Yes, Republicans are obsessed with poverty

Poor, poor Jackie Calmes.  Six years in and she still thinks the president can come to terms with "leading conservative intellectuals" in the House over things they both care about.  Like poverty.

WASHINGTON — More than he might have imagined just a month ago, President Obama has an opening with Tuesday’s State of the Union address to advance his argument to Congress that the rising inequality of economic opportunities is America’s “defining challenge of our time.”

Leading Republicans have responded with their own expressions of concern — and seeds of ideas. Previously the party mostly ignored Mr. Obama’s periodic speeches about trends that show the United States trailing Canada, France and Germany on measures of upward mobility and seven out of 10 Americans born into poverty likely to stay there.

The best-known Republicans speaking out on poverty and opportunity have presidential ambitions, among them Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Influential conservative economists and columnists have spoken up as well.

Yes, Paul Ryan has a real obsession with the poor.  Via K-thug.

Mr. Ryan blames Mr. Obama’s talk of “class warfare” and Republicans’ own message mistakes — but not their policies — for his party’s image deficit.

“We have just not done a good enough job of explaining why our ideas and our principles are good for everybody and how they restore upward mobility,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview.

Why, oh why, can't we have a better press corps?

"An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring"

Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Please read the whole speech, entitled "Beyond Vietnam" A Time to Break the Silence."

One in 50

Hard to say how accurate this report is, but it is certainly distressing.

Even before the financial and home foreclosure crisis hit full stride, the number of homeless children in America had reached an alarming level. The National Center on Family Homelessness released a report today that estimates that one in every 50 American children was homeless between 2005 and 2006. That totals roughly 1.5 million kids. While the center provided no previous statistic to compare against that figure, a study conducted with different measures published in 2000 put the total at 1.35 million children living in homelessness each year. The numbers are likely to get worse as the economy continues to decline. "We know the numbers are going to skyrocket," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the Newton, Mass.-based Center and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.

Indeed, a quick survey of the country provides lots of evidence to support those fears. Chicago public school officials report the number of its 405,000 students deemed homeless soared to 11,143 last month from 9,182 in February 2006. School officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa, have so far counted some 1,700 homeless students — and expect the figure to eclipse last year's 2,020. Meanwhile, the surge in homeless families has overwhelmed Massachusetts' shelters, forcing state officials to book motel rooms for the displaced. In January, some 4,600 homeless children were reported in the state's shelters and motels, up from 3,411 from roughly one year earlier. (See one family's struggle against homelessness.)

According to the new report, the states with the highest number of homeless children in the period studied were Texas (337,105), California (292,624), Louisiana (204,053), Georgia (58,397) and Florida (49,886). The states reporting the smallest populations of homeless children: Wyoming (169), Rhode Island (797), Vermont (1,174), North Dakota (1,181), and South Dakota (1,545). However, the report also ranks the states according to parameters that go beyond their share of homeless children, factoring in, among other things, incidence of such health conditions as asthma and tooth decay. With that framework, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island and North Dakota were rated among states that dealt best with the problem overall. At the bottom of the list: Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico and Louisiana.

Funds for the homeless, included in the stimulus package, can't get to states fast enough.

And those kids had sure as hell better not own a cell phone.

Food and the economy

It's encouraging that policy makers are beginning to think beyond how many more trillions they can give to the financial industry, and instead focus on how assistance to people really hurting can help the economy. Starting with food stamps.

Fueled by rising unemployment and food prices, the number of Americans on food stamps is poised to exceed 30 million for the first time this month, surpassing the historic high set in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

The figures will put the spotlight on hunger when Congress begins deliberations on a new economic stimulus package, said legislators and anti-hunger advocates, predicting that any stimulus bill will include a boost in food stamp benefits. Advocates are also optimistic that President-elect Barack Obama, who made campaign promises to end childhood hunger and whose mother once briefly received food stamps, will make the issue a priority next year.

"We soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country," said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a D.C.-based anti-hunger policy organization. "If the economic forecasts come true, we're likely to see the most hunger that we've seen since the 1981 recession and maybe since the 1960s, when these programs were established."

[...]

Analysts attribute the jump primarily to rising unemployment, which hit 6.5 percent in October and is predicted to increase to 8 percent by the end of 2009, but rising food costs are also a factor. Although prices have fallen from the levels of this past spring, they remain high. In October, the consumer price index for food and beverages had jumped 6.1 percent over last year. Staples such as eggs and bread rose even faster.

For low-income families, who spend a higher percentage of their monthly budget on food, that rise has been particularly painful. Food stamp benefits are adjusted for inflation only once a year, and as of September, the maximum benefit fell $64 a month short of the cost of the thriftiest, USDA-established diet for a family of four. The annual adjustment in October of 8.5 percent largely brought the benefit in line with food costs again, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan policy group, estimates that if current inflation persists, by December benefits will again fail to match the cost of the thrifty food plan.

"At a time when we have more people turning to the food stamp program, it is less and less able to meet their basic food needs," said Stacy Dean, the research center's director of food assistance policy.

[...]

To tackle the problem, supportive lawmakers are pressing to include a temporary bump in food stamp benefits in the next stimulus package. Similar proposals failed to pass twice this year, but there appears to be broad support now for an increase of 10 to 20 percent, advocates and lawmakers said.

Economists say an increase in food stamp benefits would help the economy overall by concentrating relief on those most likely to spend the money quickly, pumping dollars into an economy desperate for demand. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist of the rating agency Moody's Economy.com, every $1 spent on food stamp benefits generates $1.73 of economic activity, more than extending unemployment benefits or offering state fiscal relief.

"Congress has been focusing on the impact on the financial markets," said Dean at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "We want them to focus on the supermarkets and help 30 million people."

And Hilzoy has more on how giving to your local food bank does more than simply increase your personal supply of favorable karma.

The Beets of Wrath

Maybe this is nothing like the Great Depression. Our financial crisis is far more complex and financial systems are far more globally interconnected.

Tell that to the 40,000 who showed up to pick root vegetables left in the field after harvest in Colorado.

As many as 40,000 people seeking free vegetables descended like locusts on a family farm north of Denver on Saturday, making off with as much as 300 tons of potatoes, onions, beets, leeks and carrots. Joe and Chris Miller extended an invitation to hungry Colorado residents to harvest what remained in the fields of Miller Farms, but only expected 5,000 takers. “At one point, we did have to turn people away in part because we weren’t sure that there would be anything left in the fields and in part because we were so overwhelmed,” the Millers wrote on the farm’s Web site Monday.

The free harvest, intended as a “thank you” to the community, was scheduled for two days, but the Millers canceled the second because “the fields are clean,” Joe Miller told NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Monday. He said farm personnel “still had to turn people away Sunday that just kept coming out,” despite having gone through 80,000 produce bags the day before.

“Overwhelmed is putting it mildly,” Chris Miller told the Denver Post. “People obviously need food.”

Well, maybe "wrath" is not yet quite the word.

“Everybody is so depressed about the economy,” Greeley resident Sandra Justice told the Post. “This was a pure party. Everybody having a a great time getting something for free.” Justice and her family hauled off 10 bags of vegetables, the Post reported.

As many as 11,000 cars backed up two miles on the roads to the farm, just east of Longmont, and families that arrived without proper harvesting equipment used “nothing more than their bare hands and a few utensils — mostly dried-up carrots” to glean leftover root vegetables buried in the 600-acre farm’s soil, the Greeley Tribune reported.

The persistence of poverty

The Boston Globe's "Ideas" section is one of the best -- and least appreciated -- parts of Sunday.

Today, Drake Bennett highlights the little known work of Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University. Intuitively, his ideas make a lot of sense.

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.

If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.

"It's Econ 101 that's to blame," Karelis says. "It's created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty."

I'm not sure I get the bee sting analogy. After all, who gets treatment for bee stings, unless your allergic? But the dented car makes tremendous sense. Or, more accurately, the dented car, the toothache, the lack of child care, lack of health care, unavailability of fresh food, and the bureaucracy of dealing with social services does.

UPDATED for clarity.