Income shrinking for "poor" workers/families while rich grow richer. . .

Clearly, our best efforts aren't working.  And, I've about decided we aren't working on the right things.  The problem of declining earning power among your low-income neighbors will not be solved via charity.  Only large, systemic reforms and investments will move the income needle in the necessary direction. 

Read this troubling report and give me your feedback.

Dallas income gap widens, Brookings study reports

Household earnings at top of scale 12 times those of working poor

By MICHAEL E. YOUNG                

The income gap continues to grow between affluent Americans and those struggling to get by, with Dallas households near the top of the scale earning more than 12 times as much as those broadly defined as the “working poor,” according to a new study by the Brookings Institution.

The study compared household income of those in the 95th percentile — about $220,000 in Dallas — with those in the 20th percentile, roughly $18,000 a year, said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings and deputy director of its metropolitan policy program.

The growing disparity isn’t just about rising incomes for upper-class households, Berube said, but rather about shrinking paychecks in poorer households, whose incomes remain 13 percent below levels prior to the recession of 2007-09.

 

Read the entire article here.

Dallas, we have a problem

Cash

To Help Poor Neighborhoods, Urban Planners Have to Do More Than Urban Planning

They can't just improve the physical environment if they want to revitalize poverty-stricken areas.

by William Fulton | October 2015

 

William is a Governing columnist, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and former mayor of Ventura, CA.

              

In San Diego, half the neighborhoods are inhabited by mostly poor residents. During my recent stint as director of planning and economic development there, residents would often ask me how I planned to revitalize those neighborhoods. I tended to give an alarmingly honest answer: I wasn’t sure.

Read the interesting conclusion here.

Poverty and brain development

Poverty shrinks brains from birth       

Studies show that children from low-income families have smaller brains and lower cognitive abilities.  Sara Reardon

30 March 2015

 

 

 

The stress of growing up poor can hurt a child’s brain development starting before birth, research suggests — and even very small differences in income can have major effects on the brain.

 

Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor. The reasons have never been clear, although stressful home environments, poor nutrition, exposure to industrial chemicals such as lead and lack of access to good education are often cited as possible factors. 

 

In the largest study of its kind, published on 30 March in Nature Neuroscience¹, a team led by neuroscientists Kimberly Noble from Columbia University in New York City and Elizabeth Sowell from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, California, looked into the biological underpinnings of these effects. They imaged the brains of 1,099 children, adolescents and young adults in several US cities. Because people with lower incomes in the United States are more likely to be from minority ethnic groups, the team mapped each child’s genetic ancestry and then adjusted the calculations so that the effects of poverty would not be skewed by the small differences in brain structure between ethnic groups.

 

Read the entire essay here.

If you can read the following essay and not be concerned, you process reality much differently than do I.  Read and let me know your response.

__________________________________

 

 

Richer and Poorer

Accounting for inequality.

By Jill Lepore       

For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to climb.

Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world.


Read more here.

Two cities, divided

The map below depicts the segregated nature of the Dallas Metroplex.  

The teal/blue areas indicate high-income sections of the community.  The red represent the low-income portions of this urban area.  

While racial segregation does not play as negative a role in community life as it once did, still, it has been replaced by financial or economic segregation.  And, that segregation accompanies a sharply divided community in racial terms as well.  

Dallas is a divided, unequal, troubled community in terms of income distribution.  

I've long said that it is the richest poor town in the US.  In fact, Dallas is among the top 10 most income/resource divided cities in the nation.  This reality affects every aspect of our community life.  

You can read the entire report, including analysis of cities other than Dallas, here.

Insightful tool. . .

I found an insightful tool regarding family income and budgeting.  

Take a look here!

Looking for reactions!

Cash First!

Randy Mayeux sent an interesting essay from Slate.com my way recently.  In it Matthew Yglesias argues that  the best way to really assist the world's poor is to provide direct cash transfers to them.

I find Yglesias' analysis fascinating and, in may ways, counter intuitive to much thinking in the nation today.

In much the same way that "housing first" provides a super-charged solution to homelessness, the idea of "cash first" offers up life, incentive and initiative for recipients.  Take a look at the article here.

Surprising facts. . .

Nine Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin

Wednesday, 20 February 2013 10:07By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet | Report

Half the population of the US has slipped into poverty or is barely making enough to get by.

How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts and figures that might surprise you.

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.

Economic recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of over 11 percent since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.

The top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money earned from investments. The wealthy have benefitted from favorable tax status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down. Saez believes this trend will continue in 2013.

2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.

Click here to read on. . . 

Mr. Obama, help us!

Finally, the national elections are behind us! 

Just possibly we can return to a more civil tone in our conversations and attitudes.  I hope so.

But, with President Obama headed for his second term, I have favors to ask of him and the new Congress. 

My requests relate to my own neighborhood and to the people who live around me, my neighbors.  I'll just put my priorities in a list without much comment.

Here goes:

Sir,

1.  Please work to give us comprehensive immigration reform so that so many of us can live without the fear of deportation.  The vast majority of us work hard every day to make Dallas great.  Please give us all a pathway to legitimacy as residents and members of the labor force.

2.  If comprehensive immigration reform is not possible, then at least give us the DREAM Act to put our children in documented status so they can finish school and go to work legally.

3.  Help us obtain the workforce skills we need to land livable wage jobs.

4.  Make sure our children can attend public schools that work.

5.  Stay the course so that we can make progress in providing universal health care for all of us.

6.  Continue to fund programs like AmeriCorps, and take a look at how the programs of the Corporation of National and Community Service actually pay for themselves in public benefit and educational advancement.  AmeriCorps' ROI is astounding!

7.  Help us rebuild the blighted neighborhoods often referred to as the "ghetto," but known as "home" to many of us.

8.  Find ways to support/reward creative mayors who come up with new, innovative community renewal strategies that actually work!

9.  Incentivize the utilization of creative financial instruments like social impact bonds (SIBs).

10.  Lead the most progressive tax reform effort in our nation's history to promote policies that lift people and create new wealth at the bottom--I know those techniques exist and I know you are smart enough to identify them!

11.  Bring work back to the inner cities of the nation.

12.  Figure out how to make as many of those jobs as possible linked in training programs to the emerging "green economy."

Wealth gap drives new era of segregation

Rising Income Gap Shapes Residential Segregation
by NPR STAFF
September 23, 2012

The income gap is receiving much attention lately as more Americans are isolating themselves around "people like us." More accurately, they surround themselves with people who earn similar incomes, and it is now fueling a rise in residential segregation. One recent study suggests the income gap might be greater today than even during colonial times – even when you account for slavery.

 "Thirty years ago, about 9 percent of all upper-income people lived in predominantly upper-income neighborhoods," says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center. "That share has now doubled to 18 percent."

Taylor recently co-authored a study that tracked this income gap increase between 1980 and 2010.

 He tells Jacki Lyden, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered, that this is a national trend. But, he adds, locally several factors can contribute to residential segregation by income, including in-migration, the nature of the local economy, housing discrimination and even a city's physical layout.

 Although it might seem self-evident that people of similar incomes would gravitate toward one another, Taylor says the problem is that it creates an increasingly polarized electorate. "We are in a political moment where the sense of the middle, the sense of the cohesion, isn't feeling particularly robust," he says. "One outcome of that is a sense that the political process is ossified ... [and] that Washington doesn't work." 

Residential segregation also makes it easier when it comes to gerrymandering, or redrawing district boundaries. Taylor says that increasingly the people who draw those lines do so in order to create "safe" districts, whether for Republicans or Democrats.

Read and listen to the entire report here.