Bryce Covert | The Nation

Happy fortieth, Roe! They say 40 is the new 20. And that might be fitting, because four decades later to the day it feels like in many ways we’ve moved back in time. While access to abortion is still in theory a right every woman in this country enjoys, an economic chasm has yawned between the well-off and the poor.

The Guttmacher Institute has some enlightening, if disheartening, infographics to celebrate the anniversary. As the first demonstrates, low-income women are the majority of those who seek abortions:

The rights of domestic workers may be an important issue in the United States, but we’re far from alone in having growing ranks of workers who suffer from few labor protections and abusive working conditions. A new report out from the ILO yesterday sheds some much-needed light on what the global domestic worker workforce looks like.

Firstly, it’s huge. Just take a look at some of these figures:

We may not have avoided going over the fiscal cliff, but Congress did act to make a deal to undo some of the damage. For a good overview of what it did and did not include, read my Nation colleague George Zornick. Overall, it’s basically a mixed bag. Long before the deal was reached and passed, I had warned that the components of the fiscal cliff deal would hit the poor hardest. So how did they make out in the end? It’s a mixed bag for them too, but things are likely to get worse before they get better.

First, the good news. The biggest takeaway, perhaps, was for the unemployed: they saw a one-year extension in federal unemployment benefits. This will help keep many families out of poverty. In 2011 alone, unemployment insurance lifted 2.3 million people out of poverty. Unemployment remains painfully high, making these benefits still incredibly important to millions.

Another very important piece of the deal was a five-year extension of crucial tax breaks: the Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit. The first two alone mean that 13 million families—and their 26 million children—will avoid paying an average of $843 extra a year in taxes. Specifically, 8.9 million families will avert a hike of $854 through the Child Tax Credit and 6.5 million will avoid a raise of $530 under the EITC. That’s not chump change when you struggle to put food on the table.

News is out today that a deal to avert the fiscal cliff is nigh. The New York Times is reporting that President Obama’s latest offer, which is close to Speaker Boehner’s dreams and desires, will permanently extend the Bush tax cuts on income below $400,000 and raise them above that bracket. In return, there will be spending cuts. One big component of those cuts is a change in how Social Security benefits are calculated, shifting to using the chained CPI. What sounds like a complex accounting measure will mean a serious benefit reduction for those who are elderly and impoverished. And guess who will get hit hardest? If your guess rhymes with schwomen, you’re correct.

First, what is chained CPI? Currently Social Security benefits are adjusted to account for inflation, but there are many different measures of inflation. If the fiscal cliff deal includes a switch to a chained CPI, it will mean using a measure that tries to take into account human behavior in reaction to price increases—specifically, the substitution for something cheaper if the price of what you normally buy goes up. If provolone costs a fortune, perhaps I’ll switch to Swiss. Unfortunately for the elderly, they buy products that don’t behave much like provolone. As Dean Baker explains, the elderly spend more of their money on health care, which has seen costs far outpace the costs of cheese, and are also generally less likely to be able to make substitutions on what they buy.

A Brad DeLong put it yesterday, “’Chained-CPI’ is code for ‘let's really impoverish some women in their 90s!’” This change would end up reducing benefits by about .3 percent each year and will hammer elderly women. The National Women’s Law Center calculates that the typical single elderly woman would see her monthly benefits reduced by $56 at age 80. It reports that this is “an amount equal to the cost of one week’s worth of food each month.” Perhaps they’ll start substituting cat food for provolone. But these cuts get even worse over time as the reduction adds up. By age 95, the NWLC reports that her benefits will be down by over nine percent, the equivalent of nearly two weeks of food. Even with a “bump up” in later years, the graph below from the NWLC shows how quickly benefits will erode with the chained CPI: