One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.
That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the World Bank).
America’s Poorest Are Getting Virtually No Assistance
They further note that the EITC expansion partially exacerbate the problem, by further increasing the supply of labor, thus putting downward pressure on wages.
.. the strong increase in labor demand, as the late 1990s ultimately became a unique period of truly full employment. For the first time in decades, real low-wages grew at the rate of productivity. In the early 1990s, poverty among black mother-only families with kids was around 60 percent. By the end of the 1990s it was around 40 percent, a massive decline over such a short time period.
.. if the Federal Reserve is the “lender of last resort,” then the government must be “the employer of last resort.”
Starting Over after Katrina: Malcolm Gladwell
‘Now, I hate that the storm came because a lot of people died in the storm, but, guess what, that was probably the best thing that could have happened to a lot of people, because it gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves if their life wasn’t going right.’ ”
.. The main lesson of our analysis is that intergenerational mobility is a local problem,” the economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez conclude in a landmark study of U.S. economic mobility, published last year. They mean that the things that enable the poor to enter the middle class are not primarily national considerations—like minimum-wage laws or college-loan programs or economic-growth rates—but factors that arise from the nature of your immediate environment. The neighborhoods that offer the best opportunities for those at the bottom are racially integrated. They have low levels of income inequality, good schools, strong families, and high levels of social capital (for instance, strong civic participation). That’s why moving matters: going to a neighborhood that scores high on those characteristics from one that does not can make a big difference to a family’s prospects.
.. “For low-income people in the South, Houston is a pretty darn great place,” Hendren said. “It’s not a beacon of phenomenal upward mobility like Salt Lake City. But it’s kind of the Salt Lake City of the South.”
.. How, in a system like this, do you prevent some schools from cherry-picking students—dumping the difficult cases on someone else?
Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice
I remembered that A.T.M. in Venice when, in May, Kansas state legislators voted to impose nationally unprecedented and sharply punitive A.T.M. withdrawal limits on welfare recipients. A family of four can receive a maximum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars per month from state assistance in Kansas, and perhaps a comparable amount in “food stamp” funds. The money is electronically credited to a state-issued debit card. The pending A.T.M. cap, of twenty-five dollars a day, would increase the number of withdrawals required to obtain the same amount of money, with each transaction siphoning fees—one dollar to the state’s electronic-benefits contractor, in addition to a given machine’s standard fee—from public money into private bank coffers. (Even the cash-back option for point-of-sale transactions in Kansas comes with a forty-cent fee after the first two each month.) Compounding the pinch, the limit would effectively be twenty dollars, because few A.T.M.s dispense five-dollar bills.
.. Should a withdrawal cap pass muster with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the state’s electronic-benefits processor, Fidelity National Information Services—which has received incentives to keep a divisional headquarters in Kansas, and presumably has benefited handsomely from the state’s business-tax cuts—stands ready to collect the additional fees. It is hard to think of a more twisted irony than a corporate-welfare recipient being paid by a state government to oversee a single mother’s access to public-assistance funds.
.. As James Baldwin wrote (and as much research being published during this moment of historic wealth inequality demonstrates), it is expensive to be poor.