From the New York Times:
This winter has been especially austere. As part of the drive to cut spending, the Obama administration and Congress have trimmed the energy-assistance program that helps the poor — 65,000 households in Maine alone — to pay their heating bills. Eligibility is harder now, and the average amount given here is $483, down from $804 last year, all at a time when the price of oil has risen more than 40 cents in a year, to $3.71 a gallon.
and
As a result, Community Concepts, a community-action program serving western Maine, receives dozens of calls a day from people seeking warmth. But Dana Stevens, its director of energy and housing, says that he has distributed so much of the money reserved for emergencies that he fears running out. This means that sometimes the agency’s hot line purposely goes unanswered.
So Mainers try to make do. They warm up in idling cars, then dash inside and dive under the covers. They pour a few gallons of kerosene into their oil tank and hope it lasts.
In cold climates, people with outside oil tanks burn kerosene, because regular heating oil turns into a gel when it freezes, and clogs up the pipes. Kerosene doesn’t freeze. It’s also even more expensive than regular heating oil.
For older Mainers who live in drafty houses, that $483 isn’t going to go very far. It’s not even enough to fill up the tank once. A standard oil tank holds 275 gallons. Right now in Maine the cost of oil is approximately $4.00 a gallon.
From the Huffington Post:
How the cuts affect low income households varies by state. In Vermont, the effect will be minimal: State lawmakers are dipping into reserves to make up the shortfall from Washington’s cuts.
No such luck in Maine, which saw its allotment drop from $56 million to $38.5 million. Last year 64,000 Maine households received LIHEAP assistance, with an average benefit of $804. The quasi-state agency that manages LIHEAP will make sure no fewer people receive assistance, partially by shifting funds and partially by slashing the average benefit to $483.
John and Joan McAdams, a Maine couple in their 70′s, are doing this:
“At night we leave it down to 50 and during the day right now we run it at 60 degrees,” he said. “This is ludicrous. The wealthy can handle it. We haven’t got any money. I go to the food bank. All I get is outdated cans and a lot of spaghetti. There’s a rich versus poor situation in this country. It’s bad.”
He’s right. This is bad. This is the end result of the austerity we heard mentioned so proudly: older people freezing in their homes in what is considered the wealthiest country in the world.
Tags: austerity, Maine
A new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED)shows a major increase in what they call “asset poor” households:
In the United States, 27 percent of all households are “asset poor,” meaning they lack the savings or other assets to cover basic expenses for just three months if a layoff or other emergency leads to loss of income, according to the 2012 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, released today by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED). Since the release of the 2009-2010 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, the number of asset poor families has increased by 21 percent from one in five families to one in four families. The asset poverty rate is now nearly twice as high as the Census Bureau’s official income poverty rate of 15.1 percent.
An increase of 21% is certainly significant.
“Growing numbers of families have almost no savings or other assets to see them through if they lose their jobs or face a medical crisis,” said Andrea Levere, president of CFED. “Without savings, few will be able to build a more economically secure future, including buying a home, saving for their children’s college educations or building a retirement nest egg.”
Levere added that the Scorecard findings are “particularly disturbing in the context of precipitous drops in incomes for many Americans and widening of the wealth gap between the richest and poorest households.”
Last year Business Insider provided us with fifteen graphs looking at income inequality and wealth in the US. Graph #5 above illustrates the flat wages many of us have experienced since at least 1990.
A look at key findings from the report shows something of crucial importance:
One in five jobs (22 percent) is low wage and nearly half of employers (46 percent) do not offer health insurance. Most workers (55 percent) do not have or participate in retirement plans. These low- quality jobs make it harder for families to both meet their needs today and create a reserve for tomorrow.
As wages continue to stagnate, good paying jobs are replaced with low wage jobs, and the costs of housing, food, transportation, heating oil, and everything else continue to rise, how will people save for the future, when they can’t even make ends meet in the present?
And why aren’t the presidential candidates talking about this?
Tags: Housing
Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr, via Creative Commons
In July I wrote about folk stampeding for Section 8 housing vouchers in Dallas, when thousands of people showed up, some waiting all night, to get vouchers for subsidized housing. It was a terrible story.
Since then, nothing much has changed, other than the fact that even more people are in need of affordable housing. From The Nation:
In Oakland, California, which opened its waiting list in January, officials expected as many as 100,000 people to apply for 10,000 vouchers. In Atlanta, sixty-two people were injured in 2010 at an East Point shopping center where 30,000 lined up after the local housing authority opened its waiting list for the first time in eight years. Even small communities like Aiken, South Carolina, saw hundreds queuing up in October for a chance at housing aid about as likely as seeing three cherries in a row on a Vegas slot machine.
Another way you can find tangible evidence of the housing affordability crunch is by visiting one of New York City’s exploding number of homeless shelters, where a record 41,000 homeless people bed down each night, including more than 17,000 children. The New York Times recently told the story of one of those children, fourth-grader N-Dia Layne, who travels two and a half hours each day between her Upper Manhattan shelter and her school in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. In Cleveland, the number of homeless families and kids grew so rapidly this past summer that for the first time shelters were forced to eliminate daytime meals, housing-search assistance and other services in order to move workers to the overnight shifts, according to Brian Davis of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.
I had to read those New York numbers a few times. I can’t imagine that there are over 17,000 homeless children in New York City and this isn’t an issue being discussed in the endless presidential debates?
By nearly any measure, there are fewer and fewer homes affordable to working-class and poor Americans. The federal housing agency’s annual assessment finds that “worst-case housing needs” grew by 42 percent from 2001 to 2009, and nationwide there is a shortfall of nearly 3.5 million housing units for the poorest households. According to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the share of renter households with the most severe cost burdens—that is, where more than half of income goes to rent and utilities—grew from a fifth to a quarter over the past decade and has doubled in the past half-century. And as household incomes stagnated for most of the past decade and then dropped during the economic crisis, the nation saw its already inadequate stock of cheap rental housing shrink even faster.
It’s pretty simple, really. The cost of living is increasingly high, while wages are increasingly low. It’s not a recipe for keeping a roof over one’s head.
All of the plans to “end homelessness in 10 years,” either are, or will be abject failures. The programs were all underfunded, and as the budget for federal housing programs continues to shrink, their failure is guaranteed. In the name of “deficit reduction” these programs are being cut, and cut again – with the goal being to eliminate them all together.
Despite the bleak policy landscape and the worsening affordability crisis, many local advocates and people working on the front lines talk about the renewed energy and hope generated by the nascent Occupy movement and the revived national discourse about income inequality. Donovan talks hopefully about the “other 1 percent”—the homeless and poor—saying that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the superrich 1 percent is “causing the other 1 percent to agitate, and to show that homeless people are something other than a herded mass. They’re saying, Enough is enough.”
The Occupy movement changed the national discussion when it began last fall. Instead of deficits and debt, we’re now hearing about income inequality, joblessness, and a host of other issues that weren’t even on the horizon over the summer. It is my hope (as someone living with housing insecurity) that Occupy brings housing to the forefront of our national dialogue.
Tags: California, Housing, New York
We hear a lot of talk about job creation, and bringing jobs back to America. We hear nothing about the kind of jobs we need the most: jobs that provide decent wages.
From the Los Angeles Times:
While productivity has grown by more than 80% over the last 30 years, wages have effectively been flat for 80% of Americans. So, although we’re making stuff faster and more efficiently, the benefits of that hard work have not trickled into the pockets of the people who do it.
In other words, more work for less pay.
First, companies are coming back to the United States because wages here are dropping, in real terms. At the same time, lower-wage corporate nirvanas such as China are no longer as cheap an alternative as they once were, partly because the sea of people who worked for next to nothing for so long have had enough and are rising up in protest.
The US is becoming the place to outsource low paying jobs to.
Second, most of the jobs coming back are not high-wage, union jobs with full healthcare and pensions. In fact, with concerted efforts by Republican governors in the Midwest to eviscerate union rights, times have never been better for corporate leaders seeking to lower labor costs. With labor costs in the U.S. dropping relative to those in the Third World, the president’s offer of tax incentives to other companies that in-source is unnecessary. As Citizens for Tax Justice points out, using a 2007 Bush administration study, corporations based in the United States already have plenty of tax incentive to locate here because “the United States takes a below-average share of corporate income in taxes compared to other developed countries.”
and
If you add those people to the people who have full-time work at or just above the minimum wage, at least 1 in 5 Americans — 30 million people — does not have a decent job. Which explains why, according to the Census Bureau, 46 million people — or about 15% of Americans — live in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.
This is a nasty reality that politicians shy far, far away from, when they talk about jobs. Many of us (I’m one of that 15 percent) are relying on part time jobs, or low paying jobs that result in us not having enough to live on. This means more people relying on the shrinking safety net, and the kindness of family and friends.
We need the kind of jobs that will rebuild the middle class.
Tags: income inequality, Jobs
Food banks in Nevada are trying to reach small communities in rural areas by setting up mobile food pantries. A truck comes in, volunteers unload, and begin to distribute the food. By the time they finish, nothing is left.
From the Las Vegas Sun:
The mobile pantries differ from traditional pantries because they’re scheduled, mass-distribution events that can quickly serve thousands of people, said John Livingston, Three Square’s chief operating officer.
and
As the Sandy Valley operation proved successful, Three Square officials scouted other locations that would benefit based on factors such as access to grocery stores, nutritious food availability and existing agencies’ capacity to feed those in need, Livingston said.
Without having to rely on a fixed location, the trucks can travel to the areas that have the greatest need.
Grace Immanuel sits in ZIP code 89106, where 27 percent of residents may go hungry despite food stamps and other services already provided in the area, according to a Feeding America report using 2010 data. It’s the same situation in neighboring ZIP codes.
Other mobile pantries began in surrounding rural areas known as “food deserts”: Pahrump, Mesquite and, earlier this month, Laughlin, Livingston said. A Caliente location will begin in February, he added.
Given that Nevada consistently has the highest unemployment rates in the US, it’s good to see organizations working together to provide assistance to folks in small communities that are often underserved. This is truly a creative solution.
Tags: hunger, Nevada
The US Conference of Mayors is meeting in Washington, and expressing their disgust with the ongoing spending cuts that leave their cities firmly mired in the ongoing economic crisis.
New York Times:
Only 26 of the nation’s 363 metropolitan areas had recovered their lost jobs by the end of 2011, and only 26 more are projected to recover them by end of this year, according to the report, which was commissioned by the United States Conference of Mayors. It will take at least five years for the 80 hardest-hit areas to recover the jobs they lost, the report forecast.
and
Not only has Congress failed to overcome partisan gridlock to agree on a way to created much-needed jobs by spending more money on infrastructure, mayors said, but even the small sources of federal support that cities rely on — whether the Community Development Block Grants that were devised by Republican administrations in the 1970s or more recent federal programs that help struggling cities pay for more police officers or firefighters — are being scaled back as Washington has made cutting the deficit a priority.
Now, here’s a thought:
Mayor James Brainard of Carmel, Ind., a Republican, said that the country must get to a point where it spends less than it collects in revenues, but that it must be done over years, carefully.
“We have to recognize that it can’t be done in one year without throwing us into a huge, much worse depression than we’ve had,” he said. “It needs to be a multiyear plan that doesn’t create terrible hardship.”
The report commissioned by the mayors can be found here.
The opening lines of the introduction:
No one has been hit harder by the Great Recession than the 8.8 million Americans who have lost their jobs during the most significant economic downturn in generations.
Our nation’s mayors are focused on doing everything we can to help the jobless, the underemployed, and those worried about losing their jobs.
That kind of concern is a real contrast to all the unemployed bashing we’ve seen by members of Congress and the presidential candidates. Let’s hope that folks in Washington are paying attention while the mayors are in town.
Photo by usmayors on Flickr, via Creative Commons.
Tags: Indiana, Jobs, unemployment
We’re all familiar with the mythos: America is the land of the meritocracy, not the aristocracy. The place where every boy can grow up to be president. Where the janitor can become the CEO.
The reality looks rather different. From the New York Times:
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”
One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents’ educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.
To put it a different way:
“The bottom fifth in the U.S. looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries,” said Scott Winship, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, who wrote the article for National Review. “Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor.”
Poor Americans are working their way up from lower bottom than other countries? Why isn’t this front page news? Why aren’t the presidential candidates currently invading NH talking about this?
Oh, wait. Here’s why:
Perhaps another brake on American mobility is the sheer magnitude of the gaps between rich and the rest — the theme of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which emphasize the power of the privileged to protect their interests. Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.
The privileged have the power to protect their interests. The non-privileged just get trickled on. This is grim news, coming on the heels of the recent report showing that one in every two families has either fallen into poverty or qualifies as low income.
The best way to turn this around is to continue to push for more jobs, better pay, and stronger unions.
Tags: income inequality, Jobs
In 2011, New Hampshire unions and supporters ultimately defeated HB 474, the first RTW bill filed by the current N.H. legislature. This was a real victory against the special interests and extremists at work in my state, but, sadly, it’s too soon to do the victory lap.
In February 2011, the N.H. House passed HB 474, a so-called “right to work” bill. N.H. has been fighting RTW for decades. It’s the hydra whose heads keep growing back, no matter how many times they’re cut off. As I documented in a piece called Threatening Their Own, threats from anti-union thugs started before the N.H. Senate voted in April. In What’s Behind Right to Work, we took a look at the special interests behind RTW and noted the arguments against it by former GOP state senator Mark Hounsell.
Current NH State Representative Lee Quandt has been an outspoken critic of the “right to work” agenda. Rep. Quandt is both a Republican and a former union member. On his own blog , Rep. Quandt refers to it as “right to work for less.” Representative Quandt’s criticism of how House Speaker William O’Brien led the House resulted in his being kicked off the House Finance Committee. The current N.H. speaker tolerates no dissent from the members of his own party.
Finally, in December we saw the failure to override the veto of HB 474.There was a brief sigh of relief, but the speaker had promised that RTW would be back.
He wasn’t kidding. It came back very quickly. HB 383, a bill that had been languishing in committee, suddenly loomed on the horizon At Blue Hampshire, a post titled “Son of Right to Work” warned readers there that it was coming back, and provided a link to the bill’s text. The bill is written to apply to state employees, but establishing a precedent is just what the union-busters are hoping for.
Today the N.H. House passed HB 383, by a vote of 212 to 128. NH Labor News posted a statement from N.H. AFL-CIO President Mark McKenzie:
Today a clear bipartisan coalition of 128 state representatives rejected the attempt by special interests to repackage HB 474, the right-to-work law voted down by the House in December. The fact that over a third of our House representatives – both Republicans and Democrats – voted against HB 383′s passage is a clear sign that Speaker O’Brien is losing momentum in his Tea Party-fueled campaign to pass the so-called right to work law.
While HB 383 only impacts state employees as currently written, it opens a back door for the Speaker and other Tea Party extremists to impose a right-to-work on all New Hampshire workers and businesses. Our legislators’ continued opposition to the right-to-work law in any and all forms the Speaker that New Hampshire’s people need jobs more than they need political attacks on workers.
As New Hampshire struggles out of this recession, Speaker O’Brien has shown no wavering from the extreme Tea Party agenda that has cost us thousands of jobs in the Granite State. Passing HB 383 is just another sign that the Speaker cannot admit defeat. He will push his agenda at any cost – regardless of how it impacts the people of New Hampshire.
N.H. defeated HB 474, the first RTW bill proposed by the current N.H. legislature. With HB 383, we’re going to have to go through the same process all over again.
Speaker O’Brien is much less popular in 2012, and so is his extremist agenda. Four special elections have been held in the last year, and every single winning candidate opposed RTW. As Mark McKenzie points out, this is a bi-partisan coalition of over a third of the N.H. House that voted against HB 383. GOP partisans are increasingly willing to distance themselves from O’Brien, a movement that will continue to grow as we move closer to the November elections.
The speaker continues to assert that businesses won’t locate to N.H. because we don’t have a RTW law, even though, when pressed, O’Brien was unable to name a single company that would move here if such a bill were enacted. In fact, Safrans, an international company, recently announced their intention to build a manufacturing facility in Rochester, N.H., and create some 400 manufacturing jobs. Safrans seems to have been undeterred by a lack of RTW legislation in N.H.
If Speaker O’Brien really wants to make his failure to enact RTW legislation his political legacy, N.H. workers will be happy to oblige him. We beat back 474. We’ll defeat 383, too.
In October we told you about the governors and legislators proposing mandatory urine testing in order to qualify for food stamps or welfare.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Rep. Jack Kingston from Georgia, who wants the unemployed to undergo mandatory drug testing to “qualify” for unemployment benefits.
The latest entrant into the drug testing wars is Michigan. From Huffington Post:
Officials in Michigan’s Department of Human Services want to bring back drug testing of welfare recipients, a controversial practice that Michigan courts struck down more than a decade ago. The new policy would differ from the one enacted under Republican Gov. John Engler in 1999, which required a urine test to apply for benefits and would have subjected recipients to random drug screenings.
and
Michigan state Rep. Jeff Farrington (R-Utica) introduced a bill on Dec. 13 that would require applicants take a drug test to qualify for FIA benefits. Under the proposed bill, which is still up for discussion, recipients who passed a drug screening would have the cost of the test deducted from their first benefits payment.
Great. Not only do they want to demonize the poor, they want the poor to pay for that demonization. Rep. Farrington should heed the lesson of Governor Rick Scott of Florida, whose misguided urine test policies lead to record low approval levels. From Mother Jones:
But with 96 percent of applicants passing the test with flying colors (and another 2 percent getting inconclusive results), the state is having to buy back a lot of clean pee: 11.5 gallons at $34,300 every month, assuming an average sample size of 1.5 ounces and and average test price of $35.
That’s spending an awful lot of taxpayer money just to harass poor people. It’s certainly not creating the big savings that Governor Scott promised his constituents.
I wrote in October:
On the one hand, we hear a lot of gnashing of teeth from DC about job creation, yet on the other, we have the ongoing blame being heaped upon those who aren’t able to find work and are living in poverty, as if being unemployed or poor were somehow voluntary.
It is deeply distressing to see this becoming a national trend.
Photo by micahb37 on Flickr, via Creative Commons.
Tags: Florida, Michigan, Rick Scott, unemployment
In the December 20th edition of Clocking Out was yet another story about the nutty NH legislature. Some members of the NH House are in favor of putting WARNING signs near the Massachusetts border, so that the good folk of NH know when they’re about to enter into that socialist republic. The best part of this inspired bit of lunacy, is that Rep. Jennifer Coffey, the lead sponsor, moved to NH in 2005. Guess what state she moved here from?
This week brings a new story. From the Concord Monitor:
House Bill 1580 is the product of such a brainstorming session this summer between three freshman House Republicans: Bob Kingsbury of Laconia, Tim Twombly of Nashua and Lucien Vita of Middleton. The eyebrow-raiser, set to be introduced when the Legislature reconvenes next month, requires legislation to find its origin in an English document crafted in 1215.
“All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived,” is the bill’s one sentence.
Yes, that’s right. These three state representatives want quotes from the Magna Carta; an 800 year old British document, in new bills going before the NH legislature.
I’ve been told by legislators that the average cost to the NH taxpayer for filing a bill is about $1500. Each bill that is filed by a state legislator goes to Legislative Services, where the bill is checked for compliance with other NH laws. Then it is printed up. So far, the members of the NH House have filed 840 potential bills.
Kingsbury said the “primary motivation” for the bill was to honor the Magna Carta’s upcoming 800-year anniversary in 2015. Citing quotes from the document will bring its historical importance to the public’s attention, he said.
And if they have to waste taxpayer dollars to bring that anniversary to the public’s attention, they will!
The majority of the people in this state don’t read ANY of the bills that go before the legislature. This is truly a bizarre vanity exercise by a trio of freshman legislators.
A translation of the Magna Carta certainly provides some interesting fodder for the 2012 legislative session:
19] No constable or his bailiff is to take corn or other chattels from anyone who not themselves of a vill where a castle is built, unless the constable or his bailiff immediately offers money in payment of obtains a respite by the wish of the seller. If the person whose corn or chattels are taken is of such a vill, then the constable or his bailiff is to pay the purchase price within forty days.
and
21] No sheriff or bailiff of ours or of anyone else is to take anyone’s horses or carts to make carriage, unless he renders the payment customarily due, namely for a two-horse cart ten pence per day, and for a three-horse cart fourteen pence per day. No demesne cart belonging to any churchman or knight or any other lady (sic) is to be taken by our bailiffs, nor will we or our bailiffs or anyone else take someone else’s timber for a castle or any other of our business save by the will of he to whom the timber belongs.
and
[34] No-one is to be taken or imprisoned on the appeal of woman for the death of anyone save for the death of that woman’s husband.
I can hardly wait to see these quotes worked into New Hampshire law.
Tags: Jobs, New Hampshire
