Economists: US Poverty On Track To Hit Highest Level Since 1960s 696
First time accepted submitter eentory writes "According to economists and other experts surveyed by the Associated Press, the U.S. poverty rate is on track to hit its highest level since the 1960s. The consensus among those surveyed is that 'the official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent.' Just a 0.1 percent increase would put the poverty rate at its highest since 1965."
"Highest rate since the 1960s" (Score:2, Informative)
Depends entirely on when in the 1960s you are talking. Around 1960 itself, the rate was over 20%, and had fallen to half that by the end. But anyways, I trust economists predictions about what is going to happen in a year about as much as I do weather predictions 5 days hence: if I had to bet on them or a coin flip, I'd go with the coin every time.
Poverty rate (Score:5, Informative)
"According to a 2011 paper by poverty expert Robert Rector, of the 43.6 million Americans deemed to be below the poverty level by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009, the majority had adequate shelter, food, clothing and medical care. In addition, the paper stated that those assessed to be below the poverty line in 2011 have a much higher quality of living than those who were identified by the census 40 years ago as being in poverty."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
These days we count poverty as economic disparity, which is not the historical definition of poverty. Today, if you have access to medical care, housing and food, we state that you are living in poverty. That is not to say there aren't those living in legitimate poverty.
Malnourishment is down, and yet we insist poverty is near all-time highs.
Re:Poverty isn't what it used to be (Score:2, Informative)
While I agree that having resources makes it easier to engage in profitable activity, everything you said after your first sentence is about avoiding taxation. What does one persons avoiding taxation have to do with anothers poverty? Do you realize that you could tax everyone with actual income over $250K at 100% and it would not come close to covering the entitlements provided by the government.
In any case, your wrong about how successful they are at hiding from taxation. As an example, you mention IRAs which are not even an option to the wealthy because once your income is high enough you are no longer allowed to make pre-tax contributions.
Re:Pay to be Poor (Score:5, Informative)
"Who in the country actually works for minimum wage? A small number indeed, 1 to 2%."
"In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm [bls.gov]
Re:Relevant (Score:5, Informative)
Why did Obama wait until he lost control of Congress to try and revive the economy?
I am not a fan of Obama, but he never had control of Congress. I believe what you refer to as "control" was 59 Democrats + 1 Indep, with 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. So he would need absolute unanimous support and the support of Lieberman (who negotiated quite a bit for his single vote).
That's a very theoretical "control", that could be broken by luring one person away (or even someone sick/campaigning/etc/).
Re:Let's really have a look at spending (Score:5, Informative)
You know what? The Constitution puts the spending power in the hands of Congress, not the president. So, take a look at where the deficits are really happening [verizon.net]
Re:Relevant (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, you have a selective memory. I guess it is easy to forget the filibusters going on during that time with every law 24/7 with no way of invoking cloture, and no way to just do an up/down vote.
Re:Relevant (Score:5, Informative)
The graphs [jaredbernsteinblog.com] tell the tale, when the stimulus kicked in jobs recovered, when it began to phase out, job growth stalled -- all the while Obama has proposed additional stimulus and gotten thwacked in the knockers for it every time.
Re:Relevant (Score:3, Informative)
Bush Sr., Clinton, and Reagan all dealt with Congresses controlled by the Opposite party, yet are still *not* considered leadership failures.
They did not deal with a Congress that tried to stop every piece of legislation going through and tried to ruin the economy so that they could blame it on the President. That part is attributed to the rise in the Tea Party.
Re:Relevant (Score:2, Informative)
Funny how the stimulus act exists when Republicans want to bash Obama on the debt, and then ceases to exist when they want to ask what he's done about job creation.
Conservative Republicans believe that it is NOT the governments purpose to create jobs. That doesn't appear anywhere in the Constitution, "...promote the general welfare..." in the preamble being the closest thing, but not an actual clause.
Then why do Conservative Republicans hammer on about how Obama has done nothing for jobs in this great country, every chance they get? Why aren't they hammering the private sector? And FFS, no one even mentioned the goddamned Constitution!
This conservative thinks Bush and Obama both got us deeper in debt, Obama doing even worse than Bush.
Lies. Obama put back on the books the costs of two wars that were excluded during Bush's terms Draw the line with the Bush wars included, and you see that Obama has done markedly better.
And ironically it was with a Democrat in the White House when we last had a balanced budget.
..and squandered by a Republican.
I'm for ZERO tax change (freeze current levels) until Congress and the President get their act together and balance the budget. Only then would I be willing to hear proposals for tax changes (increases or cuts). I will NEVER support allowing Congress to take even more from Americans until they earn my trust by proving they can live within their means without voting a revenue increase. History has shown that voting to take more inevitably leads to greater spending.
Congress doesn't 'live within their means'. Congress isn't renting an apartment and washing dishes at a local restaurant to pay the rent. It's a governing body with the obligation to pass laws, including budgets, that meet and fund the obligations of the United States of America.
It's like a kid with a credit card.
It is oh so nothing like that. It's this precise attitude that's gotten the current Congress all in a bind. Yes, I leave out the President because, if you had a clue as to how the system works, it's Congress who starts the budgetary process, and the current batch of 'tards in office seem to think pure obfuscation is a legitimate tactic. There's no respect of the system or the duties of Congress. There's just a get-my-way attitude that thinks it's preferable to burn the whole thing down rather than compromise. That's not the mindset of politicians, that's the mindset of fanatics.
Earn my trust FIRST, Congress (D or R).
You had that chance at the polling booth, friend. You'll have that chance again.
Class warfare, using jealousy and envy to separate rich/poor is awful. You may love it if you're poor and want something for nothing, or you may hate it if you're rich. And there's a mix of both in the vast middle where I'm firmly planted. You may stand on principal that what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours, that even if a group gathers and votes to take what's yours or mine away and use it for the "public good" that it still amounts to taking--so where's the reimbursement?
"Public good", huh. In quotes, like you think there's no such thing. Or maybe you just don't think you've any obligation to contribute to it. Fuck 'em, I got mine, right? Yeah. Ironic that man, the most social of animals, is convinced that 'socialism' is evil.
The rich sure love you. Under the current tax regime, you 'middlers', or 53% ers, or whatever poor downtrodden designation you want for yourselves these days, are happily deflating your income every year to the tune of inflation, while they reap not only every penny of the productivity gains of the past 30 years, they also reap the benefits of favorable taxation rules and loopholes that most everyone else can't avail themselves of.
Class warfare? The second richest man on the planet TOLD US that it was happening, and that they were winning, years ago.
Re:they aren't capitalists (Score:4, Informative)
Eh are you sure about that? Tax incidence is dependent on the price elasticity of the taxed good [wikipedia.org]. If a good has inelastic supply, or elastic demand, a seller is limited to the extent that he can pass-on taxes, because higher price points will simply cause the buyers to purchase less. If the demand for a a good in inelastic, like gasoline, all of the cost can be passed on because the consumer lacks the bargaining power to seek alternatives. That's what happens if you follow the deadweight losses, anyways.
This is why physiocrats and Georgists believed that a Single Tax on land was the only truly enlightened form of taxation, because undeveloped land has a perfectly inelastic supply and there is, thus, 100% of the tax is passed on and there is zero deadweight loss. It's a perfectly neutral tax, in that it neither encourages nor discourages any economic activity -- a landowner has to pay tax on his land, but if he were a renter his cost situation would be identical, except for premium rents charged for development on the land, which are priced in the open market. It never really took off because most of the people on Earth that own land are also relatively powerful politically :) Adam Smith wasn't a Georgist, but he inspired many of their ideas.
The idea that companies uniformly pass on all their taxes to their customers is little more than corporate propaganda, and not grounded in any economic theory. It is sometimes the case but the truth is much more complicated.
Re:they aren't capitalists (Score:4, Informative)
Just to complete the thought, you should read more about ground rents and the problem of retierism in general. Economists of the 19th century were the first to become dimly aware of the fact that people were able to extract wealth by buddying-up with the government, and they realized that the most important way they did this was by taking control of land freehold. They saw the institution of land title as the original form of rent seeking, because it allowed the owner to charge money for nothing -- they lived in an era where a landowner would charge a renter for land that was completely undeveloped, many of these economists attacked tax-free landholding the way people on slashdot attack eternal copyright. It's basically the same mechanism. Nowadays land is developed and rent value is based on the level of development, so ground rents aren't as visible to most people anymore -- though they still come up, and they absolutely exist under other circumstances, like copyright. Basically, whenever the government declares something is ownable, it creates the potential for rents, and policy comes down to how well the government balances these rights against the unavoidable waste and inefficiencies.
PS. Marx, directly following Adam Smith's program, went on to apply the principle to labor with the Labor Theory of Value, but it's not clear labor really works that way or that an employer "owns" employment openings in the same way that a landowner owns land, or that surplus labor-power is really a form of rent.