Tag: Poverty

Steve Kornacki, MSNBC host sitting in for Chris Hayes on Sunday’s Up with Chris Hayes, discussed the political posturing on fiscal negotiations with David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner and distinguished visiting lecturer at the Syracuse University College of Law; Joan Walsh, MSNBC political analyst, editor at large of Salon.com; Laura Flanders, founder of GritTV; Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress; and Avik Roy, former member of Mitt Romney’s health care policy advisory group, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Unlike the usual talk show, where right wing talking points are rarely challenged, Up pushes back and debunks those memes for the hollow myths and out right lies they are. This panel talks head on how income disparity and poverty are the real financial crisis and the insanity of “shared pain.” Topics about taxes on Wall Street transactions, defense cuts and closing loop holes that only benefit the wealthy were mentioned. You won’t hear that on “Meet the Press” or “ABC’s This Week”.

Heather at Crooks and Liars pointed out the conversation in the second video and responses in the third video to Avik Roy arguing how things are different now that when Bill Clinton was president and the nonsense that the rich already pay too much in taxes. The responses from the panel shredded Roy’s talking points. Here are just some of the comments from the panel:

   DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966 when Johnson was president, and the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent have gone in today’s dollars from 4 million to 22 million. In 2010, the first year of the recovery, 37 percent of all of the increased income in the entire country went to 15,600 households.

   We have created a privatized system to redistribute upwards and the reason people at the top are sharing a larger share of the income taxes because their incomes are growing at this enormous rate, but their burden is falling. And to suggest we don’t need to raise more revenue by applying it to people who are a success depends on this government, on living in this society, with its rules that make it possible to make that money is just outrageous. It is arguing that we should burden the poor and help the rich.

   […]

   LAURA FLANDERS: No, you’re right. we have 50, 5-0 million Americans living in poverty at this point with food stamp help for many of them. We’ve got 9 million Americans over the age of 50 who are food insecure. One in three of us have no savings whatsoever.

   I mean, you talk the Johnson years, in that period, ’65 to ’73 the war on poverty reduced poverty by 43 percent. We know how to do it. It works. That’s what we should be talking about. We are in a crisis where we’re going to see stimulus. We’re going to see stimulus of poverty and hunger in this country and it’s shameful. And again, going back to ’63, you had more than 60 percent of Americans, I think even in1983, 60 percent of Americans had private pension plans. Now, it’s under 20 percent.

   So these elders that you’re talking about, young people with greater unemployment than ever before. I mean, this is the stuff that we want to be talking about after the last election, children and poverty are exploding.

   JOAN WALSH: And also… we need higher tax rates for the tippy top earners because everybody likes to talk about building the middle class or rebuilding the middle class. Well, the top tax rate that the middle class we in the ’40s,’ 50s and ’60s. The top marginal rate was in the 90’s. I’m not saying you should go back to that, but you can’t say at 37 percent.

A lot worse. This should make you sick and most likely you will.

This report from the Center for Budget and Policies Priorities via digby:

Today’s Census report shows that in 2010 (pdf), the share of all Americans and the share of children living in poverty, the number and share of people living in “deep poverty,” and the number without health insurance all reached their highest level in many years – in some cases, in several decades – while median household income fell significantly after adjusting for inflation. The data also show that many of these grim figures and the level of hardship would have been much worse if not for key federal programs such as unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and Medicaid. Without unemployment insurance, for instance, 3.2 million more Americans would have fallen into poverty, Census said. All of that raises the stakes for the decisions that President Obama and Congress will make in coming months about whether to extend initiatives that were designed to address hardship during the recession, as well as whether to abide by a principle that the Bowles-Simpson commission report established that deficit-reduction plans should not increase poverty and thus should shield basic low-income assistance programs.

Specifically, today’s report shows that:

   In 2010, the share of Americans living in poverty reached 15.1 percent while the share of children in poverty hit 22 percent – both the highest levels in 17 years – while the number of people living in poverty hit 46.2 million, the highest level on record with data back to 1959.

   Both the number and percentage of people living in “deep poverty” – with incomes below half of the poverty line – hit record highs, with these data going back to 1975. Some 20.5 million Americans had cash incomes below half of the poverty line (below $11,157 for a family of four, and below $5,672 for a non-elderly person living alone) last year.

   Median household income fell 2.3 percent, or $1,154, in 2010, after adjusting for inflation, and those at the bottom of the income scale have lost far more ground than those at the top. Since median income hit its peak in 1999, income (adjusted for inflation) has fallen 12.1 percent for those at the 10th income percentile but only 1.5 percent for those at the 90th percentile. The income gap between those at the 10th and 90th percentile was the highest on record. These data go back to 1967.

   The number of Americans without health insurance climbed by 900,000 to 49.9 million, another record, with data back to 1999. The percentage of Americans without insurance remained statistically unchanged at 16.3 percent. Nearly one of every six Americans was uninsured.

(emphasis mine)

Americans turned to public health insurance in 2010

(Reuters) – More Americans became reliant on public health insurance and lost coverage sponsored by their employers in 2010, the U.S. government said on Tuesday.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage showed that more people turned to state and federal programs as employer-based plans became more expensive and as unemployment levels stayed stubbornly high.

About 1.5 million fewer Americans got their health insurance plans covered by their employers in 2010, while 1.8 million more joined government insurance plans.

snip

Healthcare programs, which account for a large percentage of the federal budget, are also expected to get a close scrutiny from a bipartisan congressional “super committee” that aims to slash at least $1.2 trillion from the U.S. deficit over 10 years.

snip

The number of people covered by Medicaid, the government program for the poor, increased 1.5 percent to 48.6 million, and Medicare, the government program for the elderly, 2.1 percent to 44.3 million.

Employers remained the biggest source of insurance coverage, with 169.3 million Americans covered by employer-based plans in 2010. That number, however, has been on a steep decline since 2000, when it reached 181.9 million, as such plans get more and more expensive.

The ACA does not fully kick in until 2014. From Jon Walker at FDL

Elections are often referendums on the general state of the economy. The electorate tends to decide whether or not to remove the incumbent party from power based on how well the economy is doing. Americans voters, for the most part, decide whether or not to keep a president based on the answer to a simple question like, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Since January of 2009, when President Obama took office, the American people as a whole are noticeably worse off financially. This is a serious problem for the Obama campaign, and why they desperately need strong economic growth between now and the election.

So much for electoral victory.

77% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

David DeGraw:

That ‘Official’ Poverty Rate? It’s Much Worse than You Think

The shocking poverty statistics released last week tell only part of the story.

September 23, 2010  While the shocking new poverty statistics from the Census Bureau indicating that a record 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009 emphatically demonstrates the severity of the economic crisis, the Census is drastically undercounting this demographic. Apparently the government’s poverty statistics are as accurate as its unemployment statistics.

   In my analysis, a key metric to judge the overall economic security and hardship level of a country is the percentage of the population living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck can tell you about the stress and psychological impact it has on you when you know your family is one sickness, injury or downsizing away from economic ruin. The employment company CareerBuilder, in partnership with Harris Interactive, conducts an annual survey to determine the percentage of Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck. In 2007, 43 percent fell into this category. In 2008, the number increased to 49 percent. In 2009, the number skyrocketed up to 61 percent.

   In their most recent survey, this number exploded to a mind-shattering 77 percent. Yes, 77 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. This means in our nation of 310 million citizens, 239 million Americans are one setback away from economic ruin.

(my emphasis)

Two Paychecks Away from Homelessness

The Las Vegas Sun newspaper has done something most other papers don’t bother with. They haven’t just paid lip service to homelessness. They actually keep on printing stories about homeless people.

Roger Jacobs

   I am a 51-year-old professional writer; throughout my 20-year career I have been an award-winning feature documentary producer (“Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes” and multiple educational documentaries), a trade and arts magazine journalist, a successful playwright (“Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller”), a true crime author and a literary event producer. For the past two years, I have enjoyed my role as a book and literature columnist for Pop Matters, a popular online journal of cultural criticism.

   But in the larger scheme of things, my credentials are utterly meaningless. In less than two weeks, my girlfriend and I will be without a home in a town where we have no friends, no family, and apparently no safety net to catch us when we fall.

   I have been medically disabled for the past eight years; my primary source of income is my monthly Social Security disability payment of $926 and whatever supplemental income I can earn within the $1,000 monthly limit, but with jobs in the freelance market few and far between in the new economy, several months often pass without additional income.

Rodger Jacobs is disabled. He has psoriatic arthritis. Many of the angry people who responded to his essay told him to go get a job at McDonalds. The lack of compassion is troubling – but the level of anger is even more disconcerting. I suspect that the anger some people have for the homeless is fueled by their own fears that they are only a paycheck or two away from being homeless themselves.