“The Naysayers Are In Control”: A Well-Paying Job Is More Effective Than A Lecture
More and more mothers, whether they wear a wedding ring or not, are becoming their family’s breadwinner.
An analysis of 2011 U.S. Census data found that 40 percent of households rely on mom as the primary or sole breadwinner. That’s a massive increase from 1960, when the figure was a mere 11 percent.
This trend won’t shock a lot of Americans. They already see it within their own homes or those of their neighbors. Plenty of mommies are better educated and better compensated than their husbands, and a growing numbers of daddies gladly accept that it is their duty, too, to change diapers and do carpool duty.
But here is the more sobering tale within the data: Nearly two-thirds of these “sole or primary” breadwinning women fit that description because they are the only one working in their household. These are primarily the single mothers. And they tend to be far less educated, and to be black or Hispanic. Their median household income was $23,000.
Compare that to the families studied where it was a married woman who earned more than her mate. Those homes had a median income of $80,000, well above the national median for all households of $57,100.
The most relevant message behind the study is not so much about marriage as about the growing economic divide in this country. If we understand that, we might just agree on policies that can address the problem.
Demographically, these single mothers are a growing and younger percentage of the population. They are the nation’s future, and it’s not a promising one.
Yet it is virtually impossible to bring up the topic of single mothers, whether in Congress or at the dinner table, without inviting a howling lecture. Everybody’s got a convenient scapegoat to blame, and their certitude of their own uprightness permits them to do absolutely nothing to change the status quo. Except to call for more discipline imposed on the already unfortunate.
Attitudes about poorer families feed into the politics of welfare reform, food stamp allocation, education grants, fair wage policy and childcare subsidies.
Concern, when it’s genuine, is not misplaced. Moralizing doesn’t help.
It’s not the fact that these women are unmarried with children that drives their household poverty. It’s their lack of education and too few jobs, including for the equally under-educated men who are most likely to marry them.
Low-income families are more likely to divorce. Arguments and stress about money, after all, are often a contributing factor in divorce.
Those who wish to promote marriage often miss a truth about poorer mothers. The single mother without a college degree, and perhaps more so one without a high school diploma, might be making the best choice for her children by continuing to stay single. College-educated men aren’t exactly searching low-income areas to find a suitable spouse. The men who are more readily available to many of these single mothers — the men they may have already partnered with to father their children — tend to be of similar if not lower education levels.
And less-educated men have seen their real wages shrink along with job opportunities in the last 40 years, as Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, has pointed out.
Coontz also observes that stable single-parent households are better for children’s development than domestic situations in constant flux due to their mother’s relationships, or homes where there is constant parental conflict.
People who are better-educated and who have firm employment opportunities are more likely to marry and stay married.
A study published last year in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that low-income people value marriage as an institution and share thoughts about romance similar to people in higher income brackets.
Researchers at UCLA found that “low-income respondents were more likely than affluent couples to report that their romantic relationships were negatively affected by economic and social issues such as money problems, drinking and drug use.”
The low-income respondents actually held more negative views about divorce than their wealthier counterparts.
So let’s not pontificate about marriage or make false assumptions about mothers raising kids who aren’t living with a spouse.
Ordinary people in this country need to be able to find stable, legal employment that pays wages that make it possible to raise a family in a safe, nurturing environment. We have the ability to make that happen through education and training programs, minimum-wage legislation, trade policy, fiscal policy and other means.
If we ever resolve to turn the tide that is swamping Americans of modest means, we’ll inevitably find that some policy gambits succeed and others are bound to fail. Have you noticed, though, that our political class isn’t even trying?
The naysayers are in control. Their message is that nothing can be done. They also happen to be the loudest moralizers.
We know where that will lead us, because we’re already there.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo. June 3, 2013
“From The Mouths Of Babes”: The Ugly, Immoral, Destructive War Against Food Stamps
Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism. Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war against food stamps.
The food stamp program — which these days actually uses debit cards, and is officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — tries to provide modest but crucial aid to families in need. And the evidence is crystal clear both that the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients really need the help, and that the program is highly successful at reducing “food insecurity,” in which families go hungry at least some of the time.
Food stamps have played an especially useful — indeed, almost heroic — role in recent years. In fact, they have done triple duty.
First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line.
But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.
Indeed, estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70 — which means, by the way, that much of the money laid out to help families in need actually comes right back to the government in the form of higher revenue.
Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.
So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it.
The shrinking part comes from the latest farm bill released by the House Agriculture Committee (for historical reasons, the food stamp program is administered by the Agriculture Department). That bill would push about two million people off the program. You should bear in mind, by the way, that one effect of the sequester has been to pose a serious threat to a different but related program that provides nutritional aid to millions of pregnant mothers, infants, and children. Ensuring that the next generation grows up nutritionally deprived — now that’s what I call forward thinking.
And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidies over the years.
These cuts are, however, just the beginning of the assault on food stamps. Remember, Representative Paul Ryan’s budget is still the official G.O.P. position on fiscal policy, and that budget calls for converting food stamps into a block grant program with sharply reduced spending. If this proposal had been in effect when the Great Recession struck, the food stamp program could not have expanded the way it did, which would have meant vastly more hardship, including a lot of outright hunger, for millions of Americans, and for children in particular.
Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.
But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 30, 2013
“Not An Isolated Incident”: Washington Bridge Collapse Another Sign That America’s Infrastructure Is In Bad Shape
On Thursday evening, an Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state collapsed, sending two cars into the water and injuring three people. So far no fatalities have been reported. Authorities don’t yet know what caused the collapse.
Another bridge also collapsed in Texas on Thursday after catching fire. The fire burned too hot for firefighters to put out, so they let it burn. It was a railway bridge over the Colorado river and repairing it could cost $10 million.
The bridge in Washington was listed as “functionally obsolete,” which does not mean it was considered structurally deficient or unsafe, but rather that it was built to standards that are no longer used and may have had inadequate lane widths or vertical clearance. As Yahoo! News reported, the bridge was built in 1955 and had a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100, “well below the statewide average rating of 80.”
Unfortunately, these bridge collapses are not isolated incidents. There are 759 bridges in the state that have a lower sufficiency rating than the one that fell apart. More than 350 bridges in Washington are considered structurally deficient, meaning they require repair or replacement of a component, although are not necessarily considered in danger of collapse. More than 1,500 are considered functionally obsolete.
Overall, one in nine of the country’s bridges are rated structurally deficient by the American Society of Civil Engineer’s yearly report card in American infrastructure. The average age for the nation’s bridges is 42 years. This netted the country a C+ rating on its bridges, which is mediocre. To upgrade all of the deficient ones, the U.S. would need to invest $20.5 billion annually.
Yet only $12.8 billion is being spent on bridge updates currently. The country’s infrastructure only got a total grade of D+, a poor rating. Overall, the country needs to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it into the 21st century.
Investment, however, has been moving in the opposite direction. Public spending on infrastructure as a percentage of GDP has dropped dramatically in recent years, falling to the lowest level in two decades, as Joe Weisenthal pointed out. The U.S. is only expected to spend about a third of what the report card calls for by 2020.
While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or 2009 stimulus bill, made infrastructure improvements, that money has mostly been used up. But as that package of spending proved, investment in infrastructure not only upgrades roads and bridges to make them safer, it also puts people back to work and helps improve the economy.
President Obama has proposed further stimulus spending on infrastructure, but his proposals have been repeatedly blocked by Republicans in Congress. Yet America’s borrowing costs are extremely low and deficits are shrinking, so there is no time like the present to invest in upgrading our infrastructure.
By: Bryce Covert, Think Progress, May 24, 2013
“It’s All Your Fault”: Federal Reserve Chair Calls Out Congress For Being The Drag On The Economy
The stock market is testing new highs, the unemployment rate is declining and consumer confidence is at a six-year peak, but the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke wants Congress to know that things could be a lot better.
Testifying Wednesday in front of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Bernake pointed out that the economy has been improving, but one obstacle is keeping a real recovery from sparking — them:
“Most recently, the strengthening economy has improved the budgetary outlooks of most state and local governments, leading them to reduce their pace of fiscal tightening. At the same time, though, fiscal policy at the federal level has become significantly more restrictive. In particular, the expiration of the payroll tax cut, the enactment of tax increases, the effects of the budget caps on discretionary spending, the onset of the sequestration, and the declines in defense spending for overseas military operations are expected, collectively, to exert a substantial drag on the economy this year.”
President Obama was able to delay serious austerity — tax increases paired with budget cuts — from coming into effect until this year. This delay has given housing a chance to recover, as evidenced by strong recent earnings from The Home Depot.
However, there’s no doubt that the payroll tax holiday, which Republicans never considered extending, is affecting every America who lives paycheck to paycheck. The sequester will take $85 billion and 750,000 jobs out of the economy this year. Even the ending of the Bush tax cuts on income over $400,000 will take some steam out of the economy, though tax breaks for the rich have the least stimulative benefit for the economy.
Bernanke points out that the biggest problem with the sequester is that it has no real effect on the actual problem this country faces — the long-term deficit.
“Although near-term fiscal restraint has increased, much less has been done to address the federal government’s longer-term fiscal imbalances,” he said. “Indeed, the [Congressional Budget Office] projects that, under current policies, the federal deficit and debt as a percentage of GDP will begin rising again in the latter part of this decade and move sharply upward thereafter.”
Basically, Bernanke is echoing what New York Times‘ columnist Paul Krugman has been saying for years: Get the economy going, then worry about long-term fixes.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, May 22, 2013
“Not A Boon For Most Americans”: Congress Has Tackled The Deficit At The Cost Of The Economy
This morning, Eric Rosengren, chief executive of the Boston Federal Reserve, cautioned lawmakers against further fiscal retrenchment, lest they slow the recovery. As he said at the Global Interdependence Center’s Central Banking Conference in Italy: “Given the economic realities I would urge policymakers to consider scenarios where some elements of fiscal rebalancing take effect only after the economy has more fully improved.”
He’s right, in large part because Congress has already done a fair amount of deficit reduction. Beginning in 2011, with unemployment still high and the economy on a long, slow climb out of recession, Congress — led by a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives — moved to make big cuts in medium-term discretionary spending. It slashed $1 trillion with the Budget Control Act of 2011, and followed that with hundreds of billions more in spending cuts and tax increases with the fiscal cliff deal and sequester.
Now, as a result of this deficit reduction, the Congressional Budget Office projects a $642 billion budget deficit for fiscal year 2013, down $200 billion from its projection at the beginning of the year, and the lowest level of deficit spending since President Obama entered office. The near-term deficit projection also shows improvement; the CBO estimates a 2015 deficit of $378 billion. For Washington’s deficit hawks, this is cause for celebration. It’s a sign the federal government is on its way to a more sustainable debt load.
But this rapid deficit reduction is far less of a boon for most Americans, who have to live in an economy that’s been largely stalled by Congressional inaction. At 7.5 percent, unemployment is still too high, and there’s little sign of rapid improvement. According to most projections, joblessness won’t reach pre-recession levels for another three years.
Congress’ push for deficit reduction has a lot to do with this. As noted in the New York Times last week: “The nation’s unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011.”
To put that in more concrete terms, 1.5 million more Americans would have jobs if not for Washington’s decision to pursue deficit reduction in the midst of a sluggish economy.
Unfortunately, news of successful deficit reduction is unlikely to result in any respite from new cuts or tax increases. The Obama administration still has its Social Security cuts on the table — as part of a potential “grand bargain” — and Congressional Republicans are gearing up to demand still more spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Will Washington avoid endangering the still-fragile recovery with further deficit reduction? If the refusal to end or replace the sequester is any indication, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 16, 2013
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