Firstpost Economy ‘Why television is more important than food’ by Vivek Kaul Dec 14, 2012 #Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee #India #Morocco #Poverty #VeryCloseUp Share 21 0 8 Email13 Comments Print Adult Vaccinations Learn More About a Pertussis Vaccine for Adults. SoundsOfPertussis.comExclusive Masaba Gupta Designer Dresses,Saris And Jackets. Available Only @Pernia's PopupShop perniaspopupshop.com/Free-Shippinghttp://www.google.com/url?ct=abg&q=https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py%3Fcontact%3Dabg_afc%26url%3Dhttp://www.firstpost.com/economy/why-television-is-more-important-than-food-557010.html/2%26gl%3DUS%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dca-money_t

People with vouchers had were worse off in  nutrition. They felt that now that they have the vouchers, they are rich and no longer need to eat rice. They could eat pork, shrimps etc. They went and bought pork and shrimps and as a result their net calories went down. This is perfectly rational. These people were waiting for pleasure.

They could improve their nutrition or for the next ten days they could also eat a little bit better. Fun is something that we forget about.

most people don’t understand what it exactly means to be poor and how the decisions made by the poor might be irrational to us but are very rational decisions given the situation they are in.

We were in a village in Morocco talking to a guy who was standing in front of his house. He was telling us about his life and to get the conversation going we asked him, suppose you had some small amount of money what would you do with it? And he said, “I am going to buy some food.” And then we asked him what would he do if he had some more money? He said, “I will buy more food.” So we were very persuaded that this was a hungry man. We walk into his house and see that he had a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player. So we asked him what is this? He said, entirely without missing a step, “television is more important than food.”

One thing uniform across the world is that an evening in a village is very boring. There are no movie theatres. No music halls. No place to go. There is one tea shop. You can go there. You have been there before. All the other people have been there for years. They have talked to each other for years and they say the same things more or less.

Beginning next month, Britain will strive to put its welfare system on a different path by unifying many programs under a single “universal credit” system, what the department describes as an “integrated working-age credit that will provide a basic allowance with additional elements for children, disability, housing and caring.” The department forecasts that its “universal credit will improve financial work incentives by ensuring that support is reduced at a consistent and managed rate as people return to work and increase their working hours and earnings.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Affordable Care Act’s means-tested subsidies and cost-sharing will implicitly add more than 20 percentage points to marginal tax rates on incomes below 400 percent (see Page 27 of the C.B.O. report) of the poverty line (a majority of families fit in this category) by phasing out the assistance as family incomes increase, although a number of families will not receive the subsidies because they already get health insurance from their employer.

In summary, the United States intends to move in the direction of more assistance programs and higher marginal tax rates, while Britain intends to move in the direction of fewer programs and lower marginal tax rates.

many people remain at risk of finding themselves on the street, especially poor families.

The number of homeless veterans declined by more than 17 percent between January 2009 and January of this year. The population of the chronically homeless fell by more than 19 percent between 2007 and 2012.

But while conditions may be improving for homeless individuals, they may be getting worse for families with children, who have costlier needs and therefore fewer housing options

Because kids don’t have a political voice, they have been neglected — and have replaced the elderly as the most impoverished age group in our country.

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.

The methodology for calculating the thresholds was established in the mid-1960s and has not changed in the intervening years.

Money income does not include noncash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, employer-provided health insurance and food stamps

The poverty rate for children has historically been somewhat higher than the overall poverty rate.

Characteristics of the average homeless family:

These families were very low income—the average income for all families was only $573/month

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That is up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

Among low-income families, about one-third were considered poor while the remainder, 6.9 million, earned income just above the poverty line.

the effects of the government programs are still large. The programs reduced poverty for children under 18 by 8.8 percent (or 6.5 million children) and for people 18-64 by 6.1 percent (or 11.8 million people).

Government programs reduce poverty among seniors by 36 percent, and 34.9 percent of that decrease is due to Social Security.

Were it not for Social Security, 43.6 percent of seniors would be poor. That’s 14.5 million seniors that one program is keeping afloat.