Remembering Mollie Orshansky

Who invented the government's definition of poverty? Mollie Orshansky. She liked to say she was very poor, however, she managed to get a college degree in 1935 and landed a nice government job, something neither of my parents, who were about her age, were able to do during the Great Depression (extended to “great” by FDR, when the rest of the world just had a plain old depression).

Because of her research and government service, poverty will never go away, it will just get redefined with an ever rising threshold.  In fact, under Obama a higher percentage are poor than in 1965 when the War on Poverty began. If you have an ounce of common sense you know that's a lie because we have 126 federal programs that transfer money from the middle class to the bottom classes.

Here’s a bibliography of her work. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v68n3/v68n3p79_bib.html

Obama poor-mouths poorly

Barack Obama continued his 2012 presidential campaign first by complaining that Ryan's plan is "radical," and then by presenting himself to the Facebook audience as a poor boy who'd come up through the welfare system. Some how, even though Bush ran up the bill for social programs higher than anyone before it went through the roof with Obama, he's still trying to needle Republicans for being stingy with the poor.

And poor? That's odd. He lived with his grandparents, and his grandmother was a vice president of a bank in Hawaii. As a child in Hawaii he attended a private school. That his grandparents got social security and Medicare later in life, means they worked for living. If you don't work, you get different perks. His Muslim step-father, Lolo Soetero, went on to become an oil executive, although the family lived modestly when chubby little Barry lived in Indonesia.

His mother, he said to this audience of entrepreneurs and non-government employees, while getting her PhD briefly got food stamps (was this in his autobiography?). Why didn't she ask her own parents for money if she was short a little cash for a month or so? I did--then paid it back. Maybe transferring the wealth is considered acceptable in that family even if you don't need it? And Obama wasn't living with her then anyway. Lots of people are eligible for food stamps (now called SNAP) who never apply--the threshold is probably not far from what many students regularly live on and manage.

So he got scholarships for college? Just about everyone does. What does that have to do with Paul Ryan's proposal to cut government spending? And by the way, if he got scholarships, does that mean we will eventually see his school records, because those records are really scarce.

On the other hand, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. thinks Obama is giving Paul Ryan name recognition, something he really needs to be a presidential contender.

Last week when Obama asked Budget Committee Chairman Ryan to attend his "fiscal policy" speech, he put Ryan in the front row. There he astonished Ryan by exposing him one of the most partisanly abusive speeches I have ever heard from a president. He accused Ryan of being "un-American," among other enormities. Ryan was expecting some sort of "olive branch" to be extended to him. It would be, he thought, the start of serious negotiations between the two men. Instead he was put on display as the archenemy of all New Deal, New Frontier and Great Society programs -- as "un-American." Ryan was surprised, as he told Mark Levin on Levin's radio show.

The American Spectator : The Man Who Made Paul Ryan Famous

Where are your "green" priorities?

Certainly not with saving lives. We're about to repeat the slaughter of the disastrous malaria resurgence where our western environmentalists killed millions and millions of Africans every year for the last 30 by prematurely withdrawing DDT from the market because a bird egg might die (none have). On the advice of a non-scientist, Rachel Carson.

So now we're going to launch, with the blessings of our global power hungry president and congress, a war against all poor and undeveloped nations. From yesterday's WSJ

"Getting basic sanitation and safe water to the 3 billion people around the world who do not have it now would cost nearly $4 billion.

By contrast, cuts in global carbon emissions that aim to limit global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius over the next century would cost $40 TRILLION a year by 2100. These cuts do nothing to reduce the number of people without access to clean drinking water and sanitation." Bjorn Lomberg, WSJ, November 9.

Humanitarian Design

Where I grew up in rural Illinois, we called this a chicken coop. Now it's called good design, and it's what architects with a social conscience have come up with for Biloxi. Read about it here.

Usually I recommend an architect designed home as superior to anything you can find in a book or magazine, but I have to disagree here. . . "As they faced utter devastation, many didn’t know they could do better than buy plans from hardware stores or use drawings that church groups had downloaded from the Internet. “It opened opportunities to do things people hadn’t thought about before,” " Where is Better Homes and Garden house plans when you need them?

How electing Obama will hurt the poor

1. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) gives him a score of 100% on his pro-choice voting record. I think Ashley Judd noted that in a TV enterview yesterday (Hollywood stars are important supporters of our glamcan). Did you know approximately 79% of Planned Parenthood clinics are placed in target minority neighborhoods. While African-Americans make up only about 13% of the U.S. population, their abortions account for 35% of the total. Since Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, there have been 13 million African-American abortions in a U.S. black population estimated at some 37 million. Genocide against the poor is a not-so-subtle way to reduce poverty.

2. A lot of you think the poor don't pay taxes. Oh, they do, just not federal income taxes. That's for the middle class and rich. But by far, the rich pay the largest share of federal income taxes. Along with their big incomes, they have big, hot shot lawyers and accountants. Obama will actually get less tax money if he rescinds the Bush tax cuts, but that doesn't matter, because what he cares about is "fairness." Punishing the rich by taking from them. So he'll need to drop down a few pay grades to the ordinary middle class to make up the difference.

3. But we have all kinds of taxes factored into our system. That $1,000 tax rebate for working families? Guess where it will go. Look at your computer or your shoes or a lightbulb. Wrapped by and bundled in taxes from the designer's table to the cashier's hand. And Obama's plan to "tax the rich" will affect every product and service the worker and non-worker alike has to purchase. If you think shareholders will earn less or CEOs will just roll over and accept less, think again. The cost of the product and service will go up. The poor pay a larger percentage of their income for food and basic services than you do. Every product that gets to the store has been taxed many times at many levels by many businesses, and those are the very folks Obama wants to tax more. Why in the world would you think that cost wouldn't be passed on to you? Or to the poor?

4. When the cost of gasoline goes up because Obama and friends are going to make it increasingly difficult to be energy independent with oil and coal as well as new technology and alternatives, it's the guy earning less than $40,000 who will be hurt the most, and it's his family who will have less money to spend because it is going into the gas tank.

5. When electricity rates go up because Obama and friends don't like coal, will they ask the working poor to sit in the dark and not turn on their TVs?

6. When the environmental regulations keep getting stepped up by Obama and friends, it's the poor who will be hurt the most with new requirements for their homes, and automobiles.

7. The only accomplishment of the current Democratic Congress (other than the failed bailout) has been the increase in minimum wage, which always hurts the entry level worker and the small businessman the most. We can expect more of this.

8. Obama's dislike and denigration of the military and its worth will close one more door for the poor who will be discouraged from joining the military with a lackluster, weak Commander in Chief. They have traditionally used this method to learn skills and get an advanced education while building their sense of pride and self worth in a country gone soft and valueless. He would rather they become totally dependent on the government rather than serve their country with honor.

9. Obama and friends will up the global warming hype, hurting the poor first, not only in our own country, but also those in the third world.

10. And of course, if Obama wins, racism is over! After all, if he doesn't win, it is racism that kept him from the White House. So if he wins, we're past all that. No more race-based benefits from the government. Think of that!

The government's thrifty plan for food

Food stamps are issued based on the USDA's calculation of what a family of four with an annual income of $26,856 would need to eat nutritiously. AP writers, like the one who misled you all in the Tribune's May 16 article (Columbus Dispatch May 17) on Chicagoans using food stamps, say this can't be done with today's rising prices. Hogwash.

First of all, any family of 4 can eat on that plan even without food stamps, and the stamps will get them $542 worth of food a month. Buried at the bottom of the article (which is where truth is always found in an AP story, if it's there at all) is the crux of the matter: "carts filled with soda pop, bags of cookies, potato chips" because its cheaper for low income people to feed their families bad food than good food. Lie upon lie! Get this journalist to a library, or at least show him how to Google a dot gov site. Then have him walk the aisles of any supermarket with $500 in his hand and have him purchase ONLY real food--flour, sugar, shortening, apples, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, beans, oatmeal, peanut butter, milk, eggs, etc.; he'll be be stunned at how much food he can buy.

In the early 1980s I was writing about food budgets, coupons, sweepstakes, and other ways to play with your food, just as I do today in my blog, but using an electric typewriter, a bottle of white-out, research in the OSU Agriculture Library, and a photocopy machine to issue my own newsletter, No Free Lunch. I was interviewed on a local TV talk show, spoke to women's book clubs, a faculty lunch group at OSU, and I was featured in the local suburban newspaper. However, because my theme was in some ways anti-business and chiding the consumer for poor planning, I was not in great demand as a speaker or writer. You can't tell business that their methods are suspect and consumers that they are not behaving rationally and expect to be popular!

I was just as opinionated then as a liberal Democrat as I am today as a conservative Republican. I wrote a lot about how government and food conglomerates worked together to confuse or hurt the consumer and put the local food companies at a disadvantage (and I hadn't heard of a Wal-Mart). Actually, I still feel that way, but now wonder why Democrats continue to lull voters into thinking even more government control of their lives and wallets is beneficial. And I see how increased regulation of business hurts the little guy, and especially the poor.

In issue 8 of No Free Lunch I wrote about how the government determines the Food Stamp benefits and then I compared that to my own food purchases. I was a SAHM (I think I worked three hours a day at OSU on a temp contract), with 2 elementary school aged children, living in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Here's what I wrote (all figures based on food costs in 1980, almost 30 years ago):

"Benefits on which the Food Stamp Program are based are adjusted to changes not in the Consumer Price Index, but in the cost of the "Thrifty Food Plan."

In January 1980 this plan allowed $49.60 for 2 parents and 2 elementary shcool aged children per week. My own food bill at that time was about $45 per week, including paper products and non-food items, not included in the government's Thrifty Food Plan.

How can my food bill be lower than "thrifty?" First, I don't use the menu on which the government's plan is based. A second consideration is "economy of size" (a misuse of the term)--my husband and I are not big people, so we don't require as much food as larger people.

I don't do any of the usual things promoted as cost saving--I don't comparison shop, I don't shop at a major food chain, and I try not to use coupons and refund schemes. I avoid highly promoted, expensive new products.

I do buy a higher proportion of my food fresh and unprocessed than the average shopper, and I contribute my own labor (which is not taxable). I do not buy prepared desserts and snacks, and that was the big jump in food expendistures in the last 15 years. We drink orange juice and egg nog instead of soft drinks. A garden or a freezer would help, but I'm satisfied that food in America is a very good buy."

So what does the AP writer in today's paper say about Food Stamps and the Thrifty Plan? Here it is, full of half-truths, myths, and gotcha's. The truth is our government has been crippling poor people for generations now with the best of intentions. Enmeshed with subsidized housing, government funded school breakfasts, lunches and after school snacks, summer lunch programs, food stamps, SCHIP health plans, church food pantries (almost all getting government grants to purchase food to give away) combined with an education system that expects failure, little or nothing from the students or parents, unmarried families (that's a huge penalty for the poor), and more and more "green" regulations that the poor can't even use or which will destroy their neighborhoods for redevelopment. How in the world do these people ever hope to climb out of this government made mess?

What using less than the thrifty plan looked like in 1981

Poverty in America--we can end it

That's a slogan of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, not George W. Bush, John Edwards or Charlie Rangel.

No one who's ever read a government, foundation or religion report believes poverty will end, especially not in the United States because the bar is always being raised. It's not "poverty" that energizes politicians to ask for more taxes or para church organizations to seek donations, it's the income gap. Those on the bottom are in poverty, even if my early 1970s SAHM life style in the educated middle class was a pretty close match with today's poverty. No air conditioning, one older car, one TV set, no cable, no computer, no dinners out, no vacations. It was mac and cheese at the end of the month; sewing the kids' clothes; postponing repair projects until we had the money. Everyone we knew lived the same way.



The good news is that the USA is the land of opportunity and the percent of change was 90% in the bottom quintile of income 1996-2004--people who will have moved up and out within the next decade--and they have been doing that at least since the 1950s according to a new Treasury Dept. report. Many of the poor of the 1990s are now in the top quintile, because the bottom always includes young people starting out willing to make sacrifices and take risks.

Today's face of poverty, however, does have a distinct, unchanging look--women and children, some recent immigrants, the unhealthy, disabled, and elderly with no family. The bad news is new poor will flood in across the border (our poverty looks pretty good to them). The bad news is we loose to death and injury more young people on our roads in one year than we lost in 4 in Iran and Iraq. Many will never again be a productive citizen and will need care and assistance. The bad news is we have many children born pre-maturely, with their first 3 months of life costing a million dollars. Even choosing a Caesarian a week or two early causes death and injury to be paid for down the road. Neither private insurance or SCHIP will solve a million dollar hospital bill. They may never be healthy--they may always need more medical care, extra help in school and modified work environment.

The bad news is many people will by choice addle their brains with alcohol and drugs, decreasing their intelligence and ability to earn a living for themselves or their families down the road, or their ability to help others. The bad news is that some people will inherit diseases or conditions for which there is no cure, only modified living arrangements, and they will need some type of help the rest of their lives.

The worst news about poverty is that young woman you see above, barely hanging on. There are too many children being raised by unmarried mothers, with Uncle Sam as a distant and uncaring step-father, while the real "daddy" hangs out with his buddies and shows up just to get a loan or make a sperm deposit. Even if she eventually finishes high school and gets a grant to complete some college, her chances of giving her children what her married friends have are slim to none. Marriage of the parents is the best safety net a child can have--her chances of growing up in poverty are extremely slim if only her mother had made better choices about sex.

Poverty shouldn't be a slogan or a bumper sticker to be trotted out by politicians or preachers to get your vote or money. You are obligated by God to help, assist and love the poor. The poor are not obligated to be your feel-good project or "teach" your teens about life for a school requirement.

You are never obligated to close the gap between quintiles by reducing or taking the incomes of others, nor do you need to stand in the way of those who are trying to escape it--which many poverty programs do. You are not obligated to help the wealthy, fair-skinned Mexican government officials continue to be irresponsible and neglectful of its own brown children, by inviting people to cross the border for money to send home, and stay here illegally, decimating their culture and villages.