A lesson in poverty

Went to Fred's Discount store today to get a new shower head. Three people at checkout ahead of me. First one was an elderly black granny with a preteen granddaughter. Granny was digging in her purse to pay for garbage bags. She came up one penny short. The clerk let it go.

The next was an tiny older white woman. She paid for the soup and crackers with a SNAP card. It was so old it wouldn't scan. They had to punch the numbers in. She was fifty cents short for the OTC cold medicine. She was going to use her debit card. I offered to pay the fifty cents because it would probably cost her a buck to use the debit card. She didn't want to me to do it. She dug way deep in her purse and found the fifty cents.

The clerk told us she had to use her SNAP card to pay for a snack at work. She only had thirty cents left on the card. So she had to use her debit card to pay the rest. Except she only had thirty cents left on that so she had find three cents in her pocket to pay the balance. She said, "Hey. Two days before payday. You gotta do what you gotta do. Probably went without a snack today.

None of these people were fat. Obviously the clerk has a job. They were clean, reasonably well dressed. Clearly they're barely surviving even with the paltry assistance. It's heartbreaking to watch it happen. These are people who suffer when the GOPers cut assistance for the poor because they want to punish the one overweight person who goes through the checkout buying candy and soda.

Addendum: No sooner had I posted than I saw this, about administrative incompetence in distributing SNAP aid in NC. They talked about this at the checkout. The cashier said she waited six months to get a card after she had already been approved.

Homeless in Connecticut

I'm liking Connecticut's junior Senator more and more all the time. This guy gets it. In order to better understand the reality his poorest constituents face, Sen. Chris Murphy spent the day with a homeless guy. The guy did everything right. He overcame tremendous odds in his childhood to better his life. Then the crash came and he lost his job and his home. Now he's on the street and the paltry $400 a month he was receiving in UI benefits were cut off by the crackpot conservatives in Congress.

Thing is, this "fiscally responsible" policy makes it almost impossible for the homeless guy to get back to a decent life. He's trying to find a job but:

If there’s one thing Murphy took away from the experience, it’s a better sense of how critical stable housing is as a foundation for solving other problems. “Without a place to live, Nick can’t find a job,” Murphy said. “Without a house, it’s much harder for him to kick his drug habit.” But without more affordable housing in Connecticut and funding for the poor, it’s extremely difficult for people like Nick to leave the shelter and break out of the cycle of poverty.

Every damn politician that voted to cut assistance for the poor should be forced to spend a month in their shoes. Maybe that would cure their sociopathic callousness.

Hungry

Some days I just despair for the future of my progeny. Are we so far gone as a society to find it acceptable to watch our elderly and disabled slide into abject poverty while casino capitalists on Wall Street are raking in billions of nearly tax free winnings and corporate CEOs make 475 times more than their workers, who have reached the human capacity for increased productivity while sharing none of the gains?

With House Republicans hell-bent on cutting food stamps, some Congressional Democrats believe they can strike a "compromise" in the upcoming Farm Bill by "only" taking $90/month away from 850,000 poor families. [via]

And this on top of the expiring unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans which probably won't be renewed before John Boehner sends his House of Dysfunction home to enjoy their own comfortable holidays.

Simple fixes: Raise the minimum wage

One bright spot in our blithering national debate is this new push to raise the minimum wage. The right people are finally talking about it.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Business owners applauded President Obama in backing a federal minimum wage increase to at least $10 an hour. "The American Dream needs a minimum wage increase," said Lew Prince, CEO and co-owner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, the Midwest's largest independent music store. "The current minimum wage is too low for workers to live on and too low to sustain the consumer demand that businesses need to survive and thrive."

"We can't build a strong economy on a minimum wage from 1950, which is equivalent to today's $7.25 minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation," said Holly Sklar, Director of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. "The minimum wage has lost a third of its buying power since 1968, undermining working families, businesses and our economy."

Math so simple, even I can do it my head. Give the working people more money. They'll spend it right here in the good ole USA. Which will raise demand. Which will create more jobs and pump more money into the economy. Which will raise revenue for the government. Which will help eliminate the dreaded debt. The only people who don't get this are the "true" conservatives who are pretty sure if Dimmocrats like it and poor people don't suffer, then it must be some kind of commie, socialist, facsist, Kenyan plot. So they're agin it.

Let them eat --- nothing

Some 47 million Americans woke up yesterday with less money to spend on food. That's one in seven Americans who currently are in such economic stress they need assistance to feed their families. The $36 on average being lost monthly probably doesn't sound like a lot to the food secure, which is most of us. It's likely impossible to grasp the enormity of these SNAP cuts unless you've spent significant time in the physical spaces of poverty.

While in my many decades of existence on this planet, there has only been one day when I had no food and no money, I've spent much time among the working (and unable to work) poor. Not sure you can understand poverty until you've looked into the eyes of a hungry child across a dinner table. Believe me when I tell you if they qualify for EBT, the extra $20-30 makes a huge difference. Indeed for working poor losing $10 is a BFD. Oftentimes that's more than they have in their wallet to last a week.

It's easy to demonize SNAP recipients. One notices the impossibly fat-assed (and often rude) person ahead of you in the checkout line with a cartful of chips and soda and thinks why am I paying for that. But for every overweight person buying soda you see, there's 1,000+ underweight moms, disabled veterans and elderly singles trying to buy healthier food. You probably don't notice them. They have pitifully small orders. They try to conduct the transaction quickly and discretely out of embarrassment for needing the help. They're the ones digging in the bottom of their pockets looking for an extra coin to pay for the toilet paper. They will all suffer, much more greatly than the few who abuse the system. The abusers always figure out a new way to exploit it.

Worse yet, this is just the beginning. There's a mind boggling bi-partisan consensus to cut SNAP benefits even more:

The Republican-controlled House version of the farm bill proposes cutting $39 billion from the program over the next decade; the Democratic-controlled Senate would cut $4 billion over the same period.

WTF is up with these Democrats? Cutting food assistance is the most cruel and counterproductive GOP policy on the table. For one thing it subverts everything the Democratic party once stood for. And SNAP is one of the best stimulus for the economy. Cutting benefits will only throw one more roadblock on the way to some kind of meaningful national economic recovery.

The food stamp cuts scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1 will reduce spending by $5 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, and another $6 billion over the 2015 and 2016 fiscal years. They are expected to shave 0.2 percentage point from annualized consumption growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 and trim an estimated 0.1 percentage point off the annual growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. Those drags may seem small, but right now projections for gains in fourth-quarter gross domestic product hover around an annual rate of just 2 percent.

And on top of this, in January they'll be cutting unemployment benefits again at a time when millions are still without work that provides a living wage. Republicans have made clear they want to wreck the joint so they can blame the "tax and spend" Democrats. Instead of enabling this vandalism, every Democrat should be out there pushing for every form of stimulus possible. GOP is living in their alternate reality, but the true facts remain the same. Some 70% of our economic growth depends on the consumer spending. Democrats should be out there pushing every single day to give the people money to spend. Betting it would be a popular policy. [photo via ]

Give the people a living wage

Alec MacGillis asks a good question:

Liberals have spent years now agonizing over why it is that many working-class white Americans vote for the party whose policies on taxes, organized labor and much more work against their own economic interests—the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem. Well, here is an issue where lower-income people who vote Republican are quite clear about what's in their own interest—that is, they state a preference at direct odds with their party's line. Maybe it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to peel them away by actually talking up that issue?

Raising the minimum wage polls well with pretty much everybody except crackpot cons who are against anything that doesn't piss liberals off and the people who make a living exploiting minimum wage workers. All the focus inside the Beltway bubble is on the well off and reasonably secure but the working poor are the fastest growing demographic in our country. They're not feeling any grass shoots recovery in those circles.

Championing this demo could not only win back the House but a successful push to raise the damnably inadequate wage would actually help all the people. Hell, it might even restore the people's faith in government.

A McBudget for the working poor

"McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget." If this sample McBudget wasn't so cruel and insulting, it would be so absurd as to be funny.



Have to love that it starts by assuming their workers need two jobs to make ends meet. Of course that ignores the fact that few of their workers actually clear even as much as $1000 in a month, much less are offered schedules that allow them to get a second crappy minimum wage job with enough hours to make up the difference. And apparently they believe all their workers live in the tropics and thus need no money for heat.

In response to an email from Think Progress asking how they came up with this work of fantasy fiction, McDonald's had this to say.

The samples that are on this site are generic examples and are intended to help provide a general outline of what an individual budget may look like.”

I'd suggest their CEO try to live on that budget for a month or two and then get back to us on how well it worked. Measuring on the stupid or evil scale, this farce goes off the chart on both.

The Koch plan for prosperity

Charles Koch studies the problem of poor Americans. He's figured out what's keeping the poor folk down and has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant solution. Eliminating the minimum wage.

But how to convince the working poor that this odious requirement they be paid at least $7.25 a hour is a bad thing? That the real problem is a "culture of dependency" on government mandated fair wages because, as the Buddhists say -- money is suffering? Well, he launched a $200,000 ad campaign for that. Thus says the man with a personal worth of $43 billion:

The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. “That is the power of economic freedom,” the ad concluded.

Said world including billions of people who work for pennies a day in countries where there is no minimum wage.

I imagine the next ad will explain why a living wage is holding our economic growth down because giving the working class more money to spend is never going to increase buyer demand in a consumer based economy.

Predatory capitalists

There's no real news this weekend so here's your long read. ProPublica posts an eye-opening piece, "The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed."

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Corporations have been using temps to cut costs for decades, but under the latest iteration of this business model, the plan appears to be to virtually cut full time hires to the barest minimum in order to exploit a desperate job market and effectively shift the social costs of their predatory capitalism onto the taxpayer.

Read it in full to see our future. They're stealthily turning us into a banana republic. Hard to see how this ends well for anyone except the owners and their CEOs.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

Austerity kills

Austerity doesn't just kill economies, austerity is literally killing people:

Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health.

In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the "Great Recession" and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

The effects of forced austerity has reached practically genocidal proportions in Greece and if our homegrown austerity maniacs get their heart's desire we won't be far behind in the USA. They've been fraying the edges of the social safety net at the state level since GOPers took over the local legislatures and now with the stupid sequestration cuts, the federal safety net is in danger of falling apart altogether.

Difficult to not to sound like a conspiracy nutcase, but you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out if you keep limiting access to food and health care assistance for the poors and olds and kick people into poverty and homelessness, they're going to die sooner. Which of course eliminates the need to spend money taking care of them, the better to give more tax breaks to the wealth holders. Reminds of this classic quote:

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Not making any grand accusations, but as the world economy hinges more and more on a relative handful of people making money simply by moving around their money, the blue collar working class is becoming as obsolete at the buggy whip.

Sweet charity

I didn't find this at all surprising. Anybody who has ever worked in the restaurant/hospitality industry knows the rich are tightwads. Indeed the richer the are, the stingier they are with tips. So it goes with charitable giving.

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

It's not that rich don't donate at all, but they do it mainly for self-interested reasons. Like tax breaks. This is especially true of conservatives. Something that was made perfectly clear after the fiscal cliff farce of 2012 finally concluded and Ari Fleischer tweeted this threat.



The super wealthy also do it for prestige. Billionaires will donate hundreds of millions to museums and universities and other cultural insitutions that cater mainly to their social class to either get things named after them, or to advance academic work that suits their personal agenda. You won't see the Kochs endowing a chair in civil rights studies or labor law. Nor will you likely see the Waltons donating to Planned Parenthood even as Walmart's business practices create the welfare clients who desperately need the affordable health care.

The invisible victims of casino capitalism

I may as well have titled this "expendable people." Those would be the millions struggling to cope with having lost everything that formerly defined their comfortable lives. They live among us, nearly unnoticed by the throngs of the still secure who stride confidently down sidewalks to their next appointment or linger in cafes absorbed in their mobile devices. In the vast halls of our policy makers, they only exist as random numbers on charts and spreadsheets. The political overlords do not see their faces. They're too far removed from the reality of the invisibles' existence to have even the faintest understanding of their misery.

The luckier invisibles can still afford tenuous shelter in cheap motels but there is little hope they will find a way to return to any semblance of the middle class comfort they once enjoyed. Once the jobs they performed were essential to the creation of wealth for the investor class. Casino capitalism changed all that. Workers are expendable, a negative expense to be eliminated from the balance sheets lest they interfere with the profit margins.

Most of the invisible newly poor played by the rules. They worked hard to build decent lives. They were cheated out of everything, in one way or another, by the investor class. The end of their road looks like some version of this.



No one thinks it could happen to them before they get there. Truth is, it could happen to anyone.

Will you still need me, when I'm 54

This piece was written by a woman of relative privilege. She's not worried about where her next meal is coming from, or how to keep a roof over her head. But these grafs could apply to anyone who lost good paying jobs after the crash of 08. Thing is, with unemployment still too high and advancing technology allowing big employers to wring greater productivity out of fewer workers, "leaning in" is a cruel joke on 50something women:

Leaning in isn’t really an option for women like Marie and me, because frankly, it’s not even that easy to get someone to take our calls. In a world where newly minted JDs can’t get jobs, and college graduates are willing to take extended unpaid internships, very few employers have an interest in a 50-something-year-old woman who has been out of the workforce for 15 years and would now like a paying job. Hiring managers, facing a wave of thousands of well-qualified candidates, are going to toss out ones that try to substitute PTA executive board skills for work experience (and that’s assuming the resume even makes it through the computer algorithms that select a handful to be perused by a real person). Reading Sandberg’s prescriptions — get a mentor, don’t ever exclude options, lose your shyness and be assertive, negotiate like a man, marry a man willing to change diapers — I feel like I’m listening to a well-meaning yet clueless relative.

Women over 55 are generally ignored if they don’t have good jobs, lots of money, social standing, or powerful husbands. While this so-called “invisibility” problem has been well documented (just google “invisibility older women” and you’ll find a host of articles and blogs), today’s world seems fixated on youth, good looks and viral fame. Older women generally don’t elicit a second glance – we seem to have a sell by date and after that we’re pretty disposable – and to me, that lack of interest coupled with a resume that might have some blank spots, spells trouble if you’re trying to lean in.

The author of that piece will be okay no matter what happens, but for millons of women of lesser social standing, the desperate trade-off is between abject poverty and part time, minimum wage jobs in the service industry. Their economic security will never recover and even the employment they can find won't pay all the bills.

And it's not just women of a certain age who suffer in the age of austerity madness. Young people are finding it impossible to make ends meet as well:

“I never thought that I would be struggling as much as I have this year,” said Horton, whose already-stretched income dropped abruptly when her hours were cut at the disability services agency where she works.

The article doesn't say, but one can assume that agency almost surely depends on government grants to operate. The current mania to slash spending, mainly perpetrated by Beltway overlords who themselves enjoy income security, leads to this sort of downsizing. Which in turn leads to further economic contraction, which will lead to more downsizing in the private sector.

I've been mocked for saying this before, but I don't care. It's difficult to see this as anything less than slow motion genocide of the poors and the olds. These people are struggling to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families. Health care doesn't even enter the picture. The lack of proper nutrition, preventative health care and adding in the stress of living with permanent insecurity can only lead to many early deaths. So what else can you call it? [photo via]