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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Mon Nov 11, 2013 9:11 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Opinion
New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: October 25, 2013 468 Comments
Bank profits have reached their highest levels in years.
The market for luxury goods is rebounding.
Bloomberg News reported in August, “Sales of homes priced at more than $1 million jumped an average 37 percent in 2013’s first half from a year earlier to the highest level since 2007, according to DataQuick.”
A report last week in The New York Times says that developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.
And there’s no shortage of billionaires. Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.
It’s a great time to be a rich person in America. The rich are raking it in during this recovery.
But in the shadow of their towering wealth exists a much less rosy recovery, where people are hurting and the pain grows.
This is the slowest post-recession jobs recovery since World War II. The unemployment rate is falling, but for the wrong reason: an increasing number of people may simply be giving up on finding a job. The labor force participation rate — the percentage of people over 16 who either have a job or are actively searching for one — fell in August to its lowest rate in 35 years.
This disconnecting is particularly acute among young people. Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.
Median household income continues to fall, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. The data showed, “In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”
And according to an April Pew Research Center report, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
The dire statistics take on even more urgency when we consider what they mean for America’s most vulnerable: our children.
According to First Focus, a bipartisan advocacy organization focusing on child and family issues: “The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”
A report last month by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire bemoaned the stagnation of the child poverty rate in this country, saying, “These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”
Nearly one in four American children live in poverty.
A report last year from the National Poverty Center estimated “that the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”
And yet, the value of aid for those families is shrinking and under threat.
A report this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, “Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”
The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.
Next week, lawmakers will start trying to find a middle ground between the two versions of the farm bills that include these cuts.
There is an inherent tension — and obscenity — in the wildly divergent fortunes of the rich and the poor in this country, especially among our children. The growing |
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Mon Nov 11, 2013 9:17 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Alter Net
Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality / By Sam Pizzigati
Are Heartless People Simply Born That Way?
The wider a society’s economic divide the less empathy on the part of the rich and the powerful toward the poor and the weak.
November 4, 2013 |
People who cut food stamps - and gut child labor laws - most all had empathy when they came into the world. So what squeezed the empathy out? Analysts are pointing to inequality.
Scrooge has come early this year. We’re kicking our Tiny Tims. This holiday season, kids in America’s poorest families are going to have less to eat.
November 1 brought $5 billion in new cuts to the nation’s food stamp program, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Poor families will lose on average 7 percent of their food aid, calculates the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A mother with two kids will lose $319 over the rest of the current federal fiscal year. The cuts could cost some families a week’s worth of meals a month, says the chief at America’s largest food bank.
More cuts are looming. A U.S. House of Representatives majority is demanding an additional $39 billion in “savings” over the next decade. Ohio and a host of other states, in the meantime, are moving to limit food stamp eligibility.
Today’s brazen heartlessness toward America’s most vulnerable actually goes far deeper than food stamp cuts, as a new Economic Policy Institute report released last week documents in rather chilling detail.
Four states, the report notes, have “lifted restrictions on child labor.” In Wisconsin, state law used to limit 16- and 17-year-olds to no more than five hours of work a day on school days. The new law erases these limits.
Other states are cutting back on protections for low-wage workers of all ages. Earlier this year, the new EPI survey relates, Mississippi adopted a law that bans cities and counties in the state “from adopting any minimum wage, living wage, or paid or unpaid sick leave rights for local workers.”
The sick and elderly aren’t faring all that well either. In Arizona, the governor proposed a health-insurance cutoff that would have tripped some patients up right in the middle of their chemotherapy. Texas is considering Medicaid cuts that could end up closing 850 of the state’s 1,000 nursing homes.
America’s current surge of mean-spiritedness, observes Gordon Lafer, the University of Oregon author of the EPI study, essentially erupted right after the 2010 elections. In 11 states, those elections gave right-wingers “new monopoly control” over the governor’s mansion and both legislative houses.
Lafer links this right-wing electoral triumph directly to growing inequality. A widening income gap, he explains, “has produced a critical mass of extremely wealthy businesspeople, many of whom are politically conservative,” and various recent court cases have given these wealthy a green light to spend virtually unlimited sums on their favored political candidates.
This spending has, in turn, raised campaign costs for all political hopefuls — and left pols even more dependent on deep-pocket campaign contributions.
But America’s new heartlessness reflects much more than this turbocharged political power of America’s rich. An insensitivity toward the problems poor people face, researchers have shown, reflects a deeper psychological shift that extreme inequality makes all but inevitable.
The wider a society’s economic divide, as Demos think tank analyst Sean McElwee noted last week, the less empathy on the part of the rich and the powerful toward the poor and the weak. In a starkly unequal society, people of more than ample means “rarely brush shoulders” with people of little advantage. These rich don’t see the poor. They stereotype them as lazy and unworthy.
Some cheerleaders for the rich and powerful, adds economist Nancy Folbre, go even further. They attribute unemployment and sluggish growth “to excessively generous public assistance.” Cutting food stamps, for these self-righteous souls, comes to seem an easy solution to all that ails a failing American economy
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Defenders of inequality typically do their musings at a high, fact-free level of abstraction. CNN columnist John Sutter last week brought America down to inequality’s ground level, with a remarkably moving and insightful look at the most unequal county in the United States, East Carroll Parish in Louisiana.
In East Carroll, the rich live north of Lake Providence, the poor south. The two groups seldom interact. East Carroll’s most affluent 5 percent average $611,000 a year, 90 times the $6,800 incomes the poorest fifth of the parish average. Such wide income gaps, Sutter shows, invite “gaps in empathy.”
“Looking across Lake Providence from the north,” as he puts it, “can warp a person’s vision.”
One example of this warped vision: East Carroll’s rich see food stamps as an “entitlement” that rots poor people’s incentive to work. Yet these same affluent annually pocket enormously generous farm subsidies. In 2010, East Carroll’s most highly subsidized farmer grabbed $655,000 from one federal subsidy alone.
The average food stamp payout in the parish: $1,492 per person per year.
What should we do about the rampant inequality in East Carroll Parish — and far beyond? For simple starters, of course, we could end federal farm subsidies for wealthy farmers — and restore food stamps to full strength.
The longer-term task? CNN’s John Sutter has some ideas on that score. He offered last week an eclectic short list that includes everything from raising taxes on the nation’s most privileged to raising minimum wages for the nation’s least.
In 2013 America, sums up Sutter, we’ve come to see stark gaps between rich and poor as “inevitable.” His simple reminder for us all: “They don’t have to be.”
For more on the research that explores how inequality “weakens the willingness to share,” in the words of economist James Galbraith, and concentrates resources that could be shared in the “hands least inclined to be willing,” check “The Fraying Social Fabric,” a chapter now available online from the 2004 book, Greed and Good: Understanding the Inequality that Limits Our Lives.
Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Mon Nov 11, 2013 9:41 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Op-Ed Columnist
Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: October 25, 2013 468 Comments
The stock market is hitting record highs.
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
.
Bank profits have reached their highest levels in years.
The market for luxury goods is rebounding.
Bloomberg News reported in August, “Sales of homes priced at more than $1 million jumped an average 37 percent in 2013’s first half from a year earlier to the highest level since 2007, according to DataQuick.”
A report last week in The New York Times says that developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.
And there’s no shortage of billionaires. Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.
It’s a great time to be a rich person in America. The rich are raking it in during this recovery.
But in the shadow of their towering wealth exists a much less rosy recovery, where people are hurting and the pain grows.
This is the slowest post-recession jobs recovery since World War II. The unemployment rate is falling, but for the wrong reason: an increasing number of people may simply be giving up on finding a job. The labor force participation rate — the percentage of people over 16 who either have a job or are actively searching for one — fell in August to its lowest rate in 35 years.
This disconnecting is particularly acute among young people. Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.
Median household income continues to fall, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. The data showed, “In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”
And according to an April Pew Research Center report, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
The dire statistics take on even more urgency when we consider what they mean for America’s most vulnerable: our children.
According to First Focus, a bipartisan advocacy organization focusing on child and family issues: “The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”
A report last month by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire bemoaned the stagnation of the child poverty rate in this country, saying, “These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”
Nearly one in four American children live in poverty.
A report last year from the National Poverty Center estimated “that the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”
And yet, the value of aid for those families is shrinking and under threat.
A report this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, “Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”
The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.
Next week, lawmakers will start trying to find a middle ground between the two versions of the farm bills that include these cuts.
There is an inherent tension — and obscenity — in the wildly divergent fortunes of the rich and the poor in this country, especially among our children. The growing imbalance of both wealth and opportunity cannot be sustained. Something has to give.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 26, 2013, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines. |
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Mon Nov 11, 2013 10:00 am |
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theboyzmom
F L I N T O I D
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| Perhaps the reason for the increase in people with and without money has to do with choices? Seems poor people keep multiplying and taking on responsibilities they have no way to uphold. Then add the ACA and the low income are screwed - through no fault of the only job creators - the corporations. |
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Fri Nov 15, 2013 9:07 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Robert Reich
Even as household incomes continue to sink and the recovery sputters, the stock market is soaring: Since the start of the year, the Dow has risen 22 percent and the S&P 500 almost 26 percent. Which means the richest 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of all shares of stock are doing better than ever. Why the disconnect between the real economy and the financial one? Even though most consumers don't have enough dough to fuel a solid recovery and cause businesses to expand and hire, big corporations are (1) lifting profits by continuing to cut jobs and/or wages and benefits; (2) using their spare cash to buy back their own shares of stock, thereby raising the price of the remaining shares; and (3) borrowing money at rock-bottom rates (courtesy of the Fed) to buy even more shares or invest directly in the market, also boosting profits and share prices.
Such disconnects between the real and financial economies always end badly. When will this bubble pop? As soon as the Fed pulls in the reins. Janet Yellen, Obama's nominee to head the Fed, indicated at her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday she'd maintain the Fed's easy-money policy for the time being. That would make sense if the economic gains were more widely shared, and average working people could easily refinance their mortgages or get other loans at the low rates. But the major beneficiaries of the Fed's easy money are big corporations, Wall Street, and the very rich -- which is why the disconnect is becoming so perilous.
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Sat Nov 16, 2013 9:33 pm |
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