Shutdown hunger games

 Over a century ago Will Rogers, famous for both his acting and pithy social commentary, quipped, “Ten men in our country could buy the whole world, and ten million can’t buy enough to eat.”   Were he alive today, he would have to amend it to say that while 10 men can still buy the whole world, 42 million can’t buy enough to eat.

Because President Trump, while hosting a lavish “Great Gatsby” themed party at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withhold SNAP benefits from 42 million children, veterans, and seniors, all while boasting about his new marble bathrooms and gilded ballroom.  

These kinds of gross displays of extreme wealth against a backdrop of desperate poverty have become a common feature of American life today.  A cursory look at how some of the richest people are presently fairing gives us a sense. 

Jim Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune, saw his wealth rise by192 per cent since Trump’s corporate tax breaks were enacted in 2017.  According to Americans for Tax Fairness, this translates to an additional $80 million in just eight years for Jim Walton.

By contrast, a young woman working as a cashier at Walmart recently told me that she was worried about how she is going to feed her nine-month-old baby after WIC benefits were taken away.  She said she works as much as she can at $11 an hour, but her Walmart wages are not enough to afford formula and food, so she relies on WIC to ensure her baby is getting enough to eat.  Accounting for inflation she is making even less in real wages over the same time period Mr. Walton’s fortunes have skyrocketed.  

How do we understand the level of precarity facing millions of people like her when today America’s 916 billionaires have now amassed $8 trillion, a 172 per cent increase since the enactment of the 2017 Trump tax law?  

Joseph Stiglitz gives an answer from his perspective as a Nobel prize winning economist.  In The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future he points out, “There are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed.”  From this perspective, the extraction of wealth from working people is what is fueling today’s extreme levels of poverty and wealth inequality. 

This extraction and concentration of wealth is made possibly by the policy decisions made by those in power, and to that, Will Rogers has a related quip: “America has the best politicians money can buy.”  As illustration, West Virginia’s entire congressional delegation voted for the “Big Brutal Bill” which permanently extended Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts, partly paid for by cutting health care and food access for West Virginians and other struggling Americans. 

Yes the Federal Government is still shut down as President Trump and our representatives in Washington refuse to side with Democrats and restore the premium tax credits that allow West Virginians to access health care.  Even so, the Administration can designate contingency and carryover funds to keep SNAP running, as the USDA has done during previous shutdowns. It can also transfer funds from other accounts to make up any shortfall.

In open letter to West Virginia’s four senators and representatives and signed by over 40 food banks, churches, and advocacy groups, they stated, “Allowing SNAP and WIC payments to lapse and hunger to deepen during a shutdown is a policy choice and a preventable cruelty.”

These same groups also requested that each of our senators and representatives sit down as soon as they can with West Virginians who are experiencing the crushing stress of whether or not they will have enough food for their loved ones to eat.      

If our leaders continue to prioritize wealthy donors and the corporate elite over the thousands of West Virginians struggling to afford health care and food, then you can count on Will Rogers for some final words of wisdom: “The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”  So let us not forget next time.  

This column by Lida Shepherd, director of the American Friends Service Committee WV Economic Justice Project, appeared in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Pass the chronos, please

I often think about how the New Testament uses two Greek words for time, kairos and chronos. Times of kairos can be described as critical, make-or-break, pivot points, hinges of history, times of decision and all that. Chronos is like the ordinary run of times when things are not so...interesting. 

It seems like this truly is a time of kairos for the nation and the planet with so much at stake, including ensuring the future of democracy; dealing with catastrophic climate change; fighting off authoritarianism; addressing gross inequalities and such, all in the middle of a pandemic. And things seem pretty close to unraveling all over the place.

And, just to prove that God, the gods, Lady Fortuna and/or world history have a sense of humor, people from West Virginia are going to have a disproportionate impact for good or ill. Will the right to vote be guaranteed or will the forces of racist voter suppression win? Will we "build back better" with a stronger and cleaner infrastructure and more just economy for all? Will we take what may be a last chance to deal with climate?

Which also means, what are the most effective things that we can do here and now to move things in a more positive or at least less bad direction? A lot of my friends are working on it. And we're all feeling it.

I keep thinking about those lines from Lord of the Rings where Frodo said "I wish it need not have happened in my time." 

To which Gandalf replies, "So do I...and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

I wouldn't mind a good chunk of chronos right about now.

Not surprised

 I can't say I was bowled over with surprise when I saw this CNN news story about how badly health care in the US compares to other economically advanced countries.

To wit, 

The US once again ranked last in access to health care, equity and outcomes among high-income countries, despite spending a far greater share of its economy on health care, a new report released Wednesday has found.

The nation has landed in the basement in all seven studies the Commonwealth Fund has conducted since 2004. The US is the only one of the 11 countries surveyed not to have universal health insurance coverage.

Commonwealth Fund  president David Blumenthal was quoted as saying "In no other country does income inequality so profoundly limit access to care as it does here. Far too many people cannot afford the care they need and far too many are uninsured, especially compared to other wealthy nations."

However, if you want to look at it from a slightly more optimistic angle, think how much worse all that would be if the Affordable Care Act had been repealed or if the many attacks on Medicaid and other programs had succeeded. All those things were real possibilities not so long ago--and fighting them off took a LOT of work from a LOT of people.

One step at a time I guess.

Called it

 

I have a binge-watching confession to make: I'm hooked on The Crown, Netflix's portrayal of the drama of the British royal family. I'm not proud of it.

A lot of the show is pure aristocratic soap opera, which is also arguably the case of the real life counterparts. But it's not all melodrama. I was particularly hit by the portrayal of the cruelty of the Thatcher regime. And for what it's worth, X Files star Gillian Anderson does an amazing job of portraying that person...which couldn't have been easy for anyone with a living soul.

I think one reason for my reaction was living through the American version during the Reagan years, a time of extreme economic hardship for millions of Americans and most West Virginians, including myself. 

Those years were, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, "the beginning of sorrows," of decades of bad policies, tax cuts for the wealthy, growing inequality.

And the results are in: the London School of Economics just released a report that looks at the effects of tax cuts for the wealthy over a 50 year period and covering 18 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And there's no surprise here.

As Hamlet said, O my prophetic soul! Here are some nuggets from the report:

We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment...

Furthermore, we find no effect of tax reforms on real GDP per capita. When looking at the effect on unemployment rates, the estimates show a slightly different pattern. Here, tax cuts for the rich lead to slightly higher unemployment rates in the short term...

We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of 0.8 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short and medium term...

...cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance.

The sad part is that I'm pretty sure the WV legislature is going to try to push for even more of this garbage in the coming session.

What could possibly go wrong?

Another one to watch

 Universal Basic Income is an idea that's been around for a while, arguably for centuries, but it's started gaining more traction in the wake of COVID. It tends to be popular in progressive circles, although it has some surprising support from libertarian and conservative circles where it's non-paternalistic and unbureaucratic approach resonates.

The idea is pretty much what it sounds like: guarantee every citizen a certain amount of money on a regular basis. It's been touted as a solution to poverty, a degree of protection from automation, and a safety net for the growing "gig economy" (a phrase that makes me think of unfortunate frogs hunted for their legs).

It's been tried to a limited degree in some places and the results seem promising. The latest city to announce an experiment with it is Compton, CA, a city with a poverty rate about twice the national average (sounds like a place I know). According to Mayor Aja Brown, the idea is to "challenge the racial and economic injustice plaguing both welfare programs and economic systems." According to CNN, 800 low income residents will pilot the program, as described in this fact sheet.

It will be interesting to watch the results. One thing I'm pretty sure about, in a climate of growing inequality, we're going to need something like a universal basic income or guaranteed employment program. Pope Francis issued a similar call earlier this spring.

Questioning capitalism?

Proteus the shape-shifter 

Business Insider reported some interesting survey findings last week, courtesy of the Harris Poll and Just Capital. Using a sample size of 1,000, it found that only 25 percent of Americans think that capitalism in its current iteration is good for society as a whole. The survey, of course took place in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, which lifted the veil on a host of social and economic inequities.

As reported by Just Capital, the responses are pretty radical. Among them:

*89 percent wanted corporations to hit "reset" and do right by workers, consumers, communities and the environment;

*Only 29 percent viewed the prevailing form of capitalism as offering "the kind of society I want for the next generation" or as one that "works for the average American."

*Over 50 percent wanted a reformed version of the economic system, while around 20 percent believed that no form of capitalism was good for the public. Put another way, that means over 70 percent are in the reform or replace columns.

The epidemic has exposed gross economic inequality as well as racial and gender inequities. Those surveyed wanted protective equipment and safe conditions for front line workers, paid sick leave, wage increases and greater flexibility to work remotely.

While it would be a bit much to interpret the data as a call for the collectivization of agriculture or government ownership of hot dog stands, it does seem to point out that we really could be at a turning point.

Capitalism over the last 500 years as been as shape-shifting as the mythological creature Proteus in the Odyssey, taking numerous forms. Many of these have been nasty, as in slavery, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and an unrestrained global economy. But in some places and times, when tempered by good public policies, a strong labor movement and a healthy civil society, it has shown a more humane face.

It could be that there is a growing demand for the US economy to move in that direction....which is a good thing.

Why we fight

 "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”--Stephen Jay Gould, 1941-2002/

That pretty much sums the answer to "why we fight" for me.

The boot or the face?

For some reason, “1984,” George Orwell’s book about a nightmarish society, has had a revival in the Trump era.

Maybe it’s the weather.

The New York Times reported it was top of Amazon’s list in early 2017. Around the same time, Penguin USA reported a 9,500 percent increase in sales over a few days. It’s a hot item nearly 70 years since its publication.

It’s probably a good thing that more people have been reading it. It’s probably a bad thing that people felt like they had to.

A haunting line from the book that has stuck in my mind: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Some days I think that might not be too far off — unless we act to prevent it. There are dangerous trends that, if unaddressed, point towards a disastrous future.

The top two are economic inequality and climate change.

Let’s start with inequality, which is reaching record levels and is likely to worsen, since returns from wealth grow much faster than productivity or wages. This doesn’t just impact life chances; it affects the length and quality of life itself.

Research shows that one’s relative position within society has a huge impact on health and longevity. People in higher social positions tend to live longer and be healthier than those below them — even if you control for behavioral factors such as smoking, exercise, obesity and diet.

Studies by British epidemiologist Michael Marmot suggest that the key ingredients to longevity and health are a sense of control over one’s life and the ability to fully participate in society. These diminish as we move down the ladder.

According to Marmot, “It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health.” The wider the divide, the sharper are the effects.

In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better,” epidemiologists Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett expand on these themes. Using international data, they found that high degrees of inequality have negative effects not just on mental and physical health, but also on things like substance abuse and addiction, education, incarceration, obesity, social mobility, violence, social trust, teen pregnancies and child well-being.

While social problems pile up at the bottom, “The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor. A growing body of research shows that inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society.”

Harvard researcher Ichiro Kawachi has described inequality as a “social pollutant.”

The concentration of wealth makes it easier for the very wealthy to buy political influence and further stack the deck, endangering democracy. One person/one vote is turning into one dollar/one vote. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, with the state, including its means of repression, effectively being captured and controlled by economic elites.

Overheated economic systems are also prone to catastrophic recessions and depressions, which have devastating impacts on communities, as we saw during the most recent recession.

Widespread inequality increases social tensions around the world, and the frustration it causes is a fertile breeding ground for toxic political movements, hate groups, religious extremism, armed conflict, racism and scapegoating vulnerable people. Movements such as these feed on the pain but ultimately will fail to cure it.

In the worst case, authoritarian political movements can gain political power and use it to advance the interests of elites while repressing popular resistance. It’s happened before and the results weren’t pretty.

Unfortunately, the same inequality of economic and political power is also being used to block meaningful action on climate change, since those who profit from a fossil fuel economy prefer short-term profit to long-term sustainability.

The playbook is pretty obvious: use wealth and political clout to delay action on climate until it’s too late, then say it was going to happen anyway.

Meanwhile its effects include things like extreme weather events, heating oceans, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, extinctions, crop failures, health impacts, damaged habitats, invasive species, mass displacement and migration, conflict over scarce resources, water contamination, desertification, epidemics, collapsing fisheries, droughts and floods and a host of other unpleasantries that will affect everyone but hit poorer communities hardest.

And that fun is only beginning.

If this keeps up, things don’t look good for the human face. The smart money will be on the boot.

I’m not sure what it will take to keep that from happening, but it probably won’t be business as usual.

In 1933, the great German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered what a just response from people of faith would be required to deal with the evils of his time, particularly the persecution of the Jews.

He came up with three possibilities.

One was to “ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e. it can throw the state back on its responsibilities.” That’s worth a shot, even though it hasn’t worked too well lately.

Another option was to “aid the victims of state action,” since “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society ...” That’s always in order, even if it doesn’t solve the problem.

The third option was a bit edgier: it was “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Just a thought.

(This appeared in today's Gazette-Mail.)

Revisiting Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign 50 years later

Fifty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies made some ambitious plans. They hoped to bring poor people together across racial and other social divides to call for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

They hoped that a multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign would awaken the conscience of the nation and spark a mass movement to end poverty, systemic racism and the war economy.

The campaign came to pass but the desired results obviously did not. I can’t help but wonder what might have been different had Dr. King not been assassinated on April 4, 1968. I don’t believe that history is made by a few heroic figures, but it seems clear that individuals can make a huge difference.

In any case, half a century later we have unprecedented levels of economic inequality and a political system dominated by the very wealthy who seem intent on widening the gap. More people in America live in or near poverty now than in 1968.

Today, in the wake of passing gigantic $1.9 trillion in tax cuts that benefit primarily wealthy people and corporations, Congress is contemplating drastic cuts and restrictions in food assistance to vulnerable Americans as the mammoth Farm Bill comes up for reconsideration.

Slashing spending on food assistance by billions and cutting off basic help to millions won’t promote work, although it is likely to exert a downward pressure on wages for working Americans.

Other programs — like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, student aid — that help millions of Americans and tens of thousands of West Virginians are also being targeted at a time when the wealthiest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 99.

This is clearly a moral issue, one that is all too often ignored by those preaching restrictive versions of religion and myopic views of morality.

Ignoring issues of social justice goes against the grain of the biblical religion so many profess. The prophet Isaiah, honored alike by Jews, Christians and Muslims, couldn’t be any clearer:

“Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?” (Isaiah 10:1-3)

Around the country, there is a growing awareness of the need to revisit the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign in our new context and to issue a national call to moral revival.

In the words of the Rev. William Barber and the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the new campaign, “There needs to be a new moral discourse in this nation — one that says being poor is not a sin but systemic poverty is.”

(This ran as an op-ed in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Leftovers

Well, the legislative session is finally over. Some bad stuff happened. We didn't get all we wanted and got a good bit of what we didn't. On the other hand, we had a huge successful nonviolent uprising. I guess you can't have everything.

Speaking of which, we discussed the lessons of the teachers' strike on the latest edition of The Front Porch. It's great to watch the ripples spread out around the country.

I had trouble getting published in the Gazette this year, with only one op-ed on the dangers of oligarchy getting printed.

Here's the last edition of Wonk's World, which we produced on the day before the session ended.

Speaking of the Gazette, we got the good news that the paper was bought by HD Media, a non-evil locally owned newspaper group. For a long while it looked like it would be bought by Ogden, which seems to specialize in producing not-too-readable reactionary stuff. That would have been for WV what Bedford Falls would have been if Mr. Potter took over in the movie It's a Wonderful Life.

Last word (for now) goes to Gazette-Mail political columnist Phil Kabler (who just dodged a likely bullet, as the above paragraph explains), who summed up the session pretty well here.

Three ways bad

For a quick look at what's bad in the #taxscam bogus tax reform that seems ready to slide through Congress, all you have to do is take a look at three charts here that show how it will:

*increase pre-tax inequality;

*make the tax system more regressive, meaning that people with lower incomes will pay a higher percentage of their income; and

*raise after-tax income for the top 10 percent of income at the expense of the bottom 90. Most of the benefits will go to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

I guess this is what happens when money trumps democracy.

Poverty pays if you aren't poor

“Poverty pays unless you’re poor.”

So said Don West, a rebellious Appalachian poet and educator and friend of mine who devoted his life to the struggle against it.

The evidence suggests he’s right.

Way back in 1971, sociologist Herbert Gans enumerated the different ways poverty benefits the non-poor in an essay titled “The Uses of Poverty: the Poor Pay All.” His findings hold up pretty well.

Then as now, it turns out that those who benefit the most from it are the wealthy.

Among the functions of poverty are these:

*Poverty ensures that the “dirty work” of society gets done in the form of the many jobs that are low-pay low-trust and low-status but are absolutely necessary for a society to work.

A pool unemployed and underemployed people also imposes “discipline” in the labor market and helps drive down wages for all workers. A bad job looks pretty good when you step over homeless people or drive past people holding “Will work for food” signs on your way to work. When hundreds apply for a handful of living wage jobs, it sends a strong message to the lucky few that they can be easily replaced.

This population can also be mobilized by the powerful and wealthy as strike-breakers or cannon fodder in war time or even as angry mobs that can be used to target other vulnerable populations.

*Because the poor work at low wages, they can perform the tasks (cleaning, child care, etc.) that make the leisure of the affluent possible. They also pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and consumption taxes, something likely to get worse if some in the Legislature get their way.

*Poverty creates a lot of jobs and economic opportunities for people, businesses and organizations which “service” the poor, from pawn shops to plasma centers to professionals to prisons.

*Poor people can be counted on to buy or otherwise consume the goods that others don’t want, whether it’s old food, second hand goods, or used cars. In a twist Gans couldn’t have imagined, huge corporations now get major breaks for dumping unwanted and often unhealthy food products to pantries and charities.


*Poor people are an ideal group to punish in order to uphold social norms. As Gans put it,
“To justify the desirability of hard work, thrift, honest, and monogamy, for example, the defenders of these norms must be able to find people who can be accused of being lazy, spendthrift, dishonest, and promiscuous. Although there is some evidence that the poor are about as moral and law-abiding as anyone else, they are more likely to be caught and punished when they participate in deviant acts.”

They are also less able to defend themselves against stereotypes and legal punishments.

*Speaking of deviance and social norms, the non-poor can derive a vicarious thrill from contemplating the real or imagined moral laxity of the poor.

*The affluent also have a long history of what I call cultural strip-mining, which consists of finding, commodifying, and profiting from the cultural creations of the non-wealthy. Think blues music, mountain ballads, folk art, etc. To paraphrase the Clash, the spice of poverty adds life where there isn’t any.

*A poor population helps boost the status and self-esteem of those who aren’t poor. It also gives the aristocracy a chance to display its generosity on the “worthy poor,” which presumably helps justify its existence.

*Because of their relative powerlessness, Gans noted that poor people can absorb the costs of change. If you need to wipe out a neighborhood for a new highway or development project, close down a school or locate a toxic dump, poor communities are a ready target.

There are also a lot of ways the affluent can use the poor for political purposes, some of which Gans couldn’t have anticipated.

He noted that “An economy based on the ideology of laissez-faire requires a deprived population that is allegedly unwilling to work or that can be considered inferior because it must accept charity or welfare in order to survive.”

An “unworthy” population is a powerful argument against working for a more just social order, since presumably such people would benefit the most from such an arrangement.

Politicians such as Ronald Reagan and many others elevated this process to an art by stirring racially-charged resentments against mythical “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” buying steaks with food stamps. Wealthy people and corporations are still reaping the benefits of that strategy.
Tapping such resentment served to further enrich the already wealthy and contribute to a level of inequality unprecedented in recent history.

Finally, and this is just me talking, it seems like some people in positions of power and influence derive some kind of gratification by proposing and imposing laws and policies that impose humiliation, surveillance and degradation on poor people. The pleasure seems to be enhanced when masked as compassion. To me it’s the political equivalent of bullying or cruelty to animals.

Considering all the benefits the poor convey to the wealthy, there doesn’t seem to be much gratitude. But I guess that would defeat the purpose.

I’m reminded of some lines by the English poet William Blake:

“Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.”

Notes from the bad idea factory

First off, if you happen to be around a screen on Wednesday, March 15 (the Ides of March!), check out a Facebook Live webinar thingie my co-worker Lida Shepherd and I are doing about SNAP (formerly food stamp) benefits, what they mean to WV, and what some people are trying to do to them. It's a 1:15. More info here.

Next up, this op-ed of mine ran in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail about the bad idea of replacing WV's personal income tax with a regressive consumption tax:

One of my favorite state legislators, who shall remain nameless except to say he’s Mike Pushkin, likes to call a certain place with a dome “the bad-idea factory.”

While I would never even dream of saying such a thing, some days I can see where he’s coming from. Like today, for example.

Senate Bill 335 is a case in point. It would replace West Virginia’s income tax with a steep boost on consumption taxes. The bill has numerous sponsors in the Senate, with the notable exception of Republican Finance Chairman Mike Hall, who knows more about the state budget than just about anybody ever has.

So what’s wrong with the bill?

For starters, it would slam middle-class and low-income families with much higher taxes while granting a huge break to those at the top.

West Virginia’s state and local tax systems are already topsy-turvy, with the poorest 20 percent paying a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than the wealthiest 1 percent (8.7 percent vs 6.5 percent).

One reason for that is our regressive sales tax, which is basically a consumption tax. The imbalance here is even more extreme, with the poorest fifth paying more than six times the percentage rate of their income than the wealthiest 1 percent.

Eliminating the personal income tax, which is the only state tax actually based on the ability to pay, and replacing it with the proposed consumption tax would increase taxes on the bottom 80 percent, while providing breaks for the very wealthiest. Assuming revenue neutrality, middle-class families would pay over $1,000 more per year, while those earning $353,000 or more per year would see a tax cut of more than $27,000 according to an analysis by the Institute for Tax and Economic Policy.

The reason for this is pretty obvious. Middle-class and low-income people of necessity spend more of their money on basic necessities than the wealthy. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, people earning less than $70,000 per year typically spend 114 percent of their income (think debt) while those earning over $200,000 per year spend around 50 percent.

This shift in tax policy would only increase income inequality, which has skyrocketed in recent decades. In West Virginia, for example, between 1979 and 2011, the average real income in the state increased by only 3.9 percent, compared to the U.S. average of 14.8 percent. But over that time, all of the income growth was gained by the top 1 percent of richest West Virginians. Real income for them grew by more than 71 percent, while it fell for the bottom 99 by almost 3 percent. This bill would be another step in the wrong direction.

SB 335 wouldn’t be great for state businesses either. They already pay more in sales taxes than income taxes. Phasing out the income tax would likely mean a hit for them, as well.

Then there’s the border-county issue. I checked a map and found that 29 counties border another state (31, if you count tiny parts of Tucker and Summers). While small or moderate increases of excise taxes on some goods wouldn’t have much of an effect on consumer behavior, a major hike in consumption taxes would encourage people to take their business out of state or online, thus hurting the state’s economy.

Recently, Gov. Jim Justice memorably said West Virginia is like “a patient laying there, and blood is shooting to the ceiling.”

(Try getting that image out of your head.)

Sticking with that simile, SB 335 is like an unnecessary surgery that would make the bleeding even worse.

Of Dr. King, poverty and hypocrisy

As the nation marks (it's hard to say celebrates these days) the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I started thinking about the many things Dr. King had to say about poverty, of which this is one example:

 “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

and this is another:

"...it is obvious that if a man is to redeem his spiritual and moral ‘lag,’ he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’ of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.”

and this is another:

 “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

The observation of King's birthday provides the occasion for conspicuous displays of hypocrisy perhaps outmatched by only a few religious holidays.I'm sure quite a bit of that was on display in WV's capitol today even while that body prepares to ramp up the war on poor people that is the subject of this Jacobin article. 

I think it's going to be a long winter. Maybe even literally.

Sticking it to which man?

This op-ed of mine ran in Tuesday's Charleston Gazette-Mail, although for some reason it didn't get posted online:

There’s a lot of talk lately about the working class. In an ordinary year, I’d be ecstatic because this is something I care about.  But this isn’t an ordinary year.

Lately, the term is often racialized, which is never a good sign. The Electoral College victory of the president elect is attributed to the white working class. While there are lots of ways of parsing the results, let’s assume that’s true and consider how working people are likely to fare now.

I guess we could start by saying that white working class people probably won’t have their names added to a registry, face mass deportations, or have travel restricted for reasons other than lack of money. There’s that anyway, although I kind of doubt this would have happened in any case.

But a number of policies now on the agenda could be harmful to working people.

Let’s start with the Affordable Care Act.  Around 30 million Americans could lose coverage if it is fully repealed without being replaced. Of these, over half are white, most of whom work for a living.

 In WV, Medicaid expansion alone covers nearly 180,000 people, about one out of ten. That doesn’t include people with disabilities or the tiny TANF or welfare population.  Around 37,000 working West Virginians got covered through the exchange.  Around 18,000 young people up to age 26 are now covered on their parent’s insurance. These people are overwhelmingly in working families. White ones too.

Losing expansion funding would be a devastating blow to hospitals and health care providers here and would result in job losses in one of the few growing industries.

The new administration could breathe new life into House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Medicare is a health care program for people age 65 and older who have worked and paid into the system. It provides coverage to over 55 million Americans and around 400,000 here, over 1/5 of the population. We’re tied with Maine in having the highest percentage of beneficiaries.

Ryan has also proposed block granting—and effectively cutting--programs such as SNAP and traditional Medicaid, both of which benefit working families. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the data shows that “The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so.”  SNAP benefits go straight to local businesses and help support thousands of retail and agriculture jobs.

Traditional Medicaid covers 70 million, including long term care for the elderly and people with disabilities. Many seniors who worked all their lives run out of savings when they need long term care. Medicaid picks up the slack. With block granting, some would have to quit jobs to care for elderly family members, even though they may be unequipped to do this. More seniors who worked all their lives will be in danger of abuse or neglect.

This would also mean losing federal matching funds, again with job impact. More than 10 years ago the WV Bureau of Business and Economic Research found that Medicaid spending supported economic activity that generated nearly 33,000 jobs. That number has only gone up since.

Medicaid and CHIP provide health care to children in many working families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level—and most workers want their kids to live and be healthy. The programs also bring millions of dollars to local communities and sustain jobs.

The latest round of proposed tax cuts—a remedy that has yet to produce impressive results--would likely benefit the very wealthy, increase inequality, and reduce the ability of the federal government to respond to the needs of working families—for example by making vocational and post-secondary education more affordable.

From the earliest days of the republic, working people fought for a free public education for their children, which is likely to be undermined by a secretary of education committed to undermining it with a system of vouchers and privatization schemes. Speaking of labor history, another key demand of the past was the abolition of child labor, which has been praised by a group the newly appointed education chief has supported.

Then there’s trade, a major issue for working people. I’m not mourning the death of the Trans Pacific Partnership and I support revisiting trade deals to ensure workers’ rights and save American jobs. But a heavy handed approach could set off a trade war which the conservative Peterson Institute described as “horribly destructive.” Peterson estimated that this could cost between 1.3 and 4 million jobs. Progressive groups that ordinarily oppose Peterson on trade issues, such as the Economic Policy Institute, share similar concerns.

If the US ignores the dangers of climate change, working people will be hit the hardest by extreme weather events, like those that hit much of the state this summer. Scientific models project more droughts, floods, food shortages, wildfires, disease epidemics, etc. While we’re at it, if the US goes to war with the known universe over perceived slights on Twitter, it’s a pretty safe bet that working people would pay the highest price.

Then there’s the pick for secretary of labor, a fast food baron who opposes the minimum wage and talks about replacing workers with robots, saying that the latter are ““always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case”

Sorry, but If this is a case of sticking it to the man, I’d have to ask, which man would that be? From where I’m sitting, it seems to be the one who is living paycheck to paycheck.

I think a real pro-working class program would be based on solidarity, not scapegoating. It would include such things as full employment and trade policies to strengthen the middle class; patching the holes in our pension and health care system, ensuring paid sick days and family leave; making debt-free post high-school job training and education a reality; strengthening K-12 public education; investing in things like early childhood programs and infrastructure; and guaranteeing the right of workers to organize. And, since widespread poverty exerts a downward pressure on everyone’s wages, it would support an increase in the minimum wage indexed to inflation.

It would recognize that an injury to one is the concern of all, just as the labor movement of the 1800s came to recognize that free labor could never prosper while slavery persisted. And it would promote international policies that would guarantee fair trade, a sustainable future, and what Lincoln called “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I haven’t heard a lot of that.

Obstacles to higher ed--and the middle class

This op-ed of mine appeared in yesterday's Charleston Gazette-Mail:

I first started attending Marshall University a while back, sometime between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the most recent ice age. It really was a different world.

At the time, I was working part-time as a janitor at a local public library (writing being a fairly recent innovation at the time). I found it to be a congenial calling I pursued with something less than perfect diligence, although it vastly contributed to my appreciation for the poetry of Langston Hughes and the like.

Imagine this: After a couple of part-time paychecks, I had enough money to pay for tuition.

Like I said, it was a different world.

Since then, inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the eve of the Great Depression, college costs have risen astronomically as the federal and state governments shifted priorities, student debt has exploded and hardships have mounted for students from low-income families.

Just how many hardships students face was documented in an interesting research project in Wisconsin. A team of researchers led by Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of the new book “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream,” studied 3,000 students who received Pell Grants while attending the state’s public colleges and universities.

They started out full of hope and enthusiasm but, six years later, fewer than half had graduated and 90 percent of those who did had debt.

In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Goldrick-Rab summarized the finding of her research:

 Federal student aid gets it wrong, by overestimating what families can pay and underestimating the cost of education.

 Contrary to stereotypes of families supporting children, “low-income children are supporting their parents, grandparents, and even siblings, all while being unable to buy their books.”

 Many are going without adequate food and, sometimes, shelter.

 While there’s nothing new about students working, many low-income students today are either looking for jobs they can’t find or holding down as many as three to get by.

 Debt, and its shadow, impact education, as well: “Feeling forced into borrowing is contributing to stress during college. To make money through work and minimize their loan exposure, students sacrifice participation in the sorts of academic and social activities that build networks and learning, the kinds of activities than increase the economic returns of their degrees.”

The real kicker is that the evidence suggests that academic success comes down to money: “Price, not intellect or effort, is the primary sorting mechanism in today’s colleges ... . Time after time, the failure to complete college does not reflect intellectual inability but rather an inability to pay.”

I’ve often had conversations with West Virginians who were stranded, unable to graduate and saddled with debt they had trouble paying on low wages and no benefits, which, in turn, made more education that could lead to a better job more inaccessible.

There’s something messed up about a situation where CEOs and corporations have an easier time dodging promised benefits to workers and retirees than ordinary people do dealing with debt for higher education.

If we’re going to move forward as a nation — let alone as a state that ranks at the bottom in educational attainment — we need to address issue of affordability. But we also need to work together to ensure that those who are trying to move forward can meet the basic needs for food, shelter and safety that make learning possible.

Left behind in rural America

There is some good news about incomes nationally. For the first time since 2015, US households saw a decent bump in incomes. However, as this Vox item shows, incomes actually went down in rural areas.  As one of the most rural states (the others are Maine, Vermont and Mississippi), the outlook isn't too good for West Virginia. But you already knew that.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting review by a WV-born writer about a certain demographic group that is getting a lot of ink these days.

Dodging a bullet

I think it was mostly luck and an unforeseen and unforeseeable outbreak of rationality in the recent WV legislative session, but the Mountain State managed not to pass one of those controversial "religious freedom" bills that are a license to discriminate. Similar bills have been causing controversy--and costing money--in several states. It's nice that we managed not to embarrass ourselves, even if it was kind of an accident.

Meanwhile, this NY Times article on inequality, longevity and geography is worth a look. For some reason, we didn't look too bad in this one either.

NOTE: for some reason, the several  hundred odd (no disrespect intended) people who subscribed to this blog via email haven't been getting it for a while. I'm going to try something. Please let me know if it works if you happen to get this and read it. Thanks!

Mark me as a "no"

On the latest Front Porch podcast, we debate "right-to-work-(for-less). Check it out here.

Oligarchy 2, Democracy 0

As if there weren't enough downers out there these days, here are two more. The first looks at the power of corporate lobbyists in Washington (pretty much total), while the second looks at the Koch brothers grand design for the elections of 2016.

It's a pretty disgusting state of affairs.