For your calendar. . .

Poverty in Dallas

Last week 231 people showed up for a 7:00 a.m. meeting at Paul Quinn College to talk about poverty. 

But more than that, they showed up to make plans to do something about it. 

The Mayor's Task Force on Poverty heard from outside leaders/experts on the subject.  Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor in New York City's Bloomberg Administration and Thad Williamson, a professor at the University of Richmond and director of the new Office of Community Wealth Building for that city, both shared with the group. 

Then, for almost three hours, task force members divided up into focus groups and played "If I were Mayor of Dallas, I would __________," when it comes to the various focus groups' assigned topics. 

At the event, Mayor Mike Rawlings called us to  action and to ideation. 

His urgency rolled my stomach. 

But, it's time for urgency.

Between 2000 and 2012, Dallas' population grew by a modest 5%. 

During that same period, Dallas poverty grew by 41%!

We will keep working. 

Dallasites will hear from our mayor soon. 

We will keep battling poverty with a new fierceness.

Cutting poverty today!

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings speaks to poverty's threat/challenge

Here's a very interesting interview with Dallas Mayor, Mike Rawlings.

What he says about the challenge and threat of poverty to our community is worth your  time.

Serious words to ponder.

Go here to listen.

Consider community

As I post the following commentary from Nicholas Kristof, I catch myself bracing for the reaction from some of my regulars here!  I think some of you follow me to refill your frustration tank!  But what Kristof writes raises tough and important issues that as a society we must address.  Hopefully, we can find a way to do so with respect, substance and integrity.  The debates over the role of public institutions in addressing real-life, contemporary issues affecting communities, neighborhoods, corporations and individuals must be taken seriously. 

This is certainly, possibly doubly, true in the neighbors where we live and work.  From education to health care, from infrastructure to public safety, from housing to living wage employment we face big issues that call for new, bold and comprehensive solutions and responses. 

At the end of the day we just need to face the fact that "standby generators" just won't get us what we all need. 

Read Kristof's essay.  Tell me what you think.

 

A Failed Experiment

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.

In part, that’s a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again.

(A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy — and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!)

More broadly, the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid, prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009.

So Generac, a Wisconsin company that dominates the generator market, says it is running three shifts to meet surging demand. About 3 percent of stand-alone homes worth more than $100,000 in the country now have standby generators installed.

“Demand for generators has been overwhelming, and we are increasing our production levels,” Art Aiello, a spokesman for Generac, told me.

That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.

It’s manifestly silly (and highly polluting) for every fine home to have a generator. It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place.

But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.

The National Climatic Data Center has just reported that October was the 332nd month in a row of above-average global temperatures. As the environmental Web siteGrist reported, that means that nobody younger than 27 has lived for a single month with colder-than-average global temperatures, yet climate change wasn’t even much of an issue in the 2012 campaign. Likewise, the World Economic Forum ranks American infrastructure 25th in the world, down from 8th in 2003-4, yet infrastructure is barely mentioned by politicians.

So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.

Is crime a problem? Well, rather than pay for better policing, move to a gated community with private security guards!

Are public schools failing? Well, superb private schools have spaces for a mere $40,000 per child per year.

Public libraries closing branches and cutting hours? Well, buy your own books and magazines!

Are public parks — even our awesome national parks, dubbed “America’s best idea” and the quintessential “public good” — suffering from budget cuts? Don’t whine. Just buy a weekend home in the country!

Public playgrounds and tennis courts decrepit? Never mind — just join a private tennis club!

I’m used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country. The disregard for public goods was epitomized by Mitt Romney’s call to end financing of public broadcasting.

A wealthy friend of mine notes that we all pay for poverty in the end. The upfront way is to finance early childhood education for at-risk kids. The back-end way is to pay for prisons and private security guards. In cities with high economic inequality, such as New York and Los Angeles, more than 1 percent of all employees work as private security guards, according to census data.

This question of public goods hovers in the backdrop as we confront the “fiscal cliff” and seek to reach a deal based on a mix of higher revenues and reduced benefits. It’s true that we have a problem with rising entitlement spending, especially in health care. But I also wonder if we’ve reached the end of a failed half-century experiment in ever-lower tax rates for the wealthy.

Since the 1950s, the top federal income tax rate has fallen from 90 percent or more to 35 percent. Capital gains tax rates have been cut by more than half since the late 1970s. Financial tycoons now often pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

All this has coincided with the decline of some public services and the emergence of staggering levels of inequality (granted, other factors are also at work) such that the top 1 percent of Americans now have greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

Not even the hum of the most powerful private generator can disguise the failure of that long experiment.

Back to the 60s

Last week the following grim report put the spotlight on what we've known for a decade here at CitySquare.  Namely, poverty has been on a steady rise since the early 2000s.  The numbers explain our dramatic increase in persons seeking us out for assistance.  We can do better than this, can't we?

 

US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s

HOPE YEN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalization, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionization that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 percent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.

"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.

Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.

The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.

The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 percent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 percent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.

Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.9 percent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.

Demographers also say:

—Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 percent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels — 15 percent to 16 percent — will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 percent and weak wage growth.

—Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 percent, will increase again in 2011.
—Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 percent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.
—Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.
—Child poverty will increase from its 22 percent level in 2010.

Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 percent.

"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent.

Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.
"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.

The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as noncash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.

An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.

A new census measure accounts for noncash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.

Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 percent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 percent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.

Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 percent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.

The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.

His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.

Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."
___
Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Lakewood, Colo., Ken Ritter and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

Choices we face in Texas. . .

The Center for Public Policy Priorities is the Texas home to KIDS COUNT, a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the U.S. funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In addition to publishing annual reports, the center also offers access to an interactive, comprehensive database of county-by-county and state data on child well-being.

Anyone who works with low-income children and famiilies needs to read and digest the important material reported in Choices:  The Texas We Create--2012 State of Texas Children Data Book. 

Surprising fact (to some Texans):  29.3% of children birth to 17-years-old live in poverty in Dallas County.  In Haskell County, Governor Perry's home, 39.4% of children live in poverty.

"Poverty can't be ignored any longer," or maybe it can be. . .

Opinion: Poverty met with silence

By Juan Williams - 09/19/11 05:00 AM ET
from The Hill. . .

As Congress’s supercommittee started work behind closed doors last week on long-term spending cuts, there was a public display of Democrats and Republicans singing very predictable and partisan songs over President Obama’s jobs bill.

All of these songs featured clichés about not raising taxes at all — the Republican chorus — or protecting the middle class and small business from tax hikes — the Democrats and Republicans in stereo choral suite.

And then, for a moment, the singing stopped.

The troubling moment of silence came from a Census Bureau report last week that showed a record 46.2 million Americans living in poverty last year. That is the highest number in the 52 years the statistic has been measured.

That means 2.6 million people fell into poverty in just the last year.

That prompted more silence from the big voices on Capitol Hill.

The percentage of the population who are in poverty stands at an alarming 15 percent. For black Americans, the poverty rate zoomed to 27.4 percent. Hispanic Americans’ rate of poverty climbed to 26.6 percent. Asian-American poverty hit 12.1 percent while white American poverty was at 9.9 percent.

Yet in an instant, the congressional choir returned to singing its standard songs.

Maybe the congressional leadership, the budget committees and the supercommittee did not know what to say. Maybe the many millionaires in Congress suffered their bouts of speechlessness from embarrassment.

Earlier this year, 235 House members and 40 senators voted for the Republican budget authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The Ryan budget appears to call for the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, and for deep cuts in food stamps and Pell grants.

And the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, passed in July by the GOP House majority, and Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) proposals during the debt-ceiling talks ended longstanding exemptions to cuts on programs to keep people out of poverty.

The Bowles-Simpson proposal for balancing the budget kept those programs in place. So did the proposals from the bipartisan Gang of Six.

The Ryan budget also ends Medicare — which prevents the elderly from falling into poverty because of health problems — as a guaranteed program. It also slashes funding for programs that benefit poor children, such as Head Start and the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program.

This is nothing to sing about.

Keep in mind that the poverty line is just $11,139 for an individual and $22,314 for a family of four. Yet 1 of every 7 Americans now falls below it. And still Congress averts its eyes and continues to sing the same old hymns to people with money to donate to political campaigns and money to lobby for their pet programs.

“Programs for the poor are not politically popular because there is no constituency,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies public policy on poverty. “If it is a choice between cutting programs for veterans and cutting spending for poor mothers and infants, guess who wins? It is not that veterans shouldn’t get help. It is just the political reality.”

To read entire report click here.

Proverbs 31:9

To ponder this Sunday...

A hard stat from the 2009 American Community Survey:

In the city of Dallas, 35.4% of children 18-years-old and below live in households whose income is at or below the poverty level. . .more than one in 3.