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Economists: US Poverty On Track To Hit Highest Level Since 1960s
First time accepted submitter eentory writes "According to economists and other experts surveyed by the Associated Press, the U.S. poverty rate is on track to hit its highest level since the 1960s. The consensus among those surveyed is that 'the official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent.' Just a 0.1 percent increase would put the poverty rate at its highest since 1965."
"According to a 2011 paper by poverty expert Robert Rector, of the 43.6 million Americans deemed to be below the poverty level by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009, the majority had adequate shelter, food, clothing and medical care. In addition, the paper stated that those assessed to be below the poverty line in 2011 have a much higher quality of living than those who were identified by the census 40 years ago as being in poverty."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
These days we count poverty as economic disparity, which is not the historical definition of poverty. Today, if you have access to medical care, housing and food, we state that you are living in poverty. That is not to say there aren't those living in legitimate poverty.
Malnourishment is down, and yet we insist poverty is near all-time highs.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Who in the country actually works for minimum wage? A small number indeed, 1 to 2%."
"In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm
Why did Obama wait until he lost control of Congress to try and revive the economy?
I am not a fan of Obama, but he never had control of Congress. I believe what you refer to as "control" was 59 Democrats + 1 Indep, with 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. So he would need absolute unanimous support and the support of Lieberman (who negotiated quite a bit for his single vote).
That's a very theoretical "control", that could be broken by luring one person away (or even someone sick/campaigning/etc/).
You know what? The Constitution puts the spending power in the hands of Congress, not the president. So, take a look at where the deficits are really happening
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Wow, you have a selective memory. I guess it is easy to forget the filibusters going on during that time with every law 24/7 with no way of invoking cloture, and no way to just do an up/down vote.
Funny how the stimulus act exists when Republicans want to bash Obama on the debt, and then ceases to exist when they want to ask what he's done about job creation.
The graphs tell the tale, when the stimulus kicked in jobs recovered, when it began to phase out, job growth stalled -- all the while Obama has proposed additional stimulus and gotten thwacked in the knockers for it every time.
Eh are you sure about that? Tax incidence is dependent on the price elasticity of the taxed good. If a good has inelastic supply, or elastic demand, a seller is limited to the extent that he can pass-on taxes, because higher price points will simply cause the buyers to purchase less. If the demand for a a good in inelastic, like gasoline, all of the cost can be passed on because the consumer lacks the bargaining power to seek alternatives. That's what happens if you follow the deadweight losses, anyways.
This is why physiocrats and Georgists believed that a Single Tax on land was the only truly enlightened form of taxation, because undeveloped land has a perfectly inelastic supply and there is, thus, 100% of the tax is passed on and there is zero deadweight loss. It's a perfectly neutral tax, in that it neither encourages nor discourages any economic activity -- a landowner has to pay tax on his land, but if he were a renter his cost situation would be identical, except for premium rents charged for development on the land, which are priced in the open market. It never really took off because most of the people on Earth that own land are also relatively powerful politically :) Adam Smith wasn't a Georgist, but he inspired many of their ideas.
The idea that companies uniformly pass on all their taxes to their customers is little more than corporate propaganda, and not grounded in any economic theory. It is sometimes the case but the truth is much more complicated.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Just to complete the thought, you should read more about ground rents and the problem of retierism in general. Economists of the 19th century were the first to become dimly aware of the fact that people were able to extract wealth by buddying-up with the government, and they realized that the most important way they did this was by taking control of land freehold. They saw the institution of land title as the original form of rent seeking, because it allowed the owner to charge money for nothing -- they lived in an era where a landowner would charge a renter for land that was completely undeveloped, many of these economists attacked tax-free landholding the way people on slashdot attack eternal copyright. It's basically the same mechanism. Nowadays land is developed and rent value is based on the level of development, so ground rents aren't as visible to most people anymore -- though they still come up, and they absolutely exist under other circumstances, like copyright. Basically, whenever the government declares something is ownable, it creates the potential for rents, and policy comes down to how well the government balances these rights against the unavoidable waste and inefficiencies.
PS. Marx, directly following Adam Smith's program, went on to apply the principle to labor with the Labor Theory of Value, but it's not clear labor really works that way or that an employer "owns" employment openings in the same way that a landowner owns land, or that surplus labor-power is really a form of rent.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.