“Our Nation’s Biggest Shame”: How Much Money Would It Take To Eliminate Poverty In America?
Last week, the Census Bureau put out its annual income and poverty figures for 2012. The big news on the poverty front is that the percentage of Americans living in poverty is unchanged at 15 percent, which amounts to 46.5 million Americans. More than one in five kids under the age of 18 are in poverty, and nearly one in four kids under the age of six are impoverished as well. These are numbers we’ve all become accustomed to, but they can still shock the conscience if you make an effort to let them soak in again.
The sheer scale of poverty in the U.S. is so massive that it can seem as if eliminating or dramatically reducing it would be nearly impossible. After all, 46 million people is a lot of people. But in reality, if we stick to the official poverty line, the amount of money standing in the way of poverty eradication is much lower than people realize.
In its annual poverty report, the Census Bureau includes a table that few take note of which actually details by how much families are below the poverty line. A little multiplication and addition later, and the magic number pops out. In 2012, the number was $175.3 billion. That is how many dollars it would take to bring every person in the United States up to the poverty line. In 2012, that number was just 1.08 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is to say the overall size of the economy.
To be sure, you probably don’t want to run a program that hunts out every family below the poverty line and brings them right up to it. Such a program would effectively involve imposing a 100 percent marginal tax rate for all income made below the poverty line. But, things like strategically expanding the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, and related programs could make enormous strides toward poverty reduction. Implementing a mild basic income and a negative income tax would also help a great deal. The policy solutions for dramatically cutting poverty exist, they are used by countries elsewhere, and they could be used here, if we chose to do so.
It might be helpful to put the $175.3 billion magic number in perspective. In 2012, this number was just one-fourth of the $700 billion the federal government spent on the military. When you start hunting through the submerged spending we do through the tax code, it takes you no time to find enough tax expenditures geared toward the affluent to get to that number as well. The utterly ridiculous tax expenditures directed toward the disproportionately affluent class of people called homeowners—mortgage interest deduction, property tax deduction, exclusion of capital gains on residences—by themselves sum to $115.3 billion in 2012. Throw in the $117.3 billion in tax expenditures used to subsidize employer-based health care (also a disproportionate sop to the rich), and you’ve already eclipsed the magic number.
Eradicating or dramatically cutting poverty is not the deeply complicated intractable problem people make it out to be. The dollars we are talking about are minuscule up against the size of our economy. We have poverty because we choose to have it. We choose to design our distributive institutions in ways that generate poverty when we could design them in ways that don’t. Its continued existence is totally indefensible and our nation’s biggest shame.
By: Matt Bruenig, The American Prospect, September 24, 2013
“Foraging For Food”: What Harry Reid Learned At The Grocery Store
The speaker is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic Leader. The place is the Senate floor. The time is last week, after the House Republicans committed the latest outrage, voting to cut the food stamp program, always part of the farm bill – until now. Hear Harry speak on one of life’s simple pleasures:
One of my favorite things that I really like to do in Nevada and here, in Washington, is go grocery shopping. It’s such a diversion for me. I love going grocery shopping to look around, buy the things. Landra and I are without our children and our grandchildren. We live alone. But we still buy food. And I enjoy that so very, very much.
So I know, have a good idea how much $4 will buy or $4.50 to be specific. That’s not money to buy … a pound of hamburger. They have different grades of hamburger. They have the expensive kind, not so expensive and the cheaper kind. Even the cheaper kind you couldn’t buy a pound of that most of the time. A gallon of milk (is) about $4. You couldn’t buy them both the same day. It’s possible to (make) important reforms in both the farm and food stamp programs without balancing the budget on the backs of people who are hungry.
This is one of the most humane speeches I’ve ever come across in the Senate. It may be a first. Seldom does a majority leader, who holds so much power in his hands, seem so humble and down to earth. More often than not, the voices in that clubby chamber drone on longer than necessary, with nobody listening, trying to summon the spirit of Daniel Webster.
The straightforward Reid put his finger on the universal importance of going out to find – or forage – food for yourself and your family. Whether you are man, woman or child, that is an elemental need and the ancient way that we became civilized, by sitting down to break bread, cook meat or gather berries together.
In times of trouble, the government should be your friend trying to help you, not an enemy scheming to take away what little you have. That is not “conservative.” That’s firebrand radical. Federal food stamp assistance goes back to the Great Depression, for heaven’s sake, when government lent a helping hand.
Harold Ickes, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously observed the obvious: “People need to eat three times a day.” A blunt statement with sense and compassion between the lines.
I hope everyone knows by now the food stamp troublemakers – the same ones who threaten to shut down the government – are about 40 House Republicans, most of them tea party people who were elected in 2010. They promised to create chaos here in Washington – and then they spit out “D.C.” They ran for office on a platform of practically burning the building down, or least closing the Capitol, the citadel of our democracy.
They have no knowledge of Congress and no interest in its traditions. They respect neither seniority nor authority. They don’t even listen to their own Speaker, John Boehner. Poor country club guy from small-town Ohio, Boehner can’t control these angry white people who showed up with everything but their pitchforks. Sorry, but they are an intolerable faction and this latest act is unconscionable. In fact, let’s call it what it is: un-American.
Paul Krugman, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, spoke out strongly against “the war on food stamps.” He quoted the GOP golden boy, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, disparaging food and nutrition assistance as “a hammock” instead of a safety net. Ryan is a sharp-tongued instigator of all the madness – in both senses of the word. I have news for Krugman: These people, except for Ryan, are not likely to read The New York Times. They are anti-establishment, anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-immigrant. If anything, they would take take criticism from The Times as a compliment.
The political party they resemble most is the one Abraham Lincoln despised, the defiant Know-Nothings, back before the Civil War. I think that’s why President Obama can’t wrap his mind around how much damage they plan to do to his presidency and the government and the American people. He’s a man of reason living in unreasonable times. He has the milk of human kindness in his bones; but his political foes have no mercy on the less fortunate among us, not even on children. They would take food out of the mouths of babes.
Reid said it best in his un-common sense statement: Don’t balance the budget on the backs of people who are hungry. Amen.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 24, 2013
“Free To Be Hungry”: Conservatives Believe That Freedom Is Just Another Word For “Not Enough To Eat”
The word “freedom” looms large in modern conservative rhetoric. Lobbying groups are given names like FreedomWorks; health reform is denounced not just for its cost but as an assault on, yes, freedom. Oh, and remember when we were supposed to refer to pommes frites as “freedom fries”?
The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.
Hence the war on food stamps, which House Republicans have just voted to cut sharply even while voting to increase farm subsidies.
In a way, you can see why the food stamp program — or, to use its proper name, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — has become a target. Conservatives are deeply committed to the view that the size of government has exploded under President Obama but face the awkward fact that public employment is down sharply, while overall spending has been falling fast as a share of G.D.P. SNAP, however, really has grown a lot, with enrollment rising from 26 million Americans in 2007 to almost 48 million now.
Conservatives look at this and see what, to their great disappointment, they can’t find elsewhere in the data: runaway, explosive growth in a government program. The rest of us, however, see a safety-net program doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: help more people in a time of widespread economic distress.
The recent growth of SNAP has indeed been unusual, but then so have the times, in the worst possible way. The Great Recession of 2007-9 was the worst slump since the Great Depression, and the recovery that followed has been very weak. Multiple careful economic studies have shown that the economic downturn explains the great bulk of the increase in food stamp use. And while the economic news has been generally bad, one piece of good news is that food stamps have at least mitigated the hardship, keeping millions of Americans out of poverty.
Nor is that the program’s only benefit. The evidence is now overwhelming that spending cuts in a depressed economy deepen the slump, yet government spending has been falling anyway. SNAP, however, is one program that has been expanding, and as such it has indirectly helped save hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But, say the usual suspects, the recession ended in 2009. Why hasn’t recovery brought the SNAP rolls down? The answer is, while the recession did indeed officially end in 2009, what we’ve had since then is a recovery of, by and for a small number of people at the top of the income distribution, with none of the gains trickling down to the less fortunate. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the top 1 percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012, but the real income of the bottom 40 percent actually fell 6 percent. Why should food stamp usage have gone down?
Still, is SNAP in general a good idea? Or is it, as Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, puts it, an example of turning the safety net into “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
One answer is, some hammock: last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied people”: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.
Beyond that, however, you might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up. And that’s what the evidence shows. The economists Hilary Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach have studied the impact of the food stamp program in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was gradually rolled out across the country. They found that children who received early assistance grew up, on average, to be healthier and more productive adults than those who didn’t — and they were also, it turns out, less likely to turn to the safety net for help.
SNAP, in short, is public policy at its best. It not only helps those in need; it helps them help themselves. And it has done yeoman work in the economic crisis, mitigating suffering and protecting jobs at a time when all too many policy makers seem determined to do the opposite. So it tells you something that conservatives have singled out this of all programs for special ire.
Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the G.O.P., because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 22, 2013
“More Than A Value For Birth”: A Right-Wing Agenda Can Be Defeated
Pope Francis is stirring up all Catholics and the ways that we are involved in the world — including in politics. For too long the leaders of our church were either firmly committed to a narrow view of the Gospel or were timid about speaking of the full message of Jesus. Politicians have been for not toeing the line on the narrow message.
Now we have a breath of fresh air. This fresh air is disturbing to those who have engineered the narrow message. I can only imagine that those who have been focused on abortion and same sex marriage are angry at the sea change. Their crafty plans of using faith for a right-wing political agenda are crashing down around their ears. Pope Francis is saying that the Gospel cannot be used to benefit one political party.
In 2012 U.S. Catholic sisters and my organization, Network, were criticized by the Vatican for not holding their narrow focus. Now we see that our pope knows that no one political party has control of the Gospel message.
The faith value of life is more than a value for birth. Gospel values that mandate a care for the poor are at the heart of our faith and Pope Francis is speaking of that message. I don’t believe that our pope (or God) would be pleased with the Republican effort to eliminate food stamps for hungry people, end housing benefits for struggling workers, deny healthcare for those with no access and to refuse to consider comprehensive immigration reform.
Pope Francis spoke of his own change and conversion to a more compassionate leadership. He is speaking to the heart of those who have been in control with fear and judgment. The test is to see if they can embrace the more challenging role of struggling together to create the common good.
Catholic Democrats also have a test in front of them. They have struggled for years to be faithful in the face of a narrow right-wing agenda. Now the challenge will be for them not to retaliate. The conversion for the Democrats will be to continue to work for the full message of the Gospel and not be arrogant or judgmental themselves.
On the bus we learned that we need the 100 percent to embody our faith. We need the 100 percent to make the Gospel live. And in our pluralistic country I pray that this renewed message will help the 100 percent live our communal and Constitutional mandate to “form a more perfect union.”
By: Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of Network, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, September 22, 2013
“The Poison Of Ideology”: Republicans Have Even More Pain In Store For Their Base In Poor White Real America
Rick Santorum is right. Not far right, crazy right, piously right or, on most issues, never right. He is all of those things. But under the rubric that even a blind pig can find an acorn every now and then, the moral scourge of the Republican Party is on to something — a greater truth.
Earlier this summer, Santorum said Republicans look like the party of plutocrats, stiffing working people and the poor. The 2012 convention, he noted, was a parade of one-percenters, masters of the universe and company owners.
“But not a single — not a single — factory worker went out there,” he said. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them.”
They still don’t care, and the darkening events of what looks to be an autumn of catastrophic failure by a Congress stuffed with extremists will prove Santorum’s point ever more.
Late Thursday, despite pleas from Catholic bishops and evangelicals, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill that would deprive 3.8 million people of assistance to buy food next year. By coincidence, this is almost the exact amount of people who have managed to remain just above the poverty line because of that very aid, the Census Bureau reported a few days ago.
A Republican majority that refuses to govern on other issues found the votes to shove nearly 4 million people back into poverty, joining 46.5 million at a desperation line that has failed to improve since the dawn of the Great Recession. It’s a heartless bill, aimed to hurt. Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. They think too many of their fellow citizens are cheats and loafers, dining out on lobster.
Certainly there are frauds among the one in seven Americans getting help from the program formerly known as food stamps. But who are the others, the easy-to-ignore millions who will feel real pain with these cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.
You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.
Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.
The argument holding back higher pay — a theory that Republicans accept without challenge — is that raising wages for the poorest workers would be bad for companies, and bad for hiring.
But experience debunks this convenient political shelter. Washington State has the highest state-mandated minimum wage in the country, $9.19 an hour, and an unemployment rate that has been running below the national average. It’s not all Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, either. In the pine-forested sliver of eastern Washington, a high-wage state bumps right up against low-wage Idaho. Fast-food outlets flourish in Washington, the owners have said, because they can retain workers longer, while Idaho struggles to find qualified people to hold entry-level jobs.
Costco, they of the golf-cart-size containers of gummy bears, has long paid wages and benefits well above the industry average for big-box stores, and it hasn’t hurt the bottom line. The stock is up 79 percent over the last five years. Costco, to its credit, is urging Congress to raise the minimum wage. But that’s one big business Republicans will not listen to, because it breaks with the heartless credo of the new G.O.P.
The movement for higher minimum pay is raging through the states just now, with ballot initiatives and legislation plans. The people, in this case, will have to circumvent a Congress bent on actively trying to hurt the poor.
Republicans have more pain in store for their base in poor white America. Shutting down government, for one, will cause a ripple effect that will be hardest on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. The biggest obsession, the Moby-Dick of the right wing, is making sure millions of people do not have access to affordable health care. This week, Republicans drew the line for any doubters: they will wreck lives to blow up the health care law.
You have to wonder where this animus for those in the economic basement comes from. It’s too easy to say Republicans hate the poor. Limousine liberals can seem just as insensitive. And if Republicans were offering some genuinely creative approaches to helping the 26 million Americans who self-identified as “lower class” in a recent survey, they would deserve a listen. Tax cuts, the party’s solution to everything, do nothing for people who pay no federal income tax.
What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.
But Republican House leaders do have some empathy — for themselves. National Review reported this week that Representative Phil Gingrey, a hard-right conservative who wants to be the next senator from Georgia, complained in a private meeting about being “stuck here making $172,000 a year.” To say the least, he doesn’t yet qualify for food assistance.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times, September 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 