Poverty

[K-Dog]

Poverty Rose in 2022 as Inflation Surged and Pandemic Aid Was Terminated

Max Jones <- Article Link

As a result of pandemic relief policies expiring under the Biden administration, Americans faced the largest one-year increase of poverty on record.



In the aftermath of pandemic relief programs such as increased unemployment and nutrition benefits, greater rental assistance and the child tax credit — policies which the Biden administration allowed to expire in 2021 — Americans faced the largest one-year surge in poverty ever recorded.

According to a report from the Census Bureau published on Sept. 12, the sharpest increase in poverty affected children, with child poverty more than doubling from a record low of 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent. This was indicated by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, evaluated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which "factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living."

In the aftermath of pandemic relief programs such as increased unemployment and nutrition benefits, greater rental assistance and the child tax credit — policies which the Biden administration allowed to expire in 2021 — Americans faced the largest one-year surge in poverty ever recorded.

According to a report from the Census Bureau published on Sept. 12,

"The increases followed two years of historically large declines in poverty, driven primarily by safety net programs that were created or expanded during the pandemic. Those included a series of direct payments to households in 2020 and 2021, enhanced unemployment and nutrition benefits, increased rental assistance and an expanded child tax credit, which briefly provided a guaranteed income to families with children."

Notably, according to the Census Bureau report, the amount of Americans without health insurance "matched a record low last year of 7.9 percent" because the pandemic program which provided a temporary freeze in Medicaid terminations did not expire. This program covered more Americans than ever with Medicaid.

Median household income, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.3% in 2022 at the same time that inflation rose by 7.8% between 2021 and 2022, the largest annual increase in cost of living since 1981. This caused the poverty threshold, "which is based on the cost of essential items like food and housing," to rise dramatically.

The Times reported,

"A family of four living in a rental home was considered poor under the supplemental measure if the family's income was less than $34,518 in 2022, up from $31,453 in 2021."

They continued, 

"Common Pantry, like many food banks, had demand explode during the pandemic and then recede in 2021, when people received stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and the child tax credit, among other assistance. Then, as those programs lapsed, demand began to climb again."

Inequality lessened, since the decrease in median incomes mainly came from the middle to top of wage earners. Racial gaps, "as measured by the gap in pretax income between the richest and poorest 10 percent of households," reduced as well — but how they were reduced isn't exactly optimistic.

The Times stated that "financial hardship has declined among Black households," but this isn't exactly true. Rather than the reallocation of wealth, or the development of wealth in lower earning groups, "white households lost ground to inflation, while inflation-adjusted income was little changed for other racial and ethnic groups." In other words, racial gaps shrank because white, along with top and middle earners, lost wealth, while other racial groups remained stagnant. The Times also claimed that the decreased "financial hardship" among Black households reflects "higher incomes in recent years." Information in the Census Bureau report contradicts this claim.

According to the Census Bureau: 

"Real median household incomes in White and non-Hispanic White households experienced a decrease between 2021 and 2022 (3.5% and 3.6%, respectively). The real median incomes for Black, Asian and Hispanic households were not statistically different from 2021."

Furthermore, while it is true that according to the "official poverty rate," which doesn't account for factors such as geographic variation in housing expenses when calculating poverty thresholds, federal and state taxes, work expenses, nor medical expenses, 2022 marks the lowest poverty rate on record at 17.1 percent for Black Americans, polls among Black Americans tell a different story about the "financial hardship" the community faces.

In August 2022, about 55 percent of Black Americans reported in a poll from NPR that they "were experiencing serious financial difficulties."

In June 2022, Biden's poll numbers among Black Americans took a serious blow as gas prices and inflation rose.

Also, the Times adds crucial context to this claim:

"But those unable to work, or unable to work full-time, faced a one-two punch of higher costs and lost benefits in 2022 — problems that have continued this year. Increased federal nutrition benefits, one of the last vestiges of pandemic aid efforts, expired last spring. Factoring in the loss of benefits, real income fell for the poorest households in 2022, and inequality rose."

CHILD POVERTY

President Joe Biden blamed the doubling of child poverty as a result of the expiration of the child tax credit "entirely on Republican lawmakers, not mentioning that [Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's] opposition was ultimately decisive in the evenly divided Senate in 2021."

According to the Times,

"Mr. Biden dropped his effort to extend the program at the end of 2021; a renewed push failed again last year. The rise in poverty in 2022, social policy experts said, was the inevitable result of that decision."

The South, according to research, was where the child tax credit had the most significant impact. As a result of this failure to extend the policy, the South experienced the largest rise in poverty.

According to a study from Columbia University, if the child tax credit had "still been in effect in 2022, the child poverty rate would have been 8.1 [percent]." This would have "kept over 5 million children from poverty and cut the 2022 SPM child poverty rate by 47 [percent]."

Arloc Sherman, a vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, argues, "The last couple years, through a plunge in poverty and what is now a record single-year increase in poverty in 2022, have shown that poverty is very much a policy choice."

The article has beaucoup links.  Too many to copy.  To see them take the link at top to the original article.

[K-Dog]

Life in America.



Burning the fossil fuel, watching the homeless as you drive by.  Worry about rent in a nation with housing cost ever rising.

The housing crisis has put the unhinged on a binge and other observations.

[K-Dog]

Written by Surly1   on Medium.

Lie Flat

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own. ― Sir Richard Francis Burton

Earlier this month, I had lunch with a friend and former colleague. It has been a while since we've seen one another and caught up, and we reminisced about the "good old days," for some time. Over our Pad Thai, he asked what advice I might have given to a 30-year-old version of myself.

I heard myself say,

"I would've told my younger self to not be such a grinder. I used to think that I was what I did, and my worth was as good as what I made. And that even if I weren't the most talented person, I would outwork your ass to succeed. What a crock. All the worship of work does is make other people successful or make money for someone else."

My friend asked me what I wished I had done instead.

"Take risks. Follow dreams. Err on the side of passion. Life is too short to spend it in service to The Man."

I thought back to this exchange when I read an article about Chinese millennials giving up the rat race to 'Lie Flat.'

Tang Ping, or "Lying flat," is a growing movement in China where young people reject traditional Chinese competitiveness to take a more relaxed, less stressed approach. Instead of striving for ever-higher pay and social status, younger workers simply 'lie down and give the bare minimum.' This flies in the face of traditional Chinese values, which embrace hard work, the purchase of apartments or cars, marriage with children — what Chinese society expects a responsible, functional adult to do. But they all seem to reflect one attitude, defined by an op-ed in the South China Morning Post, that represents "a silent protest to unfairness, often the result of structural and institutional factors that can no longer be altered by personal efforts."

Not surprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party is not amused.

Official media took notice shortly after the concept of lying flat became a hit on China's social media. Guangming Daily, a house organ of the Communist Party's propaganda department, published an article criticizing the lifestyle as an avoidance of stress, saying that it "obviously is not beneficial for economic and social development." Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily, another government mouthpiece, also chastised the attitude as "not only unjustified, but also shameful. Such 'toxic chicken soup' has no value whatsoever."

Predictably the Chinese government has banned "lie down" and "lie flat" as search terms.

Despite criticisms from official media, many Chinese see the trend as a natural reaction to the unrelenting pressure of modern life. And it has caught on in this country as more and more people realize the casino is rigged.

Charles Hugh Smith noted in a recent blog post, Now That the American Dream Is Reserved for the Wealthy, The Smart Crowd Is Opting Out, how a new generation of Americans, recognizing that their American dreams are unattainable, are choosing not to play.

The Smart Crowd is opting out of the conventional workforce's debt-overwork-dead-end-treadmill. What clueless economists, pundits, and politicos don't dare acknowledge is that credentials and hard work are not a ticket to middle-class security; they're a ticket to impossible workloads demanded by global corporations and high-cost lifestyles anchored by student-loan debt, high rents, and out-of-reach real estate.

"Lie-flat" has come here.

People worldwide are spitting out the bit. Restaurant owners post self-pitying signs about "how nobody wants to work anymore" for their $7.25 an hour. Costs rise faster than your income no matter how hard you work, and corporations are ruthlessly extractive despite the bogus PR of "we value our employees," which is so much corporate happy-talk.

As in China, the slaveowners and other arbitrageurs of labor aren't going to take this, uh, lying down, per corporate media mouthpiece Bloomberg:
The labor market is behaving strangely. Quit rates are at their highest level in more than 20 years. Normally that would be welcome news because Americans have been changing jobs less frequently over the years, which was contributing to wage stagnation. Wages often increase when people change jobs. But the high quit rates could signal a less dynamic economy this time. Unemployment is high, and many jobs are unfilled.

There was a time when ambition was admired; now, opting out of a career garners 400,000 likes on Twitter.
Some labor economists speculate that many out-of-work Americans are taking their time to find new, better careers. They've been enabled by high unemployment benefits and stimulus payments that left them flush with savings and nowhere to spend it.

Note to Bloomberg: anyone who thinks that unemployment benefits leave you "flush with savings" should climb down from the penthouse once in a while.

In some ways it's surprising to see Americans rising up against the cult of work... But, unlike Chinese factory workers, people in the developed world have never worked so little. One study estimates that between 1965 and 2003, American men gained an extra six to eight hours of leisure time a week; women gained four to eight. And since 2003, leisure time has increased further.

Fall back in line, you curs...

Unlike the world as seen from the Bloomberg penthouse, and even amidst a degraded and broken educational system, young Americans have the wit to see that the ladders of advancement have been pulled up. That there is simply no point anymore to 60- and 80-hour weeks in pursuit of unattainable goals. And the most personally satisfying move is to opt out.

In his article, CH Smith noted that

Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious: the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of turning labor into capital is now reserved for the already-wealthy.

My problem is that I remember the society that has been stolen from them. People owned their own homes. They took family vacations every summer. They had a boat or a cottage on a lake. They had great insurance; their kids got new glasses every year. Braces for their teeth. College at a state school was cheap, such that kids could work the summers to pay for it. Even without college, there was good money to be made. Factory jobs with pensions and retirement plans. Show up, punch a clock for 30 years, and you were set.

It's time for us to look more closely at the class divide in our own country, which is actually a matter of state policy set by a property-first legal code and a tax system that transfers wealth from workers into the pockets of the top 10 percent. And a corporate media that inculcates our own hidden beliefs about people thought to be worthless because they earn less, people criminalized by city ordinances for being poor. In America, the only unforgivable crime is to be poor. Or homeless. And if you're born poor, likely you'll stay that way, running the treadmill of "trying to save up a down payment as housing prices accelerate away from the hapless savers."

We are told that our happy future is in an "ownerless society" unburdened by property: note that Uber has no cars, Airbnb has no real estate, Alibaba has no inventory, and Evergrande has no money. And pretty soon neither will you.

And here we are: the country is racist, the economy rigged, the health care system broken, the government captured by corporations and the billionaires who own them, and the corporate media utterly servile. And if you protest the status quo, you are labeled "divisive." Or Facebook puts you in jail for 30 days. Perhaps the most potent weapon of a population held captive is to "lie flat" and fail to cooperate with the profit-generating machine.

Who should be surprised that people are opting out of a loser's choice in a sucker's game? Why play when you can't win? And what will the capitalists do about it?

[K-Dog]

Lie Flat

I am very happy that I did not take that attitude in my life. 

I have provided for my old age and taken care of my family. 

The winds blew me to where I am in life.  But it was not random.  Raising the sail, and choosing not to lie flat brought me to a safe harbor.  I have myself, and those who gave me opportunity to thank for where I am.  There was some luck.  Mostly it was my deliberate effort.  My choices.

The idea that opportunities now are not what they were has some merit.  But single men have no right to complain.  Opportunities exist for those who look for and make them.  Single men squander their freedom.

If single men complain I'll ask them how much they spend on drinking in a week.  And who lies down?  Able single Men do. 

Single men live exceptional lives and have the luxury to lie down.  Men with ordinary lives (those with obligations) know they are selfish fools if they lie down.

Lie flat is a fucked up attitude but many people can be confused by it..  The thought of not being compensated ENOUGH for you time is truly disturbing.  But for the professional victim, and the entitled, it becomes a cause célèbre.  A professional victim will claim some jobs are below them, though they may be qualified for no others.

Insofar as the money trick wants people people to value work, and the money trick perpetually cheats the worker, I'll agree that not being compensated ENOUGH for your time is disturbing.  But this concern is not in the calculus of those who lie flat. 

I think they just want free shit.

it comes down to this. 

My objection to Lying down assholes is that it is a decision which is 'All About Them'.  Professional victimhood, and as selfish as any heartless employer who thinks workers in poverty is the natural order of things.

What about the collective?


Life not fair?

Then do something about it.  Don't just lie down and complain. 

*  If a dozen people lie down together it is called a strike.  That is something to be admired and something altogether different.

The whine of the entitled is to be despised.  Loafers and the rich are in the same social class.

[RE]

I sort of did the lie flat thing.  When I quit my last "real" job trucking and went back to just coaching gymnastics, I took a big earnings cut (about 50%) to just work at something I enjoyed and made just enough money to keep a roof over my head and own a couple of good used ICE vehicles, 1 of which I could have lived in once I retired, which was sort of my plan until I ended up a cripple.

You could say I laid flat when I quit banking because I couldn't stand wearing the penguin suit and making gobs of money by selling dogshit in gift boxes to the low hanging fruit while kissing my bosses ass to get the next promotion.  I still worked pretty hard though at my other jobs which I didn't like either for other reasons, so it wasn't truly lying flat.  Coaching gymnastics was easy work just playing with the kids really.  The only thing I didn't like about that job were the owners who wrote my paycheck.  If I had owned my own gym it would have been perfect, but I was very bad with money after college.  Spent all my big paychecks on drugs and pussy.  Lived paycheck to paycheck after quitting the banking biz until I went into trucking.  By the time I quit that and had some savings, I was too damn old to start a gym from scratch.

Anyhow, I never made any great effort to get ahead and be a big success financially.  After my marriage failed, I realized I didn't want a house or expensive car or even a wife.   There was nothing I needed to work hard for.  All I needed was the Maslow basics plus a computer for communications.  It only took making a lower middle class wage to do that.  It made it very easy to move around and live nomadically.  Very low stress once I got rid of the bitch wife.  I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted with nobody telling me what to do.  No responsibilities, kids to worry about or wife to make happy.  I got rid of the last of my old debts with bankruptcy prior to going out trucking and never went in debt again.  No bills to worry about.  I was about 40 when I went out in the truck, free and clear of everything, spent 7 years doing that and saved a small nest egg and then coasted coaching gym for another 8 year before breaking my neck and going out on disability at 55.

Last 12 years would have been perfect if my health had been better, but I wouldn't have been able to retire at 55 if I had been healthy.  So that was a tradeoff.  In any case, I wasn't much of an asset to the capitalist class as a worker through my life.  Just skating by was enough for me.

RE                                                       

[K-Dog]

Just skating by was enough for me.

RE                                                       

Loafers and the rich are in the same social class but just skating by is not the same thing as doing nothing.  A person can just skate by without feeling entitled, like the world owes them, just because they are a beautiful flower.  Someone just skating by is still contributing.  One still pulls their weight.

It is a garden of Eden sort of thing.  Eat from this tree, but not that one.  And most of what we do in life is indifferent without great consequence, so there are many trees from which to eat.

An example of eating from the wrong tree follows:

Today I arrived at work to learn that there had been a burglary in the store warehouse when the store was busy and everyone was in front at noon yesterday.  $6000.00 in merchandise taken by a crew of three.  One walked through the warehouse and opened our garage door and cameras show them walking the warehouse isles taking shit to a beater car in back. 

Later they came back after the excitement died down because they guessed correctly that there was not a new padlock on our back door yet.  That was about 4 pm and everyone was in front again.  The first time they used our own bolt-cutters to snap the padlock.  The bolt-cutters I have used to break the seal on a semi truck with, the motherfuckers.  It was a good day to have off. 

Now all the doors at work have locks and the garage door is barricaded by the forklift and pallets.  Cameras have the A-holes checking the door at 6 AM last night.

Scary shit because if someone gets in their way someone is going to be hurt.  In the last year the shoplifting problem has been huge, but this burglary is on a whole new level.

Relative to some, loafers and the rich are indeed special flowers.

[RE]

Today I arrived at work to learn that there had been a burglary in the store warehouse when the store was busy and everyone was in front at noon yesterday.  $6000.00 in merchandise taken by a crew of three.  One walked through the warehouse and opened our garage door and cameras show them walking the warehouse isles taking shit to a beater car in back.

Not to be picky, but these guys aren't loafers.  They're thieves.  Very bad, small time thieves called Burglars.

The owners of the warehouse are also thieves. They steal by charging customers more than they pay for the stuff they keep there and pay their workers less than their labor is worth.  They pocket the difference as profit and loaf all day counting their money.  They are very good, big time thieves called Capitalists.

I'm not sure of the difference between skating by and loafing.  The CCP ideologues feel the young workers aren't trying hard enough.  They don't try harder because they don't get anything for it.  They work just as much as they have to to get what they need to survive.  That is just what I did.

The unemployment rate among young Chinese is 20%.  That's not because they don't want to work, it's because the only jobs available are really low paid crap jobs that are go nowhere.  So they just work enough to get money for food and a dozen of them share a one bedroom apartment.  They are just skating by, not loafing.

RE