Neil deMause: The Website

There’s nothing more exciting than a new formula for calculating the poverty rate! Or at least so says New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who last week became the latest to put forth his own ideas (okay, actually those of Mark Levitan, a longtime NYC policy analyst) for revamping the poverty line. And there’s even a chance it’ll end up making a difference in policy towards the poor. Kinda. Maybe.

The new poverty measure unveiled by city officials at the recent NAACP convention presents New York City with a yardstick not just to count the city’s poor, but also to gauge the effect of anti-poverty measures and gain new perspective on New York’s residents – including the realization that poverty among the elderly and the employed is significantly worse than previously recognized.

The question now, say both city officials and poverty experts, is how the new statistic will be incorporated into city policies… [read more]

Soaring food prices, like soaring oil prices, are hitting hardest those who can least afford it, as well as the emergency food providers set up to help them:

With the price of a loaf of bread approaching that of a gallon of gas - isn’t it about time a refrigerator manufacturer follows Chrysler’s lead and offers a guaranteed price on groceries? - some in the media have begun to look at the effect on the nation’s 35 million people already suffering from recurrent hunger.

The unsurprising answer: “It pretty much sucks,” says Joel Berg… [read more]

NOTE: After I submitted my op-ed yesterday morning, Crain’s NY ran an excellent article with an in-depth look at how soup kitchens and food pantries are straining under the load. (Money stat: “The Food Bank For New York City, which provides the majority of food supplies for the city’s 600 pantries, is witnessing the sharpest decline in donations in a quarter of a century.”) Highly recommended reading.

My monster 10,000-word investigation of New York Mayor Bloomberg’s poverty initiatives is finally out today in the Spring issue of City Limits Investigates. To read it, you need to go to the City Limits website and either cough up $7.95 for the issue or $25 for a year’s subscription. I’ll give you a taste of my conclusions here, though:

Today, the city’s anti-poverty programs include some interesting and bold ideas, as well as long-standing efforts that have been rejuvenated by the CEO initiative. The mayor, as even many of his critics admit, deserves a great deal of credit for deciding to take on poverty after cruising to a commanding re-election victory.

There’s no question, though, that poverty was an obvious and pressing problem; for the mayor to ignore the city’s poor would be equivalent to turning his back on a population the size of Philadelphia. And whatever the good intentions of the CEO, New York City’s response to poverty remains replete with puzzling gaps and missed opportunities. For every aspect of poverty that Bloomberg is attempting to address with a new program, there’s another where the city is running in place—or moving backward… [order a copy to read more]

The Brian Lehrer Show has archived my appearance yesterday, debating deputy mayor Linda Gibbs on New York’s poverty policies; you can listen to the mp3 here. They’ve even helpfully broken up the archive into segments, so you can hear my interview without having to fast-forward through the preceding news item on the oral rape of children by bishops. (That oughta do wonders for my Google hits…)

I’ll be on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC in New York at 10 am on Friday, talking about my investigation of Mayor Bloomberg’s poverty initiatives in the soon-to-be-released Spring issue of City Limits Investigates. Tune in on 93.9 FM, 820 AM, or via the web stream to hear me answer the musical question: Two years ago Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed “a major reduction” in New York City poverty. Does his plan match his promise?

After a week off, I’m back in Metro today with a look at New York City’s best-kept secret for tax day:

With tax day coming up tomorrow, Judith Rubinstein is a bundle of energy, spreading the word about the tax rebate no one knows about. Called the city school tax credit, it’s an offshoot of the state’s STAR property-tax rebate. (It also has nothing to do with schools — welcome to Albany logic.) “When you do your taxes, there’s a box that asks, ‘Did you live in New York City for the last 12 months?’” explains Rubinstein, director of Connecting To Advantages. That’s the only requirement. “It’s the one stupid refund that you can get even if you don’t do the full tax form.”… [read more]

Also, as a special bonus for the text-messaging generation, I now offer the same article in haiku form:

Tax credit for all
Nobody knows about it
Bloomberg hates poor folk

Another op-ed in today’s Metro NY that’s somewhat akin to what I wrote for them - it’s not my headline, I know that the economic term “leakage” is a phenomenon and not a quantity of money, and the only time I’d use the word “Gotham” to refer to New York City is if I were covering Batman’s policy positions. (Tough on crime, light on inheritance taxes, I’m guessing.) My editing kvetches aside, though, the topic at hand is an important one: How spending money on the poor gets short shrift as a way of helping the economy.

If you’ve been following the debate in Washington over how to best kick-start the economy, you may have noticed an interesting twist. Along with the usual minutiae about which businesses should get to depreciate what, Congress has been consumed by a debate over whether to increase food stamps and unemployment insurance - not just to help the needy in lean times, but to help the country as a whole.

The issue first arose when the Congressional Budget Office declared that boosting benefits for the poor and unemployed was the quickest way to inject cash into the economy. Then Moody’s economist Mark Zandi - hardly a bleeding heart - said the best “bang for the buck” would be boosting food stamps, generating $1.73 in economic activity for every dollar spent. As a comparison, tax breaks for companies buying new equipment would produce only 33 cents… [read more]

In the course of responding to the New Yorker’s problematic profile of Rudy Giuliani a couple of weeks ago (by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s usually one of my favorite of their writers, but who usually sticks to environmental issues), I tackle the common belief that the sinking presidential candidate was a mastermind at tackling crime and welfare:

How will history judge Rudy Giuliani? With his presidential campaign (and political career) at a turning point in tomorrow’s Florida primary, it’s a question worth asking.

If there’s anything close to a journalistic consensus about Rudy’s reign as New York mayor, it’s something like what Elizabeth Kolbert expressed in a long New Yorker magazine profile of Giuliani earlier this month… [read more]

With Metro NY taking the last two Mondays off for the holidays, I get a special Wednesday op-ed slot today. The subject is appropriately holiday-themed: How attention to the poor disappears after Christmas, and what that means for those trying to provide food year-round:

With the holidays finally wrapping up, it’s time to mark the end of another season as well: the caring-about-poor-people season. Once the Christmas decorations come down, it’s once again safe to watch the news without fear of hearing about the plight of the homeless or of being asked to help out the hungry with a once-a-year turkey dinner… [read more]

And Metro seems to have figured out this Interweb thing now, so you can read it in sparkling HTML format! Woohoo!

The study that Steve Rendall and I conducted of nightly news coverage of the poor - which I mentioned last week would soon be out - is now online. (You can also grab a snazzy PDF version of it here.) Our key findings:

Despite being an issue that directly or indirectly affects a huge chunk of the U.S. population, poverty and inequality receive astonishingly little coverage on nightly network newscasts. An exhaustive search of weeknight news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC found that with rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina, poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships… [read more]