Tag: poverty
Joe Biden

Wake Up And Look At What's Really Happening In The Biden Economy

You may have noticed in recent weeks that alarming headlines about inflation – specifically, those ubiquitous stories about the cost of gasoline, or eggs, or other household goods – have vanished. Media outlets no longer feature those fearsome charts with arrows zooming skyward, or video loops displaying the latest eye-popping gas station signage.

Much as the mainstream media seemed to enjoy scourging President Joe Biden with the bad news about raging hikes in the price of everything, that depressing theme has disappeared because inflation is falling.

In October, what economists describe as “core inflation,” meaning the price of goods and services other than food and energy, declined to 2.0 percent – the target set by the Federal Reserve. And what they understandably call “headline inflation,” the more volatile measure of prices that include all consumer purchases, including groceries and gas, dropped on a monthly level to zero.

Got that? Zero. Year over year, the rise in personal consumption expenditures has plummeted to three percent.

So encouraging were those numbers to the financial sector – and presumably the central bankers at the Federal Reserve – that some now forecast a cut in interest rates. Dropping rates would likely prevent the recession that has been forecast (with glee) by many Republicans – and bring America in for a “soft landing” from the pandemic recovery.

Will Biden get any credit for this improvement? Not from most media organizations, nor from pundits who wrongly blamed him for the inflation spurt in the first place, when they knew that other countries were suffering much worse price increases in the pandemic’s wake. Indeed, too many outlets are barely even noting that inflation has collapsed.

At the same time, the president’s “Bidenomics” program has brought continued steady growth and strong employment, with the annualized gross domestic product topping 5.2 percent in October – and unemployment steady at 3.9 percent. Economists have long tended to view a four percent jobless rate as “full employment,” essentially the best that can be achieved in a capitalist system without spurring inflation. Our current unemployment level is among the lowest in the G-20 industrialized countries.

The reason is so simple that even a wingnut can understand: Under this president, the United States has seen an unsurpassed record of job creation, with 14 million new positions since he took office, far more than the last three Republican presidents combined. The social impact of high employment is profound, which is why traditional Democrats like Biden consistently promote infrastructure, education, environmental, and income support policies that boost jobs. As California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom explained during this week’s Fox News debate with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis (whom he crushed), the nation is now seeing the lowest rate of poverty in our history, as employment among Blacks, Hispanics, and women have reached new peaks.

Are you starting to see a fuller picture here? Let’s add a few more features: Personal income rose over five percent in the first quarter of this year and contined to go up into the second and third quarters. Consumer spending rose 3.6 percent, while housing investment increased to 6.2 percent, almost half again what had been predicted.

You may well retort that polling consistently shows – and the media persistently emphasize – that most Americans say they are unhappy with the economy and blame the president, resulting in poor approval ratings and endangering Biden’s reelection prospects. And that’s undeniably true, as far as it goes. But more than one expert now wonders why, if so many of our neighbors feel pessimistic and even angry, they keep buying stuff as if everything is working out just fine.

Economist Dean Baker suspects the influence of slanted news coverage and can imagine a very different political scenario. “If we had the exact same economy, and Donald Trump was in the White House,” Baker says,”Trump would be endlessly saying ‘greatest economy ever.’ Every Republican politician in the country would be amplifying the claim and all the political pundits would be writing that the strong economy will make Trump almost a sure bet for re-election.”

Sooner or later, the majority of Americans will wake up and realize that Joe Biden has not only protected us from recession but has created the conditions for a generation of prosperity. Let’s hope they figure that out before it is too late – and vote to defend the future from Trump’s madness.

No, People Shouldn't Be Living On City Streets

No, People Shouldn't Be Living On City Streets

A lot of smart voices seem afraid to say outright that homeless mentally ill people should be taken off the streets, forcibly if necessary. They may easily agree that the sad humans sleeping on grates and under bridges would benefit from coming indoors for medical care and other social services. But they can't concede that the public's right to use sidewalks, parks and train stations should trump a homeless person's desire to take over those spaces.

Thus, this headline in the Harvard Gazette: "N.Y. plan to involuntarily treat mentally ill homeless? Not entirely outrageous."

The piece mostly defended New York Mayor Eric Adams' plan to hospitalize mentally ill people without their consent, but the "not entirely outrageous" was wrongly apologetic. There is nothing "outrageous" about stopping people living in filth, hollering into the night and sometimes attacking bystanders from, in effect, denying others access to public amenities.

This is a good opportunity to revisit the views of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote in the 1950s about "private affluence and public squalor" in our cities and towns. He was referring to the size and comforts of American homes versus the shabbiness of our shared streets with their poor lighting and trash all around. In cities like Paris, he said, the opposite was the case. There, apartments were tiny and lacking modern appliances, but the world outside was well kept.

Galbraith was a liberal and meant "private affluence and public squalor" to reflect the ability of our rich to better limit their exposure to the broken-down public sphere. And so there is great irony in self-described progressives' insistence that the squalor of homeless encampments is acceptable in the name of affording dignity to the poor.

Some have sued the city making mostly specious arguments. New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, for example, holds that the program puts people at risk for being detained "for merely living with their illness while in a public place."

The lawsuit further complains that they could be forcibly hospitalized "solely because an NYPD officer perceives them to have a mental disability and nothing more."

But that's not how it works. When the police take someone who concerns them to a hospital, that individual then undergoes evaluation by mental health professionals. Anyone who has witnessed the growing number of disheveled souls screaming at passersby and sometimes slamming into them understands that the bar for involuntary detention is high.

And those who recall the horrifying incident in which a homeless man pushed a young woman to her death as a subway train approached would be at pains to downplay his level of insanity as a "mental disability."

Katherine Koh, a street psychiatrist in Boston, told the Gazette that the criteria for hospitalizing someone without consent are whether there is serious risk of self-harm or harm to others. A third, "inability to care for oneself to a degree that it puts the person at risk of serious harm," is less clear but an important consideration.

For a treatable population, she adds, expanding community-based mental health services and supportive housing would be the preferred outcome to long-term hospitalization. If more staff and facilities are needed, the public has a duty to build them. But the public won't have the money to build them if the homeless crisis frightens away enough business to badly hurt the local economy.

In the end, citizens should have the right to enter a subway without having to step around cardboard boxes turned into shelters. And recognize that those who can afford the private affluence of taxis don't have to endure the public squalor of the others who have to walk through it. Where is the justice there?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Millions Could Lose Health Coverage When Medicaid Emergency Ends

Millions Could Lose Health Coverage When Medicaid Emergency Ends

According to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, somewhere between 5.3 million to 14.2 million low-income Americans could lose their Medicaid coverage if COVID public health emergency declarations expire on July 15.

The declaration is expected to be renewed, however, the KFF analysis points to the precarious health care faced by many Americans .

Medicaid enrollment increased by nearly 25 percent throughout the pandemic as the federal government implemented a continuous enrollment requirement. This cost $47.2 billion, but the federal government granted Medicaid about $100 billion to cover the costs related to continuous enrollment.

The wide estimate of 5.3-14.2 million Americans at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage is due to uncertainty over how individual states will respond to the looming end of the emergency declaration.

The Department of Health and Human Services has renewed the emergency declaration regularly throughout the pandemic, and HHS is required to provide a 60-day notice to states if the declaration will not be renewed. However, HHS has not yet set an extension date.

More Expensive Healthcare?

In addition to questions about how long continuous enrollment will keep Americans on Medicaid, the federal subsidies that reduced the price of marketplace health insurance could be gone at the end of 2022.

In tandem with increased Medicaid coverage, the federal government subsidized private insurance beyond what the ACA already does. If those additional subsidies end at the end of 2022, millions will likely see their monthly premiums increase.

Not only did Medicaid see an enrollment spike, but Obamacare enrollment reached its highest level ever during the pandemic at 14.5 million Americans. Enrollees received subsidized marketplace insurance as well as a longer enrollment period, and more public messaging was spent on ACA enrollment.

Some healthcare advocates have argued that the increased subsidies for marketplace insurance should remain in place when the public health emergency declaration and continuous enrollment for Medicaid are peeled back. People who lose Medicaid coverage would then have the option to enroll in the subsidized marketplace insurance.

The Build Back Better Act had a provision in place to decouple Medicaid continuous enrollment and subsidized marketplace insurance from COVID emergency measures. The legislation would extend subsidized insurance until 2025, but the bill is currently in legislative limbo after Democratic Senator Joe Manchin pulled his support in March.

What the Future Holds

Another renewal of the COVID emergency declaration would postpone worries of lost Medicaid coverage until mid-October, but many Americans will still be living in healthcare insecurity when the next deadline rolls around.

A lack of clarity about the future also puts healthcare workers, already facing long hours and staffing shortages, in a worrisome position, already facing long hours and staffing issues

Jana Eubank, executive director of the Texas Association of Community Health Centers told The Texas Tribune, “We already have a huge uninsured issue in this state, and this [the end of continuous Medicaid enrollment] just could be a perfect storm. We’re busting at the seams. … The last thing we need are more uninsured people.”

Americans living in red states face a particularly daunting task when acquiring healthcare. Texas has the highest number of uninsured people per capita and is one of the 12 states that has refused to expand access to Medicaid as part of the ACA. The other states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Individual states have considerable power over who can enroll in Medicaid, and their power is set to further expand in the realm of abortion rights after the leaked Supreme Court draft that would overturn Roe vs. Wade.

To expand access to healthcare in these states, some have proposed increasing the subsidies for marketplace insurance to include higher levels of income.

What remains clear in these debates is that a significant number of Americans are at risk of losing health insurance and more permanent action is needed to prevent an increase in the uninsured.

To Save Americans From Starving, Congress Must Raise The Minimum Wage

To Save Americans From Starving, Congress Must Raise The Minimum Wage

Reprinted with permission from DC Report

Imagine Washington announcing today that for the next three decades your pay will increase each January. You'll get a boost to cover inflation plus 10-cents more an hour. That means your real pay next year, before taxes, will be $4 more per week.

Ask yourself, would you even notice an extra $4 a week in gross pay? Would you feel like playing by the rules and being a good worker was worth it?

Well, that's what has happened to the typical American worker since 1990, but no one announced it back then. And it's happened as unions have been pretty much destroyed, representing only about one in 15 private-sector workers.

As a middle-aged widow who lost her job and took minimum-wage work at a major national retailer to feed herself and her son, who live together in a town with low-cost housing, told me:

"You can't make ends meet on the minimum wage no matter how much you try. It is just not possible."

That's the prime reason Congress and President Biden must raise the minimum wage.

As private-sector unions have faded away, wages have fallen in tandem. The numbers and the pain of people like the widow show that Congress must step in, acting as a proxy union for the lowest-paid workers by raising the floor on wages in America. If lawmakers fail then taxpayers should expect rising costs for welfare to cope with social pathologies. We should all expect popular support for our tattered democracy will wither even more, putting our liberties in danger.

Inflation Toll

The story I pulled from the official data shows things are much worse than just the awful fact that the minimum wage has been stuck since 2009 at $7.25 an hour, its value being eroded by inflation even as America grows ever richer.

Each year, I do detailed analyses of W-2 wage and salary reports that employers send to the Social Security Administration. Its computers add up every filing and then a report shows how many people make how much in broad pay categories whether they had one employer or many.

What the wage data show is disturbing. America is becoming two nations separate and unequal, one with a minority of workers who are prospering, some making each year enough for a hundred families for a lifetime. Across the income divide more than 130 million workers struggle.

Republicans and some Senate Democrats claim that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs and force small businesses to close. That's not what past actual experience shows, at least not on this planet.

Faulty Argument

That argument is actually silly because it assumes that prices never increase so if wages go up businesses must fail. Nonsense. But should you find a dealer advertising new cars today at 1990 prices please let me know.

What the facts show that since 1990 our national wage pie, adjusted for inflation, has grown much bigger. Adjusted for inflation it was $8.8 trillion in 2019, up from $5 trillion in 1990.

But the way the wage pie was cut into slices changed significantly.

Let's look first at workers who always earn only the minimum wage. Such people exist, though they are not common.

In 1990 the minimum wage was $3.80. Adjusted for inflation it would have to have risen to $7.48 in 2019 just to stay even. But the minimum wage was only $7.25, the same as today. In absolute terms these workers are worse off, their meager slice of income pie shrinking.

In 2019 half of America's 169 million workers made less than $35,000; a third made less than $20,000. Only one in three workers earn more than $1,000 per week.

$620 a Week

What about the typical worker? That's measured by examining median pay; half make more, half less. In 2019 the median wage was $34,250 or $620 a week.

That's a real increase since 1990 of $5,712. That sounds good until you realize that in round numbers it works out to that dime an hour raise every January.

How about the average wage which includes those with ginormous paychecks? Real average pay rose by $12,225 to $51,916. That's two dimes and a penny more per hour each January. How much would you notice an extra $8.40 a week – before taxes?

Now let's turn to the extremely well paid, people whose pay increases alone meant they gorged on wage pie while most everyone else got crumbs.

Let's consider all workers making $1 million or more, roughly one in every thousand workers. Their share of the national wage pie rose mightily, from 3 cents in 1990 to a nickel in 2019. That leaves everyone else with a smaller share of the pie to divvy up.

What about the super-paid workers who made $10 million or more in 1990 and 2019 using 2019 dollars?

More Super-Rich

The number of super-paid workers is for sure small. But it grew five-fold from 739 to 4,024.

Their average gross pay increased from just shy of $2 million to almost $2.5 million. Simply put in 2019 they got six days of pay for five days of 1990 work.

Also, a record 222 of these workers were paid more than $50 million in 2019, averaging $89 million each.

Even if we assume that employers pay these top earners what they are worth, a society whose rules and regulations lavish every more pay on those to the top while hardly growing wages for two-thirds or more of the workforce is neither stable nor enduring. The chasm between the super-paid and everyone else is huge and widening and can destroy support for democracy, as we saw with the failed coup on Jan. 6.

Without unions to bargain for workers pay simply is not going to improve. Indeed, our government has put downward pressure on wages through the welfare "reform" act President Bill Clinton signed, which flooded the market with women who have few job skills and little education, a stealth subsidy for many employers because they could pay less. The child tax credit for working parents has morphed over time into a subsidy for employers who now capture its benefits by not raising pay. Those are just of many anti-worker policies our government put in place during the past 40 years.

Congress can fix this. It has to step in as a proxy union for powerless workers and raise the minimum wage. If we could afford a minimum wage in the 1960s that's equal to about $12 an hour today then we can afford to raise our pay standards in today's much wealthier America.

And to those small businesses that say they will fold if they have to pay their workers more there is an answer: Raise prices.

If you can't afford to pay a living wage and you can't raise prices, your business is already failing so put it out of its misery. You can always start a new business in the future — and with people making more money your chances of success will be much better because more customers will have more money to spend.