Urge the Senate to Extend Unemployment Benefits
Published February 09, 2010 @ 02:22PM PT
The unemployment insurance and COBRA health care subsidies that have proven critical to families struggling through the recession are set to expire this month unless the Senate acts now.
Congress previously extended both programs when the economy didn't bounce back as quickly as some had hoped, but those extensions expire on February 28. The House has already passed new legislation, but unless the Senate acts, millions of people will lose out on unemployment benefits and be forced to give up their health insurance.
The benefits at stake can make all the difference for someone who's unemployed. Under the Recovery Act, people who have lost their jobs in this recession can get up to 73 weeks of emergency unemployment benefits versus the usual state allotment of 26, plus an extra $25 per week in both state and federal benefits. It's needed -- 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. According to the National Employment Law Project, 5.6 million people are currently receiving some form of emergency unemployment insurance.
COBRA helps laid off workers maintain their health coverage with 15-month, 65 percent subsidies. If an extension is passed, people laid off through the end of 2010 will also be eligible for 12 months. If the Senate doesn't authorize an extension, many of these people will join the ranks of the uninsured.
Demand assistance for those who can't find work.
Photo credit: aflcio2008
Why Are 40 Million People Still Poor In America?
Published February 09, 2010 @ 07:41AM PT
Carl Chancellor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been writing about social justice issues for decades, is a columnist for Change.org.
February is the perfect month to begin my regular column here on Poverty in America.
Why February?
Because it's Black History Month, the 28 days (when we're lucky, 29) set aside to recognize the many contributions of African-Americans to this nation of ours, although the month-long celebration tends to spotlight the Civil Rights Movement and the epic fight to end American apartheid. And that's alright, since focusing on the civil rights struggle and on the very embodiment of the movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fluoresces the last great battle of his life -- ending poverty.
"Why are there forty million poor people in America?" he asked in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference presidential address of August 1967.
Shamefully, more than four decades later, Dr. King could ask the very same question.
According to Half in Ten, which is working to cut the poverty rate by 50 percent by 2020, nearly 40 million people, more than 13 percent of our fellow Americans, live in poverty. That number includes 13.3 million children. Another one in every three Americans struggles to make ends meet at twice the federal poverty level. Last year, 12.6 million households could not always afford enough food.
By the late 1960s, Dr. King was pivoting from the fight to end racial discrimination to the audacious goal of eradicating poverty in the United States. He recognized that just ending Jim Crow wouldn't usher in equality and understood that genuine equality was inextricably linked to economic security for all.
Dr. King also realized that poverty knows no racial boundaries -- it's not a black, white, red or brown problem, but an American problem.
North Dakota, Land of Opportunity?
Published February 08, 2010 @ 01:54PM PT
North Dakota has the nation's lowest unemployment rate, just four percent. The state's economy actually grew in 2008. It has plenty of oil fields, major farms and customer service call centers that are hiring. There's even a swanky government web site advertising the thousands of available jobs. Sound like paradise for the millions of people out of work in other states? Not so fast. There's one minor problem: thousands of the job-seekers streaming into North Dakota can't find housing, and many of them aren't paid enough to afford it anyway. So, incredibly, although there's no unemployment problem in North Dakota, there is a poverty and homelessness crisis.
It seems unbelievable that people would pick up and move to North Dakota without an official job offer or a lead on a place to live, but desperation can drive people to make poor decisions. The oil fields near Williston, in the northwestern part of the state, have been a major draw for people hoping to strike it rich -- or at least secure a steady, high-paying job. And presumably, people who hear about the 8,500 open jobs in North Dakota just assume the state also offers at least 8,500 homes. Last August, The Washington Post followed a woman moving from Ohio to North Dakota for a job. The front-page article depicted Janet Morgan passing up $350-monthly rental apartments in favor of buying a $7,500 expanded mobile home, without a mention of the growing homelessness problem.
But in fact, housing is scarce throughout the state, especially in small towns. In Williston, two city-owned trailer parks are completely full, but developers aren't yet willing to gamble on building new houses or apartment complexes. Many of those new jobs are entry-level gigs with low pay, meaning that a large percentage of the people who move remain too poor to afford anything, even at North Dakota prices. People who come for the oil jobs often end up living in their cars, a scary proposition during a North Dakota winter. Since homelessness has been practically nonexistent before the past few years, few shelters and soup kitchens exist.
There's a lesson here for job-seekers: do your research before moving to North Dakota. But the state government deserves much of the blame for creating the problem: that glitzy web site teeming with job opportunities says nothing about how difficult it is to find housing. The government is understandably excited about being seen as a land of opportunity, but it owes it to its future residents to be honest about what the North Dakotan life is really like.
Photo credit: bsabarnowl
School's In Session with Free Poverty Syllabi
Published February 08, 2010 @ 12:35PM PT
Even if you've long since graduated from college, or didn't go, never fear -- school is not out. Dozens of college professors are sharing syllabi from their recent poverty-related courses with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. Skimming through them is a great way to find out what people who study poverty full-time are reading and thinking about. When you begin to see overlap from syllabus to syllabus, you can feel confident in having a fairly firm grasp of the current academic trends. Flipping through these is also a great way to get a reading list of books to stack beside your bed to hold your water glass. That's just me? Oh. Moving on ....
When picking and choosing (the luxury of not actually being in the class), each syllabus has a lot to teach. Professor Ezra Rosser at American University requires his "Poverty and Law" students to read two 2006 articles from The New Yorker: "Relatively Deprived," about the origins, and failings, of the federal poverty level, and "Million Dollar Murray," about an affable but afflicted homeless man who cost the city of Reno, Nevda untold sums in public services. Rosser also has his students take the poverty quiz from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and read large portions of John Iceland's book Poverty in America and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed.
In Iceland's own course, "Poverty and Welfare" at the University of Maryland, he asks students to review the NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll on poverty in America that provides a disheartening overview of how most Americans view their neighbors living in poverty. He has also made required reading of "The Rise of the Super Rich," from the New York Times from 2006. Another benefit of an academic syllabus is the potential to be exposed to views different from your own. Iceland, for example includes more liberal resources next to a piece from the conservative Heritage Foundation: "Increasing Marriage Would Dramatically Reduce Child Poverty."
At New York University, you can follow along with Professor W. Jean Yeung's course on "Contemporary Social Problems: Poverty." It also requires Iceland's book, as well as American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle and When Work Disappears by William J. Wilson. You won't have the benefit of an in-class lecture from DeParle, of course, but you will have the latest academic thinking on the issues surrounding poverty in America. And no student loans.
via Poverty Law
Photo credit: velkr0
1 in 8 Americans Receive Emergency Food Assistance
Published February 07, 2010 @ 11:45AM PT
Would you want to live in a country where one in eight residents receive emergency food assistance each year? If you're an American, it's too late -- you already do.
Feeding America released a shocking report this week on the state of hunger in America, relying on data gathered from its large network of food banks and partner agencies. The report found that 37 million people in the U.S. currently receive emergency food, up 46 percent from 2006. Over one third of those are children.
The report's authors attribute this spike to the economic crisis still plaguing the nation's poor and working classes. In a press release, Feeding America president and CEO Vicki Escarra said the recession and rising unemployment have "driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs." And for those Americans who were already struggling with hunger before the economy plummeted, the situation's gone from bad to worse: the report finds a 54 percent increase in the number of client households experiencing "very low food security" -- in other words, outright hunger.
One particularly enlightening, albeit distressing, section of the report centers on the difficult choices America's poor are having to make to stay afloat. Of those served by Feeding America's food banks, almost half report choosing between paying utilities and buying groceries. Almost 40 percent can't afford both housing and meals. The list goes on.
Unemployment Office Errors Are Costing the Poor
Published February 06, 2010 @ 11:23AM PT
Since the state of Wisconsin pioneered the idea of unemployment benefits in 1932, Americans have known they can rely on their state governments for a little help when they're down and out. Except when they can't.
Increased poverty during the recession has revealed many holes in the safety net, including dysfunctional unemployment benefit offices that unfairly cut off people's benefits, nearly allow the benefit fund to disappear and/or rely on "Flintstone-era technology" to handle millions of new claims. One thing is for sure: as the number of first-time unemployed Americans continues to rise, states need to spend less time cutting people's benefits off and more time figuring out how they can better help those in need.
The situation may be the most dire in South Carolina, which has the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the country at 12.6 percent. There, the commissioners that oversee the unemployment benefits fund allowed the endowment to go broke without raising a red flag. The state government plans to borrow a billion dollars from their federal government to fix that little issue. That news came after a 2008 publicity stunt in which Gov. Mark Sanford refused to accept any federal loans, threatening to cut off all South Carolinians' benefits checks. And now comes word that the agency owes $950,000 in penalties to the IRS because it hasn't been paying taxes. The state House plans to discuss the immediate removal of the three unemployment commissioners in two weeks.
What Christians Owe the Poor
Published February 05, 2010 @ 01:45PM PT
Christianity may not save us from the recession, and in fact may have helped cause it, but for a refreshing number of people of faith, the economic downturn has brought an opportunity to step up their ministries to the poor.
Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, a minister who serves as the leader of the National Council of Churches, has been a vocal advocate of Christians doing more to help the poor. In an much-discussed essay published last week, he chastised fellow religious people for not paying nearly enough attention to the struggling people in their communities.
"Working together, we can accomplish the abatement of poverty worldwide," Kinnamon writes. "But even if we fail, it is clear God is commanding us to make the effort. God is not on the side of social scientists, politicians or cynics. God is on the side of the poor."
At yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama brought a similar message. Contrasting Americans' response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti with their interest in the poverty all around them, he said "we become numb to the day-to-day crises, the slow-moving tragedies of children without food and men without shelter and families without health care."
Kinnamon's essay comes off as tough love; he doesn't give Christians credit for taking their responsibility to the poor more seriously than secular people, which surveys consistently show they do. (Sociologist Robert Wuthnow's book God and Mammon in America is an excellent, if slightly outdated, exploration of this divide.) In Kinnamon's mind, the Bible gives Christians an elevated responsibility to fight poverty, and they are not living up to it.
