The Great Debate

In many respects the economy is healing, as both the unemployment rate and hiring statistics slowly improve. But there are growing numbers of Americans being left out.

These are not just the unemployed. Rather they are families that, despite having a working adult in the home, earn less than twice the federal poverty income threshold – a widely recognized measure of family self-sufficiency. They are working, but making too little to build economically secure lives. And their number has grown steadily over the past five years.

They are cashiers and clerks, nursing assistants and lab technicians, truck drivers and waiters. Either they are unable to find good, full-time jobs, or their incomes are inadequate and their prospects for advancement are poor.

New analysis of the most recent U.S. Census American Community Survey by the Working Poor Families Project shows that the number of low-income working families in the United States has increased to 10.4 million in 2011, up from 10.2 million a year earlier. In all, nearly one third of all working families – 32 percent – may not have enough money to meet basic needs.

These stark figures should be on the minds of policymakers in 2013. They should make it a priority to bolster these working families’ economic opportunities by preserving funding for education, training and other programs that help working adults prepare for better jobs and by enacting policies that improve the availability of high-quality jobs.

This essay is a response to the Reuters special report The Unequal State of America.

Income inequality is a difficult story to get your arms around, and I think Reuters has done a splendid job. I was particularly intrigued to read about the hollowing out of middle-class jobs within the federal government in D.C. I wasn’t aware that the government had so thoroughly followed the private sector’s lead in this regard.

It is important to acknowledge that while government has played an enormous role in creating the trend toward growing income inequality in the U.S., surprisingly little of that role has involved the most obvious ways government affects income distribution, i.e., taxes and benefits. Overall, the federal government redistributes about one-quarter less today than it did in 1979. But the inequality trend is more pronounced when you look at changes in income before taxes and benefits are taken into account. For example, the share of the nation’s income going to the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2008. For years economists concluded that such findings meant that income inequality was market-driven. But they failed to ask whether government policies might be shaping the course of the market.

During the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. Promises like this one inspired a generation of young voters, excited long-neglected progressive voters and gave hope to millions of his supporters across the country.

President Obama ran a campaign of soaring rhetoric and uplifting ideas. Amidst two unpopular wars, a rapidly deteriorating financial crisis and the wildly unpopular presidency of George W. Bush, Americans were desperate for a change. He was viewed as a “transformational” candidate, a president who would turn the page on the stagnant politics of Washington.

It is now four years later, and there has been no increase to the minimum wage. There has been no congressional vote, much less a whisper from the White House on the minimum wage.

There are the Liberty Tax guys dancing at strip malls in Statue of Liberty costumes. The “FA$T CA$H” banners plastered on storefronts. And in a cult classic of advertising, all over the South there were those ridiculous Mo’ Money Taxes commercials in which buffoonish Southerners bumble through financial crises. Each one ends with advice on how to avoid a similar mess: “Just come on down to Mo’ Money!”

All of these campy promos are actually selling costly loans against your own money, but they have in fact generated lots of easy cash – for the lender, if not the borrower.

Refund anticipation loans, as they are called, have been risk-free business for most of the past decade. Lenders offer roughly 10-day advances of tax refunds, for which they charge exorbitant subprime fees. More than 12 million taxpayers got anticipation loans in their peak year, in 2004, according to the National Consumer Law Center. IRS data shows that over 90 percent of people who applied in 2010 were low-income.

Don’t be fooled, though, refund anticipation loans are no fringe market. Throughout the so-called boom years, the same banks that sit at the center of our high-end economy spread this fraud-ridden industry throughout its bottom tier. Take for instance Mo’ Money, which has faced several fraud probes. Until 2010, its storefronts were actually agents of JPMorgan Chase. The bank backed roughly 13,000 independent preparers in this business.

By Stephen Crawford and Shawn Fremstad
The opinions expressed are their own.

The newly released poverty statistics paint a grim picture. Last year 43.6 million Americans — more than 14 percent — had income below the federal poverty line. But those numbers only give a partial picture of the problem.

That’s because real poverty is not just about income, but also consists of assets and liabilities. The official poverty numbers look only at income and use an unrealistically low estimate for what it takes to make ends meet.

It’s time to take assets into account when measuring poverty.

As Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, write in their new book Mis-measuring Our Lives, “Income and consumption are crucial for assessing living standards, but in the end they can only be gauged in conjunction with information on wealth.” This point is just as relevant to poverty measurement as it is to other measures of living standards.

Earlier this month, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argued that Africa needs Western countries to cut long term aid that has brought dependency, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. The comments on the blog posting suggested that many readers agreed. In a response, Savio Carvalho, Uganda country director for aid agency Oxfam GB, says that aid can help the continent escape poverty - if done in the right way:

In early January, I travelled to war-ravaged northern Uganda to a dusty village in Pobura and Kal parish in Kitgum District. We were there to see the completion of a 16km dirt road constructed by the community with support from Oxfam under an EU-funded programme.

The road is bringing benefits in the form of access to markets, education and health care. Some parents say their daughters feel safer walking to school on the road instead of through the bushes. Many families have used the wages earned from construction work to pay for school fees and medical treatment. This is the impact of aid.