Don't Starve the Poor

At a time when struggling Americans need policies that serve the common good, political leaders are making choices that reflect grossly distorted values. Cuts to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program that the House Appropriations Committee approved would force the program to turn away 200,000 to 350,000 eligible low-income women and children next year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) faces $2 billion in cuts. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program would be slashed by 22 percent next year, which means a loss of food for well over 100,000 low-income seniors. The Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides emergency sustenance to shelters serving the poor across the country, would be gutted. These are not simply abstract numbers on a page. They will mean real hunger for American children, mothers and the elderly. Emergency food pantries are already overwhelmed, and even formerly middle-class families are turning to local charities already strained to the breaking point. It’s inconceivable that charitable giving, no matter how generous, could come close to making up for this loss.
While these budget proposals are shocking, it’s also discouraging to hear little more than silence from the White House. With campaign season approaching and poll numbers slipping, the Obama administration seems to speak loudly about the middle class but only mumble about the poor. Our nation’s diverse faith communities, thankfully, have not mumbled. From all denominations, religious leaders are challenging Congress to pass a moral budget that doesn’t provide tax breaks for the rich at the expense of the poor. As a Roman Catholic, I’m proud of the leadership of my bishops. Religious organizations are on the front lines in caring for the most vulnerable. They realize what’s at risk by eviscerating federal food programs when needs are more pressing than at any time in last forty years. I urge all members of Congress to join with our nation’s faith leaders by endorsing the Circle of Protection.
We need fiscal prudence to tackle budget deficits. But it's immoral to increase hunger in America when other options are available. At the very least, it's reasonable to avoid any cuts to food assistance until charities, states and local governments are in a stronger position to respond. Surely, this is common ground for compassionate conservatives and progressives on Capitol Hill and at the White House. Let’s reign in wasteful spending, end irresponsible tax breaks for the rich and make smart budget choices that reflect our nation’s highest ideals. Don’t vote to starve the poor.

To Obama and the Republicans:

Robert Reich Says:

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double-dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?
Republicans don't want to do anything about jobs and wages. They're so intent on unseating Obama they'd like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit -- and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.
Democrats, meanwhile, don't want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don't want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don't think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.
But there's a third reason for Washington's inaction. It's not being talked about -- which is itself evidence of the problem.
The unemployed are politically invisible. They don't make major campaign donations. They don't lobby Congress. There's no National Association of Unemployed People.
Their ranks are filled with women who had been public employees, single mothers, minorities, young people trying to enter the labor force, and middle-aged men who have been out of work for longer than six months. You couldn't find a collection of people with less political clout.
Women who had been teachers, public health professionals and social workers have been hit hard. These jobs continue to be slashed by state and local governments. Public schools alone accounted for nearly 40% of the nation's total public sector job losses in the last year. From March 2010 to March 2011, women lost 214,000 public sector jobs, compared with a loss of 115,000 public jobs by men.
Unmarried mothers are having a particularly difficult time getting back jobs because their work was heavily concentrated in the retail, restaurant and hotel sectors. Many of these jobs disappeared when consumers reduced their discretionary spending, and they won't come back in force until consumers start spending more again.
According to a new report by the California Budget Project, the recession erased more than half the jobs single mothers in California had gained from 1992 to 2002. The result has been a drop in the share of unmarried mothers in jobs, from 69.2% in 2007 to 58.8% in 2010. Unmarried mothers who still have jobs are working fewer hours per week than before.
Blacks also continue to be hard hit. Their unemployment rate here in California reached 20% this past March, up 5% from a year ago. That's more than double their rate before the downturn. Some of this is because of the comparatively low education levels of many blacks, and their weak connections to the labor market. Some is due to employer discrimination. Blacks were among the last hired before the recession and therefore among the first to be let go in the downturn. That means they'll be among the last hired as the economy recovers.
Many young people who have never been in the job market are unable to land a first job. Employers with a pick of applicants see no reason to hire someone without a track record, particularly those without much education. Unemployment among high school dropouts is hovering around 30%. Even recent college graduates are having a much harder time than usual finding a job. Many are settling for jobs that don't ordinarily require college degrees, which pushes those with less education even further back in the line.
Older workers who have lost their jobs are at the greatest risk of continued unemployment. Employers assume they aren't as qualified or reliable as those who are younger and have been working more recently. According to research by the Urban Institute, once you're laid off, your chance of finding another job within a year is 36% if you're under the age of 34. But your odds drop the older you get. If you're jobless and in your 50s, your chance of landing another job within the year is only 24%. Over 62, you've got only an 18% chance.
What do these jobless have in common? They lack the political connections and organizations to get the ears of politicians, and demand policies to spur job growth.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

 

 

Save the Babies

In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program. Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.” Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it’s immoral to deny health care to today’s kids and conservatives countering that it’s even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called “deficit reduction” plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits. The NBER study compared British and American illness rates, controlling for both demographic differences and risk factors like smoking and drinking. It found that (a) we have “much higher” childhood illness rates than our British counterparts, (b) the transmission rate of childhood illnesses into poor health in adults is greater in America than in Britain, and therefore (c) “the origins of poorer adult health among older Americans compared to the English traces back right into the childhood years.” In other words, America’s broken private health care system allows kids’ medical afflictions to become far worse in adulthood than they become in Britain—a nation with a government-sponsored universal health care system

Obama Looks Weak for 2012 Election

 In the United States, the reality looks a lot different. Many political leaders in Britain fail to understand the degree to which the American people are deeply unhappy with their president’s poor handling of the economy. Nor have they grasped the epic scale of the defeat suffered by the president in the November mid-terms, and the emphatic rejection by a clear majority of Americans of the Big Government Obama agenda.
Just seven months ago, the United States was swept by a conservative revolution that fundamentally transformed the political landscape on Capitol Hill, and gravely weakened the ability of the president to pass legislation. This revolution is not in retreat but gaining ground, led by charismatic figures such as Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the House Budget Committee, entrusted with reining in out of control government spending. And as a Gallup poll showed, America is unquestionably a conservative country ideologically, but one that is ironically led by the most left-wing president in the nation’s history.
Ultimately, the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy, and new data released this week makes grim reading for the White House. In fact you cannot watch a US financial news network at the moment, from Bloomberg to CNBC to Fox Business, without a great deal of pessimism about the dire condition of the world’s biggest economy. 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will run out of money in the face of towering public debts.
To say this has been an extremely bad week for the Obama administration on the economic front would be a serious understatement. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, home prices in the United States have sunk to their lowest levels since 2002, falling 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011. At the same time, employment growth is stalling, with only 38,000 Americans added to the workforce in May, the smallest increase since September. This compares with 179,000 jobs added in April. There has also been a steep slowdown in the manufacturing sector, and a downturn in the stock market on the back of weak economic news.
Bill Clinton’s labour secretary Robert Reich summed up the grim mood in a hard-hitting op-ed in The Financial Times, which took aim at both the administration and Congress: