I haven't slept well the last couple of nights, and have devoted the otherwise wasted time to an attempt to finish Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine before I turn 67 years old tomorrow. In sheer number of pages, I have not that far to go, but the entire book is truly depressing reading, and it is so packed full of information and examples that one gets the most out of it by reading every word. And of course Ms. Klein, of necessity, takes the reader back to the George W. Bush presidency, which was IMNSHO even worse than the Obama era. Ah, well; I have plenty of good, cheap wine on hand, and an undeniably good book, to see me through the evening...

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AFTERTHOUGHT: let me clarify. Obama has been disappointing to me, while GeeDubya and crew were utterly disgusting. Got it?

Greg Kaufmann (Center for American Progress; The Nation, BillMoyers.com) lists a couple of dozen numbers depicting poverty in America, often comparing the most recent figures available with those of a decade or more ago. The short version: American poverty is bad and getting worse. Astonishing numbers of American families live in poverty; even more astonishing numbers of Blacks, Hispanics and female heads of households live in poverty. Notwithstanding the words of Paul Ryan (R-Hell), federal antipoverty programs actually can and do make a difference; in this context, Social Security retirement and disability are also antipoverty programs (remember that when Mr. Obama and his Republican buddies start blathering about any sort of "grand bargain" that would compromise SocSec).

I have never lived in poverty, though my father and mother came damned close when I was a child: later in my adolescence, Dad often reminisced about the Christmas in my childhood in which we had $3.00 (three dollars) left in the bank. The times and policies of both the federal government and many employers were kinder than they are today, and we didn't have a Republican Party full of Paul Ryans from the pits of Hell, trying their damnedest to toss people straight into poverty. My family's experiences are a good example of the possibility of a whole society of people, of many different levels of income and wealth, all living life adequately fed and clothed, none suffering abject hunger, all adequately medically cared for. But for that to be the sustainable state of America today, our leaders have to stop lying about what it costs to secure a minimum healthful livelihood for everyone... and the extremely wealthy must be stopped, the sooner the better, from buying our government for their own purposes, which usually involve making themselves even wealthier. To provide the best for anyone, America must provide an adequate life for everyone. It's that simple.

Via Robert Reich, here's information from The Levy Institute of Bard College (.pdf):

For the vast majority of people in the United States, economic growth has become little more than a statistical sideshow, largely disconnected from their paychecks. This is starkly illustrated in the figure below, which shows how income growth has become more inequitably distributed with virtually every subsequent economic expansion during the postwar period.

In the 1949–53 expansion, the overwhelming majority of the income growth went to the overwhelming majority of the people—the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. After that, the bottom 90 percent’s share of income gains gradually shrunk, decade by decade. This trend accelerated in the 1980s, to the point that the richest 10 percent began receiving the majority of the income growth. And from 2009 through 2012, while the economy was recovering from one of the biggest economic downturns in recent memory, 116 percent of the income growth went to the top 10 percent (with the top 1 percent alone taking home 95 percent of the income gains); this absurd result is possible because the bottom 90 percent actually saw their incomes fall, on average, during this growth period.

...

(See linked article for the figure referred to above.)

This trend and its consequences in people's lives are utterly unjust. Worse, action by a government in facilitating such outright robbery of the poor and the middle class by the very rich is the stuff of which revolutions are made... read America's Declaration of Independence, and note how many of the reasons given for revolt are economic in character. The 1% has basically one choice in its own self-interest: revise the rules to reinstitute a prosperous middle class and substantially reduce poverty. Not that those people listen to me...

Conservatives are reaching new depths in their insistence upon outright cruelty to children and old people. Some version of the meme has always been part of the conservatives' creed, but it's getting worse.

Everyone remembers Charles Pierce's famous labeling of Paul Ryan as a "zombie-eyed granny starver" in August 2012 in the run-up to the presidential election for Ryan's proposals regarding Social Security and Medicare in his "budget." Pierces' reaction:

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live.

Conservatives' fondest dream

And most people remember Newt Gingrich's November 2011 proposal that schools fire their janitors and hand brooms to kids enrolled in the free lunch program, a recommendation subsequently echoed by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) as recently as December 2013.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, a commitment to absolutely no redistribution of wealth is important to many conservatives. I am thinking of an old friend of mine who used to say, "TANSTAAFL," an acronym from possibly the 1930s made famous by s/f author Robert Heinlein in 1966. You could almost see my friend raise his index finger in the classic gesture of quoting a wise proverb... at least I think it was his index finger... as if the acronym were holy writ.

In any case, "no redistribution" is absurd: the very people who advocate it loudest are the same people who would be howling in outrage if it were enforced upon their wealth. Look, folks: the whole friggin' world is a free lunch. Life is a free lunch: you didn't earn it, it just happened to you. For most wealthy people, wealth is a free lunch: that's the consequence of living in a society that legally protects most inheritance from parents to children.

So don't give me that "TANSTAAFL" nonsense! And stop starving grannies and slave‑driving children, right this minute!

We're supposed to be grateful: the GOPers wanted to whack $39 billion. I wonder how many of the Tea Party Starve-The-Poor caucus actually opened their Bibles to find out how Supply-Side Jesus told them to justify what they did. Failures as human beings; that's what they are... just plain evil, not merely ignorant.

BTW, altogether too many Democrats voted for the farm bill in spite of the food stamp cuts in it. Shame knows no political party.

Stella works a half-day on Thursday. (Really? that's what you think? You try to find a full-time job with full benefits in America today.) When she got home, she was pretty hungry, and said, I assume you've already had lunch? No, said I, but I'm not quite hungry yet. Stella went on to prepare something for herself; after a while, I finally felt the urge and heated up some veggie chili (who knew Hormel made a decent non-meat product as well). Now neither one of us is hungry.

That conversation, and that conclusion, are by no means universal in American households today: lunch or no‑lunch is often enough a big deal. Congress just axed food stamps (part of SNAP) for everyone, to save the taxpayers' money... $8 billion of it, as I'm sure Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Hunger) would tell you. That's biiiig bucks, right? Wrong! As Laura Clawson at Daily Kos finds, using CEPR's Responsible Budget Reporting Calculator, that's 0.04 percent of federal spending. A micro‑drop in the feral budget bucket... but all the food some families get to eat. A great trade, eh? Maybe if you're a well-off GOPer it's a great deal, but if you've been pounding pavement for months on end looking for work, that might not be the way you'd put it. These days, cruelty has a name, and its acronym is G‑O‑P.

When I think of hunger due to poverty, I think of my sainted father. Now he and his family experienced genuine hunger in the Great Depression. Dad's father was part of a road‑building crew in Arkansas; Dad used to say that to the extent technological facility is inheritable, mine came from my granddad: reputedly he could disassemble a piece of road equipment in situ on the job, fix it, put it back together and get things going again in a hurry. Unfortunately, I never met my paternal grandfather: he skipped out on his family, his wife and three growing boys. All the boys took part-time jobs at night, but even that was barely enough. Dad described meals at home: if you wanted two chops, not just one, you'd better take both the first time the platter was passed, because the platter was always empty after one time around. Dad got a lot of grief from his brothers (particularly the youngest) for going to college, even though Dad saw to it that the family was never out one penny for his doing so. (As a consequence of his college degree, Dad, when W.W.II came along, entered the Navy at officer level, for which the youngest brother again gave him grief. Some people cannot be pleased.)

Dad gave up his football scholarship after his sophomore year. After that, he skipped a lot of meals in his junior and senior years... and, as he told it, made his best grades ever in that period. That notwithstanding, when he married and started a family of his own, he was determined to see to it that we never went hungry. And we never did. And so far, I still haven't missed any meals for lack of means to pay for them. But who knows what this Great Recession, even if it's truly over, will spell for my declining years. As President Obama ought to understand, but seems not to, hunger is an ever-present danger for a family in an alleged free-market economy, and we have the Koch Brothers and their Tea Party doing their damnedest to make sure that's exactly what we experience.

Here's to food. May you never lack it! May no one ever starve!

Krugman

Paul Krugman claims, with considerable justification, that today's political right‑wingers are "still living in the 1970s, or actually a Reaganite fantasy of the 1970s" in which "[p]overty was therefore a problem of values and social cohesion, not money." Hence "[the Right's] notion of an anti-poverty agenda is still all about getting those layabouts to go to work and stop living off welfare." But as Krugman says, "[t]he reality that lower-end jobs, even if you can get one, don’t pay enough to lift you out of poverty just hasn’t sunk in." As far as the Right is concerned, poverty is a sign of moral, not financial, bankruptcy, and must be punished, not alleviated by government.

In other words, America's Right is an organized, well-funded group of utter failures as human beings. If the nation is to survive, the Right must not be allowed to continue to control the agenda: the drastic bimodal nature of wealth in America, particularly, the lack of opportunity to find jobs that pay a living wage and the consequent starvation of whole families, are far more the cause than the result of poverty. Johnson's War on Poverty was in fact won... yes, by proactive government intervention... but the victory has been stolen over the past 3‑4 decades by people who have an ax to grind and who lack common human sympathy. Maybe, like the war for freedom of speech, the war on poverty is one which requires perpetual re-winning. It's time to enlist, if you haven't already...

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money (which I really must blogroll), Ashley Lutz at Business Insider tells us YAWMS (Yet Another Wal-Mart Story):

A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for its own employees.

"Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner," reads a sign accompanied by several plastic bins.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer first reported on the food drive, which has sparked outrage in the area.

"That Wal-Mart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers — to me, it is a moral outrage," Norma Mills, a customer at the store, told the Plain Dealer.

A company spokesman defended the food drive, telling the Plain Dealer that it is evidence that employees care about each other.

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Stiglitz

"... and the poor get poorer," goes the increasingly accurate but abominably titled song, "Ain't we got fun." Well-known economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, whom the New York Times describes as "a Nobel laureate in economics, a Columbia professor and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank," may as well have quoted that song (omitting the "fun" part) to describe the growth in economic inequality among individuals within developed nations: since the 1980s, individual inequality has grown, using as a basis a paper by World Bank economist Branko Milanović, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality:

...

... While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. ...

So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.

From 1988 to 2008, Mr. Milanovic found, people in the world’s top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by 60 percent, while those in the bottom 5 percent had no change in their income. And while median incomes have greatly improved in recent decades, there are still enormous imbalances: 8 percent of humanity takes home 50 percent of global income; the top 1 percent alone takes home 15 percent. ...

The United States provides a particularly grim example for the world. ...

On the one hand, widening income and wealth inequality in America is part of a trend seen across the Western world. A 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. ...

Of the advanced economies, America has some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences. The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top.

Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. ...

...

(Bolds mine. - SB)

Please note that this 30-odd-year decline in the economic wellbeing of the lower and lower-middle classes in America spans three Republican presidencies and parts of three Democratic presidencies. It spans vast improvements in technology, especially information technology. It also spans historically unprecedented growth in productivity.

Much good that has done the 99% of us. It doesn't seem to matter whom we elect to the presidency or to Congress. It doesn't seem to matter what we do... only the top 1% are able to get ahead, while the rest of us scrape for what we get, and get a portion of all that average economic growth that never really increases. (Beware any author who praises average incomes. Unless you are wealthy or at least well-off, averages have little meaning. The average— the mean— of your income and that of Bill Gates is probably in the billions of dollars; averages are used mostly by Republicans to paper over bad news for the lower and middle classes.)

And poverty... please see this chart for the US and Texas from 1980 to 2007. Note that poverty goes up and down, but never really descends below 11% in "the greatest nation on Earth."

Welcome to our brave new world.

Stiglitz concludes:

...

Inequality and poverty among children are a special moral disgrace. They flout right-wing suggestions that poverty is a result of laziness and poor choices; children can’t choose their parents. In America, nearly one in four children lives in poverty; in Spain and Greece, about one in six; in Australia, Britain and Canada, more than one in 10. None of this is inevitable. ...

For these reasons, I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity — the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok. ...

Stiglitz does not explicitly say which category includes the United States. What do you think?

I was shocked when I read 1½ years ago in a Center for Public Policy Priorities study (.pdf) that 25% of Texas children lived below the official poverty level in 2009, the newest figures then available. But I was really blown away today when I read this on AP via TPM:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

...

The four-out-of-five figure results from a survey by AP-GfK. The survey format allows interviews about related subjects and reflects opinions or impressions of American citizens of their own economic status, not published official statistics. But all of it taken together paints a relatively bleak picture that cannot easily be summarized. Please read the second linked article above; they do the numbers better than I could.

Have I experienced the trappings of poverty in my life? Well, yes, during two periods: my very early childhood and my recent old age. In the former case, my father nonetheless managed to stay employed full-time at a railroad job (therefore a union job), and we never missed meals or were homeless. Today's poor do not enjoy any protections to speak of, and my own income-free existence is cushioned mainly because I put away a lot of money while I was earning a lot, and Wall Street hasn't managed to kill my savings completely yet. If I had a few more years without income (note: I should start receiving Social Security fairly soon) or one more major medical event (another note: I should apply for Medicare this year), I could end up in literal, subjective poverty. I have some hope that will not happen.

Thus quotes the incomparable Bill Moyers in "We are Living in the United States of Inequality," a gut-wrenching summary of the extremes of economic inequality now permitted... no, encouraged... in America.

Today's gap between rich and poor is arguably the worst ever in America. Goodness knows it's bad enough... and the number of people experiencing that gap is vast. Let Moyers tell you about it in under 15 minutes.

(Link points to a transcript and a Vimeo video of the summary. Moyers packs a powerful message in a very short segment. Found by several indirections beginning at Avedon's Sideshow.)

DSWright of FDL has some details. In America, if you are a person of ordinary means... formerly of ordinary means... your prospects have literally never been worse.

Unemployment, nominally 7.7%, is actually 23% by the old metrics. It's an old game: if you don't like the numbers, change the metric.

According to Yahoo News, "nearly 50 million Americans — one in six — were living below the income line that defines poverty, according to the [US Census] bureau." Fifty million Americans suffer in poverty. Those "lucky duckies"!

From the same Yahoo News article, again according to the Census bureau, "20 percent of the country’s children are poor." Twenty percent. Of children. Some things are just plain wrong: child poverty is one of them.

Meanwhile, banks are bailed out, the wealthiest 1% pay taxes at the lowest rates, and the poor and middle class pick up the tab. All of this appears to be fine with President Obama and a bipartisan majority in Congress. And if you're poor in America, and dream of emigrating to western Europe, don't bother: European governments are pursuing austerity as surely as our own.

According to Laura Clawson at Daily Kos Labor, writing this January, having a moderately high income may not save you if you lose that income:

If you suddenly lost your income, how long would you be able to live on your savings? For 43.9 percent of American households, the answer is less than three months, even if they keep their spending to the most basic needs. That's not just true of families that know they're close to poverty, either—one in four households earning between $55,465 and $90,000 are in the same boat, according to the 2013 Assets & Opportunities Scorecard.

If you live in the South, there's a greater chance you're in poverty or headed there. There are dozens of maps; here's one from panhandlepost.com, chosen more or less at random and because it subdivides at state boundaries and is hence easier to view:

Poverty in America, 2010, percentages by state