Even though the national economy keeps growing, the number of impoverished Americans doesn’t decline. According to the new census report, household incomes edged up slightly in 2005. But 37 million people are still living below the poverty line, about the same as in 2004. (Small comfort: It’s the first without an increase in poverty since 2000, just before Bush took office.)
About one out of four New Yorkers, for example, is living in poverty. New York’s mayor has appointed a commission to come up with ways to reduce that number.
Before Katrina hit, about one in four residents of New Orleans was also living in poverty. Today, New Orleans’ poverty rate is much lower. But that’s not because it did anything New York or any other city should try to emulate. New Orleans lowered its poverty rate by having a flood that wiped out the homes of its poor, and then made it hard for them to ever come back.
More than half of the people who lived in New Orleans before Katrina have still not returned. The poor have no place to return to. Their former houses are in rubble. Housing projects are closed. Poor neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward are still devastated. Inexpensive housing, even rental housing, is hard to find.
It’s an old story, really. Areas of any town or city where the infrastructure is most ignored – like the Industrial Canal levee that burst on the morning of August 29 a year ago – have the lowest property values. So that’s where the poor live. When there’s a flood or a leak of toxic wastes or any other calamity, these places are the first to become unhabitable. Which means, the poor often have to leave. Then the political and moral question is whether anyone cares enough to help them return and rebuild.
Sometimes cities actively try to get rid of their poorest citizens. Not long ago officials in Fall River, Massachusetts, tried to raze a low income housing project and not replace it with any other affordable housing. Other cities have been known to give the poor one-way bus tickets out of state.
But more often it’s a matter of simply doing nothing. Last September, President Bush promised more than sixty billion dollars for the first stages of getting New Orleans back on its feat. But he made that money contingent of the city of New Orleans developing a recovery plan. The mayor of New Orleans appointed a commission to do that, but nothing came of it. The congressman who represents New Orleans came up with a proposal but the White House rejected it. The New Orleans City Council tried to do something but it’s been deadlocked. The governor of Louisiana appointed her own commission but it hasn’t come up with a plan, either.
A year after Katrina and there’s no plan to redevelop its poorest neighborhoods, no housing for the displaced, barely a trickle of money to help them. Could it be that there’s no plan to bring back the poor to New Orleans because no one in power wants to bring them back? Or am I being too cynical?
Since the poor who used to live in New Orleans don’t have their own money to rebuild there, they’ll probably stay where they are now – in Houston or Dallas or Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi. At least until those cities figure out how to reduce their own poverty rates and send the poor somewhere else.
August 2006
7 posts
I’m baffled by the way the press has covered the tenth anniversary (this week) of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform — full of praise for a policy that has led to more poverty in America among single mothers and their children than before. I keep reading that welfare reform succeeded because welfare rolls were reduced. Of course they were reduced. People were kicked off welfare. How could they not be reduced?
TO be sure, the economy of the late 90s was so strong that many who were kicked off found jobs. Remember, between 1995 and 2000, some 14 million new jobs were added to the U.S. economy. That was because Alan Greenspan allowed the economy to grow fast, thereby pushing the official rate of unemployment down below 4 percent. In many cities, employers had to troll for workers — which meant a lot of people who otherwise could never find or keep a job landed and maintained one, and at a wage above the minimum.
But that was then. Now is now. Since 2001, barely 6 million new jobs have been added, and the recovery has been anemic. Large numbers of people are too discouraged even to look for work, which means they’re not counted as unemployed. As usual, it’s the poor and unskilled who are at the end of the job line. And worse may be in store: The Fed has raised steadily raised rates. The economy is slowing.
The welfare law signed by Bill Clinton allowed recipients to depend on welfare for a maximum of five years during their lifetimes. Assume they got off welfare and got a job in the roaring late 90s. During the anemic 00s they’ve been mostly out of work. If they’ve depended on welfare (now called “temporary assistance”) to keep their kids fed, their five years is about over.
Look, I’m not saying the old welfare system was a good one. I’m just saying we didn’t replace it with anything much better. The poor need health care, job training, a decent minimum wage, and income assistance while they get the training. They’re getting almost none of this. Above all, they need an economy that’s creating lots of jobs. They don’t have this, either. At the very least, the five-year limit should be suspended whenever the payroll survey of new jobs falls below the number needed to keep up with population growth (150,000 a month), as it has for months now.
The number of Americans in poverty has continued to rise during this so-called recovery. Many poor kids are in grave trouble. Instead of congratulating ourselves for “ending welfare as we know it,” we should be acknowledging that when it came to poor Americans we simply shut our eyes even tighter than they were shut before.
We’re in the dog days of summer. The President and his economic team met with reporters late last week to tout good economic growth and a shrinking deficit. But the University of Michigan’s latest survey shows consumer confidence dropping like a stone. The Administration is puzzled, and worried about the implications for the fall elections. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson calls the disconnect between the upbeat economic news and the public’s downbeat attitude “the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”
Paulson shows his age by referring to the title of an old TV quiz show that most Americans don’t remember. In it, contestants worked their way up to a big stumper of a question which, if they answered correctly, paid them sixty-four thousand dollars. But how can the Administration really be stumped by the public’s downbeat assessment of this economy? I mean, the housing sector is weakening, and homes had been piggy banks for extra cash as well as baby boomer retirement nest eggs. Meanwhile, the price of gas continues to hover around three dollars a gallon. No question about any of this.
But maybe Hank Paulson had something more subtle in mind when he spoke of a $64,000 question. Maybe, just maybe, he was taking note of the fact that median annual household incomes have dropped, in real terms, from about $46,000 in the year 2000 to $45,000 today. Yet if American households had been sharing in the growing economy the Administration is so eager to tout, median household income today would be well on the way to $64,000.
Rarely before in history has the American economy grown so nicely without most Americans sharing in the growth. Corporate profits are fatter than they’ve been in years. What corporations aren’t using for investment they’re awarding to their top executives or distributing to their shareholders. The top one percent of income earners, gleaning over $750,000 this year, are doing wonderfully well and are quite happy about the economy. The typical family — with stagnant income, a house that’s no longer a piggy bank, and higher fuel bills — is not. Hence the real disconnect.
Supply-side economics, meaning big tax cuts for the very wealthy, used to be called trickle-down economics on the assumption that some of the gains would be felt by average people. But in this economy nothing has been trickling down. The real sixty-four thousand dollar question is why the White House is puzzled that most Americans are so downbeat.
I talked this afternoon with a Dem strategist who’s been telling House members they should be planning now — in the ikely possibility they’ll win the 15 seats they need in November — for how to use their coming majority to showcase the Bush administration in all its lurid awfulness.
Imagine an endless parade of witnesses offering shocking details of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, torture camps, Cheney’s secret energy task force, payoffs to Halliburton, rigged electronic voting booths, Katrina, Valerie Plame, CIA failures, Defense Department usurpations, Iraq’s descent into civil war, and other coverups, deceptions, data manipulations, silencings, suppressions of science, crass incompetencies, outright corruption. Out of all of these hearings, he said, would comes a bill of particulars so damning that every 2008 Democratic candidate running for everthing from Indianapolis city council to U.S. president will be swept into office on a rip tide of public outrage.
After all, he said, didn’t House Republicans during the Clinton years wreak all the damage they could even when there wasn’t much of anything to complain about? Recall Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who while chairman of the House Government Affairs Committee issued truck loads of White House subpoenas along with a suplphurus guiser of unsupported uaccusations. Why shouldn’t Henry Waxman, who will fill the same shoes, give as good as the Clinton White House got? Imagine how John Dingell, who will run the House energy and commerce committee, could expose the intimacies between the Bushies and Big Oil; what John Conyers, Jr, in command of the house judiciary committee, could reveal about Bush’s trouncing of Americans’ civil liberties; or the job Barney Frank, at financial services, could do on the Administration’s nefarious links to Wall Street. Hell, why not try to impeach Bush?
I told him he was dead wrong. If they get the House back, Dems shouldn’t do anything of the sort.
First, they won’t be credible. The investigations and hearings would be seen by the public as partisan wranging. They might even cause the public to question what it already knows, allowing Republicans to argue it was all conjured up by partisan zealots from the start.
Second, they won’t get any new information anyway. Their subpoena power would have no effect on this White House. They’d end up fighting in federal courts for the whole two years. Besides, there’s enough dirt out there already to sink any administration. Although cowed at the start of the administration, the mainstream media have done a fairly good job since.
Moreover, Bush is the wrong target. His popularity could hardly be lower than it is already, which means 2008 Republican candidates in all but the reddest of red states will distance themselves from this White House. John McCain, should he be the Republican nominee, won’t be tarnished by Bush at all because in the public’s mind McCain is a maverick and independent. He’ll remain above the partisan mud-throwing while the House Dems would be mired in it.
Finally, House Dems have spent the last six years whining and complaining. That was understandable. There was ample reason, and they didn’t have the power to do otherwise. But if they spend another two years whining and complaining, when they do have some power, they’ll confirm the Republican message that Dems are pessimistic Eeyores, obsessed with what’s wrong with America and clueless about what to do or how to fix it.
I told him House Dems should use the two years instead to lay the groundwork for a new Democratic agenda. Bring in expert witnesses. Put new ideas on table. Frame the central issues boldly. Don’t get caught up in arid policy-wonkdom.
For example, instead of framing basic economic question as whether to roll back Bush’s tax cuts, make it how to recreate good jobs at good wages and rebuild the middle class. Consider ideas for doing this through trade policy, industrial policy, antitrust, publicly-financed research and development, and stronger trade unions.
Instead of framing central foreign-policy question as whether we should have invaded Iraq, make it how to partition Iraq into Shiite, Suni, and Kurdish zones while America gets out. Focus the national security debate on how to control loose nukes and fissile material, and secure American ports. Open direct negotiations with North Korea and Iran.
On energy and the environment, they should offer ideas for developing new non-fossil based energy industries in America, and how to ratify a realistic Kyoto accord.
Help the public understand how these are all related. Show why, for example, we’ll never have a sane foreign policy unless we reduce our dependence on oil, how the creation of new alternative-energy industries can help create good jobs in America, why good jobs are essential to a reviving the middle class and saving the environment.
Most important, be positive. Avoid the blame game. Bush’s shameful record is plain enough. Start the new record. Help America dream again.
Looks like Senator Joe Lieberman will soon be former Senator Joe Lieberman.
If he goes down, expect the Republican message machine to say his defeat in Tuesday’s primary means that the Democratic Party can’t tolerate dissent and won’t abide anyone who puts the nation’s security first. Dead wrong. Connecticut Dems are not particularly left wing. The Democratic Party has always been a big tent, and they’ve abided Joe Lieberman for 18 years. Most Dems in Connecticut and elsewhere are acutely concerned about the nation’s security. They’ve concluded — as have many Republicans — that Bush’s war is radicalizing the Middle East and recruiting more terrorists and enemies than we had before. We have to get out of Iraq, put it under an international authority until it can be petitioned into three separate states. Lieberman’s support of Bush and his insane war have stripped him of the right to call himself a Democrat and the moral authority to be in the Senate at all.
Every day the bad news from the Middle East gets worse. The only good news is this: All across America I’m seeing Dems more fired up than I’ve seen them in years. I’ve visited a bunch of congressional districts that had been in Republican hands and now seem poised on the brink of turning Democrat. The real lesson of Lieberman’s likely defeat is the Iraqi War has finally mobilized Democrats, helping them remember why they became Democrats and what it means to be a Democrat. And once fired up with the courage of their conviction, Dems have a good chance of taking back the House — perhaps even the Senate. And hopefully, in 2008, the presidency. Are you listening, Hillary?
Today’s payroll survey shows only 113, 000 new jobs in July. That’s well below the 150,000 new jobs needed per month simply to keep up with population growth and newcomers into the job market. The July jobs report follows disappointing jobs numbers for June, May, and April. What’s happening? Mainly, a slowing economy that’s particularly affecting home construction, where a significant portion of job growth in the last few years had been coming from. What’s the significance? More people out of work, typically for a longer period of time. More importantly, lots and lots more people who know someone who’s lost a job or can’t find one, news that sends a chill into the wallets and pocketbooks even of those who have jobs. Which, in turn, means a lower rate of buying. Which, in turn, further slows the economy. Add in higher fuel prices for the typical family (gas, air conditioning, etc) and we’re facing increasing odds of a r** (a word not to be written unless the odds become so high that the mere mention does not contribute to its arrival). But be warned nontheless.
My old college classmate Hank Paulson has been making the media rounds, seeking to assure all watchers and listeners he’s no Paul O’Neill or John Snow because he has Bush’s ear and personal assurance he’ll be a key player on economic policy. Hank may be a key player but his real problem is there isn’t going to be any Bush economic policy from here on — no trade rounds (Doha is dead), no entitlement reform (Social Security privatization is dead), no tax reform (dead, dead), no major extensions of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (even if Republicans keep the House after November, they have no stomach for more of this), no major cuts in non-military discretionary spending (all the low-lying fruit has been picked). No nothing, nada, zilch, zip.
Despite his boilerplate babble about maintaining a strong dollar, Paulson won’t be able to stop the dollar from falling because the nation is so deep in debt. Despite his China ties, he won’t be able to get the Chinese to revalue because tens of millions of peasants are coming off the land and wanting jobs, and the export sector is the only readily-available job bank for them. Despite Hank’s avowed concern about widening inequality and sluggish wages, he won’t be able to do a thing about them because there’s not a soul in the administration who has a single idea what to do, or, with the possible exception of Paulson, cares.
He met today with Ben Bernanke, apparently. Says they’ll be meeting monthly. That’s just as well. Bernanke is the only Bush economic appointee with any power to do anything from here on. But given the dire combination of price inflation with a slowing economy, not even Bernanke will be able to do much.
