Poverty

What States Can Do to Reduce Poverty And Inequality Through Tax Policy

March 4, 2019 By Sarah Anderson and Chuck Collins, Inequality.org Strategize! Inequality, New Economy, Policy, Poverty, Taxes

States have an opportunity to act to close the loopholes that hide and protect the wealth of the top 1%, remedy the impact of the new federal tax law that lowers taxes on the wealthy, and make critical investments in infrastructure, energy systems, and programs that create broader opportunity and shared prosperity. Concentrations of wealth are distorting our economy and undermining our democracy and civic health. State administrations and state legislatures can act to close the loopholes, put a brake on economic inequality and concentrations of wealth, and generate significant revenue.

What States Can Do To Reduce Poverty And Inequality Through Tax Policy

February 26, 2019 By Sarah Anderson and Chuck Collins, Inequality.org Create! Inequality, Poverty, Taxes

How A Free Meal Program Affected Federal Poverty Stats

February 24, 2019 Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report. Educate! Education, Food and Agriculture, Poverty

In 2014, schools had a new way to give students free breakfast and lunch, paid for by Uncle Sam. Instead of asking low-income families to apply for the meals, a school district could opt to give everyone free food if at least 40 percent of the student population was already on other forms of public assistance or fell into a needy category, such as being homeless or in foster care. This new “community eligibility” option was a policy change by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the school lunch program, and was intended to reduce paperwork and make it easier for schools to feed hungry kids.

Low-Income Medical Marijuana Patient Evicted For Doctor Recommended Therapy

February 24, 2019 By Kevin Mahmalji, NORML. Educate! Health Care, Housing, Marijuana, Poverty

Up until a few years ago low-income housing that received federal subsidies were required to maintain a “drug-free” environment. This meant that if anyone living in subsidized housing was caught possessing and/or consuming marijuana onsite, everyone living in the property was at risk of being evicted. Fortunately, in 2014 the Obama Administration amended this policy to no longer mandate evictions which provided some discretion to housing management. As a result, the decision is now left to property management so they can insist on a “drug-free” environment, but are not required by law to impose such restrictive policies.

By the Best Definition, The Poverty Rate Should Be Tripled

January 10, 2019 By Paul Buchheit, Commondreams.org Educate! Inequality, New Economy, Poverty

The World Bank defines poverty as "pronounced deprivation in well-being," not only of material needs but also of health and education and security and public voice and the "opportunity to better one's life" and the "capability of the individual to function in society." Surveys of tens of thousands of people throughout the world found that "the poor did not focus on their material need; rather, they alluded to social and psychological aspects of poverty." The United Nations calls poverty the "denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity." It's not just a lack of money, but also the "lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society."

Over Half Of Americans Delay Or Don’t Get Health Care Because They Can’t Afford It—These 3 Treatments Get Put Off Most

January 1, 2019 Shawn M. Carter, Cnbc.com Educate! Health Care, Inequality, Poverty

A nurse listens to a client's chest at the Spanish Catholic Center agency of the Diocese of Washington Catholic Charities. With open enrollment for many medical plans in full swing, health care is top of mind for millions of Americans. But health care is still too expensive for most: A majority of U.S. adults have to delay getting the care they need, or put it off completely, because they can't afford it, data from financial website Earnin shows.

Kentucky Is Making The Poorest Of The Poor Pay For Healthcare In 2019

December 29, 2018 By Nick Martin, Splinternews.com Educate! Health Care, Inequality, Kentucky, Poverty

Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and if you live in Kentucky, good luck going to the doctor. Starting Jan. 1, Kentucky will require all patients to make a copay when visiting the doctor, regardless of income or financial status. The mandate is part of the new set of state healthcare rules, an overhaul championed by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. As detailed in a piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, while most managed care companies waived copays for Medicaid patients in the past, Bevin’s new rules will forbid it.

The Decline Of Empire And Rise Of Trumps

November 27, 2018 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast Corporatism, Democracy, Poverty, US Empire

In his new book, "America: The Farewell Tour," based on his travels around the United States, Chris Hedges describes the decline of society and how that brought President Trump into power. Trump is a symptom of failing systems, and there will be more Trumps until things change. We speak with Hedges in depth about the basis for what is happening, what he has learned while covering other countries that went through similar transitions and what we must do if we are to weather the current crises.

The Evidence Pours In: Poverty Getting Much Worse In America

November 7, 2018 By Paul Buchheit, Commondreams.org Educate! Inequality, New Economy, Poverty, United States

According to the Credit Suisse 2018 Global Wealth Databook, 34 million American adults are among the WORLD'S POOREST 10%. How is that possible? In a word, debt. In more excruciating words: stifling, misery-inducing, deadly amounts of debt for the poorest Americans. And it goes beyond dollars to the "deaths of despair" caused by the stresses of inferior health care coverage, stagnating incomes, and out-of-control inequality. Numerous sources report on the rising debt for the poor half of America, especially for the lowest income group, and largely because of health care and education costs. Since 2008 consumer debt has risen almost 50 percent. The percentage of families with more debt than savings is higher now than at any time since 1962.

Inequality Represents A Wasted Opportunity For Poverty Reduction

October 16, 2018 Paul Segal, Ineteconomics.org Educate! Inequality, Poverty

This is the most frequent response I get when I tell other economists that I work on inequality. The economist Deidre McCloskey put the view bluntly in an article titled “Equality lacks relevance if the poor are growing richer.” But this view shows a remarkable disregard for one of the most fundamental principles of economics: that of optimization. Economists go to great lengths to optimize GDP growth and efficiency. But when it comes to poverty, any positive change is taken as good enough. If poverty is falling by any amount, or the poor are growing richer by any amount, then apparently we (and more to the point, the poor) should stop worrying. If we really care about poverty, this won’t do.

No One In The United States Should Be Poor, Period

October 15, 2018 By Josh Hoxie, Otherwords.org Educate! Elitism, Inequality, Nationalism, Poverty, United States

The federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up in nearly 10 years. Yet with a stroke of his pen, Jeff Bezos of Amazon raised the wages of hundreds of thousands of the company’s lowest paid workers. In an age of extreme income inequality, this is leap in the right direction. It’s also a stark reminder of how far we as a nation are from caring for our most vulnerable people. Consider the story of Vanessa Solivan, an East Trenton mother of three struggling in and out of homelessness. Vanessa is “working homeless,” an increasingly common phenomenon as the gap between wages and cost of living grows wider. In the richest country in the world, millions of families shouldn’t have to struggle every day to get by while wealth concentrates into fewer and fewer hands at the top.

HypoCrazy Or Home-Land?- A Love Challenge For Liberated Land To Build Homefulness

October 12, 2018 By Lisa Tiny Gray-Garcia, Poormagazine.org Educate! Land, Poverty

Unhoused, poverty skolaz living in vehicles and on the streets in the stolen Ohlone/Lisjan land colonizers call Berkeley face constant harassment (like they do pretty much everywhere) -but in Berkeley,its not so much from one entity, poltrickster or community, but from all of them and mostly from "Nimbyism" (Not in my backyard), fueled by the omnipresent, anti-poor people hate that exists everywhere in colonized Turtle Island. This deep anti-poor people hate has been in this stolen land since the colonizers stole it and called the theft a “discovery”. With their greed, thieving, genocidal, racist, wite-supremacy, they also brought criminalization of poor, houseless and disabled peoples and a whole litany of laws and language meant to incarcerate every poor person they got.

Nicaragua: Ortega Says Planned US Sanctions Will Bring Poverty

October 1, 2018 Staff, Telesurtv.net Educate! Nicaragua, Poverty, Sanctions, US Imperialism

"They think that with it the Nicaraguan people are going to get down on their knees, and they do not realize that this is a town that does not sell or surrender," Ortega said. Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega criticized Saturday the draft sanctions that the United States Congress is discussing against his government saying such actions would bring poverty and economic troubles to his country. "I say to the U.S. congresspeople and senators who are voting in favor of this interventionist law that what they are coming to is simply to harm the country's economy," the president said in a massive rally he led along with Vice President Rosario Murillo. Addressing thousands of people who marched in the capital Managua in favor of peace, despite the heavy rain, Ortega criticized the Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act...

The Best Way To Eradicate Poverty: Welfare Not Jobs

September 19, 2018 Matt Bruenig, Peoplespolicyproject.org Educate! Labor, New Economy, Poverty, Revisionism, Social Welfare

The Census released its income, poverty, and health insurance data last week (ASEC, SPM). Among other things, the data allows us to see who was in poverty and therefore gives us good insights about how to eradicate poverty. In this post, I detail what I think these insights are using my own calculations of the 2017 microdata. Below is the overall poverty rate broken down by market income and disposable income. “Market income” refers to all income received from labor earnings and capital ownership. “Disposable income” refers to each person’s final income and takes into consideration taxes paid and government benefits received. For both figures, I use the poverty line of the Supplemental Poverty Metric. In 2017, the market poverty rate was 25 percent. The poverty rate when counting disposable income was 13.9 percent.

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