Birth of the Bureau of the Budget Blogging

Well, actually, it's the development of the B.O.B. (now O.M.B.), but where's the alliteration in that? Still, important stuff, and more fun than you may think.

UPDATE: Our friends at The Monkey Cage also point us toward this very, very cool NYT graphic. Go look, and, at the very least, hit the "Hide Mandatory Spending" button.

And I didn't get you anything. . . . .

I've just learned that it's National EITC Awareness Day! It is, in fact, among the most effective of American anti-poverty programs, which may be damning with faint praise, but still. . . . . .

More info from our friends at the IRS here.

Views from above, and from below

The passing of Louis Auchincloss and Howard Zinn.

Getting the Cops Off the Beat

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Spending Freeze?

Sullivan has a nice summary of reactions here. I'd add Robert Farley: "As a policy/PR stunt, the spending freeze seems geared entirely around satisfaction of the Washington Post editorial page."

ADDING:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Rise of Consumer Debt

Source

The Execrable Charles Murray

Charming, as always:

Although the government distributed billions of these food coupons, or food stamps, over the last half-century, only a small number have survived since they were replaced by a debit-card-like system. Now this coupon — and the master dye used to make the plate that created it — will be enshrined in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which on Thursday announced that it has acquired a large trove of materials related to the food-stamp program.

The materials, long housed at the Agriculture Department, which runs the program, were headed for disposal until last summer, when two museum volunteers alerted curators and helped arrange for the most significant items — nearly 200 in all — to be transferred and preserved. The items include food coupons, booklets, proof sheets, early artists’ designs and printer’s plates.

“What we did, effectively, was go over and cherry-pick the collection,” Richard Doty, senior curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the museum, said on Thursday. “We wanted to tell a story with it.”

The museum’s director, Brent D. Glass, said the acquisition was “especially significant considering the current economic hardships facing Americans today.”

A record number of people — 38 million, or nearly one in eight Americans — are now using food stamps, and nearly half of food stamp users are children. Some six million people report that food stamps are their only form of income.

Michael B. Katz, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on welfare and social policy, applauded the acquisition. “It shows an attention to the history of social policy, which is an important part of the history of this country that is relatively neglected by that museum,” he said.

Others took a dimmer view. “A roomful of material relating to food stamps is another example of why museums aren’t much fun anymore,” said Charles Murray, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who believes that welfare programs promote dependency. “I get chills when I go to a great museum and see Jefferson’s writing desk or the coat Nelson was wearing at Trafalgar,” he added, whereas an acquisition like this amounts to little more than political correctness. (“It’s spinach, and it’s good for us,” Mr. Murray said. “I say to hell with it.”)

On Haiti

via Nicholas Kristof.

The Other King

From the Center for American Progress:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shifted his focus in the dwindling years of his life to an audacious, but achievable goal: ending poverty in the United States.

In his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, King argued that the United States must change its attitude and approach toward the treatment of its poor citizens. He reasoned that since poverty knew no racial boundaries, he couldn’t limit his call for congressional action to assist only black Americans.

“In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out,” King wrote in 1967. “There are twice as many white poor as [black] poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and [black] alike.”

This was a radical—and unpopular—change for the preacher who is best known for pushing voting, employment, housing, and other civil rights for black Americans. At this point in his career, during what would become the final months of his life, he was widening his field of vision to seek an end to poverty among all Americans.

It’s appropriate as we pause to celebrate this year’s national holiday in memory of King’s 81st birthday to recall the relevance of his final struggle to the contemporary fight against poverty.

Read the Rest here.

Awful

Via Reuters:

The latest budget plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would force 200,000 children off low-cost medical insurance, end in-home care for 350,000 infirm and elderly citizens and slash income assistance to hundreds of thousands more.

And that's the best-case scenario under Schwarzenegger's prescription for filling the state's $19.9 billion deficit.

Refusing to consider broad tax hikes, he is relying mostly on $8.5 billion in reduced expenditures including drastic cuts to health and social spending that has long made California one of the leading U.S. states in providing help to the needy.

Schwarzenegger also is counting on the U.S. government contributing nearly $7 billion that he says is due California because of various federal mandates.

If federal money fails to materialize, the governor's plan would trigger deeper cuts that would dismantle entire programs, including the state's welfare-to-work system, CalWorks.

. . . .

"You're blowing entire holes in the safety net," said Kelly Brooks, an analyst for the California State Association of Counties, which lobbies on behalf of county governments that stand to bear much of the added burden from such cuts.

No one understands better than Anthony Arias, 25, who sought assistance from CalWorks in 2008 after he was laid off from his warehouse job in the midst of the recession.

Unable to find steady work, and sharing custody of his 3-year-old son, Arias had to drop out of community college east of Los Angeles as he slipped into a financial tailspin.

"It was getting bad to the point where there were days when I didn't have food," he recalled.

But with a monthly CalWorks check that helps pay his rent, and state-subsidized child support, Arias has since managed to complete training to become a barber -- a more gainful vocation with flexible hours that will enable him to return to school to earn a degree as a paralegal assistant.

"There's no way I would have been able to survive without the help of CalWorks," he said.

Arias is just one of 1.3 million CalWorks beneficiaries -- most of them children -- who will see their monthly assistance checks cut by 16 percent under Schwarzenegger's proposal, even if federal dollars sought by the governor arrive.

. . . .

Others programs on the chopping block include transitional housing for foster youth; low-cost Healthy Families medical insurance for needy children, the Medi-Cal healthcare plan for the poor, and a network of subsidized in-home care for the elderly and disabled.

At least 200,000 children are slated to lose eligibility for Healthy Families, with that number growing to 900,000 if the program is gutted entirely.

Nearly 90 percent of the 400,000 recipients of In-Home Support Services stand to lose care under Schwarzenegger's best-case scenario, and state reimbursements to providers of those who remain would be slashed to minimum-wage levels. Otherwise, the program would be abolished, throwing 350,000 caregivers out of work.

. . . . . .

The Political Power of Data Visualization

The Tattered Safety Net

The state of anti-poverty policy, such as it is. A panel discussion from the Woodrow Wilson Center, with Peter Edelman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Maria Foscarinis, Alice O'Connor, and Margaret Simms. Go -- watch.

UPDATE: Follow along at home:

Battered by the Storm

The Second Bill of Rights

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty

Urban Institute: Poverty and the Safety Net

Poverty Threshhold 2009

Edelman on Clinton and TANF

Not More Extremism. . .

It's just easier to see:

We live in a complex world and I don't mean to oversimplify this too much. But it seems to me that, rather than a change in underlying sentiments -- that is, more prevalence of quote-unquote extreme, alienated, nonmainstream, populist, pox-on-both-their-houses viewpoints -- what has instead changed is that these viewpoints have become much more visible. And the reason has to do with technology -- to some extent cable news but to a much greater extent the Internet.

Take the Tea Parties, for example. . . .

. . . .The change we are seeing is perhaps principally a technological one.

Nate has the rest.

Strawberries

From Pandagon:

. . . Certainly, the discussion of welfare has always been bogged down by moralistic hand-wringing over the idea that the poor might scratch out some pleasure they don’t “deserve”, because it’s supposed to be reserved for what Sarah Palin likes to call Real Americans---white, middle class, politically conservative. A long time ago, I read an essay by a woman on food stamps that really opened my eyes to how much this is true. She was describing how she got glares from people in the supermarket for having items as innocuous as strawberries in her cart. I’m sure if those people were confronted, they would say that they don’t want to pay for someone who is wasteful and that strawberries are just too expensive and don’t go far enough. But this argument is bullshit, because strawberries are nutrient dense compared even to most fruits. You get a lot of bang for your strawberry buck in terms of fiber and vitamin C. I think they even have more calories than most fruit. Clearly, the objection to strawberries is that they’re so pleasurable, and someone on food stamps is viewed as someone who doesn’t deserve even the smallest pleasures.

Healh Care Take-Away

Via Ezra Klein

Cash, Not Cans

From the NYT:

Ann Kansfield, who runs a weekly food pantry at the Greenpoint Reformed Church in Brooklyn, cannot bring herself to tell you this, so I will: She doesn’t want your cans. As uncharitable as it sounds, she doesn’t want your holiday food drives. Don’t be offended. She knows you are well meaning; just misguided, perhaps misinformed. . .

Read the rest.

"Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport"

From the History Channel, The People Speak.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger

"Like Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade, it has the potential to change American life."

Nicely Done

Josh K. publishes his Op-Ed. Anyone else having any luck?

Costs and Benefits

Tony Judt, in the New York Review of Books (emphasis mine):

I suggested above that the provision of train service to remote districts makes social sense even if it is economically "inefficient." But this, of course, begs an important question. Social democrats will not get very far by proposing laudable social objectives that they themselves concede to cost more than the alternatives. We would end up acknowledging the virtues of social services, decrying their expense...and doing nothing. We need to rethink the devices we employ to assess all costs: social and economic alike.

Let me offer an example. It is cheaper to provide benevolent handouts to the poor than to guarantee them a full range of social services as of right. By "benevolent" I mean faith-based charity, private or independent initiative, income-dependent assistance in the form of food stamps, housing grants, clothing subsidies, and so on. But it is notoriously humiliating to be on the receiving end of that kind of assistance. The "means test" applied by the British authorities to victims of the 1930s depression is still recalled with distaste and even anger by an older generation.

Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to "deserve" help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive.

But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to "quantify" the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify "humiliation"? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers?