Neil deMause

The Bloomberg Administration prides itself on basing its policies on hard data. But in the case of welfare policy, an analysis of new city documents (and conversations with city staffers) shows that it’s been picking and choosing which data to keep tabs on:

In last week’s State of the City address, Mayor Bloomberg pointed with pride to the fact that despite the economic downtown, his administration has “kept the welfare rolls at historic lows.” Over the past 15 years, cash assistance rolls have shrunk from 1.1 million to barely 350,000—a figure that conveys the city’s commitment to “work first” policies that began under Rudy Giuliani and have continued under the current administration.

But documents released to City Limits reveal that even under the famously data-driven Bloomberg, there’s much that the city can’t answer about who’s applying for welfare—and what happens to them when they do. …[read more]

You may have noticed the recent spate of articles on the Census Bureau’s decision to replace the old “poverty line” with a spate of different alternative measures of poverty, in hopes of eventually settling on one that makes sense. I’ve written before about why this is a good thing to do — more interesting at the moment is the Economic Policy Institute’s take on what the new numbers mean.

What EPI has done is sliced and diced the poverty figures to show how the poverty rate changes as you account for various government programs. (The official poverty line counts welfare and other cash transfers as income, but not food stamps or the earned income tax credit, which is one reason why people want a new poverty measure.) The upshot of their analysis: “Social Security is the most important anti-poverty program in the United States.” To wit:

There are other interesting takeaways from this chart, not least of which is that without government programs, nearly one American in four would be living in poverty; and that, even if you count government-supplied medical care as cash income, still more than one American in ten counts as poor. But “Social Security is the most important anti-poverty program in the United States” is a pretty good start — especially given some of the rumors floating around.

A multi-year campaign to require that all employees in New York City receive paid sick time (which I first wrote about last fall) was quashed in October by city council speaker Christine Quinn. What happened, and what does it mean for worker rights and the city economy?

Last winter, it seemed all but inevitable that New York City would become the latest city to pass a law mandating that all city businesses provide paid sick leave to their employees.

A coalition of worker-rights groups, including Make the Road New York, the Working Families Party and the legal advocates A Better Balance had lined up to push for the legislation; a veto-proof majority of 37 city councilmembers had not just endorsed but co-sponsored a bill that would require at least five days of annual leave for all workers. And with the nation in the grip of swine-flu panic, visions of restaurant cooks showing up sick for work had even some small business owners admitting that some kind of sick-leave law was probably inevitable… [read more]

As part of City Limits’ series on what New York is getting itself in for with its next governor, I look at Carl Paladino and Andrew Cuomo’s job-development plans (but mostly Cuomo’s, because Paladino had to leave the story early to go to the bathroom):

If the seven-member comedy act that was the October 18 gubernatorial debate can be said to have had a serious message, it was likely this: It’s the jobs, stupid. Amid the prostitution jokes, one of the most pressing questions of the night was how New York’s next governor plans to address an economic future that looks, by anyone’s reckoning, bleak.

Neither Andrew Cuomo nor Carl Paladino returned multiple requests for comment, but both have issued statements or proposals that provide insight into their plans… [read more]

I’m not sure exactly why NPR.org is running content from National Review Online, but if they’re all as unintentionally funny as this one, I’m all in favor of it.

In today’s story, Michael Tanner of the arch-libertarian Cato Institute (one of the Koch brothers family of thinktanks) sets out to explain why the Obama administration is at fault for keeping Americans in poverty. Argument #1:

For example, few things are as important in helping people escape poverty as education. High school dropouts are more than twice as likely to end up in poverty as those who complete at least a high school education. They are less likely to find jobs, and if they do their wages will be low. In inflation-adjusted terms, wages for high school dropouts have declined by more than 23 percent in the past 40 years.

An excellent point, and one I’ve made myself in the past. So is Tanner going to argue in favor of allowing people to go to college while receiving welfare benefits, thus allowing them to pull themselves up by their libertarian-friendly bootstraps?

Not exactly:

Yet Obama and the Democrats, in thrall to the teachers’ unions, steadfastly resist proposals to give parents more control over their children’s education. Washington, D.C., has a public-school system that, despite spending more per child than almost any other system in the nation, still has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent. Yet one of the first actions of the president and congressional Democrats was to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which offered vouchers to permit poor children to opt out of the city’s rotten public schools.

That’s right: The reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough charter schools. And never mind that charter schools aren’t any better on average than traditional public schools (or, for that matter, that D.C.’s school system is run by one of the nation’s loudest charter advocates, soon-to-be-replaced “Waiting for ‘Superman’” star Michelle Rhee).

On to argument #2:

And, of course, nothing is more important in fighting poverty than jobs. Yet the Obama administration is overtly hostile to the entrepreneurs and job creators in our economy. The wealthy are demonized rhetorically. Every other day seems to bring a new proposal to raise their taxes. Just look at the barrage of political commercials and presidential speeches that sneeringly denounce the Bush “tax cuts for the rich.” But, as former Texas senator Phil Gramm once noted, “No one ever got a job from a poor man.”

Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in economics, which just makes that quip all the sadder: Anyone who runs or works for a business that sells products to the masses — which is to say, most people who are not economics professors — has “gotten a job from a poor man” in the very real sense that without the spending of the non-capital-owning classes, their company would be out of business. (You may have personal experience with this of late.) And it’s more than a rhetorical point: Economists consistently score tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as lousy economic stimulus measures in terms of how much bang you get for your federal buck. (This is known around my household as the “you can only buy so many yachts” principle.) The best alternative? Giving money to those damn poor people, who you can at least count on going out and spending it.

There’s more, but it involves privatizing Social Security as a way for poor people to reap the riches to be made by playing the stock market, and I’m laughing too hard already. So kudos to NPR for its new humor column; I just hope no overly gullible readers take it seriously.

More light, and murk, shed on the legality of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed food-stamp soda ban:

In this corner: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to grant New York City a two-year waiver to ban the purchase of soda with food-stamp cards, saying it’s a matter of public health. In the far corner: Joel Berg, New York Coalition Against Hunger director and food program expert, who says it’s not only a dumb idea, it’s illegal.

When we last left our two contenders, they were engaged in a fierce game of “Is not!” “Is too!” about what exactly the USDA can and can’t approve without going back to Congress to ask for a rewrite of the law. So what does, you know, the law say? Here are the results of an Exclusive Village Voice Investigation:…

Lots of ink spilled today about Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed ban on food stamps being used to buy soda, but few have asked: Can he legally do it, and should he?

If you’ve been remotely awake today (or at least clicking on your morning Runnin’ Scared links), you’re no doubt aware that Mayor Bloomberg has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow New York City to bar its 1.7 million citizens with food-stamp cards from using them to buy soda. “This initiative will give New York families more money to spend on foods and drinks that provide real nourishment,” declared the mayor, while Governor Paterson — who actually co-sponsored the measure, but is getting ignored in the media because nobody remembers that he’s still governor — added that allowing food stamps to be used to purchase soft drinks “subsidizes a serious public health epidemic.”… [read more]

Home health care aides are both the fastest-growing job sector in the economy, and the last job anybody would want:

Though unemployment remains north of 9 percent in the “post-recession” city economy, there are a few bright spots for New Yorkers seeking work. If you’re a computer programmer or network systems analyst, for example, the state labor department projects that businesses will still be hiring for the foreseeable future. Or you could take advantage of the number one growth industry: home health aides, which are expected to add a whopping 5,230 jobs a year statewide. By 2016, according to the state’s projections, nearly 300,000 New Yorkers will be employed as home health caregivers, either as health aides or in the related field of “personal and home care,” which includes caregivers for the elderly or infirm who don’t handle medication.

For those without advanced technical skills thinking of a career change, there’s only one problem: Though demand for home care aides—who do everything from cooking and cleaning for home-bound patients to bathing and dressing them—is soaring, wages remain dismal… [read more]

The culture clash over New York’s falling welfare rolls — are they a sign of policy success or failure? — rears its head at a city council hearing:

On one thing there is no argument: Since 1995, when it reached a peak of 1.1 million, the number of New Yorkers receiving cash assistance has dropped dramatically, falling to a low of 334,000 in late 2008 before rising slightly and then falling again during the recession.

But despite the passage of years since the Giuliani administration launched welfare reform, and substantial policy changes under Mayor Bloomberg, a fundamental issue still divides city welfare officials on the one hand, and some New Yorkers receiving welfare and the social-service workers who advocate for them on the other: Is the city blocking people from receiving benefits to which they are entitled?… [read more]

Today the Christian Science Monitor — which in general has been doing some outstanding reporting since going online-only last year — hands over a page in its business section to the old argument, favored by conservatives, that poverty rates don’t really measure poverty, because they don’t account for increases in the standard of living. And what does the Monitor (and the economist it cites, Notre Dame’s James Sullivan) come up with?

For examples, back in 1960:

• A 21-inch black-and-white Philco tabletop TV cost about $1,800 in today’s dollars and could receive only a handful of channels;
• A refrigerator with freezer cost the equivalent of $1,510 in today’s dollars;
• A two-speed automatic washing machine, primitive by today’s standards, cost the equivalent of $1,100;
• Only 12 percent of homes had air-conditioning (versus 84 percent last year);
• Only 8 percent of the population had completed four years of college (versus 27 percent today).

That’s all well and good, but when most of us think about poverty in 1960, it’s not the horrors of not being able to watch the Golf Channel. (As Superchunk’s Jon Wurster said before attempting a cover song at last night’s show: “If you’d told me in 1982 that I’d be looking up Misfits lyrics on a cellphone … I’d have asked, ‘What’s a cellphone?’”) Rather, it’s not having enough food, or livable housing, or the knowledge of where your next dollar was coming from — in other words, the same stuff that the poverty rate measures today, albeit imperfectly.

To be fair, Sullivan does say that “the great recession is a significant setback,” and worries that advances in access to washing-machine techology, et al., have come to a halt. Still, putting the focus on technological improvements, instead of the bread-and-butter issues that continue to define poverty in the U.S., only gives fodder to those who’d argue that poverty is no longer an issue because the rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under air-conditioned bridges.