The Total Failure Of The War On Poverty

[EJ]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I'll make a quick response to EJ's post here since he happened to cite the example in Home Health Care Services. I co-own a business (not my primary source of income) that provides home health aides (and limited nursing).

We're under tremendous pressure from our public sector clients to cut our costs (reimbursement rates being cut). Our survival strategy amongst other things, is to grow away from those markets. Our peers in this business are under the same pressures. I don't see home health care wages increasing that much on a macro level, as the public sector (states/medicaid) and private sector (boomers who haven't saved enough) don't have the money to support that kind of growth.

I cannot vouch for the BLS' industry growth predictions. In 2007 they were projecting gaming as an employment growth area.

The BLS forecasting track record for employment overall is hilarious. The chart below is a comparison of 2004 BLS projections versus actual.

If the BLS were any good at forecasting industry growth then the US could be like China with the central government that targets subsidies to particular segments of the economy to keep it growing at 8% per year, except that to do that you need a trade partner like the US to buy the output that feeds the trade surplus that gets funneled into the government subsidized industries... and we are that trade parter.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I suppose sterilization is preferable to the gas chambers. But if one sees their fellow man in this regard it is a certainty that the gas chambers and ovens will of necessity soon follow.

I hope you will rethink this entire post. You are in the grip of real darkness.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Warren Buffett seem to be exceptionally big supporters of providing free family planning and contraceptives to residents in the developing world.

Although that is NOT to say anything/everything billionaires do is appropriate policy as we often share and learn on this forum.

But in having said that, How much does that really differ from a billionaire offering cash for tubal libations and vasectomies?

Take it another step in that direction and answer what if the cash offered was a stepped chart offering more money for those with criminal records?

Didn't Freakonomics (Donohue Levitt study) posit that abortion reduced crime?

What if felons and the economically unsuccessful were financially incentivized to voluntarily accept the prevention of their ability to reproduce?

What is the appropriate policy on the continuum where on one end is family planning/abortion and the other is eugenics/genocide?

[vt]

Re: The Total Failure Of The War On Poverty

Agreed a jobs/industrial policy is necessary but this has been attempted and was stopped by:

The Senate didn't pass a single appropriations or jobs bill in 2013.

"But nearly a dozen bills were bipartisan pieces of legislation that drew more than 250 Republicans and Democrats to tackle pressing issues—jobs bills, protections against cyberattack, patent reform, prioritizing funding for pediatric research, and streamlining regulations for pipelines.

These laws all went to die in Mr. Reid's Senate graveyard."

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...elowLEFTSecond

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

Re-tooling for a new career in a new growing industry is not easy, especially after age 50. But people do it all the time.

The glib strategy to increase wages: Leave A for B. Easier said than done for families that are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with kids to feed and no savings to finance the household during re-training. But the point is that there are rising wage alternatives to declining wage jobs.

It sounds like being cold and wet in the wilderness, to survive you MUST keep moving.

I wonder if a writer/filmmaker will find an appropriate modern day Grapes of Wrath?

I suspect the more glacial speed of modern day industry specific droughts and dust bowls will prevent many from seeing it, let alone framing it in literature/film.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

It sounds like being cold and wet in the wilderness, to survive you MUST keep moving.

"In a way, the company had made government unemployment benefits a part of its buyout package. They were saying, in effect: you go voluntarily and we’ll agree that we laid you off."

article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbar...b_3785104.html

[vt]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I agree with Woodsman and others here.

When I was delivering newspapers as a teen at an apartment building in D.C. I was friends with the workers in the building. I would have discussions with a black janitor that was so well read and intelligent I could not understand why he wasn't a college professor or in a leadership position in a company. I thought that his talent was wasted, and that it should have been recognized.

Every human has something to contribute. We have to find a way to make use of this as a society.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...n-d-williamson

This just got published.

it hits the hot buttons on both "war on poverty" and internal migration

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I agree with Woodsman and others here.

When I was delivering newspapers as a teen at an apartment building in D.C. I was friends with the workers in the building. I would have discussions with a black janitor that was so well read and intelligent I could not understand why he wasn't a college professor or in a leadership position in a company. I thought that his talent was wasted, and that it should have been recognized.

Every human has something to contribute. We have to find a way to make use of this as a society.

i would partially agree with a qualifier:

Everyone has the POTENTIAL to contribute.

Isn't the argument over the wide gap that can exist between potential and actual?

[Woodsman]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...n-d-williamson

This just got published.

it hits the hot buttons on both "war on poverty" and internal migration

Thanks for sharing, lake. It seems the ground is being prepared by the right for an offensive. So many similar stories across the right-wing media complex and starting from the head of the serpent, Heritage, then followed by the WSJ and now NR. And just as Obama begins reigniting his plans for a grand bargain.

Aside: It's almost charming that Kristoff still considers himself a liberal.

[EasternBelle]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

EJ,
such interesting statistics.
could you state the source of these wage projections?
Thanks,
EasternBelle

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...n-d-williamson

This just got published.

it hits the hot buttons on both "war on poverty" and internal migration

Swashbuckling, in the style of Kunstler, but way off the mark. Sample the comments.

[Woodsman]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

From Jesse's place and spot on:

When a ruling subculture that has become accustomed to crushing and liquidating things for its own power and pleasure, whether it is natural resources, the environment, crops, animals, land, or social organizations, eventually runs out of things, it can become frustrated and angry in its seeming impotence to continue on, to keep expanding.

Indirectly and somewhat benignly at first, but with a growing efficiency and determination over time, it will begin with the weak and the defenseless, attacking and objectifying them, even in the most petty of ways and impositions. It will turn to its critics, and then everyone who is defined by them as 'the other.'

That is when a predatory social and economic philosophy can turn into pure fascism, and start liquidating people. And finally it liquidates and consumes itself.

But really, no one wakes up one morning and suddenly decides, 'Today I will become a monster, and wantonly kill innocent women and children.'

Otherwise ordinary people get to that point slowly, one convenient rationalization for their 'necessary and expedient' behavior at a time. After all, they are the good people, they are the strong, they are the most successful and the favored.

They are the entitled, and not these others who would seek to drain them, drag them back down. They are the champions of progress and achievement and civilisation, the hardest working, and the epitome of mankind.

What could possibly go wrong?

"He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J. H. Newman, The AntiChrist

[wayiwalk]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

I don't see the articles on the "war on poverty" as anything more than a timely response to the 50 year anniversary of something, you know, capturing eyeballs and all that.

You won't get much traction for a movement for a "war on the war on poverty" when so many people can clearly see that the distance between the sligtly better than middle class and poverty is rapidly shrinking. I've got to believe that even the most twisted republican's pollsters can tell them that.

[vt]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...9a7_story.html

‘Great Society’ agenda led to great — and lasting — philosophical divide


View Photo Gallery — The War on Poverty, through the years: A history of anti-poverty efforts in the United States from the New Deal to now.

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By Karen Tumulty, Published: January 8 E-mail the writer

The ambitious “Great Society” agenda begun half a century ago continues to touch nearly every aspect of American life. But the deep philosophical divide it created has come to define the nation’s harsh politics, especially in the Obama era.
On the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty, Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a battle over whether its 40 government programs have succeeded in lifting people from privation or worsened the situation by trapping the poor in dependency.

Graphic


Some statistics about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Many of today’s fiercest political debates can be traced to the aspirations of the Great Society, the domestic programs it spawned during the 1960s, and the doubts it raised about the role and reach of Washington.

Johnson’s years in office saw the greatest expansion of government since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and even exceeded the scope of those Depression-era programs. The two parties have been fighting about it ever since.
“It is a kind of uniquely American thing that we have had all these battles over the size of government,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “The attack on government has been with us for decades, and it has been very effective. Progressives are able to overcome it when the problems loom largest.”
This may prove to be such a moment.
With battles underway over extending long-term unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage, leaders of both parties are feeling a new urgency to address the issue of rising income inequality, as well as the economic insecurity that many in the middle class are feeling. But to a large degree, that means coming to terms with a political legacy that reaches back to the 1960s.
“We created new avenues of opportunity through jobs and education, expanded access to health care for seniors, the poor, and Americans with disabilities, and helped working families make ends meet,” President Obama said in a statement commemorating the War on Poverty’s 50-year mark. “But as every American knows, our work is far from over.”
The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers released statistics showing that the percent of the population in poverty, measured to include tax credits and other benefits, has declined by a third since 1967, from 25.8 percent to 16 percent.
And in one clear echo of the Great Society, Obama announced Tuesday that five American cities have been designated “promise zones,” where the government will provide tax incentives and grants to address poverty.
But even as Obama celebrated the War on Poverty, GOP leaders were citing it as proof of liberalism’s failure.
In a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), a potential 2016 presidential contender, noted, “Five decades and trillions of dollars after President Johnson waged his War on Poverty, the results of this big-government approach are in.
“We have 4 million Americans who have been out of work for six months or more. We have a staggering 49 million Americans living below the poverty line, and over twice that number — over 100 million people — who get some form of food aid from the federal government,” Rubio said. “Meanwhile, our labor force participation is at a 35-year low, and children raised in the bottom 20 percent of the national income scale have a 42 percent chance of being stuck there for life.”
Johnson announced the War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address. Four months later, in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, he put forward a more far-reaching vision, declaring that “we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.”
It would ultimately include a raft of initiatives: Medicare and Medicaid, the first direct federal aid to school districts, Head Start, food stamps, landmark environmental legislation, the Job Corps to provide vocational education, urban renewal programs, national endowments for the arts and humanities, civil rights legislation, funding for bilingual education.
The political environment was ripe: The nation was reeling from the assassination of a young, idealistic president; Johnson had a firm hold on his governing coalition; and the economy was booming.
“Nineteen sixty-four was the beginning of about 11 or 12 years of massive change in the role of government, that went through Johnson and the Nixon years,” said Charles Murray, a political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whose influential 1984 book “Losing Ground” argued that the Great Society made the problems of the poor and disadvantaged worse.
But even as Johnson was cruising to a landslide reelection victory, the terms of engagement were being set for a longer battle. Conservatives often say it began when a Hollywood actor, who was co-chairman of Californians for Barry Goldwater, made a nationally televised last-ditch appeal for the GOP presidential nominee.
“In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the ‘Great Society,’ or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people,” Ronald Reagan said. “A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”
Goldwater’s campaign was astonished when its switchboard lit up with calls pledging money, Reagan later wrote. “The speech raised $8 million and soon changed my entire life.”
In a struggle that lasted through much of the 1970s, the conservative movement took over the Republican Party. Reagan was elected president in 1980 — in part, on his promise to dismantle much of the Great Society.
The programs, by and large, endured.

“Reagan lost, and the Great Society won,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a top policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. “If you look at the big things that happened during that period, most of them are still with us, and costing more than ever.”

But resentment and disillusionment with many poverty programs grew. In the 1990s, Clinton achieved something of a cease-fire when he declared that “the era of big government is over,” and overhauled the welfare system.

“Clinton very consciously set out to thread the needle on the portions of the Great Society that had become most unpopular with middle America,” Galston said.
But there remained between the two parties philosophical disagreements about the role of government, and resulting fiscal ones over how much of the country’s resources should go toward paying for it.

Obama’s election came at a time of deep economic crisis, as well as the opportunity presented by the fact that Democrats had control of the executive and legislative branches.

For liberals, that meant a chance to pass broad health-care legislation, which many considered unfinished business after Medicare and Medicaid. But that also brought a political backlash, which cost Democrats the House in 2010.
Some think a new dynamic is taking shape, as the economic recovery fails to lift those on the lowest rungs and to reassure the middle class.
“It seems entirely possible to me that by the 2016 election, the public will be ready to entertain a much bolder set of ideas about creating a more shared prosperity,” said Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under Clinton.

And even conservatives say they cannot risk appearing insensitive to the anxieties and insecurities of those who are struggling.
“The left doesn’t work, and the right has been indifferent,” said Newt Gingrich (Ga.), a former House speaker who remains one of the nation’s most prominent conservatives. “What you need is a new reform centrism that says, ‘We’re going to take the values of the right and the concerns of the left.’ ”

[vt]

Re: Are Rector's facts wrong?

One in three Americans slipped below the poverty line between 2009 and 2011

• BY BRAD PLUMER
  
  
• January 8 at 3:59 pm
  
  

How many people in the United States are poor? It's a surprisingly tricky question.
The "official" poverty rate was 15 percent in 2012. That number gives the impression that poverty is a bright line, that roughly one sixth of the country is poor and the rest are not poor. But that's a bit misleading. As a new report from the Census Bureau shows, a much, much larger subset of people slip in and out of poverty all the time.
For instance: Between 2009 and 2011, nearly one third of the country — 31.6 percent — fell below that official poverty line for at least two months. By contrast, only 3.5 percent of the U.S. population remained poor for that entire period. Both of those figures rose after the recession:

"A small fraction of people are in poverty for more than 1 year," writes Ashley Edwards, author of the census report, "while a larger percentage of people experience poverty for shorter time periods." In the years after the recession, the median length of time spent in poverty was 6.6 months.
The poverty rate we usually see quoted — the 15 percent figure — is the "annual poverty rate." That's calculated by "comparing the sum of monthly family income over the year to the sum of monthly poverty thresholds for the year." (The official poverty line is defined as $23,492 per year for a family of four.) So a family that had very little income for four months and then earned more money the remaining eight months might not count as poor for the year, even though they went through a significant period of hardship.
Here are the different ways that the census measures poverty over the past few years:

By any count, the recession made poverty significantly worse. Persistent, chronic poverty rose from 3 percent to 3.5 percent. Many more Americans experienced brief spells of poverty. The median length of time spent below the poverty line also increased, from 5.7 months before the recession to 6.6 months after.
There was also a fair bit of churn. In the first two months of 2009, there were 37.9 million people in poverty. About one third of them, 12.6 million, managed to escape poverty by 2011 — although many were still hovering close to the poverty line. And that improvement was counterbalanced by the fact that 13.5 million people who weren'tpoor in 2009 became poor by 2011.
By the way, the Census study above is looking at the "official" poverty rate, a metric that comes in for plenty of criticism. But the Census has developed other "experimental" measures, too. There's also this alternative measure of poverty developed by researchers at Columbia University that tries to be more comprehensive and arrives at somewhat different results. That Columbia study also found that poverty rose during the recession — but that it would have risen much more sharply had it not been for safety net programs such as food stamps, unemployment insurance and Medicaid.
Related: Everything you need to know about the war on poverty

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...2009-and-2011/