Category: Social Safety Net

Schnorers

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Do you want to guess?

Is it in Missippi, or Alabama, or maybe Arkansas?

Nope, it’s in New York State, just an hour from Times Square. It’s Kiryas Joel, which has a mind boggling 70% poverty rate: (number 2 only has a 56% rate)

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Normally, I am not inclined to tell people that they need to get off their asses, and get a real job, but in this case, I’m going to say get off your asses and get a job.

Kiryas Joel is a hole in the map created by cynical New York politicians in order to pander, and since then it has been used to suck up various welfare payments, so that able bodied residents could game local government for handouts.

Judaism is very clear about this:  Studying is good, but there is also an obligation to work and support a family.

So Obama’s Speech Was This Afternoon

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I’ve read it, and it was much better than I expected.

It is not what I would want in a perfect world, it’s pretty much a 3rd way center right prescription, though it was rather stronger that I expected.

He did not sell out Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, and he did not hippie punch, and he framed the Republican plan as a transfer from poor to rich.

The fact that he actually presented a moral argument here stuns me.

My only problem here, and I agree with Paul Krugman:

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.

This is clearly a first shot in the 2012 campaign, though I hope that is more than that.

His statements about needing reforms in the social safety net toward the end of the speech worry me though.

I’ll take what I can from him.

The Concept is So Repugnant that Obama Will Have to Offer a Compromise

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Just when I think that the Republican party cannot get any more contemptible, they do something that makes me sit there with a stunned expression on my face that resembles nothing more than a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

Case in point, the Republicans are trying to pass a law that would take away food stamps from the children of strikers:

However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer:

I understand that Republicans hate labor unions, but taking it out on their children??

You have to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld with the f%$#ing white Persian cat on your lap in order to be that evil.

Of course, I’m sure that Barack Obama will find a way to compromise on it.

And in the Annals of Hypocrisy…

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We have Ayn “Atlas Shrugged” Rand, who took medicare to pay for her lung cancer surgeries, and Congressman Paul “We will transform our social safety net into a hammock” Ryan, who freely collected social security benefits after his father died.

I don’t generally begrudge people accessing social programs, but when you call people who need them “moochers” and the like, you are a hypocrite and a wanker.

OK, Social Security is Safe, Until Wednesday, At Least

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It looks like the poll numbers and the heat from activists and members of Congress have done their job, because the Obama administration has said no proposed Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address:

President Obama has decided not to endorse his deficit commission’s recommendation to raise the retirement age, and otherwise reduce Social Security benefits, in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, cheering liberals and drawing a stark line between the White House and key Republicans in Congress.

(emphasis mine)

Note the specificity of the language. He won’t endorse cutting Social Security Tomorrow. I am also pretty sure that he won’t do it on Wednesday, and it’s pretty clear he won’t do it in 2012, because he wants to be reelected, but if he is reelected, it’s pretty clear he’s going to try for another bite at the apple.

I wish that we still had Republicans like Ike Eisenhower, who said about those who will cut Social Security, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.“

Alan Grayson for President in 2012

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If you don’t believe it now, just wait until Obama tries to sell gutting Social Security and Medicare in his State of the Union speech.

I could be wrong, and if I am, I will issue a correction, but I think that it is clear that embracing right wing talking points is more important to Barack Obama than is good policy, and driving the “first stake through the heart of Social Security” is clearly seen as a big plum by Obama and most of his administration.

We will know one way or the other in 5½ days.

Howard Dean, Call Barack Obama and Tell Him

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That you will run against him in the primaries unless he drops his idea to cut social security:

The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.

The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.

This is bad policy, it’s bad politics.

You could call it political Seppuku, but I think that is more accurately the deliberate and premeditated murder of the New Deal, and the marginalization of the Democratic Party for at least a generation.

I can no longer attribute this to incompetence or cowardice.  This is deliberate malice:

Just In Case You Wondered How Repugnant Obama’s People Are

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Peter Orzag, in his last column for the New York Times before accepting his bribe from starting his new job with Citigroup, calls for gutting disability insurance because the problem is that people are just lazy malingerers:

Finally, the disability insurance program itself must be reformed. Program administrators understand the need to encourage beneficiaries to return to work, and they have experimented with various incentives. Such initiatives have generally been ineffective, though, because they reach beneficiaries too late, after they have already become dependent on the program and lost their attachment to the work force.

A better approach has been suggested by David Autor of M.I.T. and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland. In a paper released last week from the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, these economists argue that employers should be required to offer their workers private disability insurance. Such coverage would provide people who have a work-limiting disability with vocational assistance, workplace accommodation and limited wage replacement. All of these benefits would kick in within 90 days of the onset of disability, to avoid the problems with delayed assistance that have plagued efforts to reform public disability insurance. Private employers would have an incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications, because their insurance premiums would rise in response to higher disability rates.

Disabled workers could remain on this privately financed insurance for two years, and then be eligible for the existing public program. The goal would be to minimize long-term dependency, and re-orient the federal disability insurance program toward assisting those who are truly unable to work.

(emphasis mine)

If you do not believe that Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ want to privatize Social Security, you are a fool, because one of his closest confidants is suggesting privatizing disability insurance.

Think about this, with unemployment at a generational high, and new entrants to the work force unable to find jobs, Orzag wants something akin to insurance recission teams, the people who kicked cancer patients out of health insurance programs, to hound people who are on disability.

Basically, every person who is on disability is someone who is not competing with a kid fresh out of high school or college looking for their first job.

That’s what, having “incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications,” means. It means allowing employers to use coercion to intimidate sick people so that they do not file claims.

This is how Peter Orzag rolls, and this is how Timmy Geithner rolls, and this is how Lawrence Summers rolls.

This is not a mistake.  These are people who the President chose to execute his agenda, and the agenda is seriously right wing by any sane standard.  (Note here that “sane standard” and “Republican Party” had a messy divorce in the 1990s.)

Barack Obama Wants to Gut Social Security and Medicare

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Social Security and Medicaid together do not match Medicare’s costs

Really, he just expressly said that to Steve Inskeep of NPR:

Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they’ll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

(emphasis mine)

It’s not helpful that he leads with a lie.

Anyone who has the vaguest idea of how to count knows that the elephant in the room (pun not intended), is not Medicaid, but Medicare, but Obama realizes that that the political consequences of going after that are simply too dire for him to mess with the seniors.

The alternative, of course, is something private, which means higher costs, since we know that both Medicare and Medicaid deliver healthcare for a lower cost than the private sector, and the expense ratio (the cost of managing the money) for Social Security is on the order of 1⁄10 that of most private plans out there.

We now understand why Barack Obama has been so deferential to the insurance and finance industries:  It’s because they own him, and he wants to sell the rest of us to them.

H/t Gaius Publius.

What Barack Obama Wants

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So, after Alan Simpson has repeatedly shown an implacable hostility to Social Security spanning decades, and referred to every person in the us as freeloaders sucking at the tits of society, the Obama administration has decided to double down on this biased nutjob:

But at the White House, Jennifer Psaki, the deputy communications director, said, “Alan Simpson has apologized and while we regret and do not condone his comments, we accept his apology and he will continue to serve.”

The only reason to appoint him in the first place, and the only reason to keep him on after this incident is because Barack Obama wants, and, based on his behavior, what he wants is to gut Social Security.

Remember That Alan Simpson Was Always Thus, and Obama Picked Him

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So, a few weeks back, Anal Alan Simpson, the co-chair of Barack Obama’s so called “Cat Food Commission,” ostensibly charged with reducing the deficit, but in reality given a mandate to trim Social Security, hence leaving seniors surviving on cat food,* was referring to recipients of the pension program as “Lesser People,” in society.

That was pretty offensive, but Barack Obama knows his way around Washington, and he knows who and what Alan Simpson is, and so I figured that he selected him to co-chair the committee because he wants to cut Social Security.

Today however, I look back at that truly repugnant statement by former Senator Simpson as a high water mark on his civility, because in an email exchange with the president of the Older Woman’s League in which he ridiculed her organization and its membership, and described Social Security as a, “Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits.”

By this, he means that he thinks that every single American who might be eligible for the program is in his mind a moocher.

Of course, we now see the non-apology apology:

I can see that my remarks have caused you anguish, and that was not my intention. I certainly did not intend to diminish your hard work for the Older Women’s League. I know you care deeply about strengthening Social Security, and so do I, just as deeply. I remember your testimony at our public hearing in June about the importance of retirement security for women. Over the last 40 years, I have had my size 15 feet in my mouth a time or two. To quote my old friend and colleague, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, when I make a mistake, “It’s a doozy!”

You see, it’s not his fault, it’s her fault for being offended, and Simpson is just a good old boy who sometimes misspeaks.

You now have a number of advocacy groups calling for his resignation, saying, with a lot of justification, that this shows that Simpson has already pre-decided this matter, while the AARP has indirectly done so as well:

The vast majority of the 310 million Americans he insulted – particularly 156 million women and younger Americans for whom the traditional pension will be a relic of history – don’t have access to the type of traditional pension retirement security that Sen. Simpson has from his decades in Congress. Perhaps that’s why his comments demonstrate a woeful disconnect from or disinterest in the challenges facing many American families for whom Social Security is literally a lifeline.

“Sen. Simpson’s most recent departure from reality would be easy to dismiss if not for his position co-leading a Presidential commission that will likely recommend changes to Social Security. Sen. Simpson’s remarks not only cross the line of good judgment, but they undermine the serious work of the commission and give us little confidence the commission can fairly look at important programs such as Social Security.”

I am not going to join into any dead pool on Simpson. He’s going to stay on the board, because Barack Obama wants him on the board, and given his long history on the social safety net, the only reason that Barack Obama wanted him is because he wants to gut the program.

Expect the deficit commission to propose a few token taxes, no defense cuts, and draconian cuts to programs that help the needy, because that’s how the White House rolls.

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

Congress Passes State Aid Bill

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It would have been better if the Senate hadn’t dithered and watered this down, but this should keep a few thousand cops and teachers employed:

The US House of Representatives has passed an aid package that will provide cash-strapped states with $26bn (£16.4) for healthcare and education.

The bill, which cleared the Senate last week, is now set to be signed by President Barack Obama, three months before the mid-term elections.

The president had appealed for the passage of the legislation, while Republicans condemned it.

The House had been called back for an emergency session for the vote.

The House voted 247 to 161 in favour of the bill, which supporters say will help to save the jobs of 100,000 teachers.

The package also includes $16.1bn to extend funding for the Medicaid healthcare programme for low-income Americans.

This has been a very busy August news wise.

Wanker of the Day

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Neel “Cash and Carry” Kashkari penned an article in (where else) The Washington Post, pens an OP/ED titled, “No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements,” suggesting that individual Americans need to suck it up, and abandon their already meager social safety net, and not expect to be bailed out by the government.

Kashkari ran the TARP. He gave out billions, of bailouts to ‘me first’ bankers, and then got a cushy job with PIMCO, so he doesn’t have to worry about eating cat food* to survive.

3 Words: Not Enough Bullets

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

OK, This is Simply Despicable

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One of the conflicts between the Obama administration and Congress has been the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” education program, where the Obama has insisted this program, an unproven experiment which consists largely of bribing state education departments to attack job security for teachers.

The problems is that Congress is using pay-go, and the money isn’t there for it, so Congress cut 15% from the program, which has led to veto threats.

Well, David Obey, who is now retiring from Congress, gave an interview about how he is leaving “discontented,” and he drops a bombshell.

When the administration protested, Obey told that they needed to suggest where the budget cuts would be made, and Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ suggested cutting food stamps, apparently because people on food stamps are getting a “good deal”:

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

I am used to this administration making me nostalgic for Richard Nixon, but I am now feeling nostalgic for Dick Cheney,and I don’t like this feeling.

At least Dick Cheney was honest about being an evil rat-f%$#.

Tin Foil Hat time

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I think that it is fairly clear by the way that Barack Obama has stacked the “deficit reduction commission,” so as to be a “very serious person.”

The two chairs, Erskine Bowles, and Alan Simpson, have both been long time advocates of privatizing and otherwise gutting Social security.

Well, we now have an oddity in statistical reporting, because the Annual Report of the Trustees of Social Security for 2010 has not yet been released.

This is the document that gives an expiration date on the Social Security trust fund, and normally, it’s released on March 31, 3 months ago.

The Angry Bear finds this odd:

I find this odd in the extreme, particularly since Social Security is front and center in the news with the ongoing meetings of the Catfood Commission with their strong suggestions that cuts to Social Security are definitely on the table. You would think that repeated delays in the release of this key Report would at least require SOME explanation and that someone in the media might be asking questions. But no like the proverbial tree falling in the forest no one was close enough to hear the sound. If any. Well the silence is deafening. The lead press item on the Social Security website is the news that Isabella is the number one name for baby girls this year. http://www.ssa.gov/ Which I guess is fascinating news for fans of the Twilight franchise but not quite satisfying for us data driven types.

I think that this is all a part of a desire to give cover to the “Cat food commission,”* so called because that is what seniors will eat if their proposals are adopted cover for their proposal.

I am not sure if the intent is to bury a good report, of if it is to release an alarmist report at the most opportune moment, but my money is on skulduggery.

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The pnenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

Just F%$#ing Marvelous

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It looks like my extended unemployment benefits , as well as those of a few million wanting-to-be-working Americans, will expire as Congress rushes out the door to take their vacation recess:

The House of Representatives Friday was to vote on a reduced package of safety-net spending and tax measures that would raise taxes on fund managers, but it likely was too late to avoid disrupting jobless benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Democrats, who say the bill would lower the country’s 9.9 percent unemployment rate, had hoped it would clear Congress this week to ensure that jobless benefits and other safety-net provisions do not expire. But the Senate was set to leave town for a week-long break without taking action.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans will probably lose the weekly payments that help them cover their bills as they look for work in a sluggish economy.

Congressional wrangling has delayed such benefits at least four times in the past year. Democrats say they will restore the benefits when they return in early June.

To whoever is slow walking this, and to whoever is letting them slow walk this, “Go Cheney Yourself.”

The Myth Of American Social Mobility

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We’re Number 3!!!! (From the bottom)

According to the the Grauniad,* the OECD has looked at social mobility in the developed nations, except for Japan for some reason, and determined that the UK has the least generational mobility of any of these nations.

I don’t find that surprising. I tend to think of class strata when I think of British society, what is surprising, at least for some, I already knew this, is that the United States is almost as bad at providing opportunity to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Essentially, look at the graph pr0n, the US is not a, “Horatio Alger makes good,” kind of place: You get where you are because of who your parents are.

It’s an artifact of a war on unions, both in the US and UK, which makes the sort of decent working-class jobs that parents could use to create upwardly mobile lives for their children are increasingly rare.

Additionally, a war on the safety net, and on public education has done more to make it difficult for someone on the bottom to get a well enough grounding in the basics to outperform someone on the top, regardless of innate ability.

To conservatives, the idea that their children can succeed by virtue of who their parents are, is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

Me, I think of it as a deep flaw in society.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

So Obama’s Magical Deficit Reduction Commission is a Go

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And former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson will be the co-chairman.

I think that it’s a bad idea in the first place, and that it’s a way to create political cover for weakening Social Security and Medicare, and what’s more, as former Clinton Treasury official Brad Delong notes, putting Simpson in charge of deficit reduction is like naming an, “Arsonist to Co-Run the Fire Department,” with history of supporting every half-assed tax cut for the rich plan out there, supporting Reagan’s disastrous 1981 cuts, and opposing Clinton’s tax increases, which produced the first surpluses in a generation.

What really worries me is that we have a whole bunch of Beltway Boyz who are thinking that the huge problem is Social Security and Medicare, and are looking for a way to gut them.