The GOP Plan for the Poor: More!

October 29, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Eduardo Porter of the NY Times, reports on his home state of Arizona, where I happen to be right now.

Arizona, where I was born, in July became the first state to cut poor families’ access to welfare assistance to a maximum of 12 months over a lifetime. That’s a fifth of the time allowed under federal law, and means that 5,000 more people will lose their benefits by next June.

This is only the latest tightening of the screws in Arizona. Last year, about 29,000 poor families received benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, 16,000 fewer than in 2005. In 2009, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, benefits were cut by 20 percent.

And of course it’s not just an Arizona problem:

… if Paul Ryan, the Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin who is expected to become speaker of the House, has his way, poor people in many other states can expect similar treatment in the years ahead.

Two forces are driving this very unchristian behavior towards “the least of us”: a deep and misplaced moral punishment ethos, joined with a states rights bias that pretends what “big” government can’t do, “state” government can.  Under this fig leaf the long-ago federal aid to the poor has been replaced by block grants to the states, which then distribute funds intended for the poor anywhere they want.

Even thoughtful Republican policy wonks, and this does not include any of the current candidates for GOP presidential nomination, think what was done, was done badly.

… states were given both incentives and tools to redeploy the money to other priorities. Notably, they could get around the requirement to meet job participation benchmarks simply by reducing the caseloads of beneficiaries — almost a direct instruction to bump people off.

“States did not uphold their end of the bargain,” said Ron Haskins, an expert on welfare who worked for more than a decade for House Republicans. “So why do something like this again?”

It’s well worth a read of Porter’s article to understand just how mean spirited and deceptive this has been, with promises of more such in the wind.

For an earlier article on the myth of welfare’s corrupting influence see here.

For a public apology and detailed analysis of the current policies of block grants see Peter Germanis paper, here.

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with , , ,

GOP — Kicking the Poor, Again

April 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

WASHINGTON — A proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10, an underpinning of President Obama’s economic agenda and an issue that Democrats hope to leverage against Republicans in the midterm elections, failed in the Senate on Wednesday.

The vote was 54 to 42, with 60 votes needed to advance the measure.

All but one Republican voted to sustain a filibuster against the measure, saying that the increase would damage the fragile economy and force businesses to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs.

NYT

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with , ,

Race, Ryan and Lazy-Day Hammocks

March 17, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Commenting on Paul Ryan’s “remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” Paul Krugman points out that it wasn’t simply Ryan being inarticulate, as he later claimed, but that since the GOP can’t face the facts about poverty in America they respond to the only dog-whistle they understand: race — “the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.”

NY Times: Krugman

And for more on Congressman Ryan, who likes to hearken back to his famine-Irish forebears, have a look at Timothy Eagan’s justified take-down of the Ryan rhetoric about “culture of dependency”  and “a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock.”  It is the same stuff the British said about the famine-Irish, exactly.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

Said Ryan:

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? asks Eagan.

Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

And the hammock?

“We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly … perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.”

The Irish Famine, 1845-1849, (1900). Artist: Unknown

The Irish Famine, 1845-1849, (1900). Artist: Unknown

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with , ,

The Rich Will Keep Getting Richer, Unless…

March 12, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Books CapitalSeveral commentators take a look at, and are impressed, with the new English translation of Thomas Picketty’s French published book, Capital in the Twenty First Century [Capital au XXIe siècle, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.]

“The most prominent for many readers might be Eduardo Porter in the business section of Tuesday’s New York Times (3/12/14)

“In his bracing “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which hit bookstores on Monday, Professor Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world’s economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies.

His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. Rather, the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time.

…income from wealth usually grows faster than wages. As returns from capital are reinvested, inherited wealth will grow faster than the economy, concentrating more and more into the hands of few. This will go on until capital owners decide to consume most of their income and stop reinvesting as much.

A growing share of national income will go to the owners of capital. Of the remaining labor income, a growing share will also go to the top executives and highly compensated stars at the pinnacle of the earnings scale.”

For a longer, more substantive look at the book and the arguments here are four scholars, writing at the American Prospect, Long Form, where the book is called a ‘triumph,’ beginning with Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson:

…another Frenchman with a panoramic vista—and far more precise evidence—wants us to think anew about the progress of equality and democracy. Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was.

…Piketty’s startling numbers show that the share of national income coming from capital—once comfortingly believed to be stable—is on the rise. Private wealth has reached new highs relative to national income and is approaching levels of concentration not seen since before 1929. Piketty’s powerful intellectual move is to place the subject of American income inequality in a broader historical and cross-national context. The forces most responsible for our egalitarian past, Piketty reminds us, were rapid growth—both of the population and of the economy overall.

And here, a snip from Heather Boushey’s article:

Among other conclusions, the data lead Piketty to describe the popular argument that we live in an era where our talents and capabilities matter most as “mindless optimism.” The data also lead him to reject the idea that wage inequality has grown as technological change increased the demand for higher-skilled, college-educated workers.

Piketty agrees that in the long run, investments in education are an important component of any plan to reduce labor-market inequalities and improve productivity.

Instead, Piketty’s evidence suggests it is the rise of what he calls the “supermanager” among the top 1 percent since 1980 that is driving the rise in earnings inequality.

Brad Delong, at UC Berkeley, adds his take:

If I had to summarize the lessons that I drew from Piketty’s book powerpoint presentation for his Helsinki Lecture, I would say that they are four.

+ he links us to Picketty’s own lecture/PowerPoint in Helsinki, November 2013.  There are some econometric equations included, but the gist is understandable — as it is from the reviews above.

His solution, if there is one?  Progressive tax schemes, estate taxes – rigorously enforced, which he thinks is unlikely.  I don’t think he mentions the R word.

Filed under Books, Economy Tagged with , ,

Corporations And Their Responsibility

March 7, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Today’s S F Chronicle featured a front page magazine piece about SalesForce.com founder, Marc Benioff and his push to enlist other Bay Area corporations to follow his in being good citizens:

Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff is challenging fellow tech leaders to raise millions to fund a new antipoverty program – and recast the industry as a local hero.

“We don’t want to be the industry that looks like ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ ” he told The Chronicle. “We want to be more benevolent.”

On Friday – the software company’s 15th birthday – Salesforce and the nonprofit Tipping Point will announce the formation of SF Gives, an initiative to raise $10 million over the next 60 days for Bay Area antipoverty programs.

Persuading 20 companies to contribute $500,000 apiece is just the start. Benioff, one of the city’s leading philanthropists, said he hopes to eventually expand the program to $100 million.  SF Gate

There is, by the way, a music event at Justin Herman Plaza, near the Ferry Building, all afternoon to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Sales Force and to raise money and food for that goal.

Now such corporate largesse would seem to be a welcome thing.  Who could complain about $10 million to help the impoverished?  The problem is two fold as I see it.  One, each corporation is necessarily guided by its Board of Directors along the value lines they set up.  Therefore, the decisions as to Who is supported, under What criteria for How long and When the help begins and ends are all privatized.  As we have seen recently, several corporations are suing the government for mandating medical care payments for services they don’t like.  It follows that a corporation or consortium of corporations will, predictably, have opinions about who the Deserving Poor are and distribute their support accordingly.

Secondly, the corporate anti-poverty push is so far, and likely to remain so, a local affair.  The Bay Area is home to Sales Force and many other mega billion dollar companies; Gallup, New Mexico is not.  The result of such local action will follow in the tracks of the public school system in which wealthy districts hold million dollar fund raisers every year; their districts far outstrip their poor brethren in the breadth of school offerings, size of classes, excellence of facilities, availability and quality of extra-curricular activities.  The notion of equal education and opportunity is lost but denied, since all are still in ‘public schools.’

Thirdly, how much is $10 million anyway?  According to a Forbes article, the US spends $550 billion yearly to alleviate poverty.  My calculator won’t show in decimal format how small a percentage that $10 million is.

Fourthly, why is such giving necessary in the first place?  Why are there so many poor?  Why, for example, is San Francisco the city in the nation where the disparity between its rich and its poor has grown the fastest?

What are the structural economic reasons for this?  Have salaries for Sales Force janitors, electricians and grounds keepers kept pace with those of the Benioffs and top managers?  Have the associated companies taken advantage of city and county tax breaks, thereby diminishing taxes available for infrastructure jobs?  Perhaps the smart guys in these corporations could help us all figure this out.  What are the algorithms of production, distribution and consumption most likely to get us to a stable, growth economy, where all who wish to work can, and those who are unable to work are provided for?  Where are the super-computer models that could help us move forward?

Finally, such corporate largesse if it does not now, will surely, be weighed against their corporate tax obligations.  Perhaps such gifts are already tax deductible, depriving the governments (state and national) from making decisions and allocations of tax moneys — based on input from affected communities and debates which, in theory at least,   are public.  Corporate Board decisions are not public.  Who are their constituents?  If the donations are not now deductible you can be sure that the argument will be advanced, strongly, that they should be, or should be more deductible if such corporate giving shows a decent track record in the next years.

And how have corporations done with their responsibilities to the national community through fair and equal taxation?  The corporate record can barely even be called spotty. According to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice:

“A comprehensive, five-year study of 288 profitable Fortune 500 companies finds that twenty-six paid no federal corporate income tax over the five-year period; 111 paid no federal corporate income tax in at least one of the last five years, and one-third paid a U.S. tax rate less than 10 percent over the same period,” says a recent study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group.

Among the companies that paid not a single penny over five years, despite making huge profits, are household names such as Boeing, General Electric, Priceline.com, and Verizon.

[Just scanning the report will set your hair on fire…]

Corporate Tax Dodgers

Further, the hue and cry from the GOP to roll back corporate taxes and compensate for lost revenue by stitching up loop-holes in the law is about to go silent completely, after a report by one of its own shows how many toes would have to be stepped on to come close to maintaining revenues while rolling back top tax rates.

… the Tax Reform Act of 2014 proposed last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican …  seems unlikely to go anywhere, in no small part because the House Republican leadership has gone out of its way to distance itself from the proposal, praising Mr. Camp for his diligence and calling it worthy of consideration but not getting close to an endorsement.

In the talk about tax reform, there has been a general agreement that top rates should be reduced and loopholes closed, something Mr. Ryan has loudly endorsed. But there has been a great reluctance to get specific. This proposal does get specific, and in doing so it makes clear that much more needs to be done to reduce tax preferences and loopholes if we want both to finance the government and to lower tax rates.

To make the limited progress he does, Mr. Camp has to attack many tax preferences. Some are easy (did you know that for some reason the National Football League is tax-exempt?), but many are not. Americans who work overseas lose a tax break. The tax credit for buying electric cars goes away. So does the credit for adopting a child. A lot of tax provisions to provide aid for higher education costs are consolidated.

And so it goes.…

It seems to me Benioff and friends would do all of us a big favor to put significant dollars into a tax reform campaign, into national discussion, payment for expert opinion, studies of other comparable countries, into its drafting and into lobbying to pass it — taxes which are recognized as corporate responsibilities.  After the payment of that obligated to the common good, and payment to workers of sufficient wages, if there is a strong benevolent ethos or particularly profitable years, additional gifting, corporately determined, would be a very nice thing, indeed.

Filed under Corporations, Poverty Tagged with , ,

Megalomania: MegaDelusional

January 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins is under fire for comparing criticism of the rich to Nazi persecution of Jews – but that hyperbolic analogy wasn’t his only inaccurate claim.

Income Changes

He thinks it’s not just unfair, but what, plutocraticidal(?), to attack those whose success is trickled down to the benefit of so many others. As Garofoli points out — ain’t much tricklin’ goin’ on.

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with , ,

GOP: Enemy of the Poor

January 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

From Krugman:

a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.

http://nyti.ms/1af0TuF

Filed under Poverty, Republicans Tagged with , ,

Picking on the Poor

December 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Bob Herbert in the NY Times

The poor are easy to pick on. They are the great boogeymen and women, dragging us down, costing us money, gobbling up resources. That seems to be the conservative sentiment.

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

Seconded by Paul Krugman

More than a million unemployed Americans are about to get the cruelest of Christmas “gifts.” They’re about to have their unemployment benefits cut off. You see, Republicans in Congress insist that if you haven’t found a job after months of searching, it must be because you aren’t trying hard enough. So you need an extra incentive in the form of sheer desperation.

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with ,

Not Too Far From Angkor Wat

November 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Scavengers in Siem Reap garbage dump

Scavengers in Siem Reap garbage dump

Not far from Cambodia’s  Angkor Wat temples, drawing millions of tourists a year, an enormous garbage dump serves as home and harvest ground for many.

See Omar Havana’s photo essay in The Diplomat.

Filed under Asia, Poverty Tagged with , ,

GOP War on the Poor

October 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Rolling Stone magazine, read mostly for its coverage of music (and I don’t mean classical) keeps a good eye on American politics as well.  Matt Taibbi regularly writes, as well as John Knefel, Bill McKibben, and others.

From the November issue here is a good piece by Elizabeth Drew: The GOP’s War on the Poor.

The GOP is pushing to decimate food-stamp programs, punishing the most vulnerable just out of sheer spite

The way the program to provide the poor with the bare minimum of daily nutrition has been handled is a metaphor for how the far right in the House is systematically trying to take down the federal government. The Tea Party radicals and those who either fear or cultivate them are now subjecting the food-stamp program to the same kind of assault they have unleashed on other settled policies and understandings that have been in place for decades. Breaking all manner of precedents on a series of highly partisan votes, with the Republicans barely prevailing, the House in September slashed the food-stamp program by a whopping $39 billion and imposed harsh new requirements for getting on, or staying on, the program. The point was to deny the benefit to millions.

And it’s not just Rolling Stone or Elizabeth Drew who think so.  Governor John Kasich (R) of Ohio has an identical warning

I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor,” Kasich told the New York Times in a story published Tuesday. “That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.” “You know what?” he added. “The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.

Filed under Economy Tagged with , ,

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