The Economy
Ask Congress About Medicaid
Published August 19, 2009 @ 01:04PM PT
After Congress failed to meet self-imposed deadlines to put together a comprehensive plan before the August recess, it's clear healthcare reform has run into some major issues. Some of them - like the wailings of a wacky former Governor about "death panels" (sounds like bad siding) are easily dismissed. Others are issues that are not likely to go away, and may well affect what happens to healthcare reform when Congress resumes in September.
The press and many progressive advocates have latched onto the "public plan", shorthand for some sort of government run insurance plan which would serve as a backstop for households when no other insurance option was available. The "public plan" has come to symbolize, for the right, the threat of a "government takeover" of healthcare... and for the left it has become a rallying cry of necessity if reform is to be done right.
Neither is entirely the case. First, I agree with other progressive advocates urging you to call your members of Congress about healthcare reform. But rather than emphasizing the public plan, if you're concerned about healthcare and poverty... ask them how they plan to defend and strengthen Medicaid.
President Promotes Renting
Published August 18, 2009 @ 04:33PM PT
At least $8B, and possibly more than $10B, in stimulus and federal budget funds will be used to (re-)invest in affordable renting housing in the U.S. The Boston Globe describes this as an "ideological shift" away from Bush's Wild West Ownership Society; Calculated Risk points out that the Obama Administration is harnessing an existing trend: the supply of rental housing has been increasing since 2004, mostly due to conversions of ownership properties.
There's two elements to this initiative that I like: $4B to upgrade existing public housing (a drop in the bucket, but a drop, nonetheless!) and the purchase of foreclosed homes to be converted into affordable rental units.
Commenter Lori raises an interesting point over at Suburban Guerilla in response to this announcement: why aren't we pursuing more radical, less costly innovations to seriously expand the stock of affordable housing - including homeownership - in the US? Her actual statement reflects why Bush's unregulated, overzealous ownership dream went so awry: "If you want to have a nation of home owners, you have to build housing that people on the bottom can afford to buy." And is it really a good idea to leave renters at the mercy of landlords? She voices support for the re-use of shipping containers as low-cost (and roomy by my condo's standards) rent-to-own housing.
Concerning landlords, I think tenants' rights is a related but separate issue here. One thing I would emphasize is that federally rental initiatives like this will partner mostly with local non-profits and municipalities to refurbish and improve rental housing, which to me is a necessary alternative to the current private market purchasers of foreclosures who are using them as investment properties (29% of the homebuying market). From living in a neighborhood with an owner-occupancy rate of only 25%, moving the rental inventory from the hands of absentee landlords to community-based non-profits sounds like a great idea to me.
(Photo by TheTruthAbout...)
Saving with SaveNYC
Published August 17, 2009 @ 05:00AM PT
SaveNYC is an asset-building program run by the City of NY that encourages low-wage tax payers to set aside a portion of their Earned Income Tax Credit refund and receive matching savings in return. Initial results have been promising; 61% of participants saved $500 - the qualifying amount to receive the matching funds. More than three-quarters of the accounts remained open after one year.
Asset building initiatives are anti-poverty programs that help low-income people save more to use towards purchases in homes, small businesses, or education - the big ticket items that may help households build equity or earn more income to eventually exit poverty. What policymakers like about SaveNYC is its demonstration that local governments can play a leadership role in financial empowerment anti-poverty initiatives.
Highest Income Inequality Ever
Published August 16, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
We've surpassed even the vaunted inequality of the 1920s - the "Gilded Age" years that preceded the Great Depression. In 2007, the top 10% of American workers took home just under 50% of all wages. Think about that: if 10 workers were to split $100, one guy (no doubt) would get $49.70, and the remaining 9 would split $51.30. What do you think that one man does for a living compared to the other nine? What jobs, to your mind, possibly deserve that kind of distorted payout?
The paper, written by a Berkeley professor, shows how from 1993 through 2007, the top 1% of earners captured "half of the overall economic growth." Think about how hard you've been working at your job for the past two decades - now you know where your hard-earned profits have gone! And the trend continues - the just released Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows American workers are working longer hours for less pay. Make sure you click through the link to see that thanks to all this productivity, corporate profits are up.
And the cycle continues.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly thinks if Democrats or progressives try to rectify this inequality they will be charged with fomenting "class warfare." David Sirota sees the wrangling over Social Security and concludes we're all ready there. We've asked a few times here: is it time to protest yet?
Grameen America Lends $2.3M
Published August 13, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
On Tuesday President Obama awarded Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. That same day, Grameen America announced it has lent $2.3M to 1,000 low-income women entrepreneurs in NY and Omaha, and plans to expand in other unbanked communities in the U.S.
Grameen America is one of many microloan programs in the U.S. that include Kiva, Accion USA, and an admirable start-up initiative at Bentley. Accion is the biggest, having lent more than $100M to almost 20k borrowers since 1991. Microlending is an interesting anti-poverty program in its reverse directionality, i.e., its success in developing countries being imported to the U.S.
Yunus believes access to credit is a "human right" and explained his program's success, namely its high rates of repayment, as due to its attachment to the "real" economy, versus our "fantasy" finance world based on (now meaningless) bits of paper. The Nobel Laureate has a point, wouldn't you say?
(Video of Grameen America opening in NYC; NY coverage starts around 2:20)
Action Alert: Modernize Poverty Measurement
Published August 11, 2009 @ 01:01PM PT
Two bills have been introduced in Congress to update our federal poverty measure that is based on an extremely antiquated estimated proportion of a family's budget spent on food. Both the House and Senate bills rely on National Academy of Science recommendations in which "the cost of food, clothing, housing, utilities and medical expenses be considered. Income from non-cash benefits, such as food stamps and government tax credits, should also be counted" in an updated poverty measure (right now, these social supports can tip people over the poverty line and deny them much needed assistance).
The linked news piece above shows that by following the NAS recommendations, the new poverty line for a family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) in 2007 $$ would jump from about $21k to almost $28k, an increase of almost 25%. To my eye, it still looks extremely low. We really need to make geographic considerations when tying assistance programs to estimated costs of living.
This reform is at the heart of the work we do as anti-poverty activists. So far, the House bill, introduced in June, has 10 sponsors, all Dems, and has probably gone on to a quiet convalescence in the House Ways and Means and House Oversight and Govt. Reform Committees. The Senate Bill is less than a week old, introduced by Dodd and co-sponsored by Sen. Bingaman of New Mexico (D). It's gone on to the Senate Health (etc.) Committee, which might have its hands full right about now.
Healthcare reform or not, this is one issue that can't wait. Contact Your Representatives (and Committee Members above) and tell them to support an updated poverty measure today!
(Difference in NAS and official poverty measures, from The Stanford Ctr for the Study of Poverty & Inequality)
Prison the New Public Housing
Published August 10, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Affordable housing advocates, esp. pro-public housing folks like myself, spend a lot of time comparing the various subsidized housing options out there: public housing, Section 8 vouchers for renting in the private market, tax-credit funded housing built by non-profit developers. Turns out, we've been miscalculating by half the 4-6M or so units these different options provide, because we've been leaving out a major new source of publicly subsidized housing for the poor: Prison!
Yep, according to Ehrenreich's latest missive in the NYT (see our previous coverage of her series here and here), "the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing."
Ehrenreich wonders if the collision of rising extreme poverty and excess criminalization and incarceration policies will lead us to descalate both - resorting instead to humane treatment of the poor and a move away from criminalizing low-income people as, she fears, disgustedly, a revenue source in this extreme recession. I'd add the masses find it morally uplifting to torment the poor during tough economic times, as it reassures us with a strong "us" vs. "them" dichotomy and gives us a sense of control of the more chaotic zones of life, given we can't seem to stop the corporate pillaging going on above us.
I too wonder if sheer economic necessity will work in our favor differently, by leading to de-crowding of prisons and cessation of expensive housing demolition and development programs. Of course, our desire to clamp down on "concentrated poverty" and its alleged ills bodes differently for prisons versus public housing. Dispersal strategies suddenly seem a lot more worrisome when we're casting offenders into the winds.
Most importantly, reversing these punitive, cruel, expensive cycles really requires to see the poor as human beings like us, our brethren, locked in a similar struggle for economic stability and justice. It requires a framework that focuses less on poverty alleviation and more on poverty eradication. It requires a common framework that embraces all of us. Gee, I wonder what that could be...
(Photo of Fremantle Prison, a decommissioned prison in Australia, by amandabhslater)
