Neil deMause: The Website

New York City and state are getting more and more isolated in their stance in favor of fingerprinting food stamp applicants:

The Obama administration has waded into the running debate over New York’s practice of fingerprinting food stamp applicants, with a top Agriculture Department official urging the state to discontinue a practice he deems costly and ineffective.

“More cost-effective alternatives to finger imaging [an electronic fingerprinting method] should be actively considered both as a cost savings and as a means of program simplification,” wrote USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon in a letter to state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance deputy commissioner Elizabeth Berlin that was sent on May 7, but first made public on Friday… [read more]

Okay, maybe the crazy right-wingers who think the health care reform law will bring about the end of civilization have a case after all:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year… [read more]

Yes, three articles in one day. In this one, I delve into a much-hyped Bloomberg anti-poverty program that didn’t deliver as hoped:

When Mayor Bloomberg announced in 2007 that he was launching a pilot program to give cash incentives to poor New Yorkers for changing their behavior—including bonuses for such activities as attending parent-teacher conferences and holding down a job—the hope was to come up with a novel approach to ending poverty.

“Even though it turns my stomach to pay a mother $10 to see a doctor,” Chinese-American Planning Council executive director David Chen, a member of Bloomberg’s poverty commission, told City Limits at the time, “in a practical sense it works.”

Or maybe not… [read more]

When is a welfare scam not a welfare scam?

If you read the Which Lazy Bastards Are Ripping You Off section of yesterday’s tabloids — you can find it after the Who Is Sandra Bullock Not Sleeping With/Adopting section — you may have spotted the story that the Post headlined “Millionaires’ welfare ‘con’”: The Brooklyn DA’s office was prosecuting 32 New Yorkers for receiving nearly $1 million in welfare benefits they weren’t entitled to. The Post zeroed in on a couple of landlords with “three luxury vehicles” who’d lied about their assets to get taxpayer cash; for NY1, the hook was a married Brooks Brothers employee who claimed to be a single mom on her application, raking in $460,000.

Only one problem with the headlines (and Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ press release that started the whole thing): Welfare benefits — aka public assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or whatever the government is calling the cash it allots to poor people to use for expenses other than food and medical care — turn out not to be involved at all… [read more]

Mayor Bloomberg picks his top welfare policy aide to tackle homeless services. What you think of this likely depends on what you thought of his welfare policies:

City Hall announced a major shakeup in its top human services staff today, as Robert Hess, who has been Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of Homeless Services for the past four years, is leaving the job. Hess is taking a position at the Doe Fund, helping run its job training program for homeless individuals. His City Hall replacement: Seth Diamond, the longtime deputy commissioner of the Human Resources Administration (HRA) who’s helped formulate the city’s welfare and food stamps policies… [read more]

Ten-percent unemployment be damned, New York City is still successfully placing welfare recipients in jobs. But what kind of jobs?

The most remarkable thing about the job placement trend chart posted on the city Human Resources Administration website each month is what it doesn’t do.

Unlike so many other charts of economic indicators over the past two years, there is no post-Lehman plunge. Instead, the line—marking the number of city public assistance recipients who’ve reported finding at least half-time work each month over the past four years—bounces up and down, but is remarkably steady: The number of New Yorkers who left welfare for work in December 2009 was actually higher than in December 2006, when the city unemployment rate was a record low 4.3 percent… [read more]

This article almost, but not quite, made it into a publication that shall remain nameless. Kill fee in hand, I now make it available to you here, free of charge.

On the scale of recent Albany misdeeds - Client 9, a legislator expelled for playing Freddy Krueger with his girlfriend’s face, rival state senate factions facing off with separate gavels - the state legislature missing its budget deadline last week wasn’t especially egregious. It wasn’t even novel: In all but two of the last 26 years, the budget has been late, making this a beloved New York tradition.

This year’s Albany stalemate, though, has higher stakes…

With Haiti starting to drop out of the news again (despite continued problems there for earthquake survivors, not least of which is the rain), it’s an apropos time for my article to appear on how the media covered the Haitian earthquake and its aftermath:

One of the most striking images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was of poor New Orleans residents crowded together outside that city’s convention center, days after the floodwaters had receded, chanting, “We want help!” It was a scene that shocked viewers and reporters alike, who had not realized that a major U.S. city could be home to so many people who lacked the economic means even to flee in the face of oncoming danger–though the promised national conversation about poverty that was supposed to result never really arrived (Extra!, 7-8/06).

Such images couldn’t help but come to mind in the aftermath of the January 12 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, where crushing poverty greatly worsened the devastation wrought in Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns. In TV news coverage, Haiti was described as “underdeveloped, overpopulated, and incredibly poor” (Nightline, 1/12/10), “extremely poor” (CBS Evening News, 1/12/10), “desperately poor” (CNN, 1/12/10) and, over and over, “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Reports focused particularly on the lack of building codes that had helped lead to such widespread destruction when the ground shook, and on the lack of government emergency services to rescue quake survivors and bring them supplies.

In many ways, the TV news coverage of Haiti paralleled the round-the-clock attention to Katrina–down to the ubiquitous presence of Anderson Cooper on CNN, asking why it was taking so long for aid to arrive. But if grinding poverty in New Orleans was seen as cause for outrage (however short-lived), in Haiti it was presented more as a natural state of affairs. …

The article is print-only (for the time being, at least), but you can find the latest copy of Extra! on newsstands, if you can still find any newsstands. Or drop them a line and ask how to send them $3.95 for a copy by mail.

The Associated Press today on the housing market and the economy:

BOSTON (AP) — Home sales in the Northeast rose in February as the economy showed signs of recovery, inspiring buyers. …

Nationwide, homes sales were up 8 percent from February a year ago, without adjusting for seasonal factors.

And the Associated Press today on the housing market and the economy:

Sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in February, pushing sales down to the lowest level since last July. There is concern the fragile housing rebound is faltering, making it harder for the overall economy to recover.

If you’d like to hear me natter about the health care bill’s effect on small business, I’ll be on WOC-AM in Iowa at 8 am (Central time) tomorrow morning, available here streaming over the interwebs. I’ll also be be on KMED-AM 20 minutes later (6:20 am Pacific), but that doesn’t appear to be streamed, so you’ll either need to live in Medford, Oregon, or have a tin can with a really, really long string.