Neil deMause

Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood has seen the city’s most dramatic increase in unemployment since the economic crash, leaping from 6.0% to 15.3%. Why has it been so especially hard hit, and what can be done to improve matters?

Three years into the Great Recession, and the dramatic rise in unemployment that began in 2008 shows little sign of abating. While the unemployment rate has eased slightly in recent weeks, much of that is the result of jobless who’ve given up even searching for work. In New York City, meanwhile, the employment news is not promising: The city’s jobless rate of 9.0 percent is unchanged from last year, now ranking higher than the national rate, and more than double what it was at the end of 2006. And the pain is not shared equally among the boroughs: Where relatively few Manhattanites are seeking work, in patches of the outer boroughs unemployment rates are well into the double digits… [read more]

I’m on FAIR’s radio show Counterspin this week, discussing the media frenzy around last week’s release of census data showing poverty is dramatically on the rise in the U.S. But what did the news stories leave out? Listen to Janine Jackson and I discuss that here.

With unemployment still through the roof, are job training programs just preparing people for jobs that don’t exist?

As the economy threatens to sink into a double-dip recession, pressure is growing for federal, state, and local governments to do something about the 16 million Americans who remain out of work. One solution popular with politicians of all stripes—and with both business and labor groups—has been job training programs to close the gap between employers’ needs and workers’ skills.

“Even though a lot of folks are looking for work, there are a lot of companies that are actually also looking for skilled workers; there’s a mismatch that we can close,” President Obama said in June in presenting a community college program to teach manufacturing skills. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg has launched a series of job training initiatives, most recently as part of his new Young Men’s Initiative to aid black and Latino teens—a cause to which he gave $30 million of his own pocket money… [read more]

Nouriel Roubini takes to Twitter to debunk last week’s rosy employment report, and I look at what it all means for New York City’s job picture:

Between the stock market nosedive and the S&P downgrade (based on a $2 trillion math error), last week wasn’t a great one for the U.S. economic outlook. There was, however, one glimmer of hope: U.S. employers reported they added an above-expected 117,000 jobs in July, as the unemployment rate fell from 9.2 percent to 9.1 percent.

Unfortunately, there to throw cold water on that hope was NYU professor Nouriel Roubini — best known as the man who predicted the housing bubble… [read more]

I’ve blogged a bit about the sports ticket bubble, but haven’t had the space to sink my teeth into the question of whether ticket prices are continuing to deflate, and if so what that will mean for the sports industry. Until now:

A few months ago, it seemed like Major League Baseball was in the throes of a ticket apocalypse. Through the first two weeks of the season, six teams had set all-time single-game lows at their current homes. The surprising Cleveland Indians led the American League Central in the standings, but remained in the cellar at the turnstiles. The New York Yankees, whose ultrapricey new stadium has been beset by empty seats since it opened in 2009, hosted record-low crowds for four games in a row. It was as if fans, having quietly absorbed more than a decade of price hikes and the advent of $9 beers, had spontaneously decided to go on strike…. [read more]

I’m happy to report that contrary to what I said yesterday, my entire article profiling low-income New Yorkers and how they make ends meet is now available online via the City Limits website. You can find links to all six sections here, or if you prefer individual links to each chapter, be my guest:

1. The Poor Have Numbers. Do They Count?
2. Even Entrepreneurs Need Food Stamps
3. From Blue-Collar to the Welfare Line
4. One Woman’s Plan to Beat Poverty
5. Sharon’s Homework: Self-Sufficiency
6. What Would Help Poor New Yorkers? Take Your Pick

You can also still order a print or electronic copy as well, but the new issue isn’t in the ordering system just yet. So if you want to see all the nice charts and photos, just hold tight and I’ll post an alert when your money is good here.

And now it can be revealed: One of the big projects taking up much of my time this spring was a special issue of City Limits magazine on low-income New Yorkers, how they make ends meet, and how government policy helps (or hinders) them in getting by.

Currently available online are the first two sections: My introduction on the anywhere from 1.5 million to 3 million New Yorkers (depending on how you count) who are poor, and the first of several profiles of low-income individuals — students, parents (single and otherwise), homeless shelter residents, low-wage workers — and their daily lives. From the former:

It’s a simple enough question on the face of it: How many people living in New York City are poor? The answer, it turns out, depends on how you count.

For decades, the milepost was the federal poverty line, a measure developed in 1963 by government statistician Mollie Orshansky to try to quantify how many Americans were in need. Noting that a federal survey had estimated the average American family’s food spending as one-third of its income, Orshansky took the cost of a subsistence “food basket,” tripled it and deemed families earning below that amount officially poor… [read more]

And from the latter:

It’s Monday, Jan. 31, and as usual, Tanya Fields is having a hectic morning. The Bronx mother of four has already had to juggle her schedule after her babysitter called in sick, forcing her to be late for an important appointment in downtown Brooklyn. But on this occasion—unlike her daily work running a nonprofit startup or her prior years as an environmental advocate—there’s no calling in sick or asking to reschedule: This appointment is for trying to keep her welfare benefits… [read more]

There are another four chapters after that, but the moment at least, you’ll need to buy a copy ($4.95 for a PDF, or add $2 shipping for a paper copy) to read those.

It’s well worth doing so, though, or else you’ll miss out on meeting people like Sharon Jones, Walter Greene, and Beverly Davis, and hearing what it’s like to live in the world’s most expensive city when your monthly income barely breaks four digits. Also, supporting City Limits, which enables me to write more of these stories. It’s a win-win!

[UPDATE: My entire article is now available online for free! But ordering a copy is still the polite thing to do.]

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.

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]

For anyone wondering whether Obama’s reported plan to give lots of investment tax breaks to businesses is really that bright an idea, Robert Reich today gives a resounding “no way, no how“:

The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.

The reason businesses aren’t investing in new plant and equipment has nothing to do with the cost of capital. It’s because they don’t need the additional capacity. There isn’t enough demand for their goods and services to justify it. Consumers aren’t buying because they’re trying to come out from under a huge debt load, including mortgage debt; they have to start saving because their nest eggs are worth substantially less; and they’ve lost or are worried about losing jobs and pay.

For those who’ve followed the world of corporate subsidies, this should be a familiar refrain: It’s the but-for question, stupid! When considering whether to subsidize economic development of any kind, the first question needs to be: Would the development happen anyway without the subsidy? Obama’s investment tax credit fails this first test, says Reich: Businesses will take the credit for investments they’d make anyway, but nobody’s going to build a factory to build crap they can’t sell just because they can get a tax credit for it.

So what we’re likely to see if this passes is the government handing out lots of money for spending that would have happened anyway, but not much else. At best, it might get some companies to shift some spending from early 2012 to late 2011 to take advantage of the tax credit, much like everyone rushed to buy houses back in April to get in under the gun for the homebuyers tax credit. And we see how well that worked out.

It always feels icky to hand out tax breaks to big businesses when tons of regular folks are losing their jobs and their homes. In this case, it’s not just ick-worthy, but lousy economics, too.