Obama Cares. Look at the Numbers.

                                          Image CreditAlex Wong/Getty Images

N.Y. TIMES

AS the predominantly black, disproportionately poor community of Ferguson, Mo., erupted in protest after the shooting death of Michael Brown, critics excoriated President Obama for his failure to empathize. Michael Eric Dyson, for example, called the president’s statement about the case on Monday a “stunning epic failure.”

 

Mr. Obama’s defenders point to his second-term commitment to issues that touch the lives of poor communities of color, especially his initiative to assist young minority men, My Brother’s Keeper. But what both sides are ignoring is the president’s first-term record.

A true measure of a president’s priorities lies hidden in plain sight in his budget proposals. Under that standard, Mr. Obama has been more committed to communities like Ferguson than any Democratic president in the past half century.

 

By looking at what percentage of the budget presidents propose to spend to fight poverty, we can compare their degree of commitment.

While Mr. Obama advocated for the Affordable Care Act as a way to assist poor African-Americans, for example, we can’t put that on an effort scale and compare it to President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for his health care plan. Our method also avoids the problem of accounting for forces beyond presidents’ control.

 

Using this method, we find that President Obama attempted to deliver far more than his counterparts. The Congressional Budget Office’s inflation-adjusted numbers show that Mr. Obama sought to spend far more on means-tested anti-poverty programs than other first-term Democratic presidents. The targeted needs include food, housing, education, health care and cash.

Mr. Obama earmarked 17 percent of his budget for these needs, versus Mr. Clinton’s 12 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 8 percent. These presidents all faced economic challenges, although of different degrees and strength. Each was committed to the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged. But Mr. Obama made good on that commitment far more concretely.

 

No president gets all he requests, but the outcomes speak well for Mr. Obama, too. Christopher Wimer of Columbia University found, for example, that tax and transfer policies lowered the poverty rate by only 1 percentage point in 1967, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, but by almost 13 points in 2012.

Did Mr. Obama plan to spend more simply because he had more mouths to feed? No. Even after accounting for the higher numbers of poor people caught in the Great Recession, Mr. Obama’s record outshines his predecessors’. His proposed first-term spending per poor individual was $13,731 to Mr. Clinton’s $8,310 and Mr. Carter’s $4,431, in 2014 dollars.

Mr. Obama even exceeds Mr. Johnson, whose budget priorities amounted only to $111 per poor person. (Because Mr. Johnson was the first postwar president to tackle poverty issues with so many new programs, it is not surprising that his proposed funding levels were low at the start.) The same pattern shows up in spending per poor family. Mr. Obama allocated $67,132, Mr. Clinton $39,820, Mr. Carter $20,790, and Mr. Johnson $546, again using 2014 dollars.

 

Nor is Mr. Obama simply a big spender across the board. His spending on the Department of Agriculture, for example, was lower than Mr. Clinton’s and Mr. Carter’s, removing food stamps and adjusting for inflation.

 

A final test of priorities is how much a president proposes to spend compared with his immediate predecessor. By that yardstick, Mr. Obama does well too. The percent change in anti-poverty spending per poor individual is highest for Mr. Clinton relative to the first President Bush (27 percent), and lowest for Mr. Carter, who actually spent slightly less than Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Obama’s increase relative to George W. Bush was a respectable 17 percent. When it comes to the poor, Mr. Obama does not appear a failure, much less an epic one.

 

So why does Mr. Obama elicit fiery condemnation for lacking empathy? His first four State of the Union speeches provide several telltale clues. These are a president’s showcase, watched, in recent years, by up to 52 million viewers. What did Mr. Obama signal to those millions?

 

First, he rarely mentioned poverty. Listeners had to hunt for words like “poor” or “homeless.” His average poverty word count is seven, lower than Mr. Carter’s nine and Mr. Clinton’s 23. Second, the little he did say was drowned in a wave of words aimed at the middle class, like “average earner.” His ratio of middle-class-related words to poverty-related words was nearly 3 to 1.

 

When he did mention the needs of the poor, he tiptoed around them. His ratio of direct mentions of poverty to indirect mentions was 1 to 3. Contrast that with Mr. Clinton’s 8-to-1 ratio. Even Mr. Carter’s was higher than Mr. Obama’s (1 to 2). By favoring words like “vulnerable” and “unemployed” so heavily, Mr. Obama nearly gave up the bully pulpit.

While critics are right to chastise Mr. Obama for his pallid rhetoric on race, at least as president, they are wrong to say that he does not care about poor communities of color. Mr. Obama has been spending without saying. He should get at least as much credit for the former as vilification for the latter.

10 Numbers That Explain Why Income Inequality is a Hot Topic

Michael Novajovsky, a father of three outside Atlanta with a temporary job as a network engineer, said the struggle to build a better life often felt similar to “a lottery.” Virginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times

WASHINGTON POST

Although high-octane rhetoric on health care seems to overshadow all other political discussions in U.S. politics, income inequality and economic opportunity have crept up in speeches and policy proposals from the White House, Congress, state government, local government and academics. Here are a few reasons why.

65 percent

According to a Pew Research poll from December 2013, that's the number of Americans who think the income gap between the rich and the poor has grown in the last three years. Of those 65 percent of respondents, only 3 percent think that's a good thing. A month later, President Obama geared a large part of his State of the Union address toward that 65 percent of the population:

The problem is that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years.  A child born in the top 20 percent has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top.  A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is. In fact, statistics show not only that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina, but that it is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies -- countries like Canada or Germany or France.  They have greater mobility than we do, not less.
The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough. But the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to action. We are a better country than this.

 Republicans have been speaking a lot about inequality in 2014, too. In early January, Newt Gingrich said on CNN, "I think every Republican should be concerned about inequality. I think when you have places where there are billionaires living in a city with 22,000 homeless children, anybody who has a sense of decency has to be concerned." Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan said in January, "Poverty is not some rare disease from which the rest of us are all immune. It is but the worst strain of a widespread disease otherwise known as economic insecurity. Most families worry about making ends meet." They all see the same problem that a majority of Americans do, but they have wildly different ideas for solving it.

32.3 million

Source: National Center for Children in Poverty

There are more than 72 million kids in America. Forty-five percent of them -- 32.3 million -- live in low-income families.

6 percent

That's how much wages grew for the median worker between 1979 and 2011. Earners in the 95th percentile saw their wages grow by 37 percent over the same time period. Earners in the top 1 percent saw their wages balloon by 113 percent.

32 

This is the number of states -- plus D.C. -- considering minimum-wage legislation as of February 24, 2014, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 4.4 percent

Source: The Equality of Opportunity Project

A child raised in a family in the bottom fifth of income earners in Charlotte, N.C., has a 4.4 percent chance of rising to the top fifth, making Charlotte the least upwardly mobile metro area in the country. San Jose, Calif., is the most upwardly mobile city, and even then there's only a 12.9 percent chance that kids raised in the bottom fifth will reach the top. The South and Midwest are the least upwardly mobile areas of the country.

  For children of affluent families, your economic future doesn't depend much on georgraphy. As David Leonhardt put it last July,

Geography mattered much less for well-off children than for middle-class and poor children, according to the results. In an economic echo of Tolstoy’s line about happy families being alike, the chances that affluent children grow up to be affluent are broadly similar across metropolitan areas.

On the other side of the economic spectrum, approximately 1.6 million children experience homelessness every year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

This lack of mobility is one of the data points most likely making politicians pay attention to inequality; the American Dream was always prefaced on the possibility that the top was never out of reach -- what's left if we've disproved that?

[ Children growing up in America today are just as likely — no more, no less — to climb the economic ladder as children born more than a half-century ago, a team of economists reported Thursday.
Even though social movements have delivered better career opportunities for women and minorities and government grants have made college more accessible, one thing has stayed constant: If you are growing up poor today, you appear to have the same odds of staying poor in adulthood that your grandparents did. Read more at the Washington Post/Bloomberg ]

 58 percent

In the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, that's the number of people who would be more likely to support a candidate who "supports raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10." This policy was one of the more popular ones tested by the survey.

Source: The Washington Post

 1,714

 That's the average SAT score of students who come from families with an income over $200,000. Students in families with an income lower than $20,000 have an average SAT score of 1,326. Not only are low-income kids unlikely to have high SAT scores, they are also unlikely to be able to afford the educations that create the next generation of high SAT scorers. Both parties have put forward different ideas to address equality in education, with Democrats focusing on universal pre-K and STEM training and Republicans focusing on school choice

 4,791,000

  That's the number of people who have been unemployed for over 27 weeks as of March 7, 2014 -- and are still looking for a job. These are the people -- more likely to be a minority, disabled, less educated and already living in poverty -- that are least likely to get hired. The likelihood that an unemployed person will get called for a job interview drops 45 percent as their unemployment stretches from one month to eight months. The U.S. Senate recently passed a bill to bring back unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed -- benefits that expired at the end of last year. The bill would also retroactively provide benefits for the time period between Dec. 28 to passage of the law. In order to make the package more enticing to House Republicans -- who haven't voted on the bill yet -- they found ways to pay for the benefits without raising government spending.

US Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) makes remarks at a press briefing to rally support for Congress to renew unemployment insurance benefits, which earlier failed to pass Republican opposition, at the US Capitol, January 16, 2014, in Washington, DC. The boxes in the foreground hold petitions to be delivered to Congressional leaders as labor leaders hold signs to support jobless Americans. UPI/Mike Theiler

  9

That's the number of countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that have higher minimum wages than the United States does. Also looking abroad, here is a map that shows how the United States compares to other countries when it comes to income equality, as measured by the Palma ratio.

The Washington Post

As Max Fisher summed up the data last September:


 The United States doesn't come out of this comparison looking great. It's ranked 44th out of 86 countries, well below every other developed society measured. It's one spot below Nigeria, which has some of the worst political corruption in the world and in 2012 saw nationwide protests over perceived income inequality. The United States' Palma ratio ranks it just beneath Nigeria but above Russia and Turkey -- all countries that have experienced heavy political unrest in recent years.

50

President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" began in 1964. This year marks the 50th anniversary of America's longest war, and both parties have reached the same conclusion (albeit for different reasons): We still have a long way to go. The White House and the House Budget Committee have both released reports on the War on Poverty this year.

MEANWHILE, IN NYC: MS. QUINN; ALSO INCREASED POVERTY, AND BIKE KIOSKS

NY TIMES

Her mother was dying of breast cancer that had spread to her bones.

Almost every morning, the young Ms. Quinn woke her mother, bathed her, made her breakfast and gave her medication.

Her mother had gone deaf, and said that Christine, her younger daughter, was the only one whose lips she could read. So it was up to her daughter to deliver the worsening medical news the family received in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms, which her mother met with disbelief and sometimes anger.

When the sadness and chaos got to be too much, Ms. Quinn would sneak tubs of ice cream and corn muffins up to her bedroom, eat them in a single sitting, and then make herself throw up. The purging brought a momentary sense of relief to what seemed an out-of-control life.

Ms. Quinn, now speaker of the New York City Council and a Democratic candidate for mayor, kept secretly bingeing and purging for 10 years, as she moved from high school to Trinity College and the beginnings of a political career, until she entered a Florida rehabilitation center at age 26.

“I’m embarrassed about it now still,” Ms. Quinn said during an interview on Friday at her City Hall office. “I wish I could say I wasn’t.”

Now, for the first time, Ms. Quinn is making public her bulimia and the alcoholism that accompanied it. She will speak about her experience on Tuesday at Barnard College, and touch on it in a memoir to be published next month.

Ms. Quinn, 46, contacted The New York Times to tell her story, as her aides try to soften her often rough-edged political image and build a campaign that draws heavily on her personal appeal to women.

She said she had come to believe that “until you stop hiding things, you’re hiding things, and hiding things is not healthy.”

“I just want people to know you can get through stuff,” she added. “I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.”

Read more at NY TIMES


City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty




NY TIMES

The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.

That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.

By the city’s definition, a family with two adults and two children could earn $46,416 a year and still fall within 150 percent of the city’s poverty level. Unlike the official but rigid federal poverty level, the city’s measure balances the added value of tax credits, food stamps, rent subsidies and other benefits against expenses like health and day care, housing and commuting that reflect New York’s higher living costs. The city says a two-adult, two-child family is poor if it earns less than $30,949 a year. The federal government sets the level at $22,811.

Though more New Yorkers were working in 2011 than the year before, larger shares of children and working adults were classified as poor in 2011, and the proportions of Asians, noncitizens and Queens residents — overlapping groups — each rose by more than four percentage points since 2008.

Read more at NY TIMES

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 Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist.

But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this.

In recent weeks, hundreds of stations have sprouted in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — empty husks sprawled 30 or 50 spaces long on city sidewalks and streets, anticipating rows of bicycles that will that will soon protrude from the kiosk slots.

The critics say the kiosks are a blight. They clash with the character of residential areas of the West Village or Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They are already magnets for pigeons, garbage bags and dogs in need of relief.

Lawsuits have been prepared. Kiosks have been defaced