Wonk holiday

Random animal picture.

In case you missed it, yesterday was a major policy wonk holiday. It was "Poverty Day," a movable feast during which the Census Bureau release a report on incomes, health insurance coverage and--you guessed it--poverty.

If you didn't observe it, you have El Cabrero's permission to take today off.

As one might expect during a major recession, the news wasn't good--and this was just 2008. Next year's report will show the effects of the recession at its presumed height and will be much worse.

Here's an overview of the report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One key point for the current health care reform debate is that private health coverage declined as more people lost work-based insurance.

West Virginia saw a 6.7 percent increase in the number of uninsured residents, according to West Virginians for Affordable Health Care. Those without care jumped from 254,000 to 271,000, an increase of 17,000.

Here's a good overall interpretation by CBPP's Robert Greenstein. Here's his conclusion:

Moreover, the expected increases in 2009 in poverty and in the number and percentage of uninsured people would be substantially greater if not for the economic recovery law that the Administration and Congress enacted earlier this year. Just seven provisions of that law — including tax credits for working families, expansions of unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance, and one-time payments to senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities — will prevent an estimated 6.2 million Americans, including 2.4 million children, from falling into poverty, according to an analysis the Center issued yesterday.[1] Moreover, these figures understate the poverty-preventing effects of the recovery act because they do not capture other provisions of the law, such as increases in housing, child care services, or the law’s effects on preserving or creating jobs. In addition, the law’s increases in medical assistance are preventing hundreds of thousands more from becoming uninsured.

Finally, today’s disquieting health insurance figures underscore the need for comprehensive health care reform. The decline in job-based health coverage is leaving millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured. As noted above, the new Census data show that last year’s economic decline did not fuel an even greater drop in overall insurance coverage only because of the expansion in coverage by public insurance programs.

Health reform bills that Congress is considering would help to address this problem by covering tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance. They would strengthen employer coverage and Medicaid, offer new health insurance choices for Americans, and prevent insurance companies from denying coverage or charging exorbitant amounts to people with medical conditions. The bills also seek to slow the growth of health care costs, which is essential to expanding coverage and sustaining progress in reducing the ranks of the uninsured over the long run.

EIGHT YEARS AGO today the US and the world received a shock that's still being felt.

EAT IT. The grassroots food revolution is still going strong. In this item, author Michael Pollan credits Wendell Berry for helping to start it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A big problem and a partial solution

Random goat picture.

There's been a good bit of talk lately in the media that the recession seems to be bottoming out. But even if the economy begins to expand again in the near future, we're going to be looking at serious unemployment problems for the foreseeable future.

The New York Times reported this weekend that 1.5 million Americans are about to exhaust unemployment benefits. Obviously, another emergency extension of benefits is in order.

But some states, including El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, have yet to take advantage of all the options for dealing with unemployment that are available in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The Charleston Daily Mail reported yesterday that over 2,000 WV workers who have exhausted benefits could be eligible for another 20 weeks of benefits if the state changes the trigger mechanism for receiving extended benefits. If we make the change by Dec. 31, this extension will be fully funded by the federal government.

Making the change would require legislation, which means it needs to go on the agenda of a special session.

This makes sense for all kinds of reasons--but we'll probably have to push to make that happen.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL. Income loss can persist for years after a layoff.

THE NEXT FOUR WEEKS will probably be critical for the future of health care reform.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's a ticker showing how many Americans have lost and are losing health care since 1/1/08.

URGENT INVASIVE PYTHON UPDATE here.

APOLOGY TO EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS. Something weird happened with the Blogger program yesterday and you accidentally received two blank posts. Sorry about filling your mailbox with nada.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WEST VIRGINIA CHAINSAW MASSACRE (WITH THE FOUR PART HARMONY)

Caption: That's what I'm talking about.

El Cabrero was prepared to write a scathing critique of the commercialism and materialism of the Christmas holiday and how sad it is that we seek fulfillment in the accumulation of toys and gadgets--but I've been forced to cancel previously scheduled blogging to make the following urgent announcement:

Me got BIG chainsaw for Christmas! Yeah, man...

It was from La Cabra.

I had a little one before but this one puts the power in power tool. I feel much better about myself as a person as a result.

But it's not all Freudian symbolism. I live far enough out in the sticks where a chainsaw is a basic accessory to transportation and sometimes a necessary precondition thereto. Then there's the whole wood stove thing, which is a plus this time of year, not to mention any number of other activities which Marx referred to under the rubric "the idiocy of rural life."

But you know, in fairness to President Bush, who has been criticized here with something like clockwork regularity, there's something to be said for spending a weekend every now and then cutting brush at the ranch.

But this Christmas wasn't all about materialism. There was also time for infantile humor. La Cabra and I attended services at a local Episcopal church where we were delighted to hear no less than two hymns sung that included the word "ass." That was awesome.

Oh yeah, then there was family stuff.

All in all, it wasn't a bad Christmas. I hope yours was OK too.

SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS, here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes From Under the Fig Tree, which includes reflections about the same as well as a new word for our vocabularies: pronoia. Check it out.

ANIMAL STEROID SCANDAL. It's not just baseball players--this NY Times article shows that birds and bugs are using chemicals to enhance performance too:

Frown though we may on steroid-style supplementation as cheating, or as competitiveness taken to unsporting and unnatural extremes, in nature such pious niceties do not apply. In nature, as the saying has it, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you win — and animals will do or ingest the most outrageous, dangerous, blechy things in their quest for victory.

Egyptian vultures consume large amounts of cow and goat dung to extract traces of plant pigments that will turn the birds’ pasty faces a sexually alluring shade of mustard. A male goat will demonstrate his ardor for a nanny by drinking her urine and soaking his beard and belly in his own. Hedgehogs, according to the new “Book of Animal Ignorance,” will gnaw on the skin of poisonous toads to incorporate the amphibian toxin into its saliva, which it spits up and down its spiny frame until it is virtually immune to predation. Hedgehogs are so eager to coat themselves in foul chemicals, it seems, that they’ve been known to start salivating and self-anointing at the merest whiff of odiferous items like cigar butts, furniture polish, boiled fish and, I’m sorry to report, coffee beans.

Why don't they just get a BIG chainsaw?

EDUCATION, INCOME, EARNINGS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Here's my suggestion as presented in a Gazette-Mail op-ed this past Sunday.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED