Welfare 102: Hanging by a Thread – Stories and Data from the Safety Net

Middle class to rags

C is a middle aged woman with a few years of college and decades of work experience. When her chronic illness became uncharacteristically severe, she had to stop working for a while. She didn’t worry at first, since she had COBRA health benefits, unemployment insurance, and savings. She was able to afford her expenses between her UI and savings. However, when she got more and more sick, she started to worry. Her savings were dwindling, and her UI was about to run out. She applied for long-term disability benefits through Social Security, but was denied. Although she appealed the denial, she waited about two years for a hearing. In that time, she became ineligible for COBRA, but she still had too much money left to qualify for Medicaid. She could not see doctors regularly, and during times of acute symptoms, she received only the most essential and least expensive care in the emergency room. Her health became so bad at this time that her condition became life threatening. Finally, however, she spent the last of her savings on rent and entered the safe haven of indigence – she could now receive Medicaid. She began to see doctors again and has been stable, though still severely ill, for a few months. If she is lucky enough to win her disability benefit hearing, she will receive enough retroactive money to replace her savings as well as monthly income and Medicare benefits. However, since she doesn’t have any money left, she is now on welfare. The rent stipend is too low to pay for the apartment in which she has lived for decades, and she risks being evicted before she has her appeal hearing. If she is evicted, she may have to live in a homeless shelter for some time.

Over the past decade or so, upward socioeconomic mobility has crawled nearly to a stop. Downward mobility, however, seems as strong as ever.

The punishment of hard workers

E also suffers from a chronic illness that prevents her from earning enough money to support herself. She received disability benefits for some time. Later, she had the extraordinary fortune to receive assistance through a charitable organization that supports people with her condition. She was placed with a top private company in her city, where she was paid a fair salary for clerical work regardless of how much work she actually completed. Since her wages generally exceeded the value of her work, regulations direct that the actual value of her work be the basis for determining her Medicaid eligibility. However, E did not fully understanding this or how it affected her responsibility to report income and additional evidence from her employer about the value of her work versus her wages. After her Medicaid office learned of her earnings through her tax return, her health insurance was terminated and she received a notice that she owed five figures in overpaid funds. Without her health insurance, E became so ill that she eventually had to be cared for full-time in a hospital. She got her health insurance back when she stopped working, but now she cannot do any work at all.

B, a middle aged man who also has a chronic illness, worked one day per week at a local nonprofit. Over several years, his good performance resulted in several raises, and he eventually started working two days a week. The extra work was hard for him, but the extra money was a sufficient incentive to overcome his hardships. However, after his tax return was received by his benefit agency after his first year of working two days per week, he lost his health insurance as well as his benefits and he, too, received a notice saying he owed five figures in overpaid funds. B, however, had always reported his income, but he didn’t realize that he had started to earn enough money that he would automatically be considered “not disabled” – he exceeded this limit by less than $100. He was forced to sign an agreement to earn less money than he was capable of making. He got his benefits and health insurance back after a few months, but he couldn’t afford his life-sustaining treatment during that time, and his landlord sued him for rent arrears.
Some may say that having very strict resource and income limits for public benefits prevents undeserving people from getting taxpayer money. I don’t know if this is true. However, these draconian limits force people who genuinely need assistance to bankrupt themselves and, often, to go without health insurance for a time before they can become eligible. Functionally, we are punishing virtue.

Toxic soup: underfunded offices, underpaid recipients

We saw in C’s case that she was put at risk for eviction because her welfare housing stipend was too low to afford her apartment. In New York City, this stipend is about $250 for a single adult. C lived in a studio apartment in a modest part of the city that cost, by local standards, a mere $800 each month. Her case is typical. Most welfare recipients here are simply not able to afford an apartment on their own. They often make ends meet by living with friends, family, and roommates. C did not have any family or friends. She found a roommate for a while, but the roommate got a job elsewhere and moved out. Since welfare does not enable adults to be self-sufficient while they look for work or while they wait for a decision on longer-term disability benefits, any time one person in a welfare household has a change in circumstances – perhaps there is a death in the household, perhaps someone gets a job, perhaps someone moves out – the entire household is put at risk.
To solve this problem, at least one, and likely all of the household members will need to make multiple trips to multiple benefit offices. These offices are underfunded and understaffed while their employees are undertrained and overworked. Click here for a look at a welfare case worker’s desk:

This picture says more than this entire blog post. It seems unlikely that this caseworker will be able to process cases timely or accurately. Welfare, then, is a toxic soup of insufficient funds for recipients and insufficient resources for benefit offices.

I’d like to take a look at two different benefits for poor people. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, better known as welfare) is paid to people who are capable of working but are unemployed or transitioning to employment, and SSI (Supplemental Security Income) is paid to elderly and disabled people who have very little or no income and resources.

Since their inception, both TANF and SSI were paid at levels below the federal poverty guideline. Here’s a historical chart for the monthly SSI Federal Benefit Rate versus the monthly Federal Poverty Guideline since 1982:

Raw data here and here.

We can see that, although SSI has received yearly Cost of Living Adjustments, it remains at nearly the same proportion to the Federal Poverty Guidelines as in 1982. The message we send to people who are poor and disabled or elderly is, “If you don’t have money and you can’t work, you don’t deserve to live in dignity.” More importantly for policy development is that inadequate and stagnant SSI levels actually hurt poor communities. Since SSI recipients have nothing, they spend every dollar they have. They don’t qualify for credit, and if at any point they did have credit, any debt would have been discharged through bankruptcy. Therefore, any increase in SSI would be a direct economic stimulus to the poorest communities and a boon to the small businesses that develop in them. Furthermore, an increase in SSI could decrease total costs to the taxpayer. Since the benefit is currently below the Federal Poverty Guideline, SSI recipients are at constant risk for eviction and homelessness, which puts them at the greatest risk for institutionalization. Increasing the SSI grant could decrease the risk of this greater financial burden, and would decrease the cost to the taxpayer.

We can make similar arguments for TANF levels. TANF pays significantly less than SSI. In NYC, a single adult receives about $500 per month, which is about 55% of the Federal Poverty Guideline. TANF grants per capita have not been increased in decades, so it becomes harder to survive on them each year.

The inadequacy of these benefits puts their recipients at constant risk. The acrobatics necessary to preserve even this exceedingly low income create hardships in pursing work; thus, misguided concerns about the bottom line for the taxpayer actually impede employment and raise the taxpayer’s burden, while putting the lives of the poor in peril.

The anti-welfare argument: government as miser

Currently, there exists a system of purported disincentives, in the form of benefit reductions and, ultimately, termination, to prevent noncompliance with work requirements. The conservative Heritage Foundation noted in 2003 that about 20% of NYC welfare cases were sanctioned, which it defined as “[having] an assignment but not currently attending.” It elaborated in a footnote that “Due to permissive rules enacted by the New York state legislature, if a recipient flatly refuses to undertake required activities, New York City may reduce TANF welfare checks only modestly[… ] If New York City were permitted to impose a “full-check sanction” (temporary elimination of the whole monthly TANF check) for serious noncompliance, experience from other states with such a full-check provision shows that nearly all recipients would comply or would look for alternatives to welfare and close their case.”

Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1651.cfm

The euphemisms in these definitions and conclusions so obscure the context and meaning of the subject matter that these claims are rendered misleading and even irresponsible. It appears that those who are “noncompliant” are choosing not to work when they could. However, many sanctioned cases involve recipients who try to work but encounter difficulty. Consider S’s case as an example. S received TANF funds to cover part of her college education, since she was turned down for private loans that would have met the full cost of attendance beyond federally guaranteed loans. She provided evidence of meeting educational requirements in lieu of a work program, but her benefit office didn’t process them in time and a computer system automatically sanctioned her case after a period of time. Deprived of sufficient funds to pay for her living expenses, S dropped out of school for the semester. However, now she is able to comply with all of the work requirements of the welfare program.

Noncompliance sanctions may also result from something as simple as a missed appointment. Welfare recipients are routinely required to appear, in person, at benefit offices for tasks as mundane as submitting paperwork or providing information. However, because the offices are underfunded and understaffed, doing so may require a half day or even a full day of the recipient’s time. This, in part, contributes to perennial unemployment among welfare recipients. Since these meetings take place at least once per month, recipients are often faced between complying with welfare requirements and complying with other requirements of life, including going to work, shopping for necessities, cooking, caring for children, and going to school. Functionally, many recipients are punished for not being able to be in more than one place at one time. The Heritage Foundation calls this “flat refusal”.

I offer one last example on this issue. S received welfare for several months during which she was unemployed. When she finally found a good job, she had to go for two weeks of training. She was unable to attend a required, work training appointment at her welfare office during that time. She attempted to contact her case worker, but was unable to do so – the line was often busy, and several voice messages went unreturned. As a result, she was sanctioned for noncompliance even while she was attending training for a high-paying job with benefits. The sanction caused her to go into arrears in her rent for one month, but fortunately, she arranged a payment plan with her landlord after providing proof of employment.

The Heritage Foundation and welfare offices will have retained her record of noncompliance.

Furthermore, the claims of “alternatives to welfare” are specious at best and disingenuous at worst. Alternatives to welfare include getting support from friends and family, crime, homelessness, or some combination thereof. Our ethos is that we prefer the risk of earnest people living on the street rather to the risk of providing support for even one person who is undeserving, all in the name of spending the least conceivable amount of taxpayer money.

The “alternatives to welfare” argument also fails to consider, however, that the withdrawal of support from the most needy, even if we end up giving money to some who are undeserving, returns to us in other ways. I mentioned the increased likelihood of institutionalization above. The drug economy is tempting for people living in poverty who cannot realistically depend either on welfare or on the market as a way to obtain funds for the necessities of life. As we all should know, the societal costs of the war on drugs may be unsustainable. Prison sentences for drug offenders drain vast amounts of taxpayer wealth every year. The violence caused by drugs and gang activity harms families and communities, and it is part of the reason urban schools and urban students are unlikely to succeed, which contributes to poverty in the long-term. It is worth noting the superior health and quality of life outcomes in Europe that are produced, in part, by superior safety nets – which, remarkably, are not causing widespread financial ruin of the taxpayer.

Both SSI and TANF should be paid at least at a level sufficient to cover the costs of living for the individuals enrolled in each case. It should be a no-brainer that a safe home, enough money for food and basic necessities, and access to health care will remove some of the most common barriers faced by the poor in finding work. As long as we continue to punish the many people in genuine need of held because of the alleged actions of a few dishonest frauds, we will never have a healthy society and we will continue to lag behind other developed nations.

Thoughts on language pedagogy

As we all know, Americans are dismal at learning languages. There are many reasons for this:

-Some people think that learning a second language is “out of touch” and “far left”.
-Americans do not have the fortune to have the kind of language diversity, proximity, and pedagogical prestige that exists, for example, in Europe. While we have many non-English speaking minorities in the US, the assumption that these minorities can and should learn English, combined with socioeconomic stratification among most limited English proficiency persons and native English speakers, prevents meaningful linguistic exchange from nondominant languages to native English speakers.
-Low confidence. I am sure that most of us here have felt the shame that is, unfortunately, normal in this country when we do attempt to speak another language with someone.

However, I place a lot of weight for our poor performance in language learning on poor language pedagogy. The traditional method for learning a language has been through translation. Advocates of newer methods are correct to point out translation’s shortcomings – specifically, it tends to produce students with unbalanced reading/writing and speaking/listening proficiencies. For example, I learned Spanish by translation. After I had been studying rigorously for five years, I could read novels and write essays, but I struggled to hold a basic conversation. Newer methods seem to have attempted to minimize this disparity, and language teachers overwhelmingly observe that students who learn by them exhibit much greater speaking and listening proficiency.

However, these newer methods are flawed by several compromises. First, let’s consider that translation methods, which are based in reading and writing, provide a stronger foundation for learning a new language. Students who learn by translation typically demonstrate superior sophistication in fundamental aspects of a language, but often may not develop sophisticated speaking and listening skills until years later. Nonetheless, a student who learns by translation may gain a native or near-native mastery of the target language after many years and after sufficient listening/speaking practice, which is likely to be gained by exposure to native speakers after learning the grammatical foundation of the language.

Many students, however, take only one or two years of a language. This is generally not enough to read a newspaper with ease. Furthermore, since speaking and listening are often delayed when learning by translation, it may appear that many people who learn by this method study for one to two years without being able to produce or comprehend the language in any capacity at all.

More modern methods attempt to address these problems. While translation provides a stronger foundation, newer methods are designed to get students speaking and listening very quickly. This, however, is at the expense of providing a strong foundation in grammar and syntax, which are critical for obtaining higher levels of proficiency. Thus, while translation studies provide the foundation necessary to master a language, modern methods allow for faster acquisition of basic levels but decrease the likelihood that students will ever reach native or near-native mastery. If a student who learns by modern methods continues study for many years, he or she will either have a disproportionately chaotic control of the target language compared with peers who learned by translation. He or she may go back and review grammar, but this will be like going back to review long division during calculus class. It ultimately ends up in poorer performance at high levels and ultimately requires the student to spend more resources to gain native level proficiency.

At the same time, a student who takes one or two years of a language via modern methods will learn almost no grammar, but lots of words and phrases. Words and phrases, however, are the easiest parts of a language to forget. While a student who learns by modern methods may start speaking and understanding faster, he or she will likely forget everything after six months to a year and have nothing to show for the time spent studying. Students who learn by translation, however, will have acquired a certain portion of the grammatical foundation of the target language, which many students remember for the rest of their lives. They may be able to restart study at any time, even many years later, with some degree of familiarity with the subject. If the latter student ever decides to live in a country that speaks the target language, he or she will likely have at least some basic skills to aid self-learning.

Let’s look at examples of translation methods vs. modern methods using made up words from a made up language, which I will call the Zoom language:

Modern methods:
We will practice using the verb koke (to buy). Here is how koke is conjugated:

I – ikoke
you – yokoke
he/she/it – shokoke
we – ikookee
you (plural) – yokookee
they – shokookee

Now use the appropriate conjugation in the following exercises:

1. Ikii ee koo Timothy and I ________ woo tee tith ti.
2. Womble wee my bother _______ tik ton too.
3. Wik tik Bob, Sally, and Sam _______ pith nith nee.

There’s a lot going on in those sentences that could be valuable for the student to understand, but since that is impossible, you naturally ignore it. The student is expected to begin using the verb right away, and to infer rules about its conjugation. However, because the student is expected to infer the rules, he or she cannot be certain of having inferred the rule in its entirety, nor is the opportunity available to see how the rule could be connected to other parts of the language.

Now, let’s look at a translation exercise:

We will practice using the verb koke. First, remember that in the Zoom language, subject pronouns are almost always omitted, unless they are absolutely necessary for clarification purposes only. Therefore, the verb changes its root form and also acquires prefixes in order to clarify person and number (singular vs. plural). In the first person, verbs have single-beat vowels to demonstrate that the subject is an individual noun. Prefixes indicate person (first person, second person, and third person.) First person uses the prefix “i”, second person uses the prefix “yo”, and third person uses the prefix “sho”. Plural verb forms have double-beat vowels, which indicates that the subject is a plural noun. Plural forms of the verb use the same prefixes for different persons.

Here is how kookee (to go) is conjugated:

I – ikoke
you – yokoke
he/she/it – shokoke
we – ikookee
you (plural) – yokookee
they – shokookee

Complete the following exercises:

1. I am going to the store to purchase groceries.
2. Bob and Sally go to the movies on the weekends.
3. We go to Zoom class everyday because we are going to learn to speak it.

Obviously, the volume of information that a student must process to do translation exercises is far greater than the information needed to do more modern methods. However, it should be a no-brainer that this is a good thing. It requires students to completely understand what they are doing, so they have greater control over and retention of the skills they practice.

Using what you just learned from the translation exercise, see what information you can infer from the following sentence:

Ho shokoke tooroo wa So shokoke tooroo liannaa ijoomee hum.

You should be able to determine that the sentence is made of two clauses, that the first clause contains two different third person singular subjects and verbs, and that the second clause apparently contains a first person plural verb, though you don’t recognize the verb. A rough template for the sentence, based on this information is:
He/she/it buys [an item]…a different he/she/it buys [the same item]…(second clause)…we [verb] the [object of verb.]

You may not know what everything means, but you know what’s going on. Pull out your trusty dictionary, and you can understand the whole sentence.

I learned Spanish by translation, and I now speak it well enough that most native speakers do not immediately detect that I am English-dominant. I am learning two other languages via modern methods, and although I can converse in them somewhat, my control of them is very weak. I am limited to the structures I have practiced by drills, and my limited knowledge of grammar prevents me from adapting my use of syntax.

If you or anyone you know wants to learn a language, I hope you manage to find a teacher who incorporates translation into the lessons.

Feel free to ask any questions about language acquisition in comments.

Java’s Crypt: Bitter Iterations and Next Gen Joe

“Either those stale beans go, or I do.”

–Oscar Wilde

Think of the majority of today’s coffee as you would of Dorian Gray – you might trust it, but it has terrible, masked secrets. Most large coffee retailers, including Folger’s and even Starbucks, offer only stale coffee. They sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds of coffee each day. To keep up with demand, coffee is roasted weeks or months before it is sold. However, beans only stay fresh for about a week after they are roasted. When coffee beans go  stale, they become very bitter. Even a master brewer will need to conceal the bitterness and other flaws of the stale beans behind milk, sugar, and manufactured flavors in order to serve a palatable cup.

From experience, most people associate bitterness with strength. When a brew is especially bitter, most will say it is especially strong. However, properly brewed, fresh coffee is a naturally sweet drink. The stronger it is, the more robust the flavor. Bitterness is a sign of imperfection, not strength. Freshly roasted, properly brewed coffee smells and tastes amazing, like perfume you can imbibe. It has a complexity that rivals and may even surpass that of wine. Beans can be choclatey, bittersweet, acidic (like citrus), and have hints of jasmine, bark, berries, vanilla (sans additives), and a host of other tastes. If you have a cup of fresh coffee, you may never again be willing to go back to Starbuck’s or Dunkin Donuts.

If you get fresh coffee, you’ll sip your brew slowly to savor it, you’ll feel sad when you reach the bottom of the cup, and you’ll certainly make yourself a second. You may be prone to melancholy on the days when you don’t have any.

The Whole Foods near me roasts beans daily in the store. Fresh beans are probably also available at small, local retailers near you.  You’ll need to search the phonebook or the internet to find one. In New York City, I recommend stopping by Oren’s Daily Roast, where you can get a free sample taste of the day’s brew. If there are no retailers near you, then you can purchase fresh beans on the internet. I found these two retailers via Google, but have not personally bought their products. Only purchaes what you can drink in one week, since fresh beans begin to lose their flavor after about that long. Under no circumstances should you brew coffee beans that are older than two weeks.

Store your fresh beans in an air-tight container at room temperature. Some advocate freezing coffee beans, which is only acceptable for long-term storage. Your batch of beans for daily use should be kept at room temperature. If you freeze them, then they will be exposed to condensation each day when you open their container, which will degrade their quality.

Brewing coffee is a task so broad and complex that it deserves many of its own posts. For those interested, I offer this resource as a general introduction.

By the way, switching to fresh beans will not only improve your quality of life, but it will also save you money. A cup of coffee from Starbucks starts at around $1.65, but you can brew your own for about $0.25.

Note to management: perhaps we can consider adding “Food” to available categories?

Obama’s Vista Crashing due to Bush drivers?

Glen Greenwald, via Democracy Now:

I mean, the British government has acknowledged that it has in its possession what it calls exculpatory evidence with regard to Mohamed, namely information that it obtained from the CIA that the confessions, on which the Bush administration previously was relying to prosecute Mohamed in the military commission, was—were concessions that were obtained by very brutal torture, not waterboarding, not forced nudity or hypothermia, but hardcore, violent, brutal torture, including things like having his genitals sliced and being severely beaten and threatened at gunpoint [...] at the hands of American agents.

[...]

And amazingly, the Obama administration issued a statement congratulating and praising the British government for keeping those secrets, and essentially reaffirming [its] threat [to cease sharing intelligence] by saying, “Now that you’ve agreed to keep this secret, we will continue our intelligence-sharing program.”

There are plenty of examples of the Obama administration continuing the opaque, faux-legal policies of the Bush administration. For additional examples, consider that Greenwald also cites CIA Directo Leon Panetta, an Obama appointee, as saying the CIA may continue extraordinary renditions and that a Bush executive order permitting discrimination in federally-funded faith-based programs still stands.

Even in the wake of a national financial crisis, public discourse does not sufficiently mourn or reflect on the death of the good times. Instead, it appears to be drudging up zombie arguments about whether we can afford to spend money on health insurance and entitlement benefits for the unemployed or whether we should give tax cuts to rich people. Dennis Kucinich continues to be a nearly solitary voice in Congress advocating a decrease in defense spending, which accounts for nearly 60% of our discretionary federal budget.

Why is the Democrat-controlled government so congruent to the radical, rightist policies of the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans? Mother Jones did a report a few months back about Bush acolytes “burrowing” into government positions when they would normally be defenestrated by the change in administrations. Could it be that Obama’s Vista is crashing due to incompatible Bush drivers? I can’t say yes or no, since I haven’t seen any investigation of the influence of Bush burrowers on Obama administration policies, even by Mother Jones. (I may publish a post about hot stories that are not currently being investigated by the media. I’m trying to follow up on a few of them myself, but I lack the time and resources.)

The Obama administration could grow up to be either a juggernaut or a jalopy of change. So far, not so good. We will need a lot of bottom-up advocacy to improve the agenda and to implement it.

Welfare 101

As a disclaimer, I don’t intend for this post to advocate a particular political party’s positions. Republican welfare extremism, which seeks to dramatically reduce or abolish these programs, would leave scores of the destitute and their children dead and suffering, denying them access to housing and health care – which, ironically, are necessary to gain employment (and they are human rights.) Democrats have been complicit as these programs have degraded; they barely manage to keep people fed and, sometimes, in homes, but they are not an adequate safety net that allows most recipients the necessities to seek work successfully. For example, the Urban Justice Center in New York City has filed a lawsuit to raise benefits levels, which have not been raised for decades. Currently, many recipients can’t afford telephones, which one needs in order to communicate with potential employers.

As the ranks of the unemployed continue to grow by six-figure increments, the mainstream media has begun to cover the debate, which is allegedly reemerging, over welfare, but there’s a serious gap in the recent published discourse. The lack of certain information prevents Republicans from reaching properly informed conclusions (or, perhaps, the resulting propaganda is so politically useful that they don’t wish to have properly informed policies) and that prevents Democrats from sufficiently explaining their position (or, cowed by Republican propaganda cannons, they’re too afraid for their political capital to try). Ultimately, the lack of background and data in this debate disenfranchises voters from participating in the development of policies that significantly affect them.

1. The media is failing to provide sufficient background on welfare to understand the context of both purported “sides” of the debate.

It should trouble liberals and conservatives alike that neither the media nor elected representatives appear to get any substantial portion their information and opinions from attorneys representing the poor, the poor themselves, welfare agency employees, or other people most directly affected by welfare policy. Instead, in a startling example of citizen disenfranchisement, elected representatives and their politically-connected think tanks are allowed to define the debate.

The Times states, “Programs for the poor are often poor programs — stigmatized and underfinanced.” Here’s some context, since that tells you next to nothing. The official name of welfare is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Feel free to read the wikipedia article for it or to google it, but in short, it works like this. If you are an adult with children and you have limited resources (generally around $2000 or $3000 in available cash or cash-equivalent assets) and little or no income, you can apply for TANF. It is federally funded, although some states contribute modest supplements in the form of cash or services. If approved, you will receive cash every two weeks (starting around $40), Food Stamps (starting at a little over $100 for an adult, with increases for married couples and children), and Medicaid (if your state has it, and not all do.) These funds are paid under a quid pro quo that you find work. As such, they have a five-year limit, after which you get cut off. TANF programs generally have education and work-training incentives for people who do not have a certain level of educational achievement or work skills. If you’re sick and can’t work, then you may be able to get TANF indefinitely, or at least until you apply for and receive other benefits for people with disabilities.

Sounds great, right? Not exactly.

As the Times mysteriously tells us, this program for the poor is a poor program. It is significantly underfinanced, though this is precisely because it is stigmatized. Republicans claim that TANF functions as an incentive for the poor not to work. (This is a euphemism for black people looting white people through taxes. In a rare moment of straight talk, Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute tells us, “It’s ‘destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs.” Emphasis added, maybe. Thirty years ago, our racist appetite was whet by images of a “strapping young buck” buying a T-bone steak with food stamps. Today, it seems we need our imagery meat a little more red. Source. Please note that Kling was referring to the Stimulus bill and not to TANF specifically, but the spending most offensive to Republicans has been aid to states for education and health care, which, along with TANF, are designed to be important remedies to poverty.) In their faithfulness to their tribal beliefs about the poor and government, Republicans disinvest in welfare. As a result, administrative budgets are too low to allow proper case processing. There are too few workers to do too much work, and the work that does get done is too slow and has too many errors. For example, I recently spoke with a man whose name was misspelled on his TANF application transcript. He reported this to his case worker, who entered a new application without deleting the old one. When it was discovered that there were two cases under the same Social Security number, they were both closed. He had to reapply and wait several more weeks for health insurance, food stamps, and cash assistance. Republicans claim that such inefficiency is justification of their perspective on welfare and that it even proves government is inherently the problem.

As for the alleged laziness of the poor, almost every TANF recipient I’ve ever met has wanted a good job and tried very hard to get one. (I can recall exactly two for whom this was not the case.) In most cases, though, they drift among part-time stints due to a lack of opportunity and other disadvantages. Even part-time jobs are hard to get in today’s economy. Furthermore, the wiredsisters pointed out in a previous post that in many cases, public benefits undermine the value of work by functioning as an earnings subsidy, thereby allowing employers to pay less than subsistence wages. If the government increased TANF benefits and their administrative budget, many of the impediments in finding work that their recipients face could melt away. Therefore, we’d have fewer people receiving taxpayer funds in the long-term, which would then reduce the long-term cost of poverty benefit programs.

At the same time, the entitlements themselves are too small to support their recipients. The constant danger of having an inadequate income along with the extraordinary acrobatics necessary to obtain and keep these benefits can be a full-time job in itself, one that is so debasing that it merits the frustration and indignation of TANF recipients. Republicans claim that this “attitude” is a lack of gratefulness and that it indicates a feeling of entitlement among the poor who want to cruise by in life on the “crushing” tax burden on the middle class.

I read a comment on facebook by a Republican-dependent small business owner who complained about homeless people who, she claimed, hung around her store all day and asked for free things. When she would give them handouts from time to time, she was offended that they complained that she didn’t give them enough. She had wanted them to express gratitude. She concluded by saying she didn’t want “people like that” to get anything at all. It never occurred to her that instead of offering a granola bar, perhaps she should have offered them a job. If she were unwilling to do so, how could she expect anybody else to do so? She would be a great example of the discrimination that the poor face in obtaining a job.

2. The media is failing to discuss the reality of the lives of people who do not work and do not receive benefits.

Examples of people who are eligible to receive welfare but were prevented from doing so:

–Mother Jones recently published a dismaying article about illegal practices within Georgia’s welfare agency offices that deny benefits to otherwise eligible women. One disabled mother who the author interviewed was forced to rely on a friend with benefits to get money for housing and food when she was wrongfully denied a chance to apply for government benefits.

–Mr. A and Ms. B, a homeless married couple I know who were wrongfully denied for welfare, were forced to move from place to place each night. Sometimes they slept on the floor in Mr. A’s great aunt’s apartment, at great risk to his relative who received other federal benefits that would be lost if investigators learned she had unapproved boarders. Other times they stayed in friends’ apartments, sleeping on more floors and on couches, trying not to get in the way of large families with children already struggling to live in too few rooms. As an added injustice, they were denied their $250 housing supplement after their case worker determined that, since they were homeless and didn’t pay rent, they didn’t need it.

It’s difficult to draw generalizations about how people survive when they don’t receive TANF benefits and have to fend for themselves. Variables may be that it’s hard to get information about them since they may no longer interact with any public or private organization that deals with poverty benefits and legal rights, that every case could be very different since it requires tremendous creativity to survive without an income or health insurance, or that not everybody survives. (See this post on the Shriver Center’s blog about the tens of thousands of people who died in the US in 2006 because they didn’t have access to health care.)

What’s abundantly clear is that the removal of the safety net causes tremendous harm.

3. The discourse in the media does not give a voice to the people.

Elected Republicans are exploiting the fears of conservative voters, elected Democrats are far to the right of their base largely as a result of their efforts to mitigate Republican “entitlement reform” rhetoric that has been political dynamite for decades, and the mainstream media takes for granted that these perspectives are the “sides” of the debate and that there are only two sides; presumably, because Democrats and Republicans disagree on welfare policy, one of them must be right. I’d like for voters at large to learn more about this issue so they can reach their own conclusions. Reform will come from a mass movement for effective poverty policy that pushes Democrats to stop enabling Republicans and that liberates conservatives from specious voodoo policy. (As an anecdote, the Shriver Center’s most recent Poverty Scorecard gave nearly all Republican congressmen grades of “D” or “F” on their poverty voting record, even while Republicans tend to get elected in states that tend to be disproportionately poor.)

As an example of one myth that might be resolved if we voters could have more productive conversations with each other, we need not view the needs of the destitute as in conflict with the needs of small businesses. Increasing TANF funds would make it easier for benefit recipients to afford a telephone to stay in touch with small business owners who need their labor.

For those waiting for my analysis of Rick Warren’s inaugural invocation and its structure as an advertisement for Saddleback’s PEACE plan, you’ll have to wait a little longer. While researching, I uncovered a lot of very interesting data which suggests that the story about the PEACE plan is much larger than I anticipated. The good folks over at Talk To Action have a nice summary of the PEACE plan itself, which I highly recommend.

Rick Warren’s invocation: an ad for Saddleback’s P.E.A.C.E. Plan

I’ll update this in the next day or so with an analysis, but for now, here’s the full text of his prayer. Please comment if you spot any errors.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of You alone. It all comes from You, it all belongs to You, it all exists for Your glory. History is Your story. The Scripture tells us,  “Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. And You are the compassionate and merciful One. And You are loving to everyone you have made.”

Now today, we rejoice not only in America’s peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time, we celebrate a hinge point of history, with the inauguration of our first African-American president of the United States. We are so grateful to live in this land, the land of unequaled possibility where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership.

And we know today, that Dr. King, and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in Heaven: “Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with geneousity. Bless and protect him, his family, Vice-President Biden, the cabinet, and every one of our freely elected leaders.”

Help us, O God, to remember that we are Americans, united not by race, or religion, or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all. When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget You, forgive us. When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone, forgive us. When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us. And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes even when we differ. Help us to share, to serve, to seek the common good of all. May all people of goodwill today join together, to work for a more just, a more healthy, and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet. And may we never forget that one day, all nations and all people will stand accountable before You.

We now commit our new president and his wife Michelle, and his daughters, Lia and Sasha, into your loving care. I humbly ask this in the name of the One who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jésus, Jesus, who taught us to pray, “Our Father…[Lord's Prayer, cont.]“

Rick Warren’s unlimited tax deductions

Via The Nation:

Warren and unethical money deals – the journalists’ investigations are beginning. You heard it here first, folks. How far will it go?

In short:

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren’s audit the amount claimed had to be “reasonable”–it shouldn’t exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that–the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.

The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense–and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses–even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns

Pumpkin Soup

After the delicious results yielded by the butternut squash and sweet potato soup recipe that DSL posted recently, I decided to expand my gourd soup repertoire. My local farmer’s market stocks perhaps a dozen different kinds of pumpkins at this time of year, and I finally bought one and cooked it. I followed the same, simple instructions as I did for the butternut squash – slice, peel, boil for half an hour or so in water or chicken stock until soft, then blend until smooth – and wound up with a delicious pumpkin soup.

Pumpkin is a largely unknown superfood. Weighing in at a mere 30 calories per cup, it packs tons of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, potassium, riboflavin, and carotenoids, the chemicals in carrots that are good for your eyes.  It also has generous amounts of iron, manganese, magnesium, niacin, phosphorous, and thiamine. It’s also delicious!

The pumpkin seeds can be lightly coated in olive oil, then sauteed briefly on a skillet over medium-high heat for about two minutes until they’re puffy and starting to brown. Pumpkin seeds have one of the highest concentrations of protein of any plant food. After roasting, you can toss them into the pumpkin soup for a garnish or you can be imaginative. I used them as a replacement for pine nuts in a fresh pesto sauce – just prepare the pesto as you normally would, then put it into a blender with the seeds.

You mean I can eat those pumpkins they sell for carving? Carving pumpkins are technically edible, but they probably won’t taste very good. You may need to go to a farmer’s market to get a pumpkin that has flavor and is good to eat. If you don’t live near a farmer’s market, you can try getting some canned pumpkin from your grocery store. You may be able to find pumpkin seeds sold separately, perhaps at your grocery near the sunflower seeds or at a health foods store.

Here’s an abridged list of pumpkin soup garnishes borrowed from the New York Times. Read the article for the rest of the ideas.

-Add 1 teaspoon of ground ginger or 1 tablespoon of finely minced fresh ginger to the simmering soup.

-Serve soup with slices of peeled apples that have been lightly browned in butter.

-Saute about 1 cup of sliced mushrooms in butter or oil, and add them as a garnish. Chanterelles are best, but shiitakes (remember to discard the stems) or button mushrooms are also good.

Will the dog whistle be heard on the animal farm? Religious Right doublespeak, why Rick Warren should scare the bejesus out of you, and why Obama chose him

While Rick Warren has successfully fashioned himself as a myth, media coverage and discourse about his selection for Obama’s inaugural invocation has not sufficiently demonstrated who he is or what he stands for. I seek here to dispel the myth that Rick Warren is a moderate, to demonstrate that his apparent social work has ulterior motives, and to prove that he is an innovator of the Religious Right we all know and fear rather than a progressive who shares any substantial perspectives, methods, or goals with liberals. Second, I would like to suggest a motive for Obama’s decision to pick him.

A discussion of Warren first requires that we review a standard technique of the religious right – dog whistle politics. This was once called double speak, but I’ll stick with the modern idiom. Let’s examine some examples of dog whistle politics:

The Iraq war: a comma?

Back in 2006, Bush said regarding the Iraq war, “I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.” To the uninitiated, Bush seems to suggest that, as a comma precedes the next part of a sentence, the war is a structural part of Iraq’s path to “democracy”. To the Religious Right, however, he was reminding them of the aphorism, “Never put a period where God has put a comma.” (For a more thorough discussion, go here, here, or just Google this infamous comment.) Therefore, he has reminded his base that Iraq is part of God’s plan, whether or not it is an unconstitutional bloodbath.

Obama girl: John Stewart, but good looking?

Bill O’Reilly is another myth, a man who, though he is primarily an entertainer, has credibility with many Americans as a journalist. He’s usually blunt about his perspective, but let’s look at an example in which he is quite nasty to a guest on his show but nobody seems to pick up on it. Earlier this year, during an interview with Amber Lee Ettinger (more commonly known as Obama Girl), he commented, “You’re like Jon Stewart, much better looking. That’s what you are.” Ms. Ettinger thanked him, and her organization, Barely Political, hosts the video on its Youtube channel, perhaps as an unexpected but ostensible compliment.

But what does O’Reilly think of Jon Stewart? In a 2004 interview, he began by telling Stewart, “Do you know what’s really frightening? You actually have an influence on this presidential election.” He knew that Ms. Ettinger would take the comparison as a compliment, but the base of his viewers probably understood that it was a pejorative.

Now let’s get back to Warren. Here are a few facts to confirm his dogmatic Religious Right orientation:

Warren and the Religious Right’s usual suspects. He’s admitted that the difference between him and James Dobson, leader of the conservative evangelical organizations Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, is primarily one of tone.

Don’t believe in Jesus? He publicly denies salvation to Jews.

Gays? He believes homosexuality is a sin equal in weight to incest, polygamy, and pedophilia. His bigotry against gays goes even further, however. Warren is also a vociferous advocate of the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola. In his own words, “Akinola personifies the epochal change in the Christian church, namely that the leadership, influence, growth and center of gravity in Christianity is shifting from the northern hemisphere to the southern. New African, Asian and Latin American church leaders like Akinola, 61, are bright, biblical, courageous and willing to point out the inconsistencies, weaknesses and theological drift in Western churches.” However, Bruce Wilson over at Talk to Action points out that Akinola supported laws that were “more draconian than comparable anti-gay statutes passed prior to World War Two under the Third Reich,” and which were officially repudiated by the US State department as illegal under international civil rights laws to which Nigeria is a party.

If his bigotry weren’t enough, Warren is a hypocrite as well. After Newsweek reported that he and his wife planned to share a meal and a 90 minute conversation with Christian gay and lesbian couples, he denied that he’d ever had such plans, but made an agreement to meet them at one of Saddleback’s alternate facilities nearly an hour away to save face. He did not share a meal with them, and after he gave them an awkward hug, he left them to his staff members, who made little attempt at dialogue. Despite his embarrassing behavior, Warren maintains that “When they come and wanna talk to me, I talk to ‘em.”

But doesn’t Rick Warren care about AIDS and poverty? Yes, AIDS and poverty are part of Rick Warren’s agenda. This is not a sign that he is a moderate or a liberal. Far from it, he has provided insight to a question which has long been lingering on my mind: what does a Religious Right solution to social injustice look like?  Warren provided the dismaying answer when rebutting a comparison between himself and Jim Wallis: “Actually, I completely disagree with Jim Wallis’s big government approach to poverty. The answer is not aid, but trade, not subsidies but freer markets, not wealth redistribution but wealth creation, not the government but local congregations. Saddleback’s P.E.A.C.E. plan is the exact opposite of outdated and ineffective liberal social government programs that have failed. We believe the answer is the Church, not bigger government.” (Source.)

There are at least two alarming problems with his plan. First, his alignment with deregulation is almost certainly a danger to the economy at this point. Second, it’s likely to lead to unethical and abusive practices abroad. The establishment of the Faith Based Initiatives program, which Obama wishes to continue, can allow taxpayer dollars to be funded to organizations like Saddleback, which may then practice discriminatory, Christian-only hiring practices. Furthermore, Warren’s efforts to combat AIDS and hunger aren’t free – they’re primarily methods for converting people to his brand of Christianity. This may result in the US government financing Christian proselytizing, which will put our country at a security risk by reinforcing the perception that we are at war with other faiths — one of the ugly consequences of the “hearts and minds” paradigm when it falls into the hands of people who see life on Earth as a “spiritual battle”. The next step in these concerns is to do journalism the old-fashioned way — follow the money. However, this is generally something professional journalists (who can commit a lot more time to it than I can) will do. Anybody want to assist? I’d love to do a future blog post about Saddleback’s finances and the issues they raise.

The smoke and mirrors of Warren’s approach — his Hawaiian shirts, his attempts at apparently inclusive teachings, and even his social works — have successfully pulled the sheep’s wool over the eyes of many Americans, and if it weren’t for his recent support for Proposition 8, he might have flown into the invocation without sounding any loud alarms. The left is just starting to hear the dog whistle that sounds whenever he speaks.

Why did Obama choose him?

If Obama believed even a small portion of the teachings of Trinity United Church of Christ, then Warren’s teachings must be antithetical to his faith. No doubt his methods of social work and conversion through wealth manipulation and private enterprise are incompatible with a liberal perspective on government and society. It is highly unlikely that Obama made this choice due merely to poor judgment or a lack of understanding. Instead, Warren may symbolize Obama’s next target. He has already felled the Clintons and John McCain; Warren may be Obama’s next Goliath.

This strikes me as similar to the tactics of Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico’s president from 1934-1940. Cárdenas succeeded Plutarco Elías Calles (pronounced kah-yes), whose anticlerical policies lead to the bloody Cristero War. He gained Calles’ trust and faithfully implemented the policies of the Districto Federal, but when he gained power, he used his talent and prestige to disenfranchise Calles and to pursue his own agenda. He was very successful, in particular when he nationalized the oil industry after wrenching control from its former American owners.

Warren may be Obama’s Calles. Obama is playing with fire by inviting him into his sphere of influence, but if the president-elect is as smart as we hope, he may emerge from the fire not just unscathed but with a new voice among a constituency that has been previously inaccessible to liberals.

Oh, by the way, Warren can be pretty crass, as you will see at 1:18 in the following video:

Evangelist admits warzone prostylitizing results in deaths, saying it’s a “good decision”

Via Talk to Action:

“Our activities can lead to people dying, and we understand that…but, the reality is an eternity with Christ in heaven is so far better than an eternity in hell that it is a good deal. It’s a good decision, even if it results in physical punishment here on earth.”

–Todd Nettleton, Director of Media Development for The Voice of the Martyrs

This is what fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity has become – a way to justify making decisions that leave people dead. Note the Orwellian use of the phrase “physical punishment”, which in a different context could mean a spanking, to describe the horrible deaths of war.

Read the whole article here.