The Nation

Senator Ted Cruz speaks at a news conference with conservative congressional Republicans who persuaded the House leadership to include defunding the Affordable Care Act legislation to prevent a government shutdown. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The House of Representatives voted this morning for a short-term spending bill that would strip all funding for Obamacare, pushing the government down an uncertain path toward shutdown. Next, Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless the law is gutted.

These moves won’t have any real effect on Obamacare, and they come against the judgment of party leaders and public opinion. President Obama won’t sign either piece of legislation even if it passes the Senate. Far more threatening to healthcare reform is the aggressive, localized campaign to sabotage the law’s implementation.

The fracas in Washington will probably cost the Republican Party far more than anyone else. Meanwhile, it’s making a lot of money for the conservatives who started it all.

* * *

On a Thursday evening in late August, in the ballroom of a Double Tree hotel outside Wilmington, Delaware, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael rallied a few hundred conservatives to his son’s chief cause, the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act. “They can take our lives, they can take our fortunes,” the Cuban-born pastor shouted, wagging a finger at the crowd, which whistled and cheered. “But they cannot take our honor! No one can take our honor.”

It was the last stop of the Heritage Action Fund’s Defund Obamacare tour, a nine-city whipping-up of Tea Party fury designed to pressure congressional Republicans into a budget showdown over the health care law. Former Senator Jim DeMint, now the head of the Heritage Foundation, impressed upon the crowd the need to break the law before October 1, when the insurance exchanges open for enrollment. “If there’s ever been anything worth fighting for in the political arena, it’s this,” he said. “This is our time to stop it…. This is a winnable battle.”

His crusade seemed quixotic then. Only a handful of conservative members of Congress had signed the pledge to walk away from any spending bill or debt-ceiling deal that left Obamacare intact. Party leadership dismissed the Defunders, wary of being blamed for a government shutdown or a default. “Do you want to risk the full faith and credit of the US government over Obamacare?” House Speaker John Boehner asked in March. “That’s a very tough argument to make.”

Outside the Double Tree, a small group smoking cigarettes around a trashcan was more optimistic. “I think everybody that was there is motivated to do something,” mused a woman named Pat. “We’re losing the country.” They felt they were losing the Republican Party, too. “They’re weenies,” a man named Joe said about the leaders. “They’re really Democrats called Republicans,” Pat added. Joe again: “Democrat-lites.” He paused to consider. “They’re French Republicans!”

Two weeks later, spines in Washington have stiffened—really, they’ve bowed to the hard right. Boehner was forced to withdraw a short-term spending bill with a nonbinding rider that stripped funding from Obamacare when conservatives balked at a vote they said was merely symbolic. It’s no surprise House Republicans are tired of such gestures, after voting more than forty times to repeal or delay the law with nothing to show but a cost upwards of $50 million to taxpayers. The continuing resolution that passed the House on Friday defunds the healthcare law, and Republicans will now set to work on a bill to raise the debt ceiling for another year’s worth of borrowing, contingent also upon the demise of the ACA, as well as expedited construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and other Democratic non-starters.

Neither bill can pass the Senate, much less the White House, and so without compromise from House Republicans the government is headed for a shutdown on October 1. More alarming is the prospect of a default, an unprecedented event that could roil the global economy. While this brinkmanship jeopardizes the country’s economic stability, it poses virtually no threat to Obamacare. With polling indicating that most Americans would blame Republicans for the shutdown, the White House has no reason to blink.

* * *

The Defund Obamacare movement represents irresponsible governing at its apex, but what’s insidious about the whole show is the way it distracts from the actual threat to healthcare reform: the efforts to cripple the law’s implementation, led by Republican-controlled state governments and a range of right-wing PACs.

Sixteen states have imposed unnecessary restrictions on “navigators,” a workforce drawn from nonprofit and government agencies to educate consumers about their options and walk them through the new system. Twenty-one states have refused to expand Medicaid, which was intended to cover 17 million uninsured, low-income Americans. Officials in Missouri have been barred from doing anything to implement the law. A handful of other states are refusing to enforce its consumer protections, most critically the provision that bans insurers from rejecting applicants with preexisting conditions.

At the center of the “Obamacare resistance” is a media campaign to discourage young people from signing up for the exchanges. In order for the economics to work, the costs of adding unhealthy people to the insurance pool must be offset by premiums paid by the healthy. With only six in ten people aware of the exchanges and some 2.7 million young enrollees needed next year for the program to work, the administration has committed millions to reach young adults and get them enrolled. Earlier this year conservatives harassed organizations partnering with Health and Human Services on public-awareness campaigns; now they’re targeting young Americans directly.

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Koch-funded Generation Opportunity launched a web series on Thursday as part of a six-figure campaign designed, in the words the nonprofit’s president Even Feinberg, “to communicate, ‘No, you’re actually not required to buy health insurance.’ You might have to pay a fine, but that’s going to be cheaper for you and better for you.” In one video, a leering Uncle Sam pops up between the legs of a young woman who has recently signed up for Obamacare and is reclining on the examining table, waiting for a pap smear. “Don’t let government play doctor,” the text reads, as Uncle Sam ratchets out the forceps, “Opt out of Obamacare.” Tinged with sexual violence, the ad is rich in irony, coming from the party that aggressively “plays doctor” to women across the country and isn’t exactly sure what rape is.

Generation Opportunity will tour twenty college campuses this fall, dogging nonprofits like Enroll America that are signing up young Americans. A slew of other organizations are working in tandem, including FreedomWorks, which encourages college students to burn Obamacare “draft cards,” and YG Network, which ran an anti-Obamacare ad on Saturday Night Live. Just like the assault on women’s health providers, these attempts to convince young people that being uninsured is “better for you” are dangerous. Young adults are the people least likely to have insurance, and unexpected health emergencies can be financially crippling. Under Obamacare, subsidies will dramatically lower the cost of coverage, to as little as $5 a month for some 21-year-olds in California. Other provisions will give young people access to essential preventative services, with no copay—like the gynecological exam denigrated in the Generation Opportunity ad.

* * *

Those discouraged or prevented from obtaining insurance will be the collateral damage of the Obamacare wars. Complication and confusion will continue to trouble the rollout, but it would take a mass panic across insurers, customers and legislators to bury the law. The loser, then, will be the Republican Party, which has staked its entire identity on opposition to healthcare reform. Once benefits begin to flow on January 1, it will be politically impossible to take them away. Without Obamacare, what is the GOP?

Capitulation to the repeal coalition signifies a rejection of the lesson in demographics offered by the 2012 election. Millennials didn’t fall for the conservative ads targeted at them then, and polls suggest they want insurance now. The people gunning for the healthcare law are mainly old and white, as the crowd packed into the ballroom in Wilmington suggested. Out in the parking lot, a tall African-American man told me that “hot air” was all he’d heard inside. “There’s no way the conservative party is going to be a nationwide party with the crowd that showed up tonight. I mean, I’m probably the youngest person in here.” He didn’t mention that he was probably the only person of color in the room, too. “This crowd here—I cannot vote Republican,” he went on. “This tonight is people who lost an election, and this man [DeMint] is selling them snake oil.”

Selling is right. Heritage Action and other PACs are profiting from the attacks on their own party by riling up rank-and-file Obamacare haters and picking their pockets to fund an unwinnable campaign. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a former DeMint project, raised more than $1.5 million in August, mostly from small donors, “the largest-ever monthly small-donor total brought in” by the group, according to The Huffington Post. Daily e-mails from Heritage feature a large red “Donate” button. The millions of signatures collected on the online petitions give the PACs a network to plumb for future causes, or candidates: Ted Cruz’s election campaign was bankrolled by the Senate Conservatives Fund in 2012.

“These organizations, ensconced in Northern Virginia office parks and elsewhere, aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire,” wrote National Review’s Bob Costa. “In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social media, donations are pouring in and e-mail lists are growing.” Brian Walsh, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, explained, “Money begets TV ads which begets even more money for these groups’ personal coffers. Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fundraising business.”

Rafael Cruz was right when he cried out to the Wilmington crowd, “They cannot take our honor!” The Obamacare opposition has no honor left to take.

Conservatives can blame anything on feminists, says Jessica Valenti.

Frank Bruni. (AP Photo)

Think Again: Austerity Kills, and So Will the Sequester

My Nation column is called “Frank Bruni, the Plutocrats’ Pundit.” But happily for Mr. Bruni, and unhappily for everyone else who might like to read it but is not a subscriber to The Nation, under a new and in my view, deeply misguided new Nation policy, it is presently behind a paywall. Personally, while I am philosophically pro-paywall, I do not understand the logic of having a press column hidden from the rest of the press—along with everyone else save subscribers—but of course such decisions are made well above my paygrade.

I had a lot of music and theater to review this week, but I’m in a bad mood about the above, so here’s Reed:

Well, no, not quite yet. I do want to give props to the Playwrights Horizons Theater Company, together with the Wooly Mamouth in Washington, together with author Anne Washburn, composer Michael Friedman and director Steve Cosson, for their insanely audacious “Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play,” which manages to combine The Simpsons, Cape Fear (both versions), the apocalypse, Gilbert and Sullivan and Grease into one unholy mess. Well, it’s a lot more than a mess. Much of it is brilliant. All of it is over the top. The Times’s rave is here. Mr. Brantley is apparently a lot smarter than I am, or a much bigger fan of Messrs. G and S, and so enjoyed the third act far more than I did. But the first two were brilliant.

Now here, (finally) is Reed:

How the Media’s Process Obsession Stifles Liberalism and Undermines our Democracy
by Reed Richardson

In our democracy, where we depend upon a free exchange of ideas and information, definitions matter. They act as an invaluable cognitive tool to help frame the polity’s thinking about issues in a broader context. When done right, they can also enable a better understanding of a complex problem confronting our country and help guide public debate toward a range of practical solutions. Settle for an imprecise or lazy description, however, and an important issue can be quickly hijacked by demagogues or bogged down in mindless minutiae. And since journalism remains our primary mechanism for dialogue between the governing and the governed, it’s incumbent upon those who practice it to think closely about how they define the issues and the context that follows.

Unfortunately, many journalists seem incapable of this nuance, even when it concerns thinking about their own profession. In a media environment increasingly unmoored from the clear-cut organizational cues of the past century, too many still cling to a clubby mindset that attaches journalistic authority to the actor, not the action. Not surprisingly, Congress has absorbed this same rigid viewpoint into its debate over a (flawed) federal media shield law. But fixating on who is a journalist, rather than what journalism is, is to miss the point. Even more importantly, the policy outcome of this narrow-mindedness could actually end up harming the robust, independent journalism that Congress ostensibly seeks to protect. Here again, definitions matter.

Still, as much as it is anathema to the First Amendment to have the government in the position of certifying who is or isn’t a journalist, we’re in pretty rarefied air here. The public, no doubt, couldn’t care less. And to be fair, they’re probably right, particularly when there’s a much larger problem plaguing journalism, one that has much more direct impact on the quality of the public’s day-to-day lives. And at the core of this problem lies another incorrect definition.

Media critics, whether professional or unpaid (or, like me, both), have long used short-hand terms like “mainstream media,” or “establishment media,” or “Beltway media” when translating individual critiques across a broader group. I’ve never really liked any of these terms and neither, it seems, do conservatives, who have their own vernacular, from the worn-out trope of the “lib-rul media” to the wet spaghetti-like wit of Sarah Palin’s “lamestream media” to Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic “drive-by media.” But except for Limbaugh’s not-so-subtly racially loaded term, all of the others fall into the same logical trap as the media shield law—they focus on the who, not the what. Mis-defining the phenomenon in this way, in effect, marginalizes and masks the critique, as it doesn’t encourage a deeper look into the faulty behavior at issue. If you think about the what of journalism first, though, you’ll find a universal thread woven throughout the credulous and irrelevant reporting and piss-poor punditry one encounters these days—it’s all about process.

In other words, it’s not the mainstream media doing a disservice to our democracy; it’s the process media. To be clear, when I refer to the process media, I’m not talking about “process journalism,” the iterative, publish-first-edit-later online news approach advocated by new media folks like Jeff Jarvis. Theirs is more of a technical, inward-looking term that refers to journalism as process. Mine is a more intellectual, outward-looking term of journalism about process. While distinct, these two phenomena are not unrelated. Process journalism’s ethos of constantly pushing content, often across multiple online channels and social media platforms, has created an almost infinite marketplace for news. While this has had the salutary effect of democratizing the news in our democracy, it has also had the unfortunate side effect of inflating what constitutes news. Thus, no campaign trail tidbit or catty Senate cloakroom comment is now too insignificant or irrelevant to publish.

Thus, process media stands as a definition better suited to the egalitarian realities of today’s press coverage. No doubt, the reporters and the editors and—Lord knows—the pundits at the New York Times routinely suffer from an obsession with the political process. But to lump everything everyone does for the Times into the same critical bin is unfair to the substantive, world-class reporting and writing it produces everyday. By the same token, the listicle-loving, Twitter-mad website BuzzFeed might ordinarily escape the scrutiny of press watchdogs, but that too constitutes an injustice. There is perhaps no beat more process infested than a presidential campaign, and as the feckless press coverage of 2012 demonstrated, a tidal wave of process Tweets from BuzzFeed can now drown out real policy discussion just as easily as a muddle-headed Times columnist’s op-ed.

That modern journalism—and political journalism, in particular—has gravitated toward a process-first, meta-news model is perhaps not surprising. After all, journalism itself is a never-ending activity in striving toward an always elusive goal, as it says right in the first tenet of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Principles of Journalism: “‘[J]ournalistic truth’ is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.” [italics mine]. As a result, the Washington press corps might naturally come to judge granular snapshots of Capitol Hill ephemera and presidential credibility as more worthy than long-gestating stories about the real-world impact of Congressional obstruction or foreign policy negotiations.

The allure of the process-media mindset is undoubtedly strong, as it handily reinforces a kind of unthinking objectivity on the coverage. For instance, if I’m just content to report dueling talking points between House Republicans and Obama on a topic like funding the government, without any adding any broader context about how a shutdown might harm the country and cost thousands of people their jobs, I can avoid being criticized as favoring a specific policy outcome or of being biased toward the president. (Or I might also say debunking Republican myths about Obamacare isn’t my job either.) Of course, a free-thinking, reality-based press corps should be courageous enough to say economic hara-kiri isn’t in our democracy’s best interests, but this calculus doesn’t add up within the process media world.

In fact, rather than offering a safe harbor of objectivity, this process-media mindset actually brings with it a number of deeply-rooted biases. The first of these is an inherent passivity and predisposition for the status quo. Forgive my pedantry, but process media coverage—as opposed to enterprise or advocacy journalism—needs, well, a process to cover. It’s simply not in the process media’s DNA to champion an unpopular or overlooked issue on its own. Instead, it prefers topics already endorsed by the DC conventional wisdom.

As a result, process-obsessed media pundits on Sunday morning news shows freely agitate for unnecessary austerity measures like deficit reduction and entitlement reform—long-time talking points for Republicans in Washington. And yet they mostly ignore legitimate crises like climate change and gun violence—both of which, sad to say, have mostly been abandoned by both parties. (If you want proof of the short and selective attention span of the process media, check out this chart of gun control coverage over the past year.) A press corps that is always reacting, however, will have a much harder time holding accountable those politicians that it relies upon to make news.

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But while the process media is itself reactive, its most elemental prejudice in those it covers is toward action—confrontation over compromise. Doing something—anything!—boldly, draws more attention and praise from the process media, no matter how foolhardy or counter-productive the end result. Thus, it literally took years before the process media felt comfortable offering up even the mildest critiques of President George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq. But when Obama wisely backtracked from his original, horribly ill-conceived plan for unilateral military airstrikes in Syria, the process-media poobahs wasted no time in pouring their derision over him. As this Washington Post op-ed ably demonstrates, however, their anger wasn’t directed at the substance of his policy decision—of which, Greg Sargent notes, there was almost no discussion—just the circuitous process by which he made it. Likewise, after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard earlier this week, one could find another Post pundit bravely wallowing in the process without ever taking a stand on the actual issue of gun control.

Over time, this misguided fascination with the micro- and the meta- of news has a pernicious cumulative effect on both politicians and the public. Thanks to this process bias, the ostensibly objective press slowly but surely signals its subjective preference for one set of policy choices, as defined through the positive or negative feedback loop of its coverage. Thus, shock-and-awe military strikes routinely draw more favorable press treatment than slow-motion diplomacy. Obstruction enjoys the press’s tacit approval, though it claims to favor negotiation. Grandstanding pays off more than legislating. Insiders matter more than outsiders. Powerful over the powerless.

It is worth pointing out that all of these biases tend to tilt against policy solutions favored by liberals. In fact, when viewed through this process media frame, one can easily see how a press corps mostly populated by individuals with socially liberal views could nonetheless be co-opted into facilitating a broad-based conservative policy agenda for the past thirty years. But just as it isn’t in our nation’s long-term interests for one of its two main political parties to willfully abandon its role in governance to embrace spiteful self-destruction, neither is it healthy when our press corps abdicates its constitutional duty to enrich the discourse by obsessing over trivial palace intrigue.

To be sure, our republic will always be a work in progress, as the Framers acknowledged in the very first line of our government’s founding blueprint. But recall that immediately following the humble talk of forming “a more perfect Union,” the Constitution lifts its gaze beyond the day-to-day machinations of government to clearly articulate broad principles—Justice, domestic Tranquility, common defense, general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty—that still define success for our country and its citizens 226 years later. It’s long past time our press corps relearn why these definitions still matter.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

(Reuters/Eric Thayer)
 
If you’re having a bad day, there’s a national tragedy, or the weather just doesn’t seem right—it’s probably thanks to a feminist. After all, feminism has been blamed for everything from killing the family to traffic. Seriously. This week—in the wake of the tragic shootings in DC—a GOP Senate candidate blamed women in the workplace.

So here are a few of my favorite things feminism has been blamed for:

Impotence: Laura Sessions Stepp (of Unhooked fame) wrote in The Washington Post that young women’s feeling empowered to initiate sex was causing a scourge of impotence among college-aged men: “According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase….. One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. “That’s a good thing,” says [teacher Robin] Sawyer, father of four daughters. “But for some guys, it has come at a price.” Because if there’s one thing that kills straight guys’ boners, it’s girls that want to have to sex with them.

Crime: Concerned Women for America, the anti-feminist organization, believes that feminism is behind the increase of incarcerated women. According to CWA’s then-president Wendy Wright, feminism made a grave error in promoting women’s autonomy: “Such ideology, which often encourages women to feel that ‘they don’t need to be dependent on a husband and they shouldn’t have to depend on their family,’ could be leading women into these kinds of activities ‘where they’re forced to fend for themselves,’ Wright says.” Hear that ladies? Husbands don’t just take out the trash, they keep you out of jail!

Mass Shootings: It’s not just women in the workplace that’s behind mass shootings, it’s “feminized” schools. According to Charlotte Allen in National Review Online, the murder of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School can be traced back to the lack of men around : “There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred….. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. [A] feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm.” Guns don’t kill people, feminized settings kill people.

Traffic & Environmental Decline: Women are so selfish, with their wanting to work outside the home. Don’t they know they’re single handedly ruining the environment? According to Jack Cashill—a writer who just put out a book, If I Had a Son: Race, Guns and the Railroading of George Zimmerman (ahem)—feminism is bad for the environment. Or, as he writes, “Equal pay for equal work also means equal commutes.” Cashill continues by saying that stay-at-home moms “save the state’s highway infrastructure from meltdown, especially since a ‘nanny’ often drives to the working mom’s house, putting three cars on the road where otherwise one would do. Homeschooling moms further ease the strain on the ecosystem by keeping their kids off the road.” The less you gals leave home, the better off the earth will be!

Anthony Weiner: You may have thought that the only person responsible in the Anthony Weiner sexting controversy was Weiner himself—how shortsighted of you! Thankfully, Fox News set the record straight and pointing to the real culprit: feminism. You see, feminists made it easy for slutty, slutty girls to go on the Internet and entice men into sin. Because birth control.

This is just a small sampling of the horror that feminism has brought to our doorstep. We didn’t even get into the ways feminism caused the horrors in Abu Ghraib (so says Phyllis Schlafly) or helped Michael Jackson’s criminal defense.

So when you’re tasked with seeking the root cause of a major problem, don’t waste your time looking to the easiest answer—look to feminism instead! If you work really hard, I’m sure you can find a link. And remember, any time you get a paper cut, or trip over something or a man somewhere stubs his toe—that’s not an accident, friends, it’s just a feminist getting her wings.

A woman walks by a dilapidated house in Nebraska. (Reuters)

For me, the biggest takeaway from the new Census data on poverty has little to do with the data itself—it’s this: we’ve long known what to do to take the next steps in the fight against poverty, and we still know what to do to take the next steps in the fight against poverty. But we’re not doing it.

If you look all the way back to the 2007 inaugural report of the Half in Ten campaign—written by Peter Edelman, Angela Glover Blackwell and other antipoverty heavyweights—it was clear then that raising the minimum wage, strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, and improving childcare assistance could reduce poverty by 26 percent. Add lessons that we have since learned from initiatives like the bipartisan (at least when it comes to state governors) subsidized jobs program, and a more responsive food stamp (SNAP) program, and we know that we could make significant strides to reduce poverty were there the political will—or more accurately, a movement to create the political will.

In lieu of that, for the eleventh time in twelve years, poverty has worsened or stayed the same. It remains stuck at 15 percent, with 46 million people living on less than about $18,300 for a family of three. That includes nearly 22 percent of all children, 27 percent of African-Americans, 25 percent of Hispanics and more than 28 percent of people with disabilities (the next group conservatives will likely target after they are through with those who currently need food stamp assistance).

Significantly, 44 percent of those in poverty live below half the poverty line—in “deep poverty”—on less than about $9,150 for a family of three. That adds up to 20.4 million people, and includes 15 million women and children—nearly 10 percent of all children in the United States. Deep poverty and its accompanying toxic stress are particularly harmful to children. We also have evidence that just a modest boost in income—$3000 in earnings or government benefits for a family living on less than $25,000—makes a significant difference in the lives of young children when they reach adulthood, both in the hours they will work and the income they will earn.

Another number that remained stagnant last year is the number of people living below twice the poverty line—on less than $36,600 for a family of three. That describes 106 million Americans, more than one in three of us. These are people who are living a single hardship—such as a lost job or serious family illness—away from poverty.

While conservatives will use the 15 percent poverty rate as fodder to label as a failure the War on Poverty launched nearly fifty years ago—since the official poverty rate is about the same now as it was in the late-1960s—we know that one has to overlook critical information to reach this conclusion.

Some examples: the poverty rate would be twice as high now—nearly 30 percent—without the safety net. Food stamp benefits aren’t included in the official poverty rate, but they lifted a record 4 million people above the poverty line in 2012; nor are the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC), which in 2011 moved 9.4 million people above the poverty line. In fact, in 2011 the official poverty rate would have dropped from 15.0 percent to 10.9 percent if it included food stamps, EITC and CTC. (See, too, Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger’s new book, Legacies of the War on Poverty.)

“If you took the official poverty measure and accounted for the effect of the biggest benefits that it leaves out—SNAP, rent subsidies, and tax credits for working families—you’d find that poverty in the United States is significantly lower today than it was at any time in the 1960s,” said Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “That’s true even despite today’s shaky economy.”

There were some obvious missed opportunities to reduce the poverty rate last year. In 2012, unemployment insurance (UI) benefits reduced poverty by 1.7 million people, compared to 2.3 million people in 2011 and 3.2 million people in 2010. According to the CBPP, the weakened antipoverty effect is in part due to reduced federal and state UI benefits and long-term unemployed workers exhausting their eligibility.

“The number of unemployed workers receiving no unemployment benefits is actually higher today than at any point in the recession,” writes Robert Greenstein, president of the CBPP. He notes that if UI benefits had been as effective as they were at reducing poverty among the jobless and their families in 2010, the poverty rate would have fallen over the past two years.

But more than just missing opportunities for effective policy, we now face a Congress poised to make matters worse for those who are faring the worst in our economy.

As Greenstein notes, federal UI benefits for the long-term unemployed are scheduled to expire in the end of 2013 and may well not be renewed. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the sequester will cost 900,000 jobs by the third quarter of 2014. As for food stamps—which average $1.50 per person, per meal—there will be cuts to benefits in November that will affect 22 million children. House Republicans voted last night for an additional $40 billion in SNAP cuts that truly boggle the mind—both from a moral and economic perspective. Senate Democrats also agreed to $4 billion in cuts that would harm 500,000 families who are currently struggling to meet their basic food needs.

“No program does more than SNAP to protect children from the effects of deep poverty, and yet the House just voted to cut 3.8 million people off the program, including many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country,” Sherman wrote me in an email. “Some of those cut will be children, others will be seniors. Others will be poor childless adults who are out of work; the bill specifically targets those living in areas with the highest unemployment, where it’s hardest to find work.”

Edelman, who has about as much perspective on the public policy fight against poverty as anyone—having lived and worked on it through much of its history since serving as a legislative assistant for Senator Robert Kennedy—is struck by the nature of the newest attacks against antipoverty policies.

“In the past year the kinds of distortions and misstatements that characterize the arguments against the public policy that we have are even more troubling than they were before,” said Edelman, author of So Rich, So Poor: Why it’s So Hard to End Poverty in America. “Because now for example, there is a significant number of people who want to characterize food stamps as being something that keeps people from looking for jobs—a totally made up thing. It’s such a gross distortion.”

If there is any hope to be gleaned from the latest economic snapshots of what Americans are experiencing when it comes to income and poverty, it lies in the notion that perhaps more people are beginning to see that the needs of low-income people and a dwindling middle class are converging. When the top 1 percent see an income gain of 20 percent, and everyone else has a gain of just 1 percent—something has to give.

“We’re not seeing much growth in jobs, we’re not seeing much growth in wages for anybody, so it shouldn’t be surprising that people’s incomes are going nowhere,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.

Edelman points to the living wage campaigns at Walmart stores and fast food restaurants as positive signs. He also calls for “campaigns of public information” to influence public opinion about people in poverty and near poverty.

“Absent a serious change in our politics, which depends on really hard work organizing and reaching people to change attitudes—we’re not going to get the policies we need and we’ll be stuck in this mess for quite a while to come,” he said.

Action

Tell President Obama: Ensure Federal Contractors Pay a Living Wage

Share your story: How has the safety net helped you make ends meet?

Event

2013 Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Awards (Wednesday, October 16, St. James’ Episcopal Church in New York City). These awards are presented annually to distinguished individuals or organizations who represent one of FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms”—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. This year’s laureates include the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who have fought to improve working conditions for Florida’s tomato pickers; Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus” fame; Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman; Ameena Matthews of Chicago’s Violence Interrupters; and poet and farm-to-table activist Wendell Berry, who will receive the overall Freedom Medal. You can learn more and RSVP to the free public ceremony here.

Clips and Other Resources

“Legacies of the War on Poverty,” Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger

“Finally, Domestic Workers Get Basic Labor Protections,” Sheila Bapat

“The Top 3 Things You Need to Know About the New Poverty and Income Data,” Melissa Boteach

“Seven Ways Occupy Changed America—and Is Still Changing It,” David Calahan

“Breaking Ground,” Kavitha Cardoza (AUDIO)

“Poverty Rate and Income Stagnate as Conservatives Attack the Safety Net,” Zoe Carpenter

“Child Poverty in the US,” Center for Law and Social Policy

“New Census Data Confirms Economy Isn’t Working,” Coalition on Human Needs

“Stop playing politics with hunger,” Bob Dole and Tom Daschle

“Innovating in Early Head Start: Can Reducing Toxic Stress Improve Outcomes for Young Children?” Carol Gerwin

“In Light Of Census Numbers, Cutting SNAP Would Be Irresponsible,” Elise Gould and Hilary Wething

“Ten myth-busting facts about welfare,” Heather Hahn

“Slow economic recovery reflected in stagnant income and poverty data,” Doug Hall and Alyssa Davis

“Lifelines for Poor Children,” James Heckman

“State Tax Codes As Poverty Fighting Tools,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

“House Bill Would Cut 3.8 Million People From Food Stamp Rolls,” Tamara Keith (AUDIO)

“Experts weigh in: Are we losing the war on poverty?” Nicole Levins

“Why is the Federal Poverty Line So Far Off?” John Light

“A System Designed For And By The People,” Kirsten Lodal

“The Children Are Still Poor in America,” Hannah Matthews

“By the Numbers: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage 2012,” Lawrence Mishel and Elise Gould

“Preview: Inequality for All,” Moyers & Company

“We can end child poverty—or, at least, do more,” Austin Nichols

“DC Mayor’s Veto of Wal-Mart Wage Bill is a National Outrage,” Isaiah Poole

“Official Poverty Measure Masks Gains Made Over Last 50 Years,” Arloc Sherman

“Book Review: Kindness and a ‘Harsh’ Ala. Immigration Law,” Thomas Vasquez

“Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement,” Elaine Weiss

“Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families,” Wider Opportunities for Wome

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Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $23,492 for a family of four): 46.5 million people, 15 percent.

African-American poverty rate: 27.2 percent.

Hispanic poverty rate: 25.6 percent.

White poverty rate: 9.7 percent.

People with disabilities: 28 percent.

Poorest age group: children, 34.6 percent of all people in poverty are children.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 21.8 percent, including 38 percent of African-American children, 34 percent of Latino children, and 12 percent of white children.

Poverty rate among families with children headed by single mothers: 40.9 percent.

Gender gap: Women 31 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Deep poverty (less than $9,142 for a family of three): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, nearly 10 percent of all children

up from 12.6 million in 2000—increase 59%

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, approximately 1 in 3 Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Federal minimum wage: $7.25 ($2.13 for tipped workers)

Federal minimum wage if indexed to inflation since 1968: $10.59.

Federal minimum wage if it kept pace with productivity gains: $18.72.

Hourly wage needed to lift a family of four above poverty line, 2011: $11.06

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2011: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2011: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Number of people 65 or older kept out of poverty by Social Security: 15.3 million

Quotes of the Week

“Children’s ability to survive, thrive and develop must not depend on the lottery of geography of birth. A child is a child and should be protected by a national floor of decency. We can and must end child poverty. It’s about values. It’s about priorities. It’s about who we are as Americans. The greatest threat to America’s national security comes from no foreign enemy but from our failure to invest in healthy and educated children.”
   —Marian Wright Edelman, president of Children’s Defense Fund.

“Following on the heels of multiple new reports on the tens of millions of Americans struggling with unemployment, inadequate wages and hunger, today’s vote by the House to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $40 billion is simply divorced from the reality of constituents’ lives. Members who voted for this bill have voted to increase hunger in their districts and around the country.”
   ——Jim Weill, president of Food Research and Action Center.

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Sasha Abramsky, author of The American Way of Poverty, discussed the new poverty data from a both historical and international perspective in his article America's Shameful Poverty Stats.