The Poverty Trap

Photo: Library of Congress. Some of the first recipients wait to receive [unemployment] benefits at the State Employment Service in San Francisco, California, 1938. Marketplace, 2020 Last week, I wrote a post critical of how the unemployment compensation system is being administered, particularly the expansive leeway given to states, and the disparity in the amount and distribution of benefits tha...

The federal law establishing unemployment compensation was part of the 1935 bill signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which created the Social Security system. It was designed not just to pull our economy out of the Great Depression, but to provide a safety net going forward for average working Americans, specifically when things got economically tough through no fault of their own. Unemploym...

Earlier this week, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, gave a speech at the New York Stock Exchange where he discussed (in incredibly vague terms) the Republican party’s proposal to raise the debt ceiling so our country doesn’t default on its financial obligations. This proposal is conditioned with all sorts of budget cuts, including repealing parts of the Inflation Reduc...

“In February, Natee Amornsiripanitch, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, published an analysis of more than 9 million mortgage applications collected through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act from 2018 to 2020. He found that rejection rates rose steadily with age, particularly accelerating for applicants over 70.” The New York Times, April 8, 2023 The reason mortgage rejectio...

“ …Cards with the highest value rewards are often available only to the rich. First, you’ll need a credit score of at least 700 to qualify for a premium card. That eliminates half the country….Second, issuers consider your income and debt-to-income ratio, which can be used to disqualify card applicants with high credit scores.” The New York Times , March 4, 2023 (T hanks to Jan Peppler, PhD, who w...

“IRS Audits Poorest Families at Five Times the Rate for Everyone Else." Based on IRS data reported to The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse ( TRAC) for FY 2021 I’m not going to comb the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code for each section that hurts the poor or benefits the rich, because that would, well, take too long. But I will explore a few areas of the tax code that don’t seem to hav...

“A condo deconversion is a real estate transaction in which a savvy investor acquires an entire condo building through a bulk sale to turn into rentals. This investment trend has been seen in Florida and California for a number of years and is picking up steam in other coastal metros and even in the Midwest.” Forbes, July 22, 2019 It is startling for someone like me, who has never been a part of a...

“Three weeks after the toxic train derailment in Ohio, an independent analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data has found nine air pollutants at levels that, if they persist, could raise long-term health concerns in and around East Palestine…The analysis by Texas A&M University researchers stands in contrast to statements by state and federal regulators that air near the crash site is compl...

“They [Researchers for the Oxford Review of Economic Policy] find that monopolistic pricing takes a bite out of every income group’s share of national income, with the notable exception of the top 20 percent, whose incomes rise. In effect, companies are using their market power to extract wealth from poor and middle-class households and deposit it in the pockets of the wealthy, to the tune of abou...

“The Biden administration is prioritizing the investigation and prosecution of corporate crime and is giving DOJ prosecutors broader power to do so.” The National Law Review , November, 2021 Unless it’s a major Ponzi scheme, we don’t hear too much about what has been dubbed “white collar crime”. And that’s a shame, because it costs its victims and the American taxpayers between $300 and $800 billi...

“Critical thinking” is a term thrown around so much it has become almost meaningless. It is embedded deep into the Common Core State Standards for public schools across the nation, which set standards for English and math. And it is discussed in countless articles by educators and for educators that attempt to evaluate and then decide how our students learn. Despite this talk, however, it also is...

This 30 minute documentary prepared by the “Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth” House Select Committee of the 117th Congress seems to suggest there are ways to close the income and wealth gap and help our economy bend toward fairness. Warning: Some of the proposals include government-sponsored programs! While the committee did prepare a robust report of it’s accomplishments, it also produce...

“…our founding concept of universal equality, in a country where one-fifth of the population was enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity. It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered ideal of the Declaration of Independence might be considered our...

“Research and development is only about 17 percent of total spending in most large drug companies,” he [Gerard Anderson, professor of health policy and management at John Hopkins University], says. “Once a drug has been approved by the FDA, there are minimal additional research and development costs so drug companies cannot justify price increases by claiming research and development costs.” Qtd....

It’s easy to think that if you have health insurance, you will not have medical bills to pay out of pocket — that’s why you’re paying those hefty premiums, right? Unfortunately, medical bills, regardless of insurance coverage, often turn into medical debt . Get full access to The Poverty Trap at povertytrap.substack.com/subscribe

“…what looks like sprawl is healthier for the middle class and conforms to what most families want anyway.” Joel Kotkin, CEOof a Houston-based think tank called “Urban Reform Institute”. The New York Times, Sept. 4, 2017, one week after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston Houston isn’t the only city in the U.S. with urban sprawl, but it is known in some circles as a “model” city for rapid, supposedly...

I believe I can speak for Bella (she’s napping at the moment), when I say this : We have never understood why citizens of the United States choose not to vote. We are fortunate to live in a participatory democracy, at least for the time being, and that good fortune comes with some responsibilities. Perhaps the most important of those responsibilities is to research the issues and the candidates ru...

“Between soaring prices and rising rates, the typical home buyer in October paid 77 percent more on their loan, per month, than they would have last year, according to Realtor.com. With a national median asking price of $425,000 and a 10 percent down payment, that works out to an additional $1,117 every month.” The New York Times , November 4, 2022 Get full access to The Poverty Trap at povertytra...

Income and wealth inequality is a “thing” now. Most people know how obscenely rich the rich have gotten, how the middle class is nearly eliminated and the working poor have increased threefold in the last few decades. I’ve also written about income and wealth inequality a few times before on Crime and Punishment because it’s a trend we have to question and understand in order to fix. It is not a g...

“President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget builds upon the administration’s previous historic investments in the arts and recognizes the critical role of the National Endowment for the Arts in supporting American communities,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) statement on this administration’s 2023 budget , proposing $203.55 million for the continued...

“We are all just walking each other home.” Ram Das I can’t tell you (but I’m going to try), how thrilled I am to have found Substack, a unique and welcoming platform for writers, and that I decided to create Crime and Punishment: Why the Poor Stay Poor in America and publish my first post one year ago yesterday. I have been incredibly grateful for your interest and support over this last year—than...

“The Transportation Department is embarking on a national strategy to tackle rising traffic fatalities using new funding in the $1 trillion infrastructure law, addressing issues ranging from speed limits and street lighting to emergency medical care.” The New York Times , January 2022 It’s not just automobile accidents that have risen, particularly in the last few years, it’s fatalities that have...

One of the first New Deal programs President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law in the spring of 1933 was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This voluntary federal program was designed to put young men back to work during the depression, and at the same time, contribute to forest management, flood control, various conservation projects and the development of state and national parks, forest...

“Misclassification of workers as independent contractors is a pervasive and extensive problem in the United States. According to a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, as many as 30% of employers, and perhaps more, have misclassified some workers, affecting millions of workers, disproportionately workers of color.” Economic Policy Institute, 2021 . The term “misclassification” soun...

What’s the holdup, then? According to statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2021, “…renewable energy sources accounted for about 12.2% of total U.S. energy consumption and about 20.1% of electricity generation.” Although these numbers for our use of renewable energy sources are expected to increase slightly in the next few years, and in the coming decades we are comm...