What Barack Obama's pet accounting gimmick would do to us

Here's the answer in one chart; the fine print points out this starts from the "Chained CPI" standard being in place for three years. So if you are, say, currently 62 and plan to take Social Security at 65, this is your future.

Why is Obama willing to give this to obstructionist Republicans? Damned if I know. If he does give it in the course of current fiscal negotiations, he better explain the truth: both Democrats and Republicans are signing on to force 90 year old ladies to get by on cat food.

Who was it that won the wars?

This graphic representation of what the U.S. enthusiasm for wars in the '00s cost in the federal budget reminded me of a passage from David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? Fromkin is describing the milieu of political and national antagonism that made space for a little band of student aspirant killers to fix on shooting an Austrian archduke and thus create a pretext for a world war.

What distinguished terrorists from ordinary assassins was that they did not necessarily desire the immediate consequences of their violence. ... Their unique strategy -- the strategy of terrorism -- was to frighten society into doing something that the terrorists wanted society to do. An ordinary assassin shoots John Doe because he wants John Doe dead. A terrorist assassin shoots John Doe, whose life or death may be a matter of indifference to him, because he wants the authorities to react in a certain way to the killing.

Osama bin Laden is dead, but he and his little band sure knew how to goad dumb leadership in Washington into spilling blood and treasure on a grand scale. Neither the Eastern or the Western set of arrogant fanatics cared much about who died.

Steve Clemons, who thought up the graphic, pointed out:

The US has spent cumulatively $2.263 trillion more than the FY2011 baseline. ... The other interesting take-away is that $2.263 trillion [in unanticipated spending for war after 9/11] roughly equates to about 7 million sustained jobs in the private U.S. economy, sustained over these entire ten years.

Instead our rulers debate in Washington which poor people will pay for the war binge touched off by the embrace of retaliatory and gratuitous violence -- will it be the sick? the disabled? the elders? the students? all of these?

It seems pretty clear that bin Laden got what he wanted. Can we imagine how to get what most of us want -- a country that values peace over power, a political system that works for the non-rich majority, a better future for coming generations?

Selfish infants grab; real adults share

Busy today; this will have to suffice for a post.

Thanks to Ronni for the clip.

Political and economic immaturity warning

Great -- by holding the debt ceiling hostage, Republicans now have investors trading in what amounts to insurance policies on whether the U.S. will pay its debts. From Stan Collender at Roll Call, one of DC's insider publications:

The best indication of all that the market has already started reacting negatively is the current trading of credit default swaps on U.S. debt. As of late May, the number of CDS contracts — essentially insurance policies on the possibility of a default — had risen by 82 percent. Equally as important, the cost of a CDS — the best indication of how much riskier U.S. debt has become — rose by more than 35 percent from April to May. Last week I spoke to a number of people who calculate such things for a living, and they said this change means that the interest rate the U.S. government has to pay has already increased by as much as 40 basis points compared with what it otherwise would be. This means higher federal borrowing costs and deficits, and overall higher interest rates on everything from car loans to mortgages to credit cards.

Except when something unexpected occurs, the initial changes in market psychology and behavior start with just a few investors who act either because they are more or less risk averse, have better information, or are smarter. That means there are usually small signs of change before a market tsunami hits. In this case, there is now clear evidence that the uncertainty over the federal debt ceiling is already having the negative impact on financial markets that the Republican leadership has said will not occur. Just because it may not yet be obvious to everyone doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Of course Republicans don't care. They just want bash President Obama and cut taxes for their rich sponsors.

What the Republican budget would really do to Medicare

When the new Obama administration was appointing economic advisers in 2009, there was really only one whose history suggested he could be trusted to speak up for Main Street against Wall Street speculators and against the apologies for greed that masquerade as economic wisdom. That was Jared Bernstein, previously of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank specializing in straight talk about "research and ideas for shared prosperity." Bernstein served for three years as Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Biden.

Now he's out of the administration, not alienated, but perhaps freer to name what's going on in DC. Here's his simple description of what would really happen under Republican's plan to phase out Medicare by giving elders vouchers to pay for private insurance. The trouble is, there can be no such thing as an efficient free market in health care.

Suppose you send me to the grocery store to buy you a gallon of milk. Milk costs $3.50 a gallon but you give me $2. I spend the whole day “denying business to inefficient providers”—i.e., grocers who all charge more than that—and at the end of the day, bring you back a pint.

Now, instead of milk, where I’ve got the information I need to be a smart shopper, suppose you give me the same under-priced voucher but ask me to bring you back a plan for treating that strange pain you’ve been experiencing on your left side on humid days.

There’s no “denying business to inefficient providers” in the Ryan plan because there’s no market discipline that average folks with incomplete information armed with an inadequate voucher can enforce on a private health insurance market ...

It's not hard to see that Congressman Paul Ryan's "plan" is just a phony baloney cover for ending the federal promise of affordable, accessible health care for old people. Democrats and anyone who gives a damn about our future need to be unafraid to call out the obvious.

These days Bernstein is writing a plain speaking blog called On the Economy. If you follow this stuff -- and we have to or the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance lobby will steal us blind -- bookmark it.

A people's budget

Mostly the whining coming out of Washington about budgets and the deficit is just cover for a partisan attempt to trash whatever safety net has so far survived thirty years of Reaganism. The very rich already have got hold of most of the country's wealth, but they are feeling deprived because they want it all.

In reality, this is still a rich country and we can pay our bills and take care of our people if our rulers will let us, despite our current trio (!) of dumb wars and habit of coddling failed financial speculators.

Progressive Congresscritters have introduced a "People's Budget" that shows how. Our rulers aren't going to give us anything so sensible unless or until we beat them into it, but progress starts with a picture of where we want to go. The People's Budget serves that function.

Don't take my word for it -- Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman agrees that this is how we need to be thinking.

... it increases revenue partly by imposing substantially higher taxes on the wealthy, which is popular everywhere except inside the Beltway. But it also calls for a rise in the Social Security cap, significantly raising taxes on around 6 percent of workers. And, by rescinding many of the Bush tax cuts, not just those affecting top incomes, it would modestly raise taxes even on middle-income families.

All of this, combined with spending cuts mostly focused on defense, is projected to yield a balanced budget by 2021. And the proposal achieves this without dismantling the legacy of the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, and the Great Society, which gave us Medicare and Medicaid.

Here's a 7 minute clip that explains all this from the Thom Hartmann show, pulled together by Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By.

In time for tax day, US Uncut visits the B of A

As US Uncut points out:

Cheating out on taxes has real costs. If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, we could ‘uncut’ $1.7 billion in early childhood education (Head Start & Title I).

Bank of America is the #1 largest bank and the 5th largest corporation in our country, holding over $2.2 trillion in assets, and yet it pays less in taxes than the average American household. In fact, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion in 2009 while it made $4.4 billion in profits.

Bank of America is Bad for America. Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America consistently avoids any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. Bank of America pockets billions in profits and bailouts, but then pays $0 in American taxes and even gets tax refunds.

On Friday, these folks decided to carry their message to a B of A branch in the San Francisco financial district.


It's not hard to get attention when you bring a brass band.


"I pay, you pay. Why doesn't B of A?"


The arrival of a flash mob can really change the atmosphere in a lobby.


Obviously actions like this one are made for video. Watch the whole thing.

British journalist Johann Hari explained the origin of the Uncut movement ("You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay") in his country in a recent Nation Magazine article. Nice to see we noticed a good thing when someone thought of it.

What the President neglected to mention ...

The President's big budget speech today had some good lines in it. He hit some good themes in his best parental mode, reminding us we are members of a community, dependent on each other.

We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities.

We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.

Of course whether the nice rhetoric will survive making deals with Republicans who don't give a rat's ass about community or anyone but their rich sponsors ... well, we'll see. It is hard to trust this guy; the fruit hasn't yet matched its promise.


What was completely missing from the budget message was any sense that putting the U.S. fiscal house in order MUST involve cuts in our crazy expenditures on the military.

• Where's the money for our new war in Libya coming from?

• Why are we still killing and being killed in Afghanistan where neither Afghans nor the U.S. people want us there?

• Why do we need to pay out 42 percent of the entire global expenditure on war and war preparations? We're rich, but not that rich. The world can be dangerous, but does all that armament make it more or less dangerous.

Chart data from SIPRI

Most people in the United States think we spend something like 25 percent of the budget on foreign aid. Not true; the real amount is less than one percent. If you add together current wars, the standing military including its hardware, and debt owed to pay for past wars, what we call "defense" spending is something more than 50 percent of the budget. (Chart is for 2009 by way of WRL. Doubt if it is more than a percentage point different one way or another for this year.)
The President pledged not to seek fiscal health by "asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill ..." We'll know he's serious when he cuts into the war budget.

How much flip will he flop?

Tomorrow the President will offer his vision of a budget. This video reminds us what he used to say about Social Security, when he wanted our votes. Everything so far leaked about the upcoming speech suggests he will break the promises he made on the campaign trail.

And that's not even mentioning what he'll be willing to give away from Medicare, Medicaid, and, most astonishingly, his own weak healthcare insurance reform. All this for "a deal" that impresses independent voters who aren't paying attention and want harmony between Democrats and Republicans. Such flopping about may even be a winning re-election strategy -- or not. But if this is what Obama does with his administration, why did he bother to go through the arduous effort to become President in the first place? He's not writing a success story -- quite the contrary.

In honor of Congressman Ryan's proposed budget ...

... a clip from last year, still pertinent.

Ryan's Republican budget would solve the nation's fiscal problems by phasing out Medicare and yanking funding from Medicaid, the health access program for elderly poor people and the disabled. Then he'd give tax breaks to rich people.

This criminal waste of resources obtained by wonton cruelty ought to be a non-starter. After his limp performance over the last two years, it's hard to trust that President Obama will stand up for the huge majority of citizens who would be damaged by this nasty gambit. But some Congressional Democrats ought to know viciousness when they see it.

Bombing other peoples' countries doesn't come cheap

The "allied" intervention in Libya may or may not serve the aspirations of Libyans. Presumably, since this is some kind of coalition effort, the United States taxpayer won't be on the hook for all the costs.

But those costs aren't small. Andrew Exum has an estimate for the first day.

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That's twice the size of the annual budget of USIP, which the House of Representatives wants to de-fund, and is about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives also wants to de-fund in the name of austerity measures.

How long will it be before Republicans and some Dems start telling us we have to cut Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit that is being inflated by the Libyan adventure?

Just asking.

What the Republican Congress is up to ...

Here's an illuminating infographic from the Center for American Progress that illustrates exactly what these people want to do with our money and our lives. They will cut the left column if they get away with it and pass out the favors to their donors in the right column-- and call that "freedom."



Would that we could trust our President and Democratic politicians to fight against this naked theft of what the labor of the US people has made. But we can't.

This is what democracy looks like ...

"We don't have a budget crisis; we have a revenue crisis," activists say. And if the government needs money, it should get it from the people who have it. Several hundred people took over a Bank of America branch in Washington DC today to make that point.

Brought to you by National People's Action, Make Wall Street Pay, and h/t to David Mizner at Daily Kos.

On solving the budget deficit

I haven't weighed in on the Presidents's budget. When a Democrat presents a budget that cuts heating subsidies to poor people in order to try to upstage Republican deficit scaremongers, why bother? Yeah, the Dems are better than the Republicans -- but only marginally. Neither bunch seems to think it is their job to help people get what they really want: a chance at a decent job, some security if they get sick or are growing older, a chance to live out unmolested lives with friends and family.

I've just heard that today the House, on a bipartisan vote, has eliminated all funding for the US Institute of Peace (USIP). This is not some hippie radical institution; it's a think tank Congress set up to study how to solve international disputes without war. Now that would be cost effective, besides being a good idea! USIP was responsible for the Iraq Study Group report in 2006 which was the establishment's vehicle for telling George W. Bush that he'd blown it with his little Mesopotamian adventure and should find a way out.

By voting down USIP funding, the government will save $42 million. That's about the cost of keeping 42 soldiers in Afghanistan for a year. Nobody has succeeded in explaining what those personnel are doing besides dodging roadside bombs, killing people, and ensuring that Afghans hate us for killing their family members. We have about 100,000 troops there at the moment, plus perhaps an equal number of contractors. Meanwhile, Congress plans to fund the wars to the tune of $158 BILLION this year. It's very hard to believe Congresspeople of either party give a damn about saving money or balancing the budget.

When politicians start in with the "precarious" condition of the national budget and the terrible deficit, there are two mantras we need to throw back at them, however many times it takes until they listen.

1. Stop throwing money down the military rathole. End the wars. Bring home the troops from the 155 countries where the U.S. has bases. Cancel expensive high-tech armament boondoggles. Reduce the nukes. When you can blow up the world, the difference between having 100o and having 100 is marginal. The U.S. spends more on maintaining military superiority than the rest of the countries in the world combined. This is mostly waste, amounting to theft from the taxpayers.

2. If the government needs cash to do what it should be doing, get it from the people who have it: rich people. U.S. rich people pay some of the lowest tax rates in the world. They should have to pay for the privilege of enjoying their wealth in this country. During the Eisenhower presidency, rich people's tax rates varied between 70 percent and 91 percent of annual income. Ever since, they've been buying politicians to let them hang on to more and more of their take. But if the country is in trouble, they could start paying what they are able again.

Budget short takes: The people know what to do

Before politicians start pushing complicated solutions to the federal government's long term deficit, they need to pay a little attention to the majority of citizens.

Increased taxes on high earners should be the first step toward balancing the federal budget, a new poll suggested Monday.

Raising taxes on the rich beats out cuts to defense spending, Medicare and Social Security as U.S. adults' top preference on how to close the deficit, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll.

Sixty-one percent of Americans said that increasing taxes to the wealthy should be the first step toward balancing the budget.

The Hill, January 3, 2011

Now that's simple, isn't it?

Oh, this isn't a democracy? Tell that to your sainted Founders when you are reading the Constitution in the first session of the House of Representatives.

Lesbians put their child on camera ...

This is kind of cute. I couldn't agree more with the analysis. But what will this young person make of this in 15 years? I have no prediction.

Signs of the times: a vicious circle at the food bank

Yesterday on leaving the San Francisco Food Bank after putting in our orders for the church food pantry, I was given a handout:

Over the past couple of months, the inventory level on the shop floor has been down. [For example,] granola bars have been non-existent., the flow of Capri Suns has become unstable...The largest factor is that donations are down.

John Curry, Food Resources Manager, discussed the situation. He states that manufactures are running tighter ships in their production lines and the big corporations spending less on promotional items in today's tight market. In addition, he also commented about the increased competition with "dollar store" retailers as companies try to milk every dollar they can for their product.

Let me decode that communication.

The Food Bank collects and centralizes corporate food producer and vendor donations of unsold food. The donors get a tax credit. The agencies and pantries that distribute food get the food (and frequently other curiosities like vitamin water) though a centralized distribution point.


In the current Great Recession (don't try to tell me this is over when nearly 20 percent of everyone who wants/needs to work is still hurting), U.S. corporations are using the downturn to get leaner and meaner. Improvements in communication and information collection have made it possible to more accurately predict what quantity of a product will sell. Likewise, these information improvements have made it more possible to avoid mismatches between where the foodstuffs are and where a market exists. The rise of "dollar stores" sucks up some more product. All this is genuinely efficient; getting the quantities right is more profitable than over- (or under-) production. There's less waste in the system. And the waste in the system is what used to go to the food banks.

Productivity per worker is rising at the food corporations. With the increased efficiency, it takes less workers to process and distribute the appropriate quantities of food. So some workers become waste in the system too -- and they get laid off. They become job hunters and stop being able to buy stuff. Everyone who sold them stuff takes a hit -- and the producers of the stuff are tipped off that they should avoid waste by producing less. Etc. and around we go ...

The economy is caught in a vicious circle.

What's interrupts of a vicious circle? Economists such as Paul Krugman say government should push money out into the system in the form of such direct help as unemployment checks (so laid off people keep buying food and other stuff) and an indirect stimulus such as rebuilding crumbling roads and encouraging green energy development. They think it doesn't much matter that the government will run up some debt because 1) right now, lenders are looking for borrowers and will lend cheaply and 2) if more of us were working, tax revenue could recover and get the government (us) out of much of the national debt.

This is too simple for Republicans and ConservaDems. As with health care reform, their apparent response to what's happening in the real world is, "sorry, go die." Oh, and lower taxes on the rich on your way out.

We need peace in order to go forward together

On Saturday, thousands of people will converge on Washington to proclaim we are One Nation Working Together "for jobs, justice and education for all." There are lots of groups involved -- and lots of organized constituencies: labor, civil rights, immigrants, progressive activists, LGBT people and the list goes on. Probably the broadest statement on the event website reads:

Demand the changes we voted for...

With the economy still in the tank, jobs miserably scarce, and one and half faraway wars dragging on, too often we are told we can't have the changes we voted for.

On Wednesday, a hearing before the House Veterans' Affairs Committee laid out all too clearly one of the obstacles to getting what we have worked for (or even to balancing the federal budget if that's your worry.) The United States has a long term moral and practical obligation to the women and men who have served in our current military adventures. And the cost of giving our veterans the care they deserve will be enormous.

"It's somewhere between Medicare and Social Security in terms of its potential impact" on the budget, said Rep. Bob Filner, California Democrat and committee chairman.

"This is another entitlement that we have committed ourselves to that is going to break the bank unless we deal with these issues as soon as possible," he told reporters. ...

Two economists, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, testified.

Ms. Bilmes said Wednesday that, with more than a half-million claims for disability benefits already filed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — and close to 600,000 being treated in Veterans Affairs medical facilities — the cost of lifetime care and benefits over the next 40 years would be between $589 billion and $934 billion, "depending on the duration and the intensity of the wars."...

Based on the historic experience of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, where increasing numbers of veterans have sought treatment or benefits for service-related ailments as years pass, "these costs are going to mount significantly over time," said Donald Overton, executive director of advocacy group Veterans of Modern Warfare.

The economists urged Congress to realize that, costly as the wars appear now, the ultimate costs over the lifetime of their veterans will continue to rise. Stiglitz has previously calculated that

the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

My emphasis.

I hope all those people on the mall on Saturday understand this. We can't undo the injuries and traumas that our senseless wars have already inflicted or escape the costs whose burden we assumed when we dispatched some of our people into harm's way. But we can stop further bleeding. If we want jobs, good education for all, increased justice at home, we will have to stop fighting unnecessary wars. And we will have to get that across to the politicians.

One Nation Working Together has a "peace table, a set of groups and shared aspirations that focus on peace.

One Nation Working Together aims to hold together through the November elections -- but more importantly, beyond the elections. The coalition website proclaims

...once the ballots are counted, we will keep organizing, we will hold our leaders accountable, and we will keep making our dream real.

This movement will grow. It will put America back to work, pull America back together, and keep us moving ever forward.

We can only do that if we stop making wars around the world.

A politician doing his job -- No on Prop. B

State Senator Leland Yee stands with a "wolf in sheep's clothing" amid a crowd of firefighters while stating his opposition to San Francisco Prop. B. We like to see our pols out and about and the smart ones perform on cue.

What's Prop. B? Ah, now there's the real question.

Proponents of the November ballot measure -- an odd marriage of Public Defender Jeff Adachi, libertarian flimflam man Matt Gonzalez (Ralph Nader's running mate in 2008), and billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz -- say it is about making San Francisco more fiscally secure by making city employees pay more into their pension plans. There are some vague words about funding worthy non-profits with proceeds, but no guarantees. And proponents barely mention that

80 percent of its cost savings comes from steep increases in health care costs for city employees with dependents. The Adachi/Moritz plan raises pension costs for a typical employee with one dependent $1750.32 per year, while their health premiums would rise an additional $3,605.60 (a total annual "tax" of over $5300).

Beyond Chron, August 2, 2010

Proponents think this will be an easy sell. Everyone is hurting. Why shouldn't city workers pay more for their benefits?

City workers get benefits that lots of other workers probably envy. They have good benefits because they have strong unions that win strong contracts. And they have strong unions because it is a lot harder for city government to outsource answering questions to a call center where wages would be cheaper than it is for multi-national corporations. We want to be able to go in and get service from our bureaucrats or at least yell at them face to face. We want to be able to trust that our street lights work and our firefighters are on the job; our politicians understand that we'd have their heads if city services were contracted out to some company that didn't have to care. So they have to deal with employee unions. Besides, we're a liberal town and most of us think everyone should have unions if they want them.

The unions do what unions are supposed to do: bargain vigorously to win good wages and working conditions for their members. Back in the 1990s when lots of people thought the stock market could only go up, pensions were set on that assumption. The editorial page editor of the Chronicle --a paper I expect to embrace Prop. B -- explains:

It looked like easy money in the headiness of 1999. It would have worked out as painlessly as advertised if the Dow Jones industrial average was at 25,000 today, instead of hovering around 10,000. When investments fall short, governments must dig into their general funds.

Ooops. Now, with the Great Recession and Republican obstruction in Washington and Sacramento, cities are in trouble and San Francisco is no exception.

But that's no reason to try to drop the bill on city workers, even though they seem an attractive target. We got into a fiscal mess together and we are going to have to get out of that mess together. We certainly don't want to do it by denying health care to workers' children -- that is what will happen if this thing goes through because a lower paid city worker will probably just drop dependent coverage. She will have to.

Prop. B is a classic piece of scapegoating, throwing blame at people who unpopular while protecting the interests of the powerful.

On this blog I have a simple refrain when governments need money to do their jobs: get it from the people who have it. This applies as much to my city as to Washington. There are rich people in this town; their multi-million dollar houses have barely lost value while suburban developments have crashed. And the ones who don't live here profit from the downtown corporate headquarters. Tax them.

Meanwhile, no on Prop. B!

H/t to San Francisco Citizen for alerting me to the Inner Sunset rally pictured above.

Poor women get the shaft while Senate flails

A friend laid it out for us last weekend: "There used to be programs where you could send them. But now -- nothing." She works with the down and out in San Francisco's Tenderloin, the sort of dense, relatively cheap, dope-infested and dangerous downtown slum that barely exists in newer and smaller cities. Think grit among apartment buildings dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Many of the people in those buildings are families -- women on their own with children, new immigrants with little English, African-Americans, the unlucky of all races.

Back when Bill Clinton was trying to make nice with a recalcitrant Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich, both parties combined to "end welfare as we've known it." That is, they agreed they'd stop offering cash benefits to women with kids who couldn't work, setting a 5 year limit on how long women could get any help -- and giving the states the funds as block grants that they were supposed to use to help poor women get into the labor force. Women on welfare and their friends howled, but the plan -- called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) -- sailed through in 1996. (Full disclosure -- I was employed in those years on campaigns to expose what Congress was doing to poor people.)

The horrors we anticipated didn't completely show up because, just as the cuts were taking effect, the economy got much stronger, some women were able to find jobs, and the rolls got smaller. "Success!" both parties crowed.

But those block grants to the states haven't grown; they are still set based on 1994 welfare costs to states and have lost 27 percent of their value. Moreover states are allowed to divert the federal grants to other uses, such as balancing their budgets. Stephanie Mencimer reports in Mother Jones that even before the Great Recession hit

the state of Georgia dropped nearly 90 percent of the women off its TANF rolls between 2004 and the end of 2007, even as unemployment soared by 30 percent, and then diverted millions of dollars in federal anti-poverty money to other parts of the state budget. Thanks to this, only 18 percent of all children in Georgia living below 50 percent of the poverty line -- that is, on less than $733 a month for a family of three -- were receiving TANF in 2008.

When welfare was a guaranteed federal program, the case rolls would have automatically increased in a recession like the present one, helping tide people over until the job market improved. But with the current rules and system of federal payments to the states, that isn't happening. In fact, according to a report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, census data shows that TANF is horribly broken.

... despite the nearly 10 percent unemployment rate, almost 90 percent of poor women with children are struggling through the recession without any financial assistance. The numbers range from 60 percent of poor women not receiving aid in DC to fully 96 percent in Louisiana who aren't getting a dime.

The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 did help some people.

The TANF Emergency Fund (TEF) ... has given states over $1 billion to operate subsidized jobs programs that have proved successful on multiple fronts. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future.

But this program ends on September 30 unless Congress reauthorizes it. That's why Jobs with Justice, a coalition including labor unions and community organizing groups that work among and are the poor, rallied outside Senator Diane Feinstein's office this afternoon, urging reauthorization. As has been true of so many bills this Congress, the House has passed an extension but the Senate is stymied by Republicans' (and perhaps the usual Dems') refusal to allow a vote.

Meanwhile, as my friend the Tenderloin caseworker explained, "there's nothing left." Medical won't enroll the sick at least until the health reform kicks in; training programs are closing; non-profits are being shuttered. Lfe is going to even tougher if the TANF emergency program is allowed to expire. Annie Lowrey in the Washington Independent reports today that

.. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) held a hearing to urge the TEF’s reauthorization. ... Casey is looking for a vehicle for the funding, but the chances seem dim.

Dumping on poor people is so much easier than taxing Wall Street to pay for civilization ...


The "welfareQUEENS" from Poor Magazine raised spirits at today's rally.