“They Get You Coming And Going”: In America, Being Poor Can Be An Expensive Proposition
Today I came across this very interesting, albeit depressing, bit of data. It’s an analysis by a travel site called Hopper that shows that it costs more to fly in states that have the lowest median incomes.
For example, the study found that in Mississippi, the poorest state, a “good deal” round-trip flight costs about $400, while in Maryland, the state with the highest income, an equivalent ticket costs around $300. The researchers also found that “typical round-trip airfare declines by $2.30 for every additional $1000 in median household income.” The reasons for the increased prices in the poorer states include “average distance traveled, demand density, and airline competition.” Presumably, there’s less demand and less airline competition in poor areas of the country because people there have less money for leisure travel, and also because those locales have less economic development and thus less business travel.
The higher price of air travel for low-income folks is yet another data point that paints a bigger picture: in America, being poor can be an expensive proposition. There are countless, painful examples of this. Food and other basic items tend to cost more in poor neighborhoods. The poor lack access to credit and so are easy prey for payday lenders charging exorbitant interest rates. Poor people are more apt to bounce checks; hello, fees for insufficient funds! There are also late fees for credit card payments — you know, the kind of thing listed in print so fine you need a magnifying glass to be capable of reading about it. But my personal favorites are those extra charges they tack on for restoring utilities they shut off because you couldn’t pay your bill on time in the first place. “They get you coming and going,” as my old man used to say.
In her classic book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich described a host of other expensive indignities that plague the working poor. For example, many of her low-wage co-workers were living in hotel rooms, which actually were far costlier, on a monthly basis, than local apartments. But the workers couldn’t move into the apartments because they lacked the month’s rent plus security deposit the landlord required. Many low-wage jobs also require uniforms, the cost of which comes out of the worker’s paycheck, or cars, which the workers are expected to maintain themselves.
There are even darker examples. I wonder how many Americans have put off going to the doctor because they lacked health insurance, sought treatment only when their symptoms were advanced, and ended up being bankrupted by medical bills as a result.
Many of the examples I’ve cited in this post could be greatly improved by some well-targeted regulatory fixes. The rights of workers and consumers against employers, the banks, and the credit card companies need to be vigorously championed, and in some cases, re-invented for our new digital era. There’s no earthly justification other than greed for the $35 bank overdraft ripoff, or the cell phone company gouging you to restore your service because your payment is late. It’s also long past time we bring re-regulation to the airlines. A more regulated airline industry might help bring down fares in certain overpriced markets. Our 30-year old experiment with airline deregulation has hardly been a rousing success — read the excellent 2012 Washington Monthly magazine article by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan for more information on this score.
In addition to more consumer regulation, we also need a much higher minimum wage and a far more generous safety net for poor people in this country. If poor people had more economic resources to begin with — if they simply had enough money to pay their bills on time, and to save a little money for a rainy day — they would never be forced to pay such an outrageously high price for being poor.
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 3, 2014
“No Defense For Nonsense”: How Not To Argue Against Medicaid Expansion
Medicaid expansion is a sensible move for literally every state, but Mississippi, with more than its share of residents who lack insurance, live near the poverty line, and suffer from poor health, needs the policy more than most. Even Mississippi’s insurance commissioner, a conservative Republican, has urged Gov. Phil Bryant (R) to put aside ideology and embrace the provisions of “Obamacare” for the good of the state.
But Bryant has refused. Last March, the governor said he wouldn’t accept Medicaid expansion in part because the Affordable Care Act is not “the law of the land.” By any standard, the argument was gibberish.
This week, the Republican governor came up with a new argument.
“For us to enter into an expansion program would be a fool’s errand. I mean, here we would be saying to 300,000 Mississippians, ‘We’re going to provide Medicaid coverage to you,’ and then the federal government through Congress or through the Senate, would do away with or alter the Affordable Care Act, and then we have no way to pay that. We have no way to continue the coverage.”
Let’s think about this for a minute. There are, by everyone’s estimation, several hundred thousand folks in Mississippi who would benefit from Medicaid expansion. According to Bryant, the state could help them, but he doesn’t want to – because in his mind, Congress might repeal the health care law at some point in the future, and the state wouldn’t be able to afford to pick up the slack.
But even by GOP standards, it’s impossible to take this seriously. For one thing, it’s pretty obvious Congress isn’t going to repeal the law, as even the most right-wing lawmakers on Capitol Hill are grudgingly conceding.
For another, even in the extraordinarily unlikely event that the law is repealed sometime after 2017, Mississippi could simply revert back to its current policy once the federal well runs dry. In other words, Bryant is effectively telling struggling families, “We’ll refuse to help you now because of the remote possibility we may no longer be able to help you later. It’s better to leave you with nothing now and for the foreseeable future than risk helping you and your family for the next several years.”
There is simply no defense for such nonsense.
Postscript: In the same interview, the governor was asked about drug testing, and why it’s limited to welfare recipients, as opposed to corporate leaders whose companies get state tax money and/or public employees like himself.
“If I was receiving any federal or state benefits to help raise my family, I’d be glad to take a drug test,” he replied.
Bryant receives $122,160 a year in taxpayer money as his salary. He also has the people of the state of Mississippi to thank for his health care benefits.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 2, 2014
“John Roberts, Pitcher And Batter”: The Voting-Rights Decision Spells The End Of Fair Elections
The Supreme Court delivered a sucker punch to fair elections today, striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. It is a ruling that will make it much easier for partisan election officials and legislators to rig the voting system — and a lot harder for ordinary voters to participate in democracy.
The ruling is also a huge Supreme Court power grab. How big? In 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House (and President George W. Bush signed it into law). Now, five Justices have swept away the decision of all those elected leaders — over the vociferous dissent of four other Justices.
At his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts — who wrote today’s majority opinion — famously declared that as a Justice, “my job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” But in nullifying one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, he picked up a bat and swung for the bleachers.
The part of the Voting Rights Act that the court held unconstitutional (Section 4) was a critical one: the formula that specifies which particular states and localities must clear significant voting changes in advance with the Justice Department. That process — “preclearance” — ensures that unfair voting rules can be stopped before they are allowed to interfere with actual elections.
An example of why it’s needed: in 2001, the all-white leadership of Kilmichael, Miss., abruptly canceled the town election when it looked like voters might elect the first black mayor. Using the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department required that the election go forward — and a black mayor was elected. That was only one of more than 700 discriminatory voting changes the Justice Department blocked from 1982 to 2006.
The Supreme Court’s majority was troubled by the specific states and localities that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” rules apply to. Why Alabama and not Vermont? Why Brooklyn and the Bronx, but not Lincoln, Neb.? The simple answer is that these are the jurisdictions Congress chose after careful consideration. It held 21 hearings and heard from scores of witnesses — it produced a 15,000-page record — before reauthorizing the law in 2006. Without doing any of that work, five Justices have said they know better.
Now that the formula has been thrown out, the whole process of preclearance is effectively thrown out as well. In theory, Congress could come up with another formula — and a list of states and localities — that the Supreme Court would find constitutional. But it would be a legislative nightmare for Congress to try to do that — and no one expects that to happen anytime soon.
So what does the gutting of the Voting Rights Act mean for American democracy? It will be easier for bad-apple election officials to revive classic vote-suppression tactics — like moving polling places at the last minute, so voters cannot find them, or getting eligible voters off the rolls. And it will be easier for state legislatures to draw district lines to divide up minority voters and dilute their power at the polls.
The majority dismisses all these very real concerns, arguing that “things have changed” since the bad, pre-civil-rights-era days. Of course, even if that were so, it would not mean that we don’t need the Voting Rights Act. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the dissenters, that sort of logic is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Now that the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, we should get ready for an antidemocratic downpour.
By: Adam Cohen, Time, June 25, 2013
“Consider The Source”: The Women-Folk Screwed Up American Education With Their Uppity Ways
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant appears to have crossed the Todd Akin Line in an online discussion at WaPo today, as WaPo’s own Valerie Strauss reports:
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America’s educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became “so mediocre” in regard to educational outcomes, he said:
“I think both parents started working. The mom got in the work place.”
Bryant seems to have instantly realized he’d stepped in it (and/or a frantic staffer signaled to him off-camera), and so he started qualifying and back-tracking without retracting his remarks. And so they remain on the record.
Is it unfair for us progressive gabbers to pounce on him? I have somewhat mixed feelings. Sure, politicians say things they don’t mean to say from time to time. But it’s not exactly my job to help the likes of Phil Bryant stay on message. So the simple approach in trying to decide if a “gaffe” like Bryant’s is significant is to consider the source. After all, Todd Akin himself in his famous and politically fatal ruminations on rape was echoing a very familiar meme of the anti-choice movement, in defense of a position (no exceptions to an abortion ban for victims of rape and incest) that he continued to maintain without interruption before and after the “gaffe.” It was fair to say that although he regretted his failure to confine the remark to entirely friendly audiences, he was honestly if inadvertently giving us a glimpse into his world-view, and that’s always relevant, particularly when you are talking about someone who would very much like to deny women the right to choose.
So what about Phil Bryant? Are there reasons to suspect he’s prone to the view that the women-folk screwed up American education with their uppity ways?
Well, there was this incident back during the 2009 battle over a “personhood” initiative (banning all abortions, all “abortifacients” like Plan B, and arguably many forms of regular old contraception) that turned out to be too extreme even for Mississippi voters (as reported at the time by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal):
Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant said Monday that “Satan wins” if voters reject Initiative 26 that defines personhood at fertilization.
“This is a battle of good and evil of Biblical proportions,” the Republican gubernatorial nominee told a pro-26 rally attended by about 30 supporters at Tupelo City Hall.
Bryant appeared with American Family Association’s Rev. Donald Wildmon, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker and Rep. Alan Nunnelee in support of the initiative.
Cristen Hemmins of Oxford, an opponent, attended the event with four other anti-26 advocates. Hemmens, who was raped and shot twice during a kidnapping as a college student, asked Bryant, “Why can’t you men have any sympathy for women like me?”
Bryant told her he is sympathetic to situations like hers but said he believes “that the child has some rights, too, even in that condition.”
Does this perhaps create a soupcon of reasonable suspicion that Bryant believes in an eternal social order dictating that women just need to get used to second-class citizenship and focus on their reproductive duties? Call me unbalanced if you wish, but I think it does. And since the jesuitical practice of hiding one’s true views as a tactical matter is very commonplace among Christian Right types, I think we are at least entitled to consider Bryant’s remarks today as a valid data point.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 4, 2013
“A Line In The Sand”: The NRA Won’t Support Arizona’s New Gun Bill
Arizona is a place where you can get a family photograph with Santa holding an AK-47, where state lawmakers point pink pistols at reporters, and where men tote AR-15s to political protests. And if one state representative gets his way, gun-loving Arizonans won’t have to worry about pesky federal gun control laws, because it will be illegal to enforce them.
Republican state Rep. Steve Smith proposed a bill last week that would prohibit public officials in the state from following any federal gun laws or regulations, fearing an effort by the Obama administration to impose harsh new restrictions on firearms. That means no background checks, no restrictions on automatic weapons or grenade launchers, and no prohibition on sale to the mentally ill, unless the state enacts its own restrictions, none of which are laid out in Smith’s bill.
While there is no penalty specified for state and local officials who follow federal law, federal judges or law enforcement agents would face felony charges punishable by up to a year in state prison. “Here’s a line in the sand: Thanks, but no thanks. Stay out with your federal regulations you’re going to impose on us,” Smith said.
HB 2291 would almost certainly be unconstitutional, as federal law trumps state law, and Smith acknowledged that there would probably be legal challenges that would have to be worked out in the courts. But he appears to be trying to get around this problem by making his legislation apply only to firearms that are manufactured in and never leave the state of Arizona, presumably in an attempt to thwart the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate trade. Still, the Supreme Court has not been sympathetic to similar arguments.
And the Constitution isn’t Smith’s only problem; he’s catching some friendly fire too. Todd Rathner, an Arizona resident who sits on the board of the National Rifle Association, told the Capitol News Service that he doesn’t like the bill because of what it would do to gun dealers, who must receive federal licenses and comply with federal regulations.
“I worry about putting federal firearms licensees in the middle of a fight between us and the federal government,” he said. “It puts them between a rock and a hard place because they worry about committing a federal crime or a state crime.”
Indeed, Smith’s law specifies that firearms dealers would be barred from following the regulations mandated by the federal government to maintain their license. Still, Rathner said of Smith’s proposal, “I like the message he’s trying to send.”
Arizona isn’t the only state considering what amounts to a lite form of secession over guns. In Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant and state House Speaker Philip Gunn have both said they intend to block any new Obama executive orders on gun control. South Carolina lawmakers have made similar moves as well. But Arizona’s law goes much further, by not only restricting new regulations but also all existing ones, targeting “any act, law, statute, rule or regulation” from Washington on guns.
Also, keep in mind that the NRA’s objection to the legislation is not that it is unconstitutional or that it might make it easier for criminals to acquire weapons, but that it would hurt firearms dealers. If Smith rewrote the law to exempt dealers, one wonders if the NRA would be OK with the rest of it.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, January 23, 2013
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