Dick

Cheney, that is.

Do Not Mix Incarcerex with the Constitution or Common Sense

h/t Andrew Sullivan

Decling Wages Means Increased Poverty?

Imagine.

Read the brief report here.

Veterans and Homelessness

A new Congressional Research Service report, via the indispensable Secrecy News. (Scroll down for PDF link).

So far, 300 who served in Afghanistan or Iraq are homeless, with more than 1,000 more at risk. At least fifteen percent with a serious psychiatric disorder. And remember that most of our men and women have not come home yet, of course, and that after Vietnam it was often a full decade before Vets found themselves homeless. . . . .

Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually stupid.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won't listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away.

Being poor is making sure you don't spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Read it all here, via Ezra.

The State of Iraq, from the NYT

I See You

Some words from former President Clinton's commencement address:

In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent [that all humans are biologically indistinguishable from one another]. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more.

Mark Twain's _The War Prayer_

The Challenge

Living on Food Stamps. Sometimes there's a lot of month left at the end of the money. Many researchers now refer not to hunger, but to “food insecurity,” defined by the Census Bureau as “not always having access to enough food to meet basic needs.” It is widespread. The USDA estimated that more than 35 million Americans lived in food insecure households in 2005, which were insecure on average for six months during the year. According to Second Harvest, a national network of emergency food providers, in 2005 over 25 million Americans used a soup kitchen (which provide eat-in prepared meals), a food pantry (which provide bags of free groceries to take home), or ate in a shelter supplied by their food distributors over the course of the year. That’s about 4 million separate people in any given week; at least 9 percent of the population that couldn’t afford food. It’s almost 15 percent in big cities. About one-third were children, and 11 percent were elderly. One-third of the non-elderly adults in need were employed at the time of their survey, and about half of all food recipients had income above 130 percent of the poverty line, making them poor enough to need help but probably not poor enough to qualify for food stamps. About one-third did receive food stamps (although nationwide only about half of all those who are eligible actually receive them; in some cities it’s as low as one in four), but they reported that their monthly supply lasted only about 2.5 weeks

Insanely Cool

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

(hat tip Daily Dish)

No Better than Ezra

You're on your own, unless you're among the educated elite:

I tend to think it's easier to not see the lack of mandatory paid vacation and holiday as much of a problem if you're a highly educated, white collar worker, and even easier if you're a stay-at-home, freelance writer. It will simply never be true for you that the minimum is your reality.

But that doesn't mean it's not true for others. According to the CEPR study (pdf), about a quarter of workers don't get any paid vacation or holidays. If you make less than $15 an hour, that number jumps to 31%. If you do get paid vacation, on average, you get 12 days of it a year. That's less than the statutory minimum in every advanced country save Japan and Canada, and I'd bet the average in both countries well outpaces the average here.

And it's not just vacation days. Nearly half of all private sector workers get no paid sick days. In the bottom quarter of US workers, 80% are deprived -- and this is exactly the group that can't afford to take an unpaid sick day. And so far as family values go, only one in three workers has paid sick days they can use to care for ill children.

Fallwell's Dead

Here's his legacy, from The Navy Times:

Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.

There more.

The Poverty Business

The poor pay more:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Read the rest.

Yowza

Go play the clip HERE. You heard me, go. . . . . .

Homeless People Count

A terrific new report from Picture the Homeless. Get it HERE

Buying the War

From Bill Moyers. Watch it -- the best account yet of failures of the press in the run up to the Iraq War, with due attention paid to the solid work done by Knight Ridder.

UPDATE: Terrific review/overview via Glenn Greenwald. And there's Amy Goodman's interview, with excerpts from the documentary.

The Accidental Inventor of the Modern Poverty Line

From the NYT:

Mollie Orshansky, a statistician and economist who in the 1960s developed the federal poverty line, a measurement that shaped decades of social policy and welfare programs, died Dec. 18 at her home in Manhattan, a family member said yesterday. She was 91.

. . . .

Miss Orshansky, whose parents had known poverty in Ukraine, worked for the Social Security Administration from 1958 until she retired in 1982. She was “one of a respected but mostly invisible cadre of women research professionals based at S.S.A. and other government agencies during the postwar years,” the historian Alice O’Connor wrote in “Poverty Knowledge,” a 2001 history of poverty research.

“These women,” Ms. O’Connor wrote, “found job opportunities in federal government and other ‘applied’ endeavors when university jobs were largely closed off to them, although within government they were often clustered in research bureaus focusing on such traditional ‘women’s’ concerns as social welfare, female labor force participation, families and children, and home economics. That experience as a career government statistician, a far cry from systems analysis, was what gave Orshansky the wholly unexpected designation as author of the government’s official poverty line.”

In 1963 and 1964, Miss Orshansky conducted the research that would become the basis of the poverty thresholds. She used the economy food plan — the cheapest of four “nutritionally adequate” food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture — and multiplied the dollar costs by roughly three to come up with a minimum cost-of-living estimate. (A household food consumption survey by the Agriculture Department had shown that, in 1955, families of three or more people spent about one-third of their after-tax cash income on food.)

Miss Orshansky devised more than 120 poverty thresholds, adjusting her calculations for family size and composition and rural-urban differences. She published her research in a seminal 1965 article in The Social Security Bulletin.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had declared a War on Poverty, but there was no official definition of the problem at the time. In May 1965, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal agency charged with carrying out the antipoverty effort, adopted the “Orshansky index” as the yardstick to measure poverty.

It was a use that Miss Orshansky herself had never intended. “Orshansky developed the index as a research tool, not an instrument of policy of a criterion for determining eligibility for anti-poverty programs,” the historian Michael B. Katz wrote in “The Undeserving Poor,” a 1989 history of antipoverty efforts.

The federal poverty guideline — $9,800 for a single person and $20,000 for a family of four in 2006 — has long been criticized as understating the true extent of poverty. It also seems outdated. Food today makes up a much smaller proportion of household expenses than it did in the 1960s; the costs of housing, transportation, child care and health care have risen far more sharply.

In 1995, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences urged several changes in calculating poverty, but no major changes have occurred, in part because they would have the politically unpopular effect of increasing the poverty rate, probably by a couple of percentage points, which would require an expansion of benefits.

Miss Orshansky, a lifelong liberal Democrat, expressed sympathy with the criticisms of the poverty line. “The best that can be said of the measure,” she once wrote, “is that at a time when it seemed useful, it was there.”

From our students

The student body of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work of Yeshiva University would like to extend our deepest condolences to the entire Virginia Tech community at this time of sorrow. Our hearts and thoughts are with all of the families and friends of those touched by this tragic loss.

Wages, Wealth and Inequality

From MissLaura at Kos. With pretty graphs and everything.

"What if John Edwards worked at Wal-Mart?"

It's just the right question.

Pundits opine over whether or not John Edwards should suspend his presidential campaign in the face of his wife's recurrence of cancer -- a personal decision that's none of our business. But here's something that is our business, every one of us: what happens when ordinary workers' loved ones become sick with cancer, or for that matter, the flu?

Read the whole thing here. Go on now, it's short.

Hat tip to the always useful Cursor.