History > 2011 > USA > Economy > Poverty (I)

Doonesbury

by Garry Trudeau

Gocomics

October 30, 2011

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/10/30

At Detroit Food Bank,

Founders Are Gone,

but a Mission Endures

December 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

DETROIT

Trucks sighing under the weight of their cargo pull up, one after another, to the dock of an old manufacturing plant on the west side of ever-challenged Detroit. For all the convoluted coding contained in their bills of lading, these trucks carry freight as basic to life as air.

Food. Thousands of cases of cheap, nutritious food.

And yards away, people bearing the weight of need choose items from some of these cases that are spilling now with America’s bounty. Blue Diamond enriched rice from Texas. Mission Pride fruit mix, in extra light syrup, from California. Land O’ Lakes cheese blocks from Minnesota, in plain white boxes stamped “Not for Retail.”

An artificial Christmas tree unearthed from storage eases the starkness of the scene, but this is a year-round affair: tens of thousands of seniors, mothers and children receive a free monthly parcel of food that would cost $50 at a brand-name supermarket. That is, if you can still find one in the city.

Providing food to the poor is so routine that we rarely pause to consider its sad necessity, or even how these harbors of grace come to be. This workhorse operation in Detroit, for example, traces its roots back many years, to a charismatic priest, a suburban housewife and the nonprofit organization that survives them, Focus: HOPE.

The two founders, though dead, still linger. Here is the Rev. William Cunningham, watching from his Mass card as the food program’s director works the telephone. Here, too, is Eleanor Josaitis, observing from a photograph as the warehouse manager prepares another inventory.

The manager, Glenn Stevenson, 65, looks up from his clipboard in a way that signals he has too much counting to do, and not enough time. A churchgoing man whose work attire includes a Detroit Tigers cap, he has been with Focus: HOPE for 21 years. He knew both the priest, who died in 1997 at the age of 67, and the housewife, who died at 79 in August. And, yes, he confirms, they’re here.

“Their spirit will always be with us,” Mr. Stevenson says, before turning back to his tallying with the purpose of someone who feels he’s being watched.

The story of Focus: HOPE is part of Detroit lore, beginning with how Father Cunningham, an English teacher, and Ms. Josaitis, a mother of five, united after the devastating race riots of 1967 to fight poverty and champion racial harmony. He gave up teaching to run a poor parish, she and her husband, Don, moved their family into the city — at a time when other white people were moving out in haste — and the two of them started to shake things up.

They published a study revealing how inner-city food and drug stores charged more for goods of poorer quality. They lobbied the Department of Agriculture to share the country’s stockpiled food with the country’s very poorest. They broadened their vision to include job-training programs and contract work that filled up old manufacturing plants along Oakman Boulevard.

Over the years, they became known as the saints of Detroit, which irritated them and sold them short. They were compassionate, relentless and wonderfully flawed. In other words, human.

Father Cunningham once rejected a well-intentioned businessman’s offer to donate secondhand computers because, he said caustically, the people of Focus: HOPE were not second-class citizens. And Ms. Josaitis could be so hard on employees — “I know I’m riding my broom, but,” she’d say — that some of them gave her a broom equipped with a seat and a horn.

The two co-founders could have booming quarrels, then abruptly switch to a pleasant discussion about where to stop for lunch. They loved each other, friends say, and knew instinctively that with his never-say-never vision and her never-say-never managerial skills, anything was possible, including the almost magical appearance of much-needed food.

Focus: HOPE was in on the ground floor 40 years ago when the federal government began the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, devised to provide poor women and children with basic, nutritious food. Before long, the Detroit operation was the largest of its kind, and leading the fight to include poor people over 60, which is now this obscure federal program’s central purpose.

These days, the federal program putters along, costing $177 million a year to serve parts of 39 states, two Indian tribal organizations and the District of Columbia. Focus: HOPE, meanwhile, is struggling, like the city it serves. The distressed economy has forced recalibrations and cutbacks. A few weeks ago the organization laid off dozens of employees and suspended several job-training classes.

But the supplemental food program grinds on. It is the Focus: HOPE original, the constant, overseen for the last 20 years by a 57-year-old man who will lunch on McRib sandwiches five days in a row, no matter that part of his job is to promote a balanced diet. His name is Frank Kubik, and he is all Detroit.

Mr. Kubik got laid off from Chrysler in 1979, then struggled for more than two years to find a job. One miserable moment sticks most in his mind: standing in a line of job seekers outside a building, being covered in snow, and seeing people inside laughing at him and his fellow unemployed.

He finally took a low-paying job unloading the train cars of food for Focus: HOPE, figuring he’d stay for six months. It’s been 30 years. Thirty years of knowing that seniors prefer orange juice to tomato juice for washing down their pills; that canned tomatoes are less popular than canned beans; that a two-pound block of cheese can go a long way. Thirty years, all because of the examples set by a priest and a housewife.

“They blew me away,” Mr. Kubik says, as rainwater drips from his office’s leaky ceiling and Father Cunningham watches from a Mass card taped to a bookshelf.

It is a familiar refrain here, echoed by Mr. Stevenson in the warehouse, who remembers how Ms. Josaitis often teased him about his messy desk (she was teasing, wasn’t she?). By Jonetta Johnson, 50, the floor manager, who has been here ever since Father Cunningham told her, more than 30 years ago, “You need something to do.” By others. It’s Father William this and Eleanor that, still.

On another biting December day, people arrive by car, bus and foot for food. They enter a storelike setting that carries an air of common dignity once insisted upon by a priest and a housewife — and, now, by a successor who has not forgotten the humiliation of standing in line for a job, covered in snow.

Guiding their carts past the glittering Christmas tree, the customers make their selections down an aisle of opened boxes that overflow like cardboard cornucopias. Tomato juice. Grape juice. Canned beef chunks. Canned apricots. Spinach. Pasta. Corn. Rice. Cheese. The things that sustain us.

    At Detroit Food Bank, Founders Are Gone, but a Mission Endures, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/at-detroit-food-bank-founders-are-gone-but-mission-endures.html

Millionaires on Food Stamps and Jobless Pay? G.O.P. Is on It

December 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — It’s an image many Americans would find rather upsetting: a recently laid-off millionaire, luxuriating next to the pool eating grapes bought with food stamps while waiting for an unemployment check to roll in.

Under the Republican bill to extend a payroll tax holiday scheduled to be voted on in the House as early as Tuesday, those Americans with gross adjusted income over $1 million would no longer be eligible for food stamps or jobless pay, producing $20 million in savings to help pay for the tax cut for American workers. The idea is also embraced by many Democrats, who had a similar version of the savings in a Senate bill to extend the payroll tax cut, as did a failed Republican Senate bill.

Yet as it turns out, millionaires on food stamps are about as rare as petunias in January, even if you count a lottery winner in Michigan who managed to collect the benefit until chagrined officials in the state put an end to it.

But the idea of ending unemployment insurance for very high earners — which would be achieved essentially through taxing benefits up to 100 percent with a phase-in beginning for those with gross adjusted income over $750,000 — demonstrates an increasing desire among members of Congress to find some way to make sure that the wealthiest Americans contribute more to reducing the deficit and paying for middle-class tax relief.

Democrats have sought a surtax on income over $1 million to pay for an extension of a tax break for the middle class, a surtax that Republicans have rejected. Employees’ share of the payroll tax, now 4.2 percent of wages, is scheduled to rise to 6.2 percent in January unless Congress takes action. The Senate is expected to come back this week with another version of its bill to extend the tax holiday. On Monday night, the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, served notice to Congressional Republicans that he would prevent final votes on a must-pass bill to finance government operations until the Democrats get what they want on the payroll tax.

While tycoons on food stamps might be hard to find, some millionaires do indeed pursue unemployment pay when they find themselves out of job.

From 2005 to 2009, millionaires collected over $74 million in unemployment benefits, according to an estimate by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who has paired with Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, to push to end the practice.

According to Mr. Coburn’s office, the Internal Revenue Service reported that 2,362 millionaires collected a total of $20,799,000 in unemployment benefits in 2009; 18 people with an adjusted gross income of $10,000,000 or more received an average of $12,333 in jobless benefits for a total of $222,000.

“Making Coloradans pay for unemployment insurance for millionaires is frankly irresponsible, especially at a time when money is tight and our debt is out of control,” Mr. Udall said in an e-mail.

Unemployment benefits are essentially an insurance program financed through the state and federal governments. States charge employers taxes dedicated to cover the first 26 weeks of unemployment benefits paid to those Americans who lose their jobs, with the federal government paying for extensions.

Currently, unemployment benefits have stretched out to 99 weeks, through a series of nine extensions that began in 2008, reflecting the high levels of extended unemployment that have dogged the country, at a cost of roughly $180 billion to the federal government. (While there are also federal taxes charged to employers, those monies tend to be used for administrative costs and not benefits.) Roughly 3.5 million people are now receiving extended benefits. Some states have already begun to reduce the number of extended weeks unemployment offered.

The Republican legislation seeks to shorten the number of weeks that will be extended to the jobless, and offer states more flexibility with how they use their own unemployment taxes, including starting programs that train people for work while they accept benefits.

“It’s a water drop in a hurricane,” said Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute. “I can see the PR appeal, but unemployment insurance collected by millionaires is not one of the major problems with the program. This is a way of trying to put an income test on the unemployment system that has never existed in the past.”

Food stamps are another matter, as recipients must demonstrate low income levels to receive them. Household income must not exceed 130 percent of poverty; for a family of three that would be a gross monthly income of $2,008.

However, of the 53 states and territories, 40 have no asset tests, which means that in some situations it would be possible for someone with, for instance, a large house or a luxury car — or in the case of Michigan, current lottery winnings not yet delivered in full — to receive food stamps.

Department of Agriculture officials dismissed the notion of millionaire food stamp recipients. “Federal law is clear,” said Aaron Lavallee, a spokesman for the department. “The program is intended for households with income not exceeding 130 percent of poverty.”

Among the 46 million Americans who receive the assistance — roughly one in seven Americans — few seem to be millionaires. As such, the $200 million in savings from this cut would be largely achieved through the cuts to the unemployment insurance for high earners.

 

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

    Millionaires on Food Stamps and Jobless Pay? G.O.P. Is on It, NYT, 12.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/us/gop-bill-would-block-food-stamps-and-jobless-pay-for-millionaires.html

To Fix Health, Help the Poor

December 8, 2011
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH H. BRADLEY and LAUREN TAYLOR

New Haven

IT’S common knowledge that the United States spends more than any other country on health care but still ranks in the bottom half of industrialized countries in outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more — it all depends on what you count.

In our comparative study of 30 industrialized countries, published earlier this year in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety, we broadened the scope of traditional health care industry analyses to include spending on social services, like rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

What’s more, America is one of only three industrialized countries to spend the majority of its health and social services budget on health care itself. For every dollar we spend on health care, we spend an additional 90 cents on social services. In our peer countries, for every dollar spent on health care, an additional $2 is spent on social services. So not only are we spending less, we’re allocating our resources disproportionately on health care.

Our study found that countries with high health care spending relative to social spending had lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than countries that favored social spending. While the stagnating life expectancy in the United States remains at 78 years, in many European countries it has leapt to well over 80 years, and several countries boast infant mortality rates approximately half of ours. In a national survey conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, four out of five physicians agreed that unmet social needs led directly to worse health.

Unfortunately, instead of learning from countries like Sweden and France, we prefer the frantic scramble to recover money from one part of the health care system only to reallocate it toward retreads of previously failed reforms. We pretend that the fresh schemes are innovative, but they are usually long on promises, short on details and often marked with an annoying acronym: H.M.O., F.S.A., A.C.O. and so forth.

It’s time to think more broadly about where to find leverage for achieving a healthier society. One way would be to invest more heavily in social services. This may be difficult for many Americans to swallow as it suggests a potentially expanded role for government. Out of respect for individuals’ rights, our current social programs are mostly opt-in, leaving holes for the undocumented, uneducated and unemployed to slip through cracks and become acutely ill. Emergency rooms, though, are not allowed to opt out of providing these people extraordinarily expensive medical treatment before discharging them back to wretched conditions and their inevitable return to the E.R.

The impact of sub-par social conditions on health has been well documented. Homelessness isn’t typically thought of as a medical problem, but it often precludes good nutrition, personal hygiene and basic first aid, and it increases the risks of frostbite, leg ulcers, upper respiratory infections and trauma from muggings, beatings and rape. The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program tracked the medical expenses of 119 chronically homeless people for several years. In one five-year period, the group accounted for 18,834 emergency room visits estimated to cost $12.7 million.

We can learn from the star pupils in our analysis. Other countries have created government ministries that marry health and social care. Earlier this year, the Department of Health in Britain released plans to create health and well-being boards comprising local government representatives, primary care physicians, hospital administrators, children and adult-services specialists and public health directors, who will coordinate care for their constituencies across the health and social care spectrum. We should think expansively about how to construct similar programs that enable much needed integration of these mutually dependent sectors. The Department of Veterans Affairs is leading the way, with programs called “stand downs” that simultaneously address the health and social needs of retired service members.

It is Americans’ prerogative to continually vote down the encroachment of government programs on our free-market ideology, but recognizing the health effects of our disdain for comprehensive safety nets may well be the key to unraveling the “spend more, get less” paradox. Before we spend even more money, we should consider allocating it differently.

 

Elizabeth H. Bradley is professor of public health at Yale

and faculty director of its Global Health Leadership Institute,

where Lauren Taylor is a program manager.

    To Fix Health, Help the Poor, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/opinion/to-fix-health-care-help-the-poor.html

Newt’s War on Poor Children

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.

Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

On Thursday, at a campaign stop in Iowa, the former House speaker said, “Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” (His second “fact” was that every first generational person he knew started work early.)

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

Gingrich wants to start with the facts? O.K.

First, as I’ve pointed out before, three out of four poor working-aged adults — ages 18 to 64 — work. Half of them have full-time jobs and a quarter work part time.

Furthermore, according to an analysis of census data by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, most poor children live in a household where at least one parent is employed. And even among children who live in extreme poverty — defined here as a household with income less than 50 percent of the poverty level — a third have at least one working parent. And even among extremely poor children who live in extremely poor areas — those in which 30 percent or more of the population is poor — nearly a third live with at least one working parent.

For this analysis, the most granular national data available — census areas with 100,000 or more people — were compared. For reference, New York City has 55 of these areas. You’d have to slice the definition of neighborhoods rather thinly to find a few areas that support Gingrich’s position.

Lastly, Gingrich vastly overreaches by suggesting that a lack of money universally correlates to a lack of morals. Yes, poverty presents increased risk factors for crime. But, encouragingly, data show that even as more Americans have fallen into poverty in recent years, the crime rate over all — and, specifically, among juveniles — has dropped.

“Facts” are not Gingrich’s forte. Yet he is now the Republican front-runner. It just goes to show how bankrupt of compassion and allergic to accuracy that party is becoming.

    Newt’s War on Poor Children, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/opinion/blow-newts-war-on-poor-children.html

Lines Grow Long for Free School Meals, Thanks to Economy

November 29, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.

“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”

In Sylva, N.C., layoffs at lumber and paper mills have driven hundreds of new students into the free lunch program. In Las Vegas, where the collapse of the construction industry has caused hardship, 15,000 additional students joined the subsidized lunch program this fall. In Rochester, unemployed engineers and technicians have signed up their children after the downsizing of Kodak and other companies forced them from their jobs. Many of these formerly middle-income parents have pleaded with school officials to keep their enrollment a secret.

Students in families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty level — or $29,055 for a family of four — are eligible for free school meals. Children in a four-member household with income up to $41,348 qualify for a subsidized lunch priced at 40 cents.

Among the first to call attention to the increases were Department of Education officials who use subsidized lunch rates as a poverty indicator in federal testing. This month, in releasing results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they noted that the proportion of the nation’s fourth graders enrolled in the lunch program had climbed to 52 percent from 49 percent in 2009, crossing a symbolic watershed.

In the Rockdale County Schools in Conyers, Ga., east of Atlanta, the percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches increased to 63 percent this year from 46 percent in 2006.

“We’re seeing people who were never eligible before, never had a need,” said Peggy Lawrence, director of school nutrition.

One of those is Sheila Dawson, a Wal-Mart saleswoman whose husband lost his job as the manager of a Waffle House last year, reducing their income by $45,000. “We’re doing whatever we can to save money,” said Ms. Dawson, who has a 15-year-old daughter. “We buy clothes at the thrift store, we see fewer movies and this year my daughter qualifies for reduced-price lunch.”

She added, “I feel like: ‘Hey, we were paying taxes all these years. This is what they were for.’ ”

Although the troubled economy is the main factor in the increases, experts said, some growth at the margins has resulted from a new way of qualifying students for the subsidized meals, known as direct certification. In 2004, Congress required the nation’s 17,000 school districts to match student enrollment lists against records of local food-stamp agencies, directly enrolling those who receive food stamps for the meals program. The number of districts doing so has been rising — as have the number of school-age children in families eligible for food stamps, to 14 million in 2010-11 from 12 million in 2009-10.

“The concern of those of us involved in the direct certification effort is how to help all these districts deal with the exploding caseload of kids eligible for the meals,” said Kevin Conway, a project director at Mathematica Policy Research, a co-author of an October report to Congress on direct certification.

Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to support commodity prices after World War II by reducing farm surpluses while providing food to schoolchildren. By 1970, the program was providing 22 million lunches on an average day, about a fifth of them subsidized. Since then, the subsidized portion has grown while paid lunches have declined, but not since 1972 have so many additional children become eligible for free lunches as in fiscal year 2010, 1.3 million. Today it is a $10.8 billion program providing 32 million lunches, 21 million of which are free or at reduced price.

All 50 states have shown increases, according to Agriculture Department data. In Florida, which has 2.6 million public school students, an additional 265,000 students have become eligible for subsidies since 2007, with increases in virtually every district.

“Growth has been across the board,” said Mark Eggers, the Florida Department of Education official who oversees the lunch program.

In Tennessee, the number of students receiving subsidized meals has grown 37 percent since 2007.

“When a factory closes, our school districts see a big increase,” said Sarah White, the state director of school nutrition.

In Las Vegas, with 13.6 percent unemployment, the enrollment of thousands of new students in the subsidized lunch program forced the Clark County district to add an extra shift at the football field-size central kitchen, said Virginia Beck, an assistant director at the school food service.

In Roseville, Minn., an inner-ring St. Paul suburb, the proportion of subsidized lunch students rose to 44 percent this fall from 29 percent in 2006-7, according to Dr. Senauer, the economist. “There’s a lot of hurt in the suburbs,” he said. “It’s the new face of poverty.”

In New York, the Gates Chili school district west of Rochester has lost 700 students since 2007-8, as many families have fled the area after mass layoffs. But over those same four years, the subsidized lunch program has added 125 mouths, many of them belonging to the children of Kodak and Xerox managers and technicians who once assumed they had a lifetime job, said Debbi Beauvais, district supervisor of the meals program.

“Parents signing up children say, ‘I never thought a program like this would apply to me and my kids,’ ” Ms. Beauvais said.

Many large urban school districts have for years been dominated by students poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. In Dallas, Newark and Chicago, for instance, about 85 percent of students are eligible, and most schools also offer free breakfasts. Now, some places have added free supper programs, fearing that needy students otherwise will go to bed hungry.

One is the Hickman Mills C-1 district in a threadbare Kansas City, Mo., neighborhood where a Home Depot, a shopping mall and a string of grocery stores have closed.

Ten years ago, 48 percent of its students qualified for subsidized lunches. By 2007, that proportion had increased to 73 percent, said Leah Schmidt, the district’s nutrition director. Last year, when it hit 80 percent, the district started feeding 700 students a third meal, paid for by the state, each afternoon when classes end.

“This is the neediest period I’ve seen in my 20-year career,” Ms. Schmidt said.

Robbie Brown and Kimberley McGee contributed reporting.

    Lines Grow Long for Free School Meals, Thanks to Economy, NYT, 29.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/surge-in-free-school-lunches-reflects-economic-crisis.html

The Poor, the Near Poor and You

November 23, 2011
The New York Times

What is it like to be poor? Thankfully, most Americans do not know, at least not firsthand. And times are tough for the middle class. But everyone needs to recognize a chilling reality: One in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it.

The Times’s Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise reported recently on Census data showing that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which they termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.

As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs and other unavoidable outlays.

The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy.

Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, on the false grounds that they have been getting a free ride. In fact, low-income workers do pay up, if not in federal income taxes, then in payroll taxes and state and local taxes.

Asked about the new census data, Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation told The Times that the “emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.” Heritage has its own, very different ranking system, based on households’ “amenities.” According to that, the typical poor household has roughly 14 of 30 amenities. In other words, how hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff?

The rankings ignore the fact that many of these are requisites of modern life and that things increasingly out of reach for the poor and near poor — education, health care, child care, housing and utilities — are the true determinants of a good, upwardly mobile life.

Government surveys analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicate that in 2010, just over half of the country’s nearly 17 million poor children, lived in households that reported at least one of four major hardships: hunger, overcrowding, failure to pay the rent or mortgage on time or failure to seek needed medical care. A good education is also increasingly out of reach. A study by Martha Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, showed that the difference in college-graduation rates between the rich and poor has widened by more than 50 percent since the 1990s.

There is also a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem. A study, by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford, shows that Americans are increasingly living in areas that are either poor or affluent. The isolation of the prosperous, he said, threatens their support for public schools, parks, mass transit and other investments that benefit broader society.

The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out.

    The Poor, the Near Poor and You, NYT, 23.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opinion/the-poor-the-near-poor-and-you.html

Older, Suburban and Struggling,

‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census

November 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE, ROBERT GEBELOFF and SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood — quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.

The Census Bureau, which published the poverty data two weeks ago, produced the analysis of those with somewhat higher income at the request of The New York Times. The size of the near-poor population took even the bureau’s number crunchers by surprise.

“These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

Outside the bureau, skeptics of the new measure warned that the phrase “near poor” — a common term, but not one the government officially uses — may suggest more hardship than most families in this income level experience. A family of four can fall into this range, adjusted for regional living costs, with an income of up to $25,500 in rural North Dakota or $51,000 in Silicon Valley.

But most economists called the new measure better than the old, and many said the findings, while disturbing, comported with what was previously known about stagnant wages.

“It’s very consistent with everything we’ve been hearing in the last few years about families’ struggle, earnings not keeping up for the bottom half,” said Sheila Zedlewski, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social research group.

Patched together a half-century ago, the official poverty measure has long been seen as flawed. It ignores hundreds of billions the needy receive in food stamps, tax credits and other programs, and the similarly large sums paid in taxes, medical care and work expenses. The new method, called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, counts all those factors and adjusts for differences in the cost of living, which the official measure ignores.

The results scrambled the picture of poverty in many surprising ways. The measure shows less severe destitution, but a bit more overall poverty; fewer poor children, but more poor people over 65.

Of the 51 million who appear near poor under the fuller measure, nearly 20 percent were lifted up from poverty by benefits the official count overlooks. But more than half were pushed down from higher income levels: more than eight million by taxes, six million by medical expenses, and four million by work expenses like transportation and child care.

Demographically, they look more like “The Brady Bunch” than “The Wire.” Half live in households headed by a married couple; 49 percent live in the suburbs. Nearly half are non-Hispanic white, 18 percent are black and 26 percent are Latino.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round. “These estimates defy the stereotypes of low-income families,” Ms. Renwick said.

Among them is Phyllis Pendleton, a social worker with Catholic Charities in Washington, who proudly displays the signs of a hard-won middle-class life. She has one BlackBerry and two cars (both Buicks from the 1990s), and a $230,000 house that she, her husband and two daughters will move into next week.

Combined, she and her husband, a janitor, make about $51,000 a year, more than 200 percent of the official poverty line. But they lose about a fifth to taxes, medical care and transportation to work — giving them a disposable income of about $40,000 a year.

Adjust the poverty threshold, as the new measure does, to $31,000 for the region’s high cost of living, and Ms. Pendleton’s income is 29 percent above the poverty line. That is to say, she is near poor.

While the phrase is new to her, the struggle it evokes is not.

“Living paycheck to paycheck,” is how she describes her survival strategy. “One bad bill will wipe you out.”

It took her three years to save $3,000 for the down payment on her house, which she got with subsidies from a nonprofit group, Capital Area Asset Builders. But even after cutting out meals at Red Lobster, movie nights and new clothes, she had to rely on government aid to get health insurance for her daughters, 11 and 13, and she is already worried about college tuition.

“I’m turning over every rock looking for scholarships,” she said. “The money’s out there, you just have to find it.”

The findings, which the Census Bureau plans to release on Monday, have already set off a contentious debate about how to describe such families: struggling, straitened, economically insecure?

Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, rejects the phrase “near poverty,” arguing that it conjures levels of dire need like hunger and homelessness experienced by a minority even among those actually poor.

“I don’t have any objection to this measure if you use the term ‘low-income,’ ” he said. “But the emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist. It is deliberately used to mislead people.”

Bruce Meyer, an economist at the University of Chicago, warned that the numbers are likely to mask considerable diversity. Some households, especially the elderly, may have considerable savings. (Indeed, nearly one in five of the near poor own their homes mortgage-free.) But others may be getting help with public housing and food stamps.

“I do think this is a better measure, but I wouldn’t say that 100 million people are on the edge of starvation or anything close to that,” Mr. Meyer said.

But Ms. Zedlewski said the seeming ordinariness of these families is part of the point. “There are a lot of low-income Americans struggling to make ends meet, and we don’t pay enough attention to them,” she said.

One group likely to gain attention is older Americans. By the official count, only 22 percent of the elderly are either poor or near poor. By the alternate count, the figure rises to 34 percent.

That is still less than the share among children, 39 percent, but it erases about half the gap between the economic fortunes of the young and old recorded in the official count. The likeliest explanation is high medical costs.

Another surprising finding is that only a quarter of the near poor are insured, and 42 percent have private insurance. Indeed, the cost of paying the premiums is part of the previously uncounted expenses they bear.

Belinda Sheppard’s finances have been so battered in the past year, she finds herself wondering what storm will come next. Her adult daughter lost her job and moved in. Her adult son does not have one and cannot move out.

That leaves three adults getting by on $46,000 from her daughter’s unemployment check and the money Ms. Sheppard makes for a marketing firm, placing products in grocery stores. Take out $7,000 for taxes, transportation and medical care, and they have an income of about 130 percent of the poverty line — not poor, but close.

Ms. Sheppard pays $2,000 in rent and says her employer classifies her as part time to avoid offering her health insurance, even though she works 40 hours a week. Unable to buy it on her own, she crosses her fingers and tries to stay healthy.

“I try to work as many hours as I can, but my salary, it’s not enough for everything,” she said. “I pay my bills with very small wiggle room. Or none.”

    Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census, NYT, 18.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/us/census-measures-those-not-quite-in-poverty-but-struggling.html

Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE, ROBERT GEBELOFF and SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — When the Census Bureau said in September that the number of poor Americans had soared by 10 million to rates rarely seen in four decades, commentators called the report “shocking” and “bleak.” Most poverty experts would add another description: “flawed.”

Concocted on the fly a half-century ago, the official poverty measure ignores ever more of what is happening to the poor person’s wallet — good and bad. It overlooks hundreds of billions of dollars the needy receive in food stamps and other benefits and the similarly formidable amounts they lose to taxes and medical care. It even fails to note that rents are higher in places like Manhattan than they are in Mississippi.

On Monday, that may start to change when the Census Bureau releases a long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay. Similar measures, quietly published in the past, suggest among other things that safety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship: as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears.

The fuller measures have also shown less poverty among children but more among older Americans, who are plagued by high medical costs. They have shown less poverty among blacks but more among Asians; less poverty in rural areas and more in cities and suburbs, where the cost of living is high. And they have found fewer people in abject destitution, but a great many more crowding the hard-luck ranks of the near poor, who do not qualify for many benefit programs and lose income to taxes, child care and medical costs.

“The official measure no longer corresponds to reality,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University. “It doesn’t get either side of the equation right — how much the poor have or how much they need. No one really trusts the data.”

Coming amid soaring need and bitter debt debates, the findings in Monday’s release are likely to offer fodder both to defenders of safety-net programs and fiscal conservatives who say the government already does much to temper hardship and needs to do no more.

Experts expect the new report to be consistent with a decade of research about the ways in which the official poverty rate distorts the realities of American poverty.

The numbers in this article are based on that research — by the census, the National Academy of Sciences and others — and include not just cash income but also government benefits, work expenses, taxes and cost of living. Many experts expect Monday’s census report, based on similar methods, to add a bit to the official poverty count of 46.2 million, while most experts also expect the recent growth will ap-pear less steep.

One alternate census data set quietly published last week said the number of poor people has grown by 4.6 million since 2006, not by 9.7 million as the bureau reported in September. At least 39 states showed no statistically significant poverty growth despite surging unemployment, according to an analysis by The New York Times, including Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.

In North Carolina, poverty has risen by more than 250,000 people by official count, but stayed flat under the alternate measure despite soaring unemployment.

One explanation can be found in programs the official count ignores: food stamps and tax credits. Combined the two programs delivered $221 billion across the country last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than doubling since 2006.

In Charlotte, Angelique Melton was among the beneficiaries. A divorced mother of two, Ms. Melton, 42, had worked her way up to a $39,000 a year position at a construction management firm. But as building halted in 2009, Ms. Melton lost her job.

Struggling to pay the rent and keep the family adequately fed, she took the only job she could find: a part-time position at Wal-Mart that paid less than half her former salary. With an annual income of about $7,500 — well below the poverty line of $17,400 for a family of three — Ms. Melton was officially poor.

Unofficially she was not.

After trying to stretch her shrunken income, Ms. Melton signed up for $3,600 a year in food stamps and received $1,800 in nutritional supplements from the Women, Infants and Children program. And her small salary qualified her for large tax credits, which arrive in the form of an annual check — in her case for about $4,000.

Along with housing aid, those subsidies gave her an annual income of nearly $18,800 — no one’s idea of rich, but by the new count not poor.

“They help you, my God,” Ms. Melton said. “I would not have made it otherwise.”

The official way of counting poverty — beloved not even by many of the people who run the count — is a historical artifact. A federal official named Mollie Orshansky created it as a placeholder in 1963 until something more sophisticated came along.

It takes a limited view of income by counting cash alone. It ignores expenses, like taxes and medical costs. And it set the poverty threshold in an outmoded way — as a multiple of food costs, which have dwindled as a share of most budgets, as is typical as a country becomes richer over time.

All three elements need updating, experts say. Yet other than to adjust the poverty line for inflation, the government has not changed it since Ms. Orshansky’s day. Efforts to do so have been slowed by both technical and political concerns. Conservatives worry liberals will inflate the number to justify more spending; liberals worry conservatives will define poverty away.

Virtually every effort to take a fuller view — counting more income and more expenses — shows poverty rising more slowly in the recession than the official data suggests. That is true of localized studies in New York City and Wisconsin and at least four different national data sets that the Census Bureau publishes. While the official national measure shows a rise of 9.8 million people, the fuller census measures show a range from 4.5 million to 4.8 million.

“That’s a big difference,” said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin who oversaw the study in that state. “It’s about time we started counting the programs we use to fight poverty.”

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the new measure “is showing that government help is keeping millions of families above the poverty line right now.”

While most scholars have called the fuller measure a step forward, Robert Rector, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, argues that both census counts — old and new — sharply overstate the amount of deprivation in the United States. In a recent study, he cited government data showing many poor families had game systems like Xbox.

“When the American public hears the word poverty, they are thinking about material hardship — bad housing, homelessness and hunger,” he said. “Most of the people that are defined as poor by the government are not poor in that sense.”

One consistent finding in the alternate measures is that poverty falls among children, the target of many government programs. And it rises among Americans 65 or older, who often have high out-of-pocket medical costs, despite being covered by Medicare.

Such is the case for John William Springs, 69, a retired city worker in Charlotte who gets nearly $12,000 a year in Social Security and disability checks. That leaves him about $1,300 above the poverty threshold for a single adult his age — officially not poor. Then again, Mr. Springs had a heart attack last summer and struggles with lung disease. Factor in the $2,500 a year that he estimates he spends on medicine, and Mr. Springs crosses the statistical line into poverty.

An upbeat survivor of a lifetime of need, Mr. Springs fills his prescriptions in partial amounts and argues the poverty counters got him right the first time.

“I ain’t poor,” he said. “I eat. I got a roof over my head.”

Some experts say cases like that of Mr. Springs may point to a hidden need among the elderly, whose official poverty rates have sharply declined over the past generation. Others have cautioned that the new measure still has flaws — failing to capture, for instance, that many elderly can draw from savings and are less reliant on annual income and benefits than younger people.

One concern in recent years is the sharp rise in “deep” poverty, defined as living on less than half the money it would take to no longer be poor. That is partly because of changes that make cash welfare harder to get. Yet many of the very poor do receive food stamps, a program whose rapid expansion has made it a safety net of last resort.

In part by counting food stamps, the fuller Census measure analyzed by The Times shows deep poverty falling by nearly 25 percent.

At the same time, all the new measures show many more people in “near poverty” — living on incomes between 100 percent and 150 percent of the poverty line. The alternate census data show a 50 percent rise in their numbers, with 44 million Americans in that economic band, where benefits dwindle in sums lost to taxes and child care, and medical expenses mount. “That’s where your safety net benefits phase out,” said Sheila Zedlewski, a researcher at the Urban Institute.

Even with assistance, life is a series of hard choices. Ashley Bolton was lifted above the poverty line under the new measure by about $10,000 in federal programs that cushioned her earnings as a hostess at the Original Pancake House in Charlotte. Still, sometimes she lets her car insurance lapse. She juggles two part-time jobs with classes to become a pharmacy technician, and relies on her mother, who works nights, to put her children to bed.

“I live the recession,” Ms. Bolton said. “All that stuff that happened to people — that’s my life every day.”

    Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/us/experts-say-bleak-account-of-poverty-missed-the-mark.html

Extreme Poverty Spikes in U.S., Study Finds

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew substantially, by one third, over the past decade, according to a new report, erasing most of the gains from the 1990’s when concentrated poverty declined.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, an addition of more than 2 million people, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, an independent research group.

Extreme poverty — defined as areas where at least 40 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line, which in 2010, was $22,300 for a family of four — is still below its 1990 level, when 14 percent of poor people lived in such areas.

The report analyzed Census Bureau income data from 2000 to 2009, the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data.

The data captures the first part of the decade most clearly, when growth in concentrated poverty was highest in metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Of the neighborhoods where poverty became most acute, three were Midwestern: Toledo, Youngstown and Detroit.

The report estimated that in metropolitan areas, worsening economic conditions in 2010 may have bumped up the portion of those living in concentrated poverty metro areas to 15 percent, a notch below the 1990 level, 16.5 percent. The biggest rises were in Sun Belt areas like Cape Coral, Fla., and Fresno, Calif., where the housing bust was biggest.

The Census Bureau’s traditional measure of poverty tends to overstate poverty for some groups, because it does not take into account noncash government assistance for the poor, like food stamps and the earned income tax credit. Those programs lift millions of people above the poverty line.

The measure of concentrated poverty came into broad public use among academics in the 1960’s, when civil unrest, the decline of blue-collar jobs and the flight to the suburbs, left swaths of American cities stranded in deep poverty. Academics argued that residents of such areas were stuck in a cycle of joblessness, poor schools, broken families and high crime that led to worse outcomes

“It’s the toughest, most malignant poverty that we have in the United States,” said Peter Edelman, the director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy at Georgetown University. “It’s bad outcomes reinforcing each other.”

    Extreme Poverty Spikes in U.S., Study Finds, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/us/extreme-poverty-is-up-brookings-report-finds.html

Outside Cleveland,

Snapshots of Poverty’s Surge in the Suburbs

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio — The poor population in America’s suburbs — long a symbol of a stable and prosperous American middle class — rose by more than half after 2000, forcing suburban communities across the country to re-evaluate their identities and how they serve their populations.

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

This shift has helped redefine the image of the suburbs. “The suburbs were always a place of opportunity — a better school, a bigger house, a better job,” said Scott Allard, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who focuses on social welfare policy and poverty. “Today, that’s not as true as the popular mythology would have us believe.”

Since 2000, the poverty roll has increased by five million in the suburbs, with large rises in metropolitan areas as different as Colorado Springs and Greensboro, N.C. Over the decade, Midwestern suburbs ranked high; recently, the rise has been sharpest in communities the housing collapse hit the hardest, like Cape Coral, Fla., and Riverside, Calif., according to the Brookings analysis.

Nearly 60 percent of Cleveland’s poor, once concentrated in its urban core, now live in its suburbs, up from 46 percent in 2000. Nationwide, 55 percent of the poor population in metropolitan areas is now in the suburbs, up from 49 percent.

Poverty is new in Parma Heights, a quiet suburb of cul-de-sacs and clipped lawns, and asking for help can be hard. The Parma Heights Food Pantry, which began serving several dozen families a month in 2006, and now helps 260, draws a stream of casualties from the moribund economy. Many never needed food relief before.

Like Mary W., 59, who has worked all her life, most recently at a tire company in Cleveland, and was always the one to remind colleagues to donate to charity. Now she is the one who receives it.

When she first came to the pantry, “I cried my eyes out,” said Mary, who asked that her last name not be used because she did not want her children to know about her financial troubles.

At Vineyard Community Church in Wickliffe, another Cleveland suburb, Brent Paulson, the pastor, said he had to post an employee in the driveway the day the church’s food bank was open to coax people inside, they were so ashamed to ask for help.

In a sign of just how far the economic distress had spread, one volunteer saw his former boss come to the pantry, Mr. Paulson said.

The Cleveland Food Bank, which serves six counties, doubled its distribution between 2005 and 2010. “There’s this sense of surprise,” said Anne Goodman, the director, “this feeling that this has got to be a mistake. It has got to be a bad dream.”

Calls to the United Way social services hot line from suburban areas in northeast Ohio more than doubled from 2005 to 2010, outstripping the increase in cities. “We are seeing a rise in need in places we never expected it,” said Stephen Wertheim, director of the hotline, First Call for Help.

Poverty has been growing in the suburbs for years — along with the population. But the 53 percent increase in poverty far outstripped the 14 percent population increase in the past decade, speeding the change in their status as upper-middle-class enclaves. They have been attracting immigrants following construction jobs and families from cities seeking inexpensive housing as suburbs aged.

Federal vouchers to get poor people into private housing also contributed, Ms. Kneebone said. Cleveland was No. 15 among the country’s top 100 metropolitan areas for increase in suburban share of vouchers.

Urban problems have appeared. In Penn Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh where people have always driven, poor residents walking near yards and bus stops have created trouble with litter, said Alexandra Murphy, a Princeton doctoral student studying suburban poverty.

Warrensville Heights, a suburb southeast of Cleveland, was pristine when Fran Matthews moved there in 1987, with good schools, manicured lawns and middle-class neighbors, she said. Now for-sale signs dot overgrown yards. Break-ins are on the rise, though crime is still far lower than in the city. Over all, the suburban poverty rate — 11.4 percent in 2010 — is still far below the city rate of 20.9 percent, according to Ms. Kneebone.

“Now when you come home, you have to look around before you get out of the car,” Ms. Matthews said.

The changes have affected the school system, she said, and her grandson now attends a charter school in Cleveland.

The double punch of the recession and the foreclosure crisis — which hit Cleveland and its suburbs particularly hard — has dragged middle-class people down the income ladder. As defined by the Census Bureau, the poverty line for a family of four was $22,314 last year.

“This community is middle class, but right on the line,” said Brad Sellers, a retired professional basketball player who grew up in Warrensville Heights and is running for mayor. “Any dramatic downturn can send you over the edge.”

The unemployment rate among black Americans was 16 percent in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — nearly double the national rate, a painful statistic in a suburb that is majority black.

“Where’s that 9 percent?” Mr. Sellers asked. “Not here.”

Some communities resist the idea that poverty exists. When Ann George, who runs the Parma Heights pantry with stalwart volunteers, speaks at churches and community gatherings, “I see the skepticism on people’s faces,” she said. “They say, ‘This is Parma Heights, not Cleveland.’ ”

Other suburbs are adapting. In Maple Heights, Mayor Jeffrey Lansky embraced the idea of a food bank, setting aside a space for it in 2008 and having the Fire Department help renovate it. The Cuyahoga County Public Library now runs after-school homework centers with snacks from the food bank, aimed at the growing population of poor children.

Edward FitzGerald, the executive of Cuyahoga County, argued that the increase in the suburban poor population could help lead to a fundamental change in local government. For years Cleveland had most of the population — and resources — but policy should reflect the flip in favor of the county, he said.

And with the state slashing funds, counties and the suburbs they contain will have to ramp up social services and economic development on their own, many for the first time.

“You’re talking about governing systems that have never really done this before,” Mr. FitzGerald said.

    Outside Cleveland, Snapshots of Poverty’s Surge in the Suburbs; NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/us/suburban-poverty-surge-challenges-communities.html

For Jobs, It’s War

September 16, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

The American political discussion has finally turned to the right target: jobs.

Even so, the president’s jobs bill is already being nickeled and dimed from the right — and the left — even though it is only throwing nickels and dimes at the problem to begin with. But at least it’s a start, even if a long-overdue one.

To understand just how overdue it is, one need look no further than the absolutely dreadful data issued this week by the Census Bureau about the increasing numbers of people falling into poverty. No matter how you slice it, it’s bloody.

There are now 46.2 million poor Americans.

Of those, 2.6 million fell into poverty last year.

At 15.1 percent, the poverty rate is at its highest since 1993.

Bloody, bloody, bloody.

But even those numbers somewhat obscure the true historic nature of the crisis and the effect that the recession, falling wages and chronic joblessness have had on those living in poverty. If you remove children and the elderly and just look at working-age adults — those 18 to 64 — the picture is even more bleak. The percentage of that group that is in poverty is the highest recorded since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty” during his first State of the Union address in January 1964.

And it’s not that most of these people don’t have jobs. It’s that they don’t have good jobs that pay enough to push them out of poverty. Three out of four of those below the poverty line work: half have full-time jobs, a quarter work part time. Only a quarter do not work at all.

This raises an important distinction — not only do we need to create more jobs, we need to increase the number of good jobs. And we can’t see that quest for good jobs as an internal skirmish between warring political ideologies. It’s an international war. At least that is the way Jim Clifton, chairman of Gallup, frames it in his fascinating — and frightening — new book, “The Coming Jobs War.”

According to Clifton, “the coming world war is an all-out global war for good jobs.”

(He defines a good job, also known as a formal job, as one with a “paycheck from an employer and steady work that averages 30-plus hours per week.”)

In the book he makes this striking statement, drawing from all of Gallup’s data: “The primary will of the world is no longer about peace or freedom or even democracy; it is not about having a family, and it is neither about God nor about owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that.” The only problem is that there are not enough good jobs to go around.

Clifton explains that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs. Therefore his conclusion “from reviewing Gallup’s polling on what the world is thinking on pretty much everything is that the next 30 years won’t be led by U.S. political or military force.”

“Instead,” he says, “the world will be led with economic force — a force that is primarily driven by job creation and quality G.D.P. growth.” And guess who is vying for the lead? That’s right: China.

And I must say, we don’t appear to be poised to fight this war. In education we’ve gone from leading to lagging, our infrastructure is literally crumbling around us, ever-expanding health care costs threaten to suffocate us and our politics have succumbed to paralysis.

A widely-cited 2009 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools,” found that the recent American educational achievement gaps — between black and Latino students and white ones; between low-income students and the rest; between low-performing states and the rest; and between the United States as a whole and better-performing countries — not only cost the economy trillions of dollars, they also “impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

According to a recent report by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young, China has “about 9 percent of G.D.P. devoted to infrastructure, compared with less than 3 percent in the United States.” And the Report Card for America’s Infrastructure graded by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009 was so full of C’s and D’s that it looked like Rick Perry’s college transcript. The group estimated that $2.2 trillion of investment over five years was needed to bring conditions up to par. We’re not even close to that.

Furthermore, Clifton points out that 30 percent of America’s students drop out or do not graduate on time. He concludes, “If this problem isn’t fixed fast, the United States will lose the next worldwide, economic, jobs-based war because its players can’t read, write or think as well as their competitors in a game for keeps.”

And, a Rand Corporation study released last week found that “between 1999 and 2009, total spending on health care in the United States nearly doubled, from $1.3 trillion to $2.5 trillion. During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product devoted to health care climbed from 13.8 percent to 17.6 percent. Per person health care spending grew from $4,600 to just over $8,000 annually.”

We simply can’t sustain that sort of growth.

Clifton enumerates 10 “demands” that America will have to master to “lead the new will of the world” — from drastically increasing exports, to having investments follow “rare entrepreneurs versus the worldwide oversupply of innovation,” to something as basic as doing a better job of identifying where likely customers are. But at the top of the list is understanding that the world has a shortage of good jobs and every decision of every leader must be informed by increasing the share of those jobs.

He puts it this way:

“The war for global jobs is like World War II: a war for all the marbles. The global war for jobs determines the leader of the free world. If the United States allows China or any country or region to out-enterprise, out-job-create, out-grow its G.D.P., everything changes. This is America’s next war for everything.”

    For Jobs, It’s War, NYT, 16.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/opinion/blow-for-jobs-its-war.html

Ex-Basketball Prodigy Dies on Streets Where He Lived

September 15, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — Lewis Brown, a high school and college basketball prodigy who spent the past 10 years living on a sidewalk in Hollywood, seemed on the verge of a second chance. He had scraped enough money together to get a California identification card so he could fly to visit a sister in New York who had thought him dead. Friends said that he would finally get off the street.

That was on Tuesday. But Wednesday, around 6 a.m., Mr. Brown, breathless and frantic, was pleading for someone to call an ambulance. By the time help arrived, Mr. Brown — 300 pounds, 6 feet 11 inches — was lying on the ground. A half-hour of efforts by four paramedics — as his neighborhood friends shouted: “Come on, Big Lew! You can make it” — could not save him.

For Mr. Brown — a star high school center who once seemed destined for a spot in the N.B.A. — all that was left on Thursday was a Staples shopping cart carrying a few of his possessions: a pair of sneakers, a blanket, a laminated copy of a New York Times article from this year that detailed his sad story of decline, bitterness, drug arrests and missed opportunities. The remainder of his belongings — a mattress, some tattered clothes — had been put into a Dumpster.

Throughout the day, people who had known Mr. Brown, 56, from the neighborhood, where he would wash windows and talk about his lost basketball past in Compton and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, stopped as they learned of his death. Tony Chauncey, a Time Warner Cable worker, said he had seen him last month and told him that he was going to a hospital to be checked for a reappearance of cancer.

“We hugged,” Mr. Chauncey said. “He said: ‘I’m giving you my healing prayer. You are going to be O.K.” Two weeks later, Mr. Chauncey said, he learned that he was free of cancer. “His last words to me were: ‘See. I told you I’m a spiritual man. Now give me $3!’ ”

Michael Kaiping, who works at a special effects rental company on the block where Mr. Brown lived, said Mr. Brown told him two weeks ago that he had raised most of the money toward his ID card so he could visit his sister, Anita, and asked to borrow $11.

“Lewis said his sister told him she needs him,” Mr. Kaiping said. “I always thought it would be very good for him to get off the streets.”

“I didn’t mind throwing him a few bucks,” he said. “He had every intention of giving me back that $11.”

Stephen Turner, who played basketball with Mr. Brown in Compton and recognized him washing windows at a gas station last year, said he would try to organize a memorial service.

Mr. Brown was long estranged from his family, though his mother had said, upon learning from a Times reporter that he was alive, that she wanted to see him before she died. Mr. Turner said the two had spoken by phone but she had not had a chance to see him in person before his sudden death.

A second sister, Jeri, who lives in Compton, had not had seen him after he resurfaced. “I pray for the best outcome for my brother,” she said after learning of his death. “God’s will is done.”

    Ex-Basketball Prodigy Dies on Streets Where He Lived, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/us/lewis-brown-faded-basketball-prodigy-dies-homeless.html

Poor Are Still Getting Poorer,

but Downturn’s Punch Varies, Census Data Show

September 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLEand SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — The discouraging numbers spilling from the Census Bureau’s poverty report this week were a disquieting reminder that a weak economy continues to spread broad and deep pain.

And so it does. But not evenly.

The Midwest is battered, but the Northeast escaped with a lighter knock. The incomes of young adults have plunged — but those of older Americans have actually risen. On the whole, immigrants have weathered the storm a bit better than people born here. In rural areas, poverty remained unchanged last year, while in suburbs it reached the highest level since 1967, when the Census Bureau first tracked it.

Yet one old problem has not changed: the poor have rapidly gotten poorer.

The report, an annual gauge of prosperity and pain, is sure to be cited in coming months as lawmakers make difficult decisions about how to balance the competing goals of cutting deficits and preserving safety nets.

Its overall findings — income down, poverty up — are hardly surprising in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Of equal interest, with fiscal knives in the air, are the looks at who has suffered the most and who has largely escaped.

“Certainly in a recession we want to put resources where they’re most needed,” said Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, who served as a Treasury official under Democratic and Republican presidents. “And in a recession, needs change dramatically from group to group.”

Perhaps no households have weathered the downturn better than those headed by people 65 and older, whose incomes rose 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2010. By contrast, household income for every other age group fell. Among people ages 15 to 24, it plunged 15.3 percent.

Partly that is because older Americans get more of their income from pensions and investments, so a job shortage hurts them less. Also, the generation now retiring has been the most prosperous in history, so as poorer Americans die off, the income of the age group grows.

Such data is likely to feed longstanding debates about generational equity, since the largest portion of safety net spending goes to those 65 and older, through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

“We are spending too much of our limited resources on the elderly, and not investing enough in programs for younger Americans, such as job training and education,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution.

Another noteworthy finding comes from the suburbs, which have traditionally had the lowest rates of poverty. Suburban dwellers experienced a sharp increase toward the end of the past decade. Nearly 12 percent of them were living in poverty in 2010, the highest level ever recorded, up from just 8 percent in 2001. (The rate in cities was 19 percent, but rose less sharply.)

“There’s been a suburbanization of poverty,” said Alan Berube, a Brookings demographer, who cited the growth of service, retail and construction jobs that lured low-income Americans to the suburbs before the recession. “The notion of poverty being only in inner cities and isolated rural areas is increasingly out of step with reality.”

Household income fell in every region of the country from 2007 to 2010. But it fell much less in the Northeast (3.1 percent) than in the South (6.3 percent), the West (6.7 percent) or the Midwest (8.4 percent). And the Northeast was the only region where household income did not fall last year.

The declines in the West have been fueled in part by the collapse of the housing industry, especially in Arizona and Nevada. And the Midwest has suffered idled factories. Its status as the hardest-hit region is likely to come into play next year as presidential candidates hunt such big Electoral College prizes as Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio.

“The big hurt has been in the manufacturing and construction industries, which were big in the Midwest and West,” said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The census findings present two competing stories of immigrants — a reminder of just how economically diverse that group has become. From 2007 to 2010, they have fared both better and worse than the native born.

Among people born in the United States, household incomes declined 6.1 percent. Among non-citizens, the decline was steeper — 8 percent. But for immigrants who had attained citizenship, the decline was only 3.9 percent.

That latter group may disproportionately include the highly educated professionals who increasingly fill the new Americans’ ranks. A recent study by Audrey Singer, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, found that the number of immigrants with college degrees now exceeds those who lack a high school education.

“The high-skilled people are starting to dominate,” she said

Two worrisome numbers in the report raise questions about the recent response of the safety net. Poverty has risen especially fast among single mothers. More than 40 percent of households headed by women now live in poverty, which is defined as $17,568 for a family of three.

That is the first time since 1997 that figure has been so high. Analysts attribute the rise in part to changes in the welfare system, enacted in the mid-1990s, which make cash aid much harder to get. Those changes were credited with encouraging recipients to work in good times, but may leave them with less protection when jobs disappear.

“The business cycle is going to hurt them a lot more than it used to,” said Robert Moffitt, a Johns Hopkins University economist.

Poor people not only grew more numerous — 46.2 million — but also poorer. Among the poor, the share in deep poverty (defined as having less than half the income to escape poverty) rose to the highest level in 36 years: 44.3 percent.

The census data may overstate hardship by failing to count some benefits the needy receive, like tax credits and food stamps. But it also may also understate their needs by failing to adjust for health care expenses and variations in the cost of living.

About 20.5 million people are in deep poverty, with food stamps increasingly replacing cash aid as the safety net of last resort. More than 45 million people get food stamps, an increase of 64 percent since January 2008. About one in eight Americans, and one in four children, receives aid. Using an alternative definition of income, the Census Bureau found that food stamps lifted 3.9 million people above the poverty line.

“Given that poverty and hardship are likely to continue for some time, it’s imperative that we protect the program,” said Stacy Dean, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which aids in food stamp outreach campaigns.

    Poor Are Still Getting Poorer, but Downturn’s Punch Varies, Census Data Show, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/us/poor-are-still-getting-poorer-but-downturns-punch-varies-census-data-show.html

The median household income adjusted for inflation

fell by 6.4 percent to $49,445 in 2010 from $52,823 in 2007.

Below is a look at the change in median income

before and after the recession for different groups.

NYT

14 September 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/15/us/who-suffered-the-most.html

Income and Poverty Rate at 1990s Levels

The median household income adjusted for inflation fell to $49,445 in 2010,

a 7 percent decrease from a peak in 1999.

The last time American households earned less than a median of $50,000 was in 1996.

Meanwhile, the nation’s poverty rate reached 15.1 percent in 2010,

the highest level since 1993.

NYT

September 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/13/us/income-poverty-rate-at-1990s-levels.html

Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’

September 13, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

The report comes as President Obama gears up to try to pass a jobs bill, and analysts said the bleak numbers could help him make his case for urgency. But they could also be used against him by Republican opponents seeking to highlight economic shortcomings on his watch.

“This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, a director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”

The past decade was also marked by a growing gap between the very top and very bottom of the income ladder. Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent. Overall, median household income adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,445. That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999. Part of the income decline over time is because of the smaller size of the American family.

This year is not likely to be any better, economists said. Stimulus money has largely ended, and state and local governments have made deep cuts to staff and to budgets for social programs, both likely to move economically fragile families closer to poverty.

Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution estimated that at the current rate, the recession will have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade.

Joblessness was the main culprit pushing more Americans into poverty, economists said.

Last year, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009, said Trudi Renwick, a Census official.

“Once you’ve been out of work for a long time, it’s a very difficult road to get back,” Mr. Katz said.

Median income fell across all working-age categories, but was sharpest drop was among the young working Americans, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a decline of 9 percent.

According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Those who do not have college degrees were particularly hard hit, he said. “The median, full-time male worker has made no progress on average,” Mr. Danziger said.

The recession has continued pushing 25-to-34-year-olds to move in with family and friends to save money. Of that group, nearly half were living below the poverty line, when their parents’ incomes were excluded. The poverty level for a single person under the age of 65 was $11,344.

“We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless,” he added.

But even the period of economic growth that came before the recession did little for the middle and bottom wage earners.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the period from 2001 to 2007 was the first recovery on record where the level of poverty was deeper, and median income of working-age people was lower, at the end than at the beginning.

“Even before the recession hit, a lot of people were falling behind,” he said. “This may be adding to people’s sense of urgency about the economy.”

The suburban poverty rate, at 11.8 percent, appears to be the highest since 1967, Mr. Sherman added. Last year more Americans fell into deep poverty, defined as less than half the official poverty line, or about $11,000, with the ranks of that group increasing to 20.5 million, or about 6.7 percent of the population.

Poverty has also swallowed more children, with about 16.4 million in its ranks last year, the highest numbers since 1962, according to William Frey, senior demographer at Brookings. That means 22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.

The census figures do not count noncash assistance, like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, and economists say that as a result they tend to overstate poverty numbers for certain groups, like children. But rises in the cost of housing, medical care and energy are not taken into account, either.

The report also said the number of uninsured Americans increased by 900,000 to 49.9 million.

Those covered by employer-based insurance continued to decline in 2010, to about 55 percent, while those with government-provided coverage continued to increase, up slightly to 31 percent. Employer-based coverage was down from 65 percent in 2000, the report said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2011

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the number of people the Census Bureau found to be in poverty in the Unites States. The number is 46.2 million people, not 56.2 million.

    Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’, NYT, 13.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html

U.S. Poverty Rate, 1 in 6, at Highest Level in Years

September 13, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

The portion of Americans living in poverty last year rose to the highest level since 1993, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, fresh evidence that the sluggish economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

An additional 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line in 2010, census officials said, making 46.2 million people in poverty in the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty Statistic Branch at the Census Bureau.

That figure represented 15.1 percent of the country.

The poverty line in 2010 was at $22,113 for a family of four.

“It was a surprising large increase in the overall poverty rate,” said Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We see record numbers and percentages of Americans in deep poverty.”

And in new evidence of economic distress among the middle class, real median household incomes declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,400. That was 7 percent less than the peak in 1999 of $53,252.

“A full year into recovery, there were no signs of it affecting the well being of a typical American family,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. “We are well below where incomes were in the late 1990s.”

According to the census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged from its level in 1973, when the level was $49,065, in 2010 dollars, said Sheldon H. Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

“That’s not about the poor and unemployed, that’s full time, year round,” Professor Danziger said. Particularly hard hit, he said, have been those who do not have college degrees. “The median, full-time male worker has made no progress on average.”

The youngest members of households — those ages 15 to 24 — lost out the most, with their median income dropping by 9 percent. The recession continued to push Americans to double up in households with friends and relatives, especially those ages 25 to 34, a group that experienced a 25 percent increase in the period between 2007, when the recession began, and 2011. Of that group, 45.3 percent were living below the poverty line, when their parents’ incomes were not taken into account.

“We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Young, less educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2011

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the number of people the Census Bureau found to be in poverty in the Unites States. The number is 46.2 million people, not 56.2 million.

    U.S. Poverty Rate, 1 in 6, at Highest Level in Years, NYT, 13.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html

The New Resentment of the Poor

August 30, 2011
The New York Times

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama’s payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.

Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.

Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the “injustice” that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.”

This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.

Economically, reducing the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit — which would be required if everyone paid income taxes — makes no sense at a time of high unemployment. The credits, which only go to working people, have always been a strong incentive to work, as even some conservative economists say, and have increased the labor force while reducing the welfare rolls.

The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

    The New Resentment of the Poor, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/opinion/the-new-resentment-of-the-poor.html

For Honolulu’s Homeless, an Eviction Notice

March 14, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

HONOLULU — From his home on Ilalo Street, Banery Afituk can feel the breeze off Mamala Bay, two blocks away. Walking out his front door, to his right, he can make out the tops of the luxury ocean liners, and to his left, some of this city’s finer high rises. “I like it here,” he said, as his three children played around him.

Home for Mr. Afituk, his pregnant wife and their children is, in fact, a tattered tent rising low off the sidewalk, one of dozens that have sprung up in a colony of homelessness near the downtown of this tropical tourist getaway.

But all these tents, including Mr. Afituk’s, are about to disappear. Hawaii redevelopment officials told residents of this fetid colony that by Tuesday they would remove the estimated 75 remaining tents, lean-tos and other structures, forcing about 100 people who have called the area home to find somewhere else.

State officials said they were simply trying to enforce the law and clean up the waterfront district to encourage development in a desirable corner of the island where the tents, piles of garbage and wandering homeless offer quite a contrast to the rest of Oahu.

But this forced exodus is only the latest chapter in Hawaii’s difficult relationship with its homeless as it wrestles with two forces: a warm climate that facilitates outdoor living and the threat to the image of the state that is central to tourism.

Advocates for the homeless said this latest sweep would have the same effect as the last few: the homeless will simply take their tents elsewhere.

“I understand that they are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Doran J. Porter, executive director of the Affordable Housing and Homeless Alliance in Hawaii, said of state officials. “This isn’t an appropriate place for lean-tos and tents.”

And Mr. Porter said he knew full well that state officials were under pressure from the business community. “My concern is that they need to have solutions of where these folks are going to go,” he said. “We can’t keep kicking them out of one place where they go to another. That’s why they are there in the first place: they were kicked out of Waikiki and the beaches. This has been going on for years.”

Anthony Ching, the executive director of the Hawaii Community Development Authority, said his agency’s mandate to redevelop this 600-acre plot had been jeopardized by the illegal dwellings. He said once they were gone, city workers would power-wash the sidewalks and clean up garbage and grassy areas.

“We are not evicting them per se,” he said. “We are telling them they can’t have structures on the roadway. That does not inhibit their use of the sidewalk.”

In the tents, people appeared accepting of their fate.

“I have no idea where I’m going to go,” said Douglas Sencio, 52, who works at a carwash, as a young girl next to him ate spaghetti from a pan bubbling on a portable camp stove. “It’s comfortable. We try to make it comfortable. And they come to take it from us. They said, ‘You have to move, you have no choice.’ ”

This patch of poverty is in a stretch of Honolulu that most tourists probably do not see, unless they glance down some of the side streets running off Ala Moana Boulevard on the trip from the airport. It makes for a startling contrast in a place better known for the surfers on the wild beaches of the North Shore and the developed beaches of Waikiki, where tourists can be seen carrying frothy drinks down the beach, listening to the soft strum of Hawaiian folk music at the House Without a Key.

There is block after block of tents and tarps, shopping carts, bicycles and piles of garbage. Mr. Afituk said he went to a nearby restroom in the morning to bring back gallons of water to wash his children before school.

The dearth of nearby toilets or garbage pickup has contributed to the depredation of a neighborhood that the Hawaii Community Development Authority is eager to redevelop. In recent years, the University of Hawaii moved its medical school to Ilalo Street, and a nearby park where homeless people once camped has been renovated.

Still, there is evidence of a shift in attitudes toward the homelessness problem with the election last year of a new governor, Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat. He appointed a homeless coordinator soon after taking office.

But national advocates for the homeless said Hawaii had been slow to recognize the extent of its problem and to take advantage of federal resources to deal with it

Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said the state was one of many trying to deal with the homeless through ordinances, like the one barring tents, rather than programs to create housing. “That’s just such a short-sighted approach,” Mr. Donovan said. “It’s all about a lack of affordable housing.”

In 2009, the coalition named Honolulu the eighth meanest city in the country in its dealing with the homeless. Still, Mr. Donovan said Hawaii’s situation was particularly challenging: on an island with limited land, escalating property values have made affordable housing scarce.

“A lot of communities have different options to present to people,” he said. “In Hawaii, if you are persistently poor, you are really stuck where you are, on the islands.”

The stories of the Hawaii homeless are not dissimilar from those in other areas: of jobs lost, time in prison, struggles with alcoholism and mental illness, of broken marriages.

“I’m just trying to save enough money to get a place,” said Michael Taylor, who said he had been living on the streets for about six years. “They’ve been chasing us all around town. Everywhere you go, they tell you to move on, or threaten to arrest you.”

Mr. Afituk, who like many of the homeless here came from Micronesia, said he and his family had been forced to move out of a one-room apartment after he lost a job last year. He said he was now working as a fire marshal at Pearl Harbor, but did not make enough to rent a home. “I can’t afford it,” he said. “It’s $1,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.”

And as in other temperate places — like Santa Monica, Calif. — Hawaii’s climate is a draw to people looking to live outside. “I love it: free rent, free electricity,” said Sherri Watson, 43. “Who wants to stay in a bed-bugged shelter?”

Todd Wilbur, 36, said: “It’s not right that they shuffle us from one side to the other and back and forth. They just make us go in circles. Over here they are going to build a shopping center, another cafe. Why don’t they put up affordable housing instead?”

    For Honolulu’s Homeless, an Eviction Notice, R, 14.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/us/15homeless.html

Social Security and Welfare Benefits Going Paperless

January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

A rooster is crowing, and an alarm clock chimes. “Wake up, wake up, wake up, it’s the first of the month,” the rap song by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony goes. “To get up, get up, get up, so cash your checks and get up.”

Immortalized in rap songs, examined in books on inner city life and discussed on Facebook, the federal benefits check has developed into a social and cultural icon. The checks have generated a “first of the month” economy in some places, as lottery revenue increases and lines at liquor stores and discount retailers swell. And in some communities, the checks serve as security to borrow cars, get a loan or sleep for a few days in someone’s house in hard times, said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

But now, the days for such rituals are numbered.

In May, the government will no longer pay someone eligible for benefits with a mailed check. Instead, the money will be electronically deposited directly into a bank account or made accessible by a debit card. And by March 2013, the 10 million people who receive checks, out of 70 million people in all, must switch over to direct deposit or use a card.

For the government, the policy is in line with a trend toward paperless banking that will curb theft and save $120 million a year in costs.

But the first of the month won’t be the same anymore.

The change will have social and cultural impact. Some recipients have resisted it because they cannot open an account, or simply because they feel more comfortable with a check in hand.

Robert A. Caciopoli, a 72-year-old retired schoolteacher, was one of the holdouts. Every month, he takes his Social Security check to the local bank in Bridgeport, Conn. He socializes with the tellers, some of them former students, and watches them count out his cash.

“I like my money in my hand once, before everybody and his brother gets their hands on it,” Mr. Caciopoli said.

But Mr. Caciopoli said he was reluctantly switching to direct deposit for his Social Security checks because he had no choice. “That is the new wave of things so they can have their hands on your money,” he said. “It drives you crazy just trying to figure out who is getting what and when.”

The paper check has been synonymous with Social Security since the first recurring payment was mailed to Ida May Fuller in 1940, an event deemed such a milestone that the Social Security Administration archived a photograph of her posing with the $22.54 check next to her mailbox in Brattleboro, Vt.

Many older adults lament the new rule as another step, like automated switchboards, toward impersonal banking. And without a check to hold, they feel they will have less control over their finances. But government officials counter that criminals have long preyed on vulnerable individuals, and the online system provides extra security.

Treasury officials say electronic deposits will eliminate the $93 million in Treasury checks of all kinds that were fraudulently endorsed and cashed in 2010. David A. Lebryk, commissioner of the department’s Financial Management Service, said direct deposit payments would be accessible even in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, when mail delivery is impossible.

While direct deposit of government checks is already widespread in states like Florida, where there are large populations of retirees, the decision puts the spotlight on places that do not have banks or where people have little access to the Internet.

In Elsa, Tex., given the state’s low literacy rate, some older adults rely on relatives, local stores or senior centers for cashing services.

“Some people did hard labor all their time and they just never learned how to print their name,” said Armando Garza, a former mayor. “They just put the X.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said 9.5 percent of Southern households did not have bank accounts — higher than any other region.

Recipients can choose debit cards instead, but that, too, will take some adjustment. Under the program, which will be administered for the government by the financial services company Comerica, recipients will have access to more than 50,000 A.T.M.’s around the country for one free withdrawal a month and 90 cents for additional transactions. If one of the A.T.M.’s is not in their area, they may end up paying fees at other A.T.M.’s.

Some see the decision as government meddling and say they fear their spending habits may be traced. But Mr. Lebryk, the Treasury official, said that information could be obtained only with a court order in a “rare exception.”

He said the department expected to keep mailing checks for people in some areas, including overseas, in remote parts of Alaska and on some Indian reservations.

Government agencies, sheriffs and banks are preparing for the changes.

Lawrence Grimaldi, a spokesman with the Rhode Island Department of Elderly Affairs, said the department had directed social workers to help older adults who might not drive anymore to get state identification cards so they could open accounts.

People’s United Bank in Bridgeport has been holding “senior appreciation” sessions in supermarkets to help older adults, over coffee and cookies, understand online banking and practice using A.T.M.’s. “I know this is a hard sell to a lot of seniors,” said Angela DeLeon, a crime prevention specialist who works with the bank.

In some areas, the new policy may have more of a social impact than an economic one.

At a New York City housing complex, tenants meet in lobbies to wait for mail delivery on check day. Some escort older adults to cashing facilities, wary of the opportunists who may circle on the first of the month. On a remote Indian reservation in South Dakota, residents of the Rosebud Sioux tribe assemble at the post office for the arrival of “first class,” the slang for mailed federal checks.

Those casual gatherings could taper off as benefits are instead electronically deposited into individual accounts.

But other rituals may well survive. There are few places to spend money in Rosebud, S.D., so the group shopping pilgrimages to Nebraska are likely to carry on — once a month.

“It is more or less like a big exodus,” said Perry DeCory, a communications specialist for the tribe.

    Social Security and Welfare Benefits Going Paperless, NYT, 28.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/business/29checkless.html

Hard-Knock (Hardly Acknowledged) Life

January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

President Obama made history on Tuesday.

It was only the second time since Harry S. Truman’s State of the Union address in 1948 that such a speech by a Democratic president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor.

The closest Obama got to a mention was his confirmation for “Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear” that, indeed, “the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real.” I’m sure they appreciated that.

The only other Democrat not to mention poverty in the speech was Jimmy Carter in 1980, but even he was able to squeeze in one reference to at least a portion of the poor and disenfranchised, stressing the continuation of jobs programs to “provide training and work for our young people, especially minority youth.” (Carter did mention the poor in a written version that he submitted to Congress.)

John F. Kennedy didn’t say the specific words “poor” or “poverty” in his first State of the Union, but he talked at length about providing “more food for the families of the unemployed, and to aid their needy children,” securing “more purchasing power for our lowest-paid workers by raising and expanding the minimum wage” and of a new housing program to address the problem of “cities being engulfed in squalor.”

So how is it that this Democratic president has the temerity to deliver a State of the Union address that completely neglects any explicit mention of the calamitous conditions now afflicting his staunchest supporters: the poor?

(In 2008, Obama won 73 percent of the vote of those earning less than $15,000 a year, 60 percent of those earning between $15,000 and $30,000 and 55 percent of the vote of those earning $30,000 to $50,000. Those were his widest margins of victory of any income group and helped to propel him to victory.)

He talked at length about education (the most inspiring part of the speech) and about civility and his repackaged bromides of global competitiveness and investments in the future. And, of course, there were cautious mentions of programs that benefit seniors and the need to protect and secure them. Can’t forget the plea to the old people.

Protecting programs for seniors strikes the right chord morally and politically, but the data show that seniors are not the ones feeling the majority of the pain these days.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the percent of people ages 18 to 64 who were living in poverty in 2009 was higher than it had been in any year since 1959, while the percent of seniors living in poverty was lower than it had been in any year since at least 1959.

(By the way, voters over 65 were the only age group that Obama lost in 2008.)

I, for one, refuse to believe that this is an either-or proposition. We can make smart choices about protecting seniors and supporting younger Americans in need at the same time. We don’t have to ignore the Annies among us to court the Miss Daisys.

For the poor, this is the Obama Conundrum. He was obviously the best choice in 2008. And judging by the current cast of Republican presidential contenders, he could well be the best choice in 2012. But does that give him license to obviate his moral responsibility to his electoral devotees? Can and should they take his snubs as a necessary consequence of political warfare as he makes every effort to tack back to the middle and reconnect with those whose opinion of him vacillates between contempt on a bad day and sufferance on a good one? Does keeping him in the White House dictate keeping them in the shadows?

And things could get even worse for the poor if the president feels the need to cut too many deals with the new Republican-led House in order to appear more centrist.

According to Brian Miller, the executive director of the nonpartisan and Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the group’s report entitled “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?” released earlier this month, “austerity measures based on the conservative tenets of less government and lower taxes will ratchet down the standard of living for all Americans, while simultaneously widening our nation’s racial and economic divide.”

As Miller put it, deficits that tax cuts for the rich helped to create “are being used to justify a host of austerity measures that will harm Americans of all races but will hit blacks and Latinos the hardest.”

According to Miller, “With 42 percent of blacks and 37 percent of Latinos lacking the funds to meet minimal household expenses for even three months should they become unemployed, cutting public assistance programs will have devastating impacts on black and Latino workers.”

(Obama won 95 percent of the black vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008.)

Even as my respect for this president as a shrewd politician has begun to rebound, my faith in him as a fervent crusader for the poor and disenfranchised has taken yet another nose dive. One’s tone-deafness — or blatant indifference — to the poor has to be at Black American Express status to brag that “the stock market has come roaring back” and “corporate profits are up” and not even mention the unemployment rate or the continuing foreclosure crisis.

I want to believe that President Obama’s speech omissions were oversights, not acts of arrogance. But I’m not sure.

President Truman wrote in 1953 that, “ultimately, no President can master his responsibilities, save as his fellow citizens — indeed, the whole people — comprehend the challenge of our times and move, with him, to meet it.” But, it is sometimes hard to follow — indeed, to chase — a president who appears to be moving, often at a full sprint, away from the people who once carried him.

    Hard-Knock (Hardly Acknowledged) Life, NYT, 28.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/opinion/29blow.html

Seeking a Warm Place on City’s Coldest Night

January 23, 2011
The New York Times
By MOSI SECRET

Gregory Sanders and his partner, Keisha Washington, had just arrived at Pennsylvania Station in New York from Pennsylvania Station in Newark on Saturday night. The trip was beside the point. Mr. Sanders, 47, and Ms. Washington, 39, were homeless, and they needed a place to stay as a fierce winter cold gripped the region.

“The plan for the night is to try and stay warm,” Ms. Washington said. “And to sleep in here until they wake you up.”

Mr. Sanders, who was carrying his belongings in a black trash bag, added that they chose the station because “they don’t kick you out here.”

The temperature fell to 13 degrees in Central Park on Saturday night and was expected to plummet to 4 degrees on Sunday night, the lowest temperatures expected this winter. (The last time it was colder was on Jan. 18, 2000, according to the National Weather Service.)

While those numbers did not approach record lows, Seth Diamond, the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services, described the string of frigid nights as “particularly dangerous.”

“You have to be particularly vigilant on nights like this,” he said on Saturday night, adding that his department had doubled the number of staff members on duty and vans on the streets over the weekend.

Teams of outreach workers checked on street dwellers every two hours under the department’s “Code Blue” procedure, which goes into effect when the temperature or wind chill drops below freezing and is heightened when the readings fall below 20 degrees, according to Mr. Diamond.

On those nights — Sunday was the 41st night that Code Blue had been invoked this winter — the department loosens its restrictions to attract those who would not normally sleep in shelters.

“You could walk into any shelter that is available, and you could get a bed,” Mr. Diamond said. “Our priority when it’s cold like this is just to get them into a place that’s warm.”

Still, some homeless people preferred to make their own arrangements. Ms. Washington and Mr. Sanders, for instance, said they had been shuttling between the two Penn Stations for about a week — since the building in Newark where they had been squatting was demolished.

James Williams, 50, said he normally slept outside in Herald Square, but on Saturday night he sought refuge in Penn Station. “I got to go somewhere to stay warm,” he said.

“The shelter is not the best place,” he added. “I don’t feel as comfortable, I can’t do what I want. Out here I can be free.”

Around 11:30 p.m., several of the homeless people staying the night in Penn Station burst into an impromptu dance session in front of a man banging on pots, pans and five-gallon plastic drums. As commuters watched, a woman who identified herself only as Sophie swayed with two men.

“Yes, I’m partying, I’m enjoying my life,” Sophie said as she sipped a beer.

Elsewhere, other New Yorkers seemed determined not to let the harsh winter night interfere with weekend fun — or work.

Matthew Everett, 38, a doorman at the ML Lounge, a nightclub on Broadway in Astoria, Queens, was well prepared with long johns, thermal socks and “combat-issued boots.”

“When it’s really supercold, I can’t feel my toes,” he said. “That’s how I know it’s brutal — even with the boots and the thermal socks.”

On Steinway Street in Long Island City, Queens, Dr. Ricardo Vanegas, 50, wore a hooded jacket and gloves while walking his Labrador, Chocolate.

“We walk at night during the summer 10 to 20 blocks,” said Dr. Vanegas, a professor of dentistry at New York University. “Now, he just wants to go back in.”

At Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, Robert Muñoz, 26, followed any mother’s advice: he layered. But in two thermal shirts, two pairs of thermal pants, two pairs of socks, a jacket, a coat and a scarf, Mr. Muñoz, a Los Angeles transplant, still struggled to keep warm.

He was about to resort to Plan B. “I’m going to get drunk,” he said, on his way to a birthday party in Manhattan. “That’s the best way to deal with the cold.”


Reporting was contributed by Nate Schweber, Tim Stelloh, Sarah Wheaton and Rebecca White.

    Seeking a Warm Place on City’s Coldest Night, NYT, 23.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/nyregion/24homeless.html

Poverty and Recovery

January 18, 2011
The New York Times

In 2008, the first year of the Great Recession, the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.7 million to nearly 47.5 million. While hugely painful, that rise wasn’t surprising given the unraveling economy. What is surprising is that recent census data show that those poverty numbers held steady in 2009, even though job loss worsened significantly that year.

Clearly, the sheer scale of poverty — 15.7 percent of the country’s population — is unacceptable. But to keep millions more Americans from falling into poverty during a deep recession is a genuine accomplishment that holds a vital lesson: the safety net, fortified by stimulus, staved off an even more damaging crisis.

Congress should take a good look at those numbers, and consider that lesson carefully, before it commits to any more slashing and burning.

The latest poverty figures are from the census “alternative” data, developed in the 1990s to count income and expenses that the “official” data omit. For example, the official measure counts only cash income to gauge poverty (defined as $21,756 for a family of four in 2009). The alternative figures cited above, which closely follow criteria from the National Academy of Sciences, include noncash federal benefits, like food stamps (and set the poverty line at $24,522 for a family of four). That gives a truer picture of a family’s economic status.

What analysts have found is that the antipoverty effect of government intervention in 2009 was profound. Calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research group, show that specific stimulus provisions — including expanded federal jobless benefits, new and improved tax credits for workers and bolstered food stamps — kept 4.5 million people out of poverty in 2009. Only Social Security and the earned income credit did more to fight poverty.

The results are likely to be roughly similar in 2010 because most of the 2009 law was continued last year. The portents going forward are not good.

Federal aid is being scaled back, even though growth is not yet robust enough to make a sizable dent in unemployment. Late last year, Republicans blocked the extension of a successful stimulus program that had created 250,000 subsidized jobs for young people and low-income parents. They claimed the stimulus was an expensive failure, even as they pressed to renew the high-end Bush tax cuts. As part of the tax-cut deal, President Obama and Congress agreed to extend federal jobless benefits in 2011, but the checks will be $25 less a week than under the stimulus. That reduction could push an estimated 175,000 more people into poverty in 2011. The deal also included a one-year payroll tax cut that will benefit most workers, but it is less helpful to the lowest-income workers than a now-expired tax break in the stimulus.

With 14.5 million people still out of work, and more than 6 million of them jobless for more than six months, reducing federal help now will almost ensure more poverty later. That would impose an even higher cost on the economy and budget because ever poorer households cannot spend and consume.

We know it goes against the prevailing rhetoric to argue that more and better government policies are still needed to repair the economy. It is also unpopular to argue that programs that have succeeded for decades in reducing poverty, like Social Security, need to be preserved even as they are retooled for the 21st century. To do otherwise is to deny the evidence.

President Obama must explain to the American people that the country needs to continue relief and recovery efforts, especially programs to create jobs. Without that, tens of millions of Americans stuck in poverty will have little hope of climbing out — and many more could join their ranks.

    Poverty and Recovery, NYT, 18.1.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/opinion/19wed1.html