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Coonoor Behal

Welfare Reform and the Work Support System | Brookings Institution - 0 views

  • Among other provisions, the 1996 reforms required work of almost every adult that joined the welfare rolls. In addition, with some exceptions, a limit of five years was placed on the receipt of cash welfare by individual families.
  • Beginning roughly in the mid-1970s with the enactment of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government originated or expanded a series of programs that provide benefits to working families. Unlike welfare benefits, which are intended primarily for the destitute, these work support benefits are designed to provide cash and other benefits to working adults and their families. In addition to the EITC, the major benefits in the system include the child tax credit, the minimum wage, state income supplement programs, food stamps, health insurance, and child care.
  • This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the 1996 welfare law.
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  • As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the 1990s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports
  • The value of these new work support programs at both the federal and state level cannot be overemphasized. The EITC alone provides roughly $4,000 a year in extra benefits to a low-wage worker with two or more children, and the children remain eligible for Medicaid. The average woman leaving welfare earns about $7 an hour, or $13,000 in after-tax income. The combined value of food stamps and the EITC, then, brings her total income up to about $19,000—enough to boost a single parent family with three or fewer children above the federal poverty line
  • Polls show that the public is willing to do more for those who work.
  • Many of these policies respond to complaints that the 1996 welfare law placed too much emphasis on reducing caseloads and not enough on reducing poverty.
  • The work support system serves three primary goals. First, it provides incentives for work.
  • A second goal of the work support system is to help ensure that parents working at low-wage jobs have enough total income to provide an adequate standard of living.
  • The third goal of the work support system is to insure that those who lose their jobs or cannot find work will not be destitute.
  • The minimum wage is not very well-targeted. Only one quarter of minimum-wage earners live in poor families.
  • By 2000, the federal EITC was providing over $30 billion in cash supplements to working families, making it the biggest program other than Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that provides benefits to low-income families. And unlike nearly every other program for low-income families, it provides benefits only to families that work. It is, in short, the quintessential work support program.
  • States have taken two major approaches to improving work incentives. First, since enactment of the 1996 reforms, nearly every state has allowed parents who find jobs to retain more of their welfare benefit. This policy enables many families to work and continue receiving earnings supplements from welfare.
  • under current federal rules, working families can exhaust their five-year limit on welfare while receiving just a small supplement to their earnings. For this reason, time limits may actually discourage work
  • A second approach states have followed is to create their own EITC programs.
  • nearly all the families leaving welfare are eligible for food stamps
  • less than half the families leaving welfare receive the food stamp benefits to which they are entitled.
Coonoor Behal

The Death of Consumer Segmentation? | CMO Strategy - Advertising Age - 0 views

  • the rather static definition of consumer segments is becoming less reliable in our extremely volatile society, especially in today's economic climate. A consumer's lifetime value may have decreased significantly in the past six months, a fact not reflected by any segmentation method. A person might be out of a purchase cycle for a particular product because of a significant household change
  • These life-changing events are becoming more difficult to predict because consumers live their lives on a much less traditional path than they did 10 or 20 years ago.
  • consumers are never just part of one segment. Rather, they feel, rightfully, that they belong to a multitude of segments.
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  • This individual belongs to three segments with different behavior patterns, product affinities and interests -- depending on the time of day or the day of the week. This is particularly true for the growing multicultural groups in the U.S. who are moving through several segment identities every single day.
  • consumers are gaining more control of any marketing activity. And they like it.
  • t's easier to let them choose and decide what is relevant for them than to predict relevance based on any expensively calculated segment identity. This is a plea to marketers for a stronger focus on enabling the consumer to self-segment.
  • following in the footsteps of Amazon in recommending segment identities by correlating the interest in one product to another. An investment in a smart product-affinity recommendation engine could be more worthwhile than spending huge dollars against micro-segmenting the consumer base.
  • wo of the most successful product and retail companies, Apple and Amazon, are not masters of consumer segmentation but experts in building relevant products that consumers choose.
  • They are far more focused on building and communicating relevance relationships than in micro-segmenting consumers by any kind of attributes.
  • consumer segmentation and self-segmentation have now entered the stage of becoming equal forces in today's marketing discipline.
Coonoor Behal

'Why television is more important than food' | Firstpost - Page 2 - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Let me give you an example of the auto-rickshaw drivers in Chennai, where one of my students did a survey. The survey found that 40% of their income goes into drinking. If you were to ask why they are doing that, the answer is “my body hurts and I want something to stop the hurt”. You are in an auto-rickshaw 12 hours a day. Your body is bouncing. Your bones are hitting against each other. At that point you want something.  I understand that alcohol is not the best possible relief. But whenever we want to be judgemental of the poor, and whenever we don’t want to trust their judgement, the question for us is to ask first is what is it that makes them make that choice? Unless we ask that question we are often tempted to impose our own conditions on their lives.
  • We need to understand how difficult it is to be poor. That is the first fact to keep in mind. Every poor person is much more in control of his life than I am of mine. I don’t know how much my salary is. I don’t how much my pension is. I don’t know where my water comes from. I have automatic health insurance. I don’t have a choice. Most of my choices have been taken out of my life. In fact, wait, I don’t want those choices.
Coonoor Behal

'Why television is more important than food' | Firstpost - Page 1 - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • So what does this tell us? That evenings in a village are very boring. And that person in the village in Morocco really felt life would be unbearable without a television.
  • In any decision we make there is a space for pleasure. A space that recognises we are human beings and the domain of pleasure is an essential driver for us.
  • I think they are helping themselves. We should understand what they are doing.
Coonoor Behal

Casey B. Mulligan: A Tale of Two Welfare States - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
Coonoor Behal

How to Fight Homelessness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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
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  • In other words, many of these families are just one financial setback away from the streets.
Coonoor Behal

Profiting From a Child's Illiteracy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
Coonoor Behal

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

  • 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

NJ mayor to live on food stamps starting Tuesday - 0 views

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    We should follow this story - AND potentially interview him?!?!?!
Coonoor Behal

New America Interactive Poverty Map - 0 views

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
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    tried to make something similar in tableau before my computer went bust last week. pretty easy to do with a solid data set so if we need to make map-based visuals it won't be too hard
Vetan Kapoor

Poverty: 2010 and 2011 (ACS) - 1 views

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    "Among large metropolitan areas, poverty rates ranged from 8.3 percent to 37.7 percent in the 2011 ACS."
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    A lot of good stats from the 2010 Census report on geography of poverty, as well as race and child vs. adult stuff, which I read in the foreword to the Harrington book. I'm typing up key notes from each chapter and will post here or google docs once done.
Coonoor Behal

http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-17.pdf - 2 views

    • Coonoor Behal
       
      Why aren't poverty thresholds different based on cost of living across different states and cities? Does it make sense for the poverty threshold in NYC to be the same as Boise?
    • Vetan Kapoor
       
      Good point. My guess would be that the poverty line is calculated based on some basket of goods deemed vital to function at a basic level, and that most of these goods are within a fairly narrow price range (food, clothing etc.). Also the highest expenditures are probably in rent/housing (30-50% of income) and for low income folks these should be pretty comparable giving housing vouchers and other HUD type assistance?
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    "People living in poverty tend to be clustered in certain neighborhoods rather than being evenly distributed across geographic areas."
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    "...living in areas with many other poor people places burdens on low-income families beyond what the families' own individual circumstances would dictate."
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    "some government programs target resources to communities with concentrated poverty. Many of these programs use the Census Bureau's definition of "poverty areas" (census tracts with poverty rates of 20 percent or more)"
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    "the South had a larger proportion of people (27.4 percent) living in poverty areas than any other region, followed by the West (21.6 percent)."
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    "Nearly half (49.0 percent) of the 10.3 million people residing in category IV tracts lived in poverty, while a little more than a quarter (27.3 percent) of the 56.6 million in category III were in poverty."
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    "More than one-half of the families in categories I, II, and III were married-couple families while only 43.2 percent of families in category IV tracts were married couples. Female householder families represented about 14 percent of families in category I tracts, but 46.2 percent of families in category IV tracts."
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    "The poverty thresholds are updated annually to allow for changes in the cost of living using the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). They do not vary geographically."
Coonoor Behal

How to Perform Customer Segmentation - YouTube - 0 views

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    Quick video on how to do customer segmentation for a strategic plan
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