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Coonoor Behal

Casey B. Mulligan: Poverty Should Have Risen - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...poverty-should-have-risen

incentives perpetuatingpoverty recession povertyline povertyprograms

shared by Coonoor Behal on 05 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • When measured to include taxes and government benefits, poverty did not rise between 2007 and 2011, and that shows why government policy is seriously off track.
  • rnment help, that amounts to 100 percent taxation (providing more benefits as income falls is sometimes called “implicit taxation”).
  • It is almost as if our present programs of public assistance had been consciously contrived to perpetuate the conditions they are supposed to alleviate.
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  • Under the Obama administration, workers with disposable income in the neighborhood of the poverty line did not, on average, see their job losses during the recession translate into significant reductions in their disposable income.
  • it is possible for the government to help too much
  • The results suggest that the government was helping too much.
  • the percentage of people in households with disposable income less than the poverty line was 15 percent in 2011, just as it was in 2007 before the recession began.
  • Erasing incentives is not the way to a civilized society but rather to an impoverished one.
Coonoor Behal

The poor in America: In need of help | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...election-campaign-they-deserve

povertyprograms systemic

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr Obama’s re-election and Democratic control of the Senate give federal anti-poverty programmes a level of security they would have lacked under a Romney administration. But America’s poor face systemic challenges beyond the aid of any single administration or programme.
  • Most counties exhibiting persistent poverty—meaning counties with poverty rates of 20% or higher, consistently, from 1990 to 2010—are indeed in rural America (see map).
  • For most, poverty will be a temporary condition; chronic poverty remains relatively rare. But it does seem to be growing more common.
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  • Another problem which got worse during the crisis, but was growing beforehand, is suburban poverty.
  • As of 2008 more than a third of America’s poor live in suburbs.
  • The number of poor people living in the suburbs grew 53% between 2000 and 2010
  • The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives.
  • Most poor children live in single-parent homes, and most families that are poor lack married parents.
  • The amount the federal government spends on food stamps hit a record $75.7 billion in the 2011 fiscal year—more than double the level of 2008. Enrolment in Medicaid, through which federal and state governments provide health care to low-income Americans, has grown every year since 2008, though its 2012 growth was the slowest since the recession began, and its spending grew at a lower level than enrolment because of federal and state cost-control measures. In 2011 states disbursed $113.3 billion in unemployment benefits to 9.9m recipients, as well as roughly $16.6 billion received in block grants as part of a federal programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
  • America is unusually reluctant, compared with other rich countries, about giving cash transfers to the poor.
  • Its benefits skew overwhelmingly toward families: the most a single person can claim is around $500, while a married couple with three or more dependent children can receive $5,000 or more. In 2010 $55 billion was paid out through the EITC, and $23 billion for the child tax credit.
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