker who now lives in Port Angeles, Washington.

Here’s why I would make sure that Brown’s unfortunate turn of events was brought to the high court’s attention: It is people who have decided not to buy coverage — but who nevertheless get sick or injured and seek medical care when they do, even if they don’t have the money to pay for it — that make health insurance so expensive for the rest of us. And it is why the cost of coverage has become completely unaffordable for millions of other Americans who, unlike Mary Brown, really want it and know they need it.

While Brown says it was not just the unpaid medical bills that forced her and her husband into bankruptcy, the fact is that more than 60 percent of people who file for personal bankruptcy in this country do so at least in part because of medical debt. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country in the world.

I called the Bay Medical Center to find out if any of their other patients had been unable to pay for the care they received there, even some of their insured patients.

It turns out that that one hospital gets stuck with $30 million in uncompensated care every year. Spokeswoman Christa Hild told me it had become such an unsustainable situation that Bay Medical Center has decided that it can no longer make it as a stand-alone hospital.

“We have had to look at different business models,” she said.

What Bay Medical Center has had to do is to give up its autonomy and affiliate, in a joint venture arrangement, with other hospitals in the area.

Health insurers often complain that one of the chief reasons why they are having a difficult time at the negotiating table with hospitals these days is because of consolidation. The reason for that consolidation, however, is the exploding problem of uncompensated care, hospitals have no choice but to consolidate. Well, they actually do have another choice: close. Which is what many hospitals have had to do because they could not find a willing partner with which to affiliate.

It is not truly accurate, of course, that that $30 million a year in uncompensated care at Bay Medical Center is, indeed, uncompensated. Somebody has to pay for it. And guess who that is? It is all of us. Even Mary Brown. She and the rest of us cover that uncompensated care either through higher taxes to support the Medicare and Medicaid programs or through higher health insurance premiums. The care that presumably is “absorbed” by the hospitals is, in reality, being absorbed not by those facilities but by us. This is what the term “cost shifting” is all about.

And this irrational way of paying for that so-called uncompensated care has us locked into a dysfunctional system in which costs for both the insured and the uninsured keep spiraling upward.

The most recent National Health Interview Survey by the Centers for Disease Control makes that abundantly clear. According to the CDC’s survey, released last week, one in three Americans say their medical bills are a “financial burden.” And it is not just the uninsured. More than a fourth of those with private insurance said they were struggling with medical debt. That’s because insurers and employers are moving more and more of us into limited benefit or high-deductible plans. Why? Because of the absurd cost-shifting that is the hallmark of the U.S. health care system.

If just one relatively small hospital in Panama City, Florida, has $30 million in “uncompensated” care every year, think of what the total amount is for all hospitals and doctors in this country.

Now do you see why we have to get everybody covered? Mary Brown might have avoided paying those medical bills by filing for bankruptcy, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are off the hook.

Richard Kirsch

Last month I wrote about how economic issues like the minimum wage were twisting Republican candidates into pretzels as they tried to make it look like they cared about the economic squeeze on American families while toeing the line on free-market orthodoxy. As I said at the time:

Romney, clearly aware that he needs to support some policies that show him sympathetic to struggling families, has broken with free-market orthodoxy by supporting indexing the minimum wage to inflation. For this he was loudly attacked by Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and Rush Limbaugh, among others. Andrew McCarthy’s post in the National Review captured the mood with the headline, “See Mitt Pander.”

It turns out Mitt couldn’t take the heat from his right yet again (which makes you wonder how he’d deal with the pressures of actually being president). This week he got back in line with right-wing economic theology, telling CNBC’s Larry Kudlow “there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.” Even in reversing his position he can’t help throwing in a waffle: “probably.”

In the same interview, Romney told Kudlow that “people are hurting; they want someone who can see rising incomes, rising jobs, and a bright future for their kids.” Unless, it appears, those people are working full-time at minimum wage and still don’t make enough to rise above the poverty level.

Maybe the problem is that full-time workers are not “the very poor” who Romney isn’t “concerned about.” He told us, “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” So I guess since minimum wage workers are just poor, not the very poor, Romney doesn’t think they need help.

As Romney knows, it’s easy to go after the very poor, who are demonized as dependent on government hand-outs in code for racist politics. But there is overwhelming support for people who are working hard and still barely able to feed their families. Even if most people make well above the minimum wage, they still feel the economic crush of stagnant wages, disappearing benefits, and job insecurity.

You can just see the Obama campaign lampooning Romney for pretending he understands that “people are hurting” while opposing raising the minimum wage, after he was for it. It’s a perfect combination of Romney the rich guy who doesn’t get it, Romney the captive of the right wing, and Romney the flip-flopper.

But beneath the political vulnerability is a deeper truth that Obama and progressives more broadly need to drive home this year. When Republicans preach smaller government, less regulation, and defending business as job creators, they are sentencing families to a future that is the opposite of what Romney told Kudlow he wants. It’s a future of shrinking incomes, disappearing jobs, and a darker future for our children.

We don’t need smaller government; we need government that works for working people, not the ultra-rich. We don’t need less regulation; we need rules that assure that working families can live in dignity. It’s not businesses that are the job creators. It’s people who go to work every day, who shop on Main Street, who are the business creators. And that includes people who work their butts off every day at the minimum wage.

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Here's looking at you...dip-shit.

Ever read an article that you found to be so well written, informative and funny (cause its true) you felt the need to put it out there and share? Yeah, me too…from the wonderful writers at Cracked, enjoy this article about the wealthy gaffe-challenged -

“All of a sudden, it’s like you can’t make huge amounts of money without people getting all pissed off about it. And it’s only going to get worse — with the election coming up and the weather getting warmer, this whole “Occupy” movement is probably going to come back strong. The 1 percent will feel even more besieged than before.

“What the hell?” you’re probably thinking, if you’re somehow both rich and reading an article with this title, “I didn’t crash the economy!” You might even be tempted to take to a microphone, to defend yourself and your wealthy friends. But before you do, I want you to stop and ask yourself, “Will this make me sound like an out-of-touch douchebag?”

Continue reading…trust me, it’s worth it.

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying…

Have a nice day.

Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse?

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I had a taste of what it is like surviving on that kind of income: part-timing as a bartender while looking for my first proper job. In fact, even after I got my first proper job, me and the GF survived on under $2000 for some time, while having to pay rent and bills and stuff. This is of course not the real thing: I just took a really long time to secure a job after graduation. It was rough, but nothing compared to people who are stuck with that kind of salary with no real prospect of escaping, at the same time having a family to support. It is not a case of spending less than what you earn: there is only so much you can do about the price of essential goods. Priorities are very different when you’re earning that kind of money: you worry about saving that few dollars per meal, that few coins per bus trip. You spend more time worrying about next day or next week rather than next year or beyond. I was fortunate enough not to have other mouths to feed on that salary: I understood that starving myself can never be as painful as starving my kids if I had any. One thing for sure: the question of whether to buy a flat or not never once crossed our minds at that stage. We were too busy subsisting, and had literally zero savings.

According to available statistics, the bottom 10% of “resident employed households” earn an average of $1,581 per month (this is including employer’s CPF contributions). This obviously excludes households with not even one person employed, which is not insignificant: they make up 9.3% of resident households (including 5.8% retiree households). Of that bottom 10%, unfortunately it is unclear how many % actually earn less than $2000 and hence is eligible for those “two-room BTOs”. Regardless, about 104k resident employed households make up this decile, yet apparently only 4,300 of such flats have ever been built: this is about 4% of that bottom decile. Also available are rental flats: targeted to reach about 50,000 units this year. Together, this exceeds 50% of the bottom decile. My guess is to get an average of $1,581 for the decile, there should be significantly more than 50% earning less than $2000.

What about the rest of them? Don’t know, but I guess there is a reason why the waiting time for a rental flat was a whopping 21 months (they aim to cut this down to eight months, which to me still seem to be whopping). My point is, while the ministers and MPs trumpet to the world about how great it is for folks earning $1000 per month to buy a flat, perhaps it is more honest to reveal what fraction of them actually do: how many actually applied for that 4,300 flats? If the number of applicants is high, then it seems obvious that there is an issue with adequacy. If low, perhaps an issue with relevance: with that kind of salary, is buying a flat really a priority as opposed to more immediate needs like food? In other words, is this really helping them? If not, then it is rather tasteless to boast about it.

Fortunately for myself, I got a lucky break and the GF is doing extremely well, so we got ourselves into a very different kind of problem: not eligible for new HDB, cannot afford private, and resale HDB is kinda crazy right now. You might be surprised to find out that salaries in some industries have been stagnant or actually declined in the past ten years with very limited career progression, one of those being food and beverage. Suffice it to say, not all of the folks in those industries are as lucky as me: getting a degree that would allow them to head somewhere else. For them, household income decile mobility is not something that can be achieved easily, aside from moving to “unemployed”, that is: employment is rather transient in nature (another problem with that two-room BTO: a requirement of continuous employment). I should ask those friends what they think of this two-room BTO.

Lastly, I’m not so sure that it is only possible in Singapore for low-income earners to buy homes. This claim is a little bit too ridiculous for me to even bother to look for examples in this big place called the rest of the world.

Jared Bernstein

I participated in a debate Thursday morning on the role of government in poverty reduction. A couple of “curious” points came up from the conservative side which I keep hearing lately and which make little sense to me.

First, on inequality, Michael Tanner from the Cato Institute couldn’t understand why I kept going on about inequality. It doesn’t have anything to do with poverty (Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution made a similar argument in a Senate hearing a few weeks back). Tanner argued that if everyone’s income doubled, poverty would go down but inequality wouldn’t change, so inequality must not matter.

Um… ok… but that’s a total non-sequitur. What’s been happening for most — not all — of the past 30 years is the pattern of real income growth you see here, from a recent CRS study. Sure, if everyone’s income grew at the overall average of the first bar-20%-we’d have less poverty and less inequality. But in the real world, average income grew 20%, fell 6% at the low end, and was up 60% for the top 1%.

Source: CRS, link above.

That’s how you get results like the ones shown here where the change in poverty over the past few decades is decomposed into the roles of growth, education, race, family structure, and inequality, the latter of which is the single largest factor.

In fact, for a few years in the latter 1990s, inequality between the middle and low end of the income scale actually compressed — the very top still pulled ahead, based on large gains in capital income. But low wages actually rose at the rate of productivity growth for a few years there, something that hasn’t happened since. And what happened to poverty rates in those years? They fell quite steeply.

This isn’t rocket science. If growth reaches the bottom, there’s less poverty. If inequality diverts growth from the bottom, poverty goes up.

The other mishap in the discussion was the claim that we really can’t do anything to help the poor because we’re broke.

No, we’re not. It is implausible to argue that the US economy will somehow stop growing. No one knows how fast, but CBO has GDP growing about a third over the next decade (2012-2022), and that translates into per capita growth of about 22% (see EPI’s take on this here).

We may well be unwilling to raise the revenue we need to fight poverty, invest in poor kids, fix up our infrastructure, push back on climate change, and ensure secure retirements for our elderly. But it won’t be because we’re broke.

This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein’s On The Economy blog.

All children need strong families and supportive communities to realize their full potential. For the nearly 8 million children under age 18 living in areas of concentrated poverty (see box below for a complete description) in the United States, critical resources for their healthy growth and development – including high-performing schools, quality medical care and safe outdoor spaces – are often out of reach. The chance that a child will live in an area of concentrated poverty has grown significantly over the last decade. In fact, the latest data available show that the number of children living in these communities has risen by 1.6 million, a 25 percent increase since 2000.

Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation

Available at: http://www.aecf.org/~/media/Pubs/Initiatives/KIDS%20COUNT/D/DataSnapshotonHighPovertyCommunities/KIDSCOUNTDataSnapshot_HighPovertyCommunities.pdf

As Miles Sees It

We’ve had such an overwhelming response to our post  – “Santorum’s Wrong: There Is Such a Thing as a ‘Liberal’ Christian. His Name Was Jesus” by Brian Normoyle that I felt compelled to repost a contribution from our old friend Miles Thirst from 2006.  We had and counting over 3,500 hits and the conversation that it has generated is quite interesting.  As we pit ourselves one against the other and debate who is the most righteous and “what would Jesus do”  maybe we should listen to what Miles has to say.    Here’s Miles….

Yo Miles Here!

 My man Ten is giving me a little space on his space to give my spin on what’s going on in the world today – As Miles Sees It!

So here goes.

On her latest CD – “La Dona” Teena Marie speaks on this Italian dude Machiavelli.  Lady T says that “Machiavelli never lied.”  Seeing that I aint never seen a brother who aint told a lie or two – even a little vanilla one, I thought I’d check this cat out.

Well as it turns out this cat Niccole’ Machiavelli was droppin’ knowledge on politics and politicians around the time that other Italian dude Christopher Columbus was getting lost trying to find the so called new world!   Anyway, around 1513, this cat Nicky Machiavelli wrote this book, “The Prince.”

Nah not THE Prince – “The Prince.”

Okay, okay… so in his book “The Prince,” Nicky Mac talks about what the kings and rulers where doing and what they needed to do so they could keep all that “bling” that they made off the little people.

What Nicky Mac said – totally dismissing any question of morality – was that politics was about cause and effect.  You do this … you get that.  Just that simple.  Nicky Mac would have been a great writer for T-Shirts and bumper stickers cause he could break down complex ideas like politics and reduce them to a few basic laws and rules.

For instance, the way Nicky Mac saw it, the world was made up of two kinds of folk, each with his own goals.  There was the elite few – the Princes, these cats were the kings or the wanna be kings waiting in the wings plotting to knock off the king if the king showed he was a punk.  All the princes and wannabes were striving for mainly only one thing – POWER, or at least should be striving for power.  Any prince who was too lazy, too dumb or too much of a wimp to fight for power would sooner or later be kicked to the curb by a more gangster prince who would snatch the ruling prince’s power.  So anyway, the princes where selected by a never ending battle for turf in which they had to throw down in order to survive.  Kind of like that dude Darwin’s survival of the fittest only Nicky Mac came up with it first.

In his own way, Nicky Mac was the first cat to lay down the laws of power politics.  That is, the more power a prince had, the more likely he was to hang around, provided he used his power to get more power – because if you didn’t come correct in this game it could be fatal. Nicky Mac wrote that this was the real deal about all politics including bad blood  among nations as well as the beefs between princes and the wanna be princes in them.

Now that other group that Nicky Mac talks about are the common folk like you and me.  Machiavelli calls us the Objects of Power or the Vulgar.  Nicky Mac really dissed the common folk, not only does he call us vulgar, but he goes on to say and I quote – “the vulgar are cowardly, fickle and ever to be deceived.”  He said that the princes could rule them easily by using force and fraud.

Damn is all this starting to sound familiar?  But hold up; check this out it gets deeper.

Nicky Mac goes on to say… “There are only two things that the vulgar seriously care for – their property and their women – and these a prudent prince ought to leave undisturbed.  As long as taxes remained moderate and families secure, the vulgar would obey the prince and care little else about what he was doing.  As long as the vulgar remained basically content, conspiracies by would -be princes posed no serious danger to the ruler, for they would always be betrayed by some conspirator or by some chance informant.”

Machiavelli believed in what he called the “ethics of power” as well as “power politics.”  Nicky Mac said that a prince had only one essential virtue and that was to be down for anything in order to get power, keep power and enhance power.  The prince only needed to be smart enough and stubborn enough to make this virtue work for him.  All other stuff like honesty, generosity, courage, and piety had to take a back seat to the quest for power.  Although these other virtues were nice to have and if the prince had them then cool, but they weren’t essential because he could always front like he had them.  Say like a prince didn’t really want to pray in church, he should still make sure folks saw his face in the place.   If he wanted to reward someone for something he should do it in front of the paparazzi but if he wanted to come down hard on somebody he needed to do that on the QT or have one of his boys take care of it for him.  That way he would appear to be a kinder, gentler prince and the common folk would fall for it.

Just as Nicky Mac said that there were two kinds of folk, he said there were two kinds of morality.  Ordinary people – “us vulgars” – should be taught the “traditional” morality.  You know, stuff like honesty, truthfulness, loyalty, peaceful and unselfish behavior and obedience.   But for the princes and the government run by the princes “traditional” morality didn’t amount to squat.   Princes could rob, kill, lie and cheat, whenever “reasons of state” – or any chance to increase their “bling” – made it seem like the right thing to do at the time.

In Nicky Macs world, princes and their homeboys had only one game – self-preservation; one rule – selfishness and one bottom line – mo’ power, mo’ power, mo’ power!   The princes saw themselves as being above the law and above any outside judgment over their decisions.  Yet they expected their subjects – the vulgar, to follow the traditional morality that they themselves had no respect for and in fact used trickery and deception to separate these two moralities.

Hey whatcha think?  Did Machiavelli ever lie or is the truth sho’ nuff stranger than fiction?

Yo! It’s been fun, but I gotta run!  I think I’m gonna go trick out somebody’s ride or drop by LeBron’s crib and raid his fridge.  Next time we hook up we’ll rap some more about Nicky Mac and his book The Prince.

In the meantime, in between time HOLLA BACK!

Miles OUT!

Tenthltr2u (c) 2006

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act gives states new tools and funding to integrate public and private delivery of health care services. Many states are already integrating services for low-income women and children to improve outcomes and reduce costs. For example, many state Medicaid agencies and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, public health agencies, provider groups, private insurers, children’s hospitals, and family organizations are partnering to share resources including technical assistance, coordinated care, and quality improvement efforts. This issue brief highlights the efforts of Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Vermont to integrate health care services for low-income women and children, especially through state Title V maternal and child health programs.

Source: The Commonwealth Fund/AMCHP

Available at: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Issue%20Brief/2012/Feb/1580_VanLandeghem_new_opportunities_integrating_hlt_care_02.pdf

Among the growing pile of influential studies on early education, a few have become landmarks.  They have tracked children over not just one year or two years, but into their mid 20s, and even at age 40, giving us important information on how participants have fared now that they are adults. The Abecedarian Project – an early childhood program for children from infancy through age 5 — is one of these famous studies. Last month, in an article in the journal Developmental Psychology, researchers released results of a study on later outcomes for the children in the Abecedarian project, giving us fresh information on their well-being at age 30.

In our podcast today, we talk with Craig Ramey, an internationally renowned scholar of early childhood research who created the Abecedarian Project in the 1970s. Ramey is now a professor and distinguished research scholar at Virginia Tech’s Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute.  He is among the co-authors of the Developmental Pyschology article; the article’s lead writer is Frances Campbell, a senior scientist at the FPG Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Source: NewAmerica.net

Available at: http://earlyed.newamerica.net/blogposts/2012/podcast_results_from_a_landmark_study_of_early_childhood_education_at_the_30_year_mar

Children represent 24 percent of the population. Yet, they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty.1 Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (21 percent) live in poor families. Young children under age 6 appear to be particularly vulnerable, with 48 percent living in low-income families, including 25 percent living in poor families. Winding up in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. There are a range of factors associated with children’s experiences of economic insecurity, including race/ethnicity and parents’ educational attainment and employment. This fact sheet, which is an update to the series based on the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS), describes the demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics of children and their parents – highlighting the important factors that appear to distinguish low-income and poor children from their less disadvantaged counterparts.

Source: National Center on Child Poverty

Available at: http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1054.html

Children represent 24 percent of the population. Yet, they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty.1 Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (21 percent) live in poor families. Our very youngest children, infants and toddlers under age 3, appear to be particularly vulnerable, with 48 percent living in low-income families, including 25 percent living in poor families. Winding up in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. There are a range of factors associated with children’s experiences of economic insecurity, including race/ethnicity and parents’ educational attainment and employment. This fact sheet, which is an update to the series based on the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS), describes the demographic, socio-economic, and geographic characteristics of children and their parents – highlighting the important factors that appear to distinguish low-income and poor children from their less disadvantaged counterparts.

Source: National Center on Child Poverty

Available at: http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1056.html

The Aspen Institute announced yesterday that Christopher King, director of the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at The University of Texas at Austin, will be in the inaugural class of its Ascend Fellowship program. The Ascend Fellows are a select group of 20 leaders from across the country who are pioneering two-generation approaches to move families beyond poverty.

King leads a team that designed and is analyzing the implementation and outcomes of a jobs strategy for low-skilled, low-income parents of children in Tulsa, Okla.’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs. He is a labor economist with four decades of experience conducting policy and program analysis, designing innovative programs and evaluating the effects of education and training interventions. He has written widely on education, workforce and social policy. He also teaches courses on policy economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, which houses the Ray Marshall Center.

Source: University of Texas at Austin

Available at: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/02/16/king_christopher_ascend_fellow/

This week and last week, EPI President Lawrence Mishel was razor sharp, poking holes in various aspects of conservative economic mythology.

• The United States is not becoming an “entitlement society.”

EPI’s Lawrence Mishel, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, and several other noted economists took issue with a recent New York Times article, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” that suggested the United States is becoming an entitlement society. “Many of the facts presented in the story do not support that conclusion and the ones that do seem to support it are misleading,” Mishel wrote. “[T]here’s no evidence to show we’re becoming an ‘entitlement society,’ just that we’re low on revenues and the economy remains depressed.”

Krugman agreed, writing that Mishel “make[s] a point I was planning to get to: the rise in safety net spending over the past decade does not reflect an expansion of that safety net. Instead, it reflects two things: rising health care costs, and a terrible economic slump that has put many more people in need.”

• Low high school graduation rates are not the cause of diminishing worker wages.

Mishel also responded to the New York Times columnist David Brooks’ contention that many workers have low wages because they never completed high school. Brooks wrote: “I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.” Mishel noted that while many people attribute workers’ low wages to not completing high school, the notion is “definitely not true.”

As the graph shows, the share of the workforce (age 18–64) without a high school or further degree (including a GED) has dropped tremendously in the last four decades, from 28.5 percent in 1973 to just 8.4 percent in 2011, a trend true for both men and women. Half of those who have not completed high school are immigrant workers, many of whom were not here for schooling. Furthermore, the education levels of the U.S. workforce have grown tremendously; the share of the workforce with a college degree or further education has doubled since 1973, rising from 14.6 percent in 1973 to one-third in 2011.

 “You definitely can’t blame the erosion of workers’ wages on their failure to graduate from high school, since the vast majority did,” Mishel wrote.

Brooks’ fellow columnist at the Times, Paul Krugman, drew the same conclusion in a blog post:

“Nobody — not William Julius Wilson, not Larry Mishel, not yours truly — denies that the bad effects of reduced opportunity would be much less if people always did what was in their best long-term interests. But people often don’t, which is why loss of economic opportunity can be socially as well as economically destructive. That’s not crude materialism, it’s saying that people are human.”

• An increase in working spouses is not causing inequality.

Mishel also debunked the new myth posited in a recent Washington Post op-ed that high inequality is due to more working spouses in high-income households, and well-off people increasingly marrying other well-off people. Specifically, there’s been no increase in two-earner households among the very well-to-do, the top 1% or top 0.1% of households.

Mishel contended that economic trends, not demographic trends, are at the heart of growing inequality. He explained:

“To these folks demographic, rather than economic, trends are generating income inequality. Consequently, economic policy has had no role in causing inequality and cannot ameliorate inequality either. Of course, this is only the latest effort to reduce inequality to a demographic phenomenon: The State of Working America has addressed other such claims going back to the first edition in 1988.”

• The construction industry is not to blame for the country’s high unemployment.

Finally, last week Mishel demonstrated that the above-average construction-sector unemployment is only responsible for a trivial portion of the overall rise in unemployment between 2007 and 2011—and is not what now prevents unemployment from falling more rapidly. In a blog post, Paul Krugman reiterated Mishel’s argument and wrote, “The unemployment rate would be almost as high as it is even if we ignore everyone in or formerly in construction.”

The reality is, as a society engaged in current dominant cultural practices such as the obsessive pursuit of money, power, prestige & wealth at the extensive degradation of the Earth; this path is impossibly unsustainable. It is simply not geophysically or bio-socially viable. Our ideologies must shift in order to be more inclusive with a greater respect for equity and the ecologically connected nature of every living beings existence. There comes a time when we must realise that the intrinsic nature of every living organism is present, and that every living structure has a crucial part to play in the healing and maintenance of this life supporting planet.

I truly feel if we all had to be honest though, the vast majority of us would be on the same page in regards to equity and the way we live. For a brief insight to an alternative click here. This may lead you to further enquiry and understanding. There is great division on our Earth at the moment. Our leaders seem to focus on national economic gain alongside some light tokenistic gestures thrown towards ecologic preservation and human equity. This is not viable and is actually destroying our existence and lives as we know it in a very rapid way. The connectedness of every person is so powerful that it can at times be overwhelming, but what can we do?…

The answer to this is deep, complicated and very long. This is not initially promising and is mainly due to the fact that as a whole we are currently and overtly “not on the same page”. But there is also absolute hope and we can start somewhere and this start is truly  meaningful. It begins with awareness. Please refer back to the first sentence. To gain awareness we must be inquisitive and choose to ask questions. Question as much as your faculties can absorb! Your existence, your purpose, your place? Why is this done this way, as an example: why are these processes terribly inefficient compared to the alternative that is not being utilised in regard to various production methods? Questions such as these and much more lead the individual or group to know themselves, to understand the world around them and to be closer connected to the culture of our society. It is not for me to tell you what is “right” and what is “wrong”, it is for you to come to the conclusion of what is suitable and sustainable for yourself and this Earth. Seek and seek well for our time and time itself is limited. When future civilisations are looking back to our epoch, what may they say, what may they think and what questions may they ponder about who we were and how we treated ourselves, each other and the living world around us ??? SS.

The Assistant Deputy Secretary proposes a priority, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria under the Arts in Education National Program (AENP). We may use the priority, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria for competitions in fiscal year (FY) 2012 and later years. We intend to use the priority, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria to award a grant to an eligible applicant to encourage and expand national-level high-quality arts education activities and services for children and youth, with special emphasis on serving children from low-income families and children with disabilities.

Source: Federal Register, Volume 77 Issue 22

Available at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-02-02/html/2012-2309.htm

Robert Reich

January’s increase in hiring is good news, but it masks a bigger and more disturbing story — the continuing downward mobility of the American middle class.

Most of the new jobs being created are in the lower-wage sectors of the economy — hospital orderlies and nursing aides, secretaries and temporary workers, retail and restaurant. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain working only because they’ve agreed to cuts in wages and benefits. Others are settling for jobs that pay less than the jobs they’ve lost. Entry-level manufacturing jobs are paying half what entry-level manufacturing jobs paid six years ago.

Other people are falling out of the middle class because they’ve lost their jobs, and many have also lost their homes. Almost one in three families with a mortgage is now underwater, holding their breath against imminent foreclosure.

The percent of Americans in poverty is its highest in two decades, and more of us are impoverished than at any time in the last 50 years. A recent analysis of federal data by the New York Times showed the number of children receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million in the last school year, up from 18 million in 2006-2007. Nearly a dozen states experienced increases of 25 percent or more. Under federal rules, children from families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty line, $29,055 for a family of four, are eligible.

Experts say the bad economy is the main factor driving the increase. According to an analysis of census data by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, 37 percent of young families with children were in poverty in 2010. It’s likely that rate has worsened.

Mitt Romney says he’s not concerned about the very poor because they have safety nets to protect them. He says he’s concerned about the middle class. Romney doesn’t seem to realize how much of the middle class is becoming poor.

But Romney doesn’t like safety nets to begin with. He’s been accusing President Obama of inviting a culture of dependency. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society,” he says over and over, arguing that our economic problems stem from a sharp rise in dependency. Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

He and other Republicans point to government data showing that direct payments to individuals have shot up by almost $600 billion since 2009, a 32 percent increase. And 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, up from 44 percent in 2008.

But Romney and other Republicans have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in benefits is Americans got clobbered in 2008 and many are still sinking. They and their families need whatever help they can get.

The real scandal, as I’ve said before, is America’s safety nets are too small and shot through with holes. Only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits, for example, because they weren’t working full-time or long enough on a single job before they were let go. The unemployment system doesn’t recognize how many Americans work part-time on several jobs, and move from job to job.

And even those who are lucky enough to be collecting employment benefits are about to lose it. A record and growing percent of the unemployed have been jobless for six months or more, and Republicans in Congress are unwilling to extend benefits.

Romney’s budget proposals would shred safety nets even more. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, his plan would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination. “These cuts would primarily affect very low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” the Center concludes.

At the same time, Romney’s tax plan would boost the incomes of America’s most wealthy citizens, who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of that nation’s total income. Romney wants to permanently extend George W. Bush’s tax cuts, reduce corporate income tax rates, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax cuts would increase the incomes of people earning more than a million dollars a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

By reducing government revenues, Romney’s tax cuts would squeeze programs for the poor even further. Extending the Bush tax cuts will add $1.2 trillion to the nation’s budget deficit in just two years. That’s the same as the amount that’s supposed to be saved by automatic spending cuts scheduled to start next year — which, by the way, will hit the poor especially hard.

Oh, I almost forgot. Romney and other Republicans also want to repeal Obama’s health care law, thereby leaving 30 million Americans without health insurance.

The downward mobility of America’s middle class is the big news, but the GOP apparently hasn’t heard about it. Maybe it’s too hard to hear about from that far away — and Mitt Romney is certainly far away. His unearned income last year was more than $20 million. That’s about as much as the combined earnings of a thousand American families at or just above the poverty line.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

Click on a state to see data, or check out the issue areas listed below.

Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development

Available at: http://assetsandopportunity.org/scorecard/