Children
"You Do Not Have Health Insurance"
Published August 09, 2009 @ 09:06AM PT
There's a great post up at The Baseline Scenario concerning the diffuse worry that healthcare reform will negatively impact those with health insurance in the US. It basically eviscerates the lie that "employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment" is health insurance: "as long as your health insurance depends on your job, your health is only insured insofar as your job is insured – and your job isn’t insured."
Unlike NycWeboy, who believes no one is paying attention to the needs to reform Medicaid for better coverage and care of the poor, James at TBS thinks "people remain convinced that health care reform is for poor people. [But] It’s for everyone – everyone, that is, who isn’t independently wealthy or over the age of 65. Because all of us could lose our jobs."
FYI: Medicare = health insurance.
More great links to while away your Sunday afternoon after the jump.
Modeling Harlem Children's Zone
Published August 08, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
I'm sort of putting this post up today as a reminder to myself to come back to it - it's a WaPo profile of Harlem Children's Zone, Geoffrey Canada's unique, high-intensity community & human development organization that President Obama sees as an anti-poverty and neighborhood development model.
This is the starting point for the Harlem Children's Zone: the womb. Geoffrey Canada's nonprofit has created a web of programs that begin before birth, end with college graduation and reach almost every child growing up in 97 blocks carved out of the struggling central Harlem neighborhood.
Folks over at PostBourgie are discussing a recent biography of Canada and HCZ. And I've mentioned HCZ in passing a couple times around this blog.
What do you think of this program? What's not to like? Anything?
Back 2 $chool-$PECIAL!
Published August 07, 2009 @ 05:32AM PT
Let your memory drift back to your grade school days. Did you dread knowing that early August signaled the soon-to-be ringing school bell? Or did you long for the stability of the classroom, your friends, and even some of your teachers? For me it varied.
Parents and guardians, especially those of limited income, view Back To School (BTS) time as a mixed bag. Sure, getting kids into their routines (and out from underfoot) is good, but the expense of getting them back to school is a budget-buster. Estimates range from near $500 for elementary kids to $1,000 for high schoolers. Even factoring in the typical frugality of financially-struggling parents, one kid is expensive, and multiple, well, multiply and groan!
Saving Middle-Class Kids at the Expense of the Poor
Published August 04, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Ok, this blog post is going to be totally contrarian, so I want to say up front that I like the research findings on which it's based, especially from a racial equity perspective, and am curious to see how/if public-private investment follows from it. But I just have to pick at something; stay w/me here...
A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts came out last week that shows that the #1 reason about half of middle-class African-American kids experience downward mobility as adults (i.e., they are poorer when they grow up) is because they grow up in high poverty neighborhoods. Lots of research has shown that middle-class and low-income Blacks often live in the same or proximate neighborhoods to one another. "Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today's dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods." And the data is not much different today.
The report authors (disclosure: I used to blog with Pat Sharkey at the now defunct Foresight) have this to say:
Sharkey and Morton said policymakers can take heart in one finding: Black children in neighborhoods in which poverty fell by 10 percent had higher incomes as adults than those who grew up in areas where the poverty rate stayed the same. This is a sign, they said, that simply improving the overall economy and quality of a given neighborhood can have beneficial effects on those growing up in it.
But the report also concludes that the data shows that we need more cradle-to-crave, neighborhood based investments, a la Harlem Children's Zone, a strategy that "holds more promise than dispersing poor families into middle-class neighborhoods by giving them housing vouchers, a strategy that has had mixed results and could be difficult to implement on a large scale."
But, doesn't dispersal of low-income Americans, by vouchers and HOPE VI, for instance, make their prior neighborhoods better off for the middle-class kids living there? So doesn't this report suggest that we should sacrifice the poor on behalf of the middle-class?
At a minimum, it points to the need to face the persistence of poverty in the U.S., and its drag on us all.
(Marching band practice in Detroit; photo by Karpov the Wrecked Train)
Annie E. Casey Foundation Calls for Updated Poverty Measure
Published August 01, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
As I'm scrolling through the weekend poverty news, I see that this week the Annie E. Casey Foundation released its 20th annual Kids Count report on child poverty in the U.S. The information is presented in a user-friendly on-line "data book" that I recommend checking out to learn more about the particulars of your state.
I took a look at the summary brief of the report and was pleased to see that in their recommendations for making better use of data to drive policy, that improvements include updating the US poverty measure to reflect contemporary economic and political realities. Why collect data if it's based on outmoded definitions of hardship? Excellent point! More on this below the fold.
KnoxNews.com has a handy round-up of the key findings in the report, based on data collected through 2006 (the current recession will be reflected in their next report):
The report documented improvements since 2000 in the infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate, high school dropout rate, and teens not in school and not working. Four areas have worsened: low-birthweight babies, children living with jobless or underemployed parents, children in poverty, and children in single-parent families. (my emphases)
Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi - Katrina's darlings, weep - continue to rank worst among states for child well-being.
I rarely do this, but this extensive block quote from KnoxNews.com captures perfectly efforts to redefine the poverty measure is - check it out after the jump.
'Bamboozle' A Golden Rule for Some
Published July 31, 2009 @ 05:19AM PT
I'm a naysayer, a contrarian. I've always been that way. It comes in handy, especially when sorting out the abundant tomfoolery hoisted upon us by "them that have the gold," the Tarnished Golden Rule of Politics. An abundance of news, opinions and blogs about poverty-related issues illustrate how this rule works.
Recent news accounts of Wall Street's audacious behavior and self-interested medical providers illustrate the power of money in guiding (mis) behavior. Follow the money and you'll figure out this nation's and world's woes. Many in Congress and most corporations tend to follow the bucks which gets them in trouble.
Less Crime, More Hunger
Published July 30, 2009 @ 01:26PM PT
I just finished reading a very frustrating article about the impacts of the HOPE VI program's impacts on public housing residents' lives ($). For those not in the know, HOPE VI is a program that since 1992 provides federal subsidies to demolish and redevelop public housing projects as mixed-income communities. Proponents say it improves residents' lives by enabling them to live in less-poor neighborhoods with better-off neighbors and that taken together these changes will bring increased safety, economic opportunities and role models for low-income residents.
The "role modeling" thing always ticks me off, but the bigger problem with HOPE VI is that it pursued a housing demolition and development strategy as the sole means to reduce poverty and inequality. If you know anything about the myriad problems poor people face in terms of job prospects (e.g., health problems, disability, young children at home, etc.), then you'll probably be unsurprised to learn that the most recent HOPE VI assessment shows no impact on residents' economic status. None. Sigh.
But the "choice" residents face between crime and hunger is what really gets me.
