 
Hadas Mandel Levy Ph.D.
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
Within the extensive and variegated research on welfare states and gender, the diversity among women is not commonly highlighted. In this lecture, Dr. Mandel will draw from the literature on welfare state policies, gender, and class in order to stress the importance of class distinction for understanding how welfare state policies affect the life chances of women.
Dr. Hadas Mandel heads the Pollak Program for Excellence for doctoral students in the social sciences at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on cross-country variations in gender inequality, their relationship to class inequality, and the role of the welfare state. She also studies the motherhood penalty within a cross-country comparative perspective and the role of gender in wage inequality between occupations. Selected publications on these topics have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, European Sociological Review, Social Politics, and the British Journal of Sociology.
This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families' Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of Economics and the Center for Public Policy and Administration.
The Tay Gavin Erickson Lectures Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.
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Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2014
Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Poverty Report by the Center for American Progress
The Top 3 Things You Need to Know About the New Poverty and Income Data
SOURCE: AP/Robert Ray
In this September 16, 2011 photo, Kris Fallon holds her 4-month-old daughter Addison, in Palatine, Illinois, as her 15-year-old son Gared looks on. The Fallon family has been living in poverty for nearly two years.
As Congress prepares for yet another fiscal showdown, new data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau should be a wake-up call that it is time to move away from a wrong-headed austerity agenda and pivot to a focus on creating jobs, boosting wages, and investing in family economic security.
The new data on poverty and income show that despite economic growth, there was no statistically significant improvement in the poverty rate or median household income in 2012.
Behind these topline numbers are data that contain real warning signs for American families and the overall economy if Congress continues down its current path.
Here are three things you need to know about the new data and how they affect the budget and policy choices before us:
- Income inequality has widened since the end of the Great Recession.
- Our safety net is working overtime to compensate for rising income inequality and the proliferation of low-wage work.
- High poverty rates among young children of color have long-term implications for our economic competitiveness.
Let’s examine each trend and its implications for timely fiscal debates.
1. Income inequality has widened since the end of the Great Recession.
Since the end of the Great Recession, the wealthiest households have fully recovered—and even shown income gains—while middle-class and low-income families are still suffering from the lingering effects of the downturn with little to no improvement in their incomes.
While household incomes for the top 5 percent have grown 5.2 percent in the past three years, incomes for workers in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes fall by 0.8 percent, while middle-class incomes have fallen even more.
These latest data are consistent with a new analysis by inequality scholars Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, showing that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States brought in more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the largest amount in nearly 100 years. In fact, in the first three years of the recovery, from 2009 to 2012, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of income gains.
As the wealthiest households have captured a rising share of income, the share of Americans struggling to make ends meet has risen.
The poverty line does not adequately capture the number of Americans struggling to get by, and a threshold of two times the poverty line is more closely aligned with the estimated amount necessary for people to make ends meet. Using this measure, the share of people living in low-income households with incomes below twice the poverty line has risen by 12.1 percent from 30.5 percent in 2007 to 34.2 percent in 2012.
This disturbing trend is related in part to the explosion of low-wage and part-time work. In 2012, more than 40 percent of job growth took place in low-wage sectors such as hospitality, retail, and health and education services.[1] In addition, while the number of people who are involuntarily working part time decreased from 2011 to 2012, last year there were still 8.1 million people working part time even though they wanted full-time work.[2]
In this context, conservatives have taken the prospect of any additional revenue from the wealthiest Americans off the table even as they are proposing cuts to the very services that help struggling families scrape by as they navigate an economy that is not producing enough living-wage jobs. In the meantime, a national movement to raise the minimum wage is emerging, with fast-food workers mobilizing to demand a living wage to pull their families out of poverty.
2. Our safety net is working overtime to compensate for rising income inequality and the proliferation of low-wage work.
The good news in the data is that our safety net is making a difference in lifting families out of poverty and helping them meet basic needs.
If not for unemployment insurance, 1.7 million additional people would have been in poverty last year, and absent Social Security, nearly 15.3 million additional seniors would have lived in poverty, nearly quadrupling the senior poverty rate. While the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is not taken into account in calculating the poverty rate, if it were counted as income, it would have lifted 4 million people out of poverty last year.[3]
The bad news is that our safety net is working harder than it should. Though a full employment economy and rising wages are the surest pathways out of poverty, our system of work and income supports provide vital assistance to help families make ends meet.
It is in this environment that conservatives are debating a Farm Bill that would kick 4 million to 6 million people off of nutrition aid and cost our economy 55,000 jobs as people cut back on their food spending.
3. We’re shortchanging our future workforce.
Low- and middle-income families have been slammed across age and demographic groups, but three years into the recovery, children are facing crisis levels of poverty—particularly very young children of color under the age of 5. In 2012, 42.5 percent of African American children under age 5 and 37.1 percent of Latino children under age 5, lived in poverty.
Research into early childhood development has shown that this is a crucial time for cognitive development. The deprivation and toxic stress associated with persistent poverty can leave a lasting imprint on children’s brains and affect future educational and health outcomes, as well as worker productivity.
This is not only a moral issue; it represents a threat to our future economic competitiveness.Given that half of all births are now children of color, these high rates of poverty among our nation’s future workforce should spur us to invest in our nation’s children and end racial and ethnic disparities.
Unfortunately, our policy priorities are going in the opposite direction. First Focus’s annual “Children’s Budget” report finds that in 2013 alone, sequestration will cut $4.2 billion of funding for children concentrated in the areas of education, early learning, and housing, and Congress is considering a budget plan that would lock in or deepen these cuts for next year. This November, 22 million children will see a cut in their family’s nutrition assistance, and House Republicans are considering cuts to food aid that would drop more than 200,000 children from free school meals.
Conclusion
These data could not be timelier. They reveal an economy where the gains of economic growth are not reaching low- and middle-income families. They show structural threats to our economic competitiveness owing to high rates of poverty among young children of color—who would be badly hurt by Congress locking in or deepening the sequester cuts. And they show the effectiveness of programs such as nutrition assistance, even as House Republicans propose deep cuts to food aid.
It is time to reset the national debate. Austerity that exacerbates poverty and inequality is not the answer; we must focus on creating jobs, investing in family economic security, and promoting shared economic growth.
Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program and Half in Ten at American Progress
Endnotes
[1] Author’s calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics(U.S. Department of Labor, 2013), available at http://www.bls.gov/ces/.
[2] Author’s calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (U.S. Department of Labor, 2013), available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ln.
[3] Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012” (Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2013), available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Poverty in 2013
Poverty in 2013: When Even Diapers Are a Luxury
Feeding Bottles (Reuters/Carolina Camps)
Here’s a little window into poverty, American- style. According to a Yale University study published in August in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30 percent of low-income women with children in diapers can’t afford an adequate supply of them, with Hispanic women and grandmothers raising grandchildren the most likely to be in need. Some women are forced to make one or two nappies last the whole day, emptying them out and putting them back on the baby. Based on a survey of almost 900 low-income women in and around New Haven, Connecticut, investigators found the lack of diapers—such a simple thing—had profound and complex effects. The risks to children’s health are obvious: rashes, urinary tract infections, painful chafing. (If a mom is too poor to afford diapers, she probably can’t afford diaper cream or wipes or baby powder, either.) But to their surprise, the study authors also found that not being able to provide this necessary item (to say nothing of having a baby prone to fussing because of the discomfort of a constantly wet and dirty bottom) was a major cause of mental problems like stress, anxiety and depression in mothers. Maternal depression, we know, is associated with all kinds of problems in children, especially for poor kids, who need heroic parenting to overcome the many obstacles they face. Diapers are also necessary for kids entering daycare—no diapers, no enrollment. And no enrollment may mean a mother can’t take a job. For want of a diaper, a future could be lost. Two futures.
About the Author
Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her "Subject to...
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How could something so basic be in such short supply? Diapers are expensive—up to $100 a month—particularly for women who don’t have transportation and must rely on bodegas and local convenience stores. Some women reported spending 6 percent of their total income on paper nappies. And before you say, “Let them use cloth,” Marie Antoinette, bear in mind that diaper services are expensive, few poor women have their own washing machines, most laundromats don’t permit customers to launder dirty diapers and most daycare programs don’t allow cloth diapers. Like fresh fruit and vegetables, humanely raised meat and dairy products, and organic baby food, cloth diapers are the province of the well-off.
Despite this clear need, however, diapers are not covered by the food stamp program (SNAP) or by the Women, Infants, and Children feeding program. The government apparently finds them unnecessary, like other hygiene products (toilet paper, menstrual supplies, toothpaste, even soap), which are also, unlike food, subject to sales tax. Never mind that babies can’t choose not to pee and poo and did not select their parents. Never mind, too, that those grandmothers who are the hardest hit caregivers are performing a crucial social task—and saving the taxpayer millions—by keeping those kids out of foster care.
Food, it’s true, is even more basic than diapers. But some people believe low-income children don’t really need that either. If House Republicans have their way, 4 to 6 million SNAP recipients may soon find themselves bounced from the rolls. This, at a time when the Department of Agriculture tells us that 17.6 million households regularly go hungry, up from 12 million ten years ago. Proving yet again that there really is a difference between the parties, Republicans want to cut the food stamp budget by $40 billion over the next ten years. Let them drink tea! Seriously, are they out of their minds?
Don’t believe them when they say the cuts are fiscally necessary. Governments can always find money for the things they want—like increasing subsidies for rich farmers (or bombing Syria). Food stamps are one of the most effective government programs, keeping countless people from outright destitution. This is about ideology—the dismantling of a social compact that goes all the way back to the New Deal, and the promotion of inequality as a civic virtue.
Tennessee Tea Party Congressman Stephen Fincher must not have been thinking about his $3.5 million in crop subsidies when he told The New York Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg that the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Of the 23 million households currently receiving SNAP, three-quarters include children, the disabled or the elderly. What sort of work should they be doing to earn their supper? Forty-one percent of food stamp recipients live in a household where someone has a job—but they don’t earn enough to feed their families. If anyone is freeloading, it’s employers like Walmart who in effect have the taxpayer subsidize their workforce. The Bible-quoting reactionaries conveniently forget that Jesus also said, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” And he may have said the poor will always be with us, but he didn’t add, “And let’s make sure we keep it that way.”
America has always had a mean streak where poor people, especially poor people of color are concerned, but at our best it’s been tempered by a sense of collective responsibility and, dare I say it, common sense. Are those days gone? On Fox News earlier this month, New Jersey school therapist and counselor Thomas Kersting spoke in favor of a school policy of denying lunch to low-income children whose parents had neglected to fill out eligibility forms. He thought it was “a little harsh” to throw the food into the garbage in front of the child, but hey, if the kid goes hungry, it’s “a teaching moment.” Kersting goes Dickens’s Mr. Bumble one better: Oliver Twist got in trouble for wanting seconds. Kersting doesn’t think poor children even deserve firsts.
Diapers, food stamps, even the lowly school lunch. God bless the child who’s got her own.
September 8–14 is National Diaper Need Awareness Week. Can you help a mother out? Visit diaperbanknetwork.org to donate and find out about volunteering at a local diaper bank—or starting your own. No computer? You can mail a check to National Diaper Bank Network, 129 Church Street, Suite 611, New Haven, CT 06510.
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