The Mickster jumped on a small mischaracterization in a New York Times article here to attack me, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and anybody else that highlighted the new Census data on the percentage of the poor living in extreme poverty, here. The Times reported that some advocates for the poor pointed to a "sharp increase" in 2005 in the percentage of poor people below half the poverty line. While that percentage did increase in 2005, the increase was not statistically significant, so characterizing it as a "sharp increase" is not right. On the other hand, this figure has increased sharply over time, reaching a record high level in 2003 and remaining at that level since then.
I've now had time to go over the data with some friends of mine who do this kind of thing for a living and here's what I understand: In 2003, 2004, and 2005, the percentage of the poor living in deep poverty stood at 42-43 percent, higher than in any prior year on record. The percentage of the poor who are below half the poverty line has risen steadily over the last two and half decades: from 34 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 1990 to 43 percent this year.
Further, other data confirm this troubling trend of the poor becoming poorer in recent years. What analysts call the per-person "poverty gap" -- the average amount by which someone who is poor falls below the poverty line -- also is at record high levels (though the measured increase from 2004 to 2005 was not statistically significant).
I quoted this aspect of the Times article, and Mickey said I made a mistake. Brad DeLong citing Kaus says I made a mistake and Kaus, again, here citing DeLong citing Kaus accused me of making a mistake. Did I in fact make a mistake? Well, I quote Lyman accurately and that was a mistake. I promise to be even less trusting of The New York Times in the future. But hey, we all know that that technical detail is not what is at issue here. Mickey's larger goal, in support of his crusade on behalf of the success of Clinton's Kaussian welfare reform bill is to deploy the Times quote as evidence of a concerted effort on the left to distort the Census poverty data to make things look worse than they really are. Well good luck on that, bub. The poverty rate is higher in the fourth year of an economic recovery (2005) than it was in the previous recession (2001), and median income for non-elderly households was $2,000 lower in 2005 than in the 2001 recession year. Both of these developments are unprecedented in economic recoveries (with available data going back to the 1960s). They are bad news for the poor, indeed.
Back on the "deep poverty" issue, Kaus discounts the figures noted in the Times piece that 43 percent of the poor lived in deep poverty in 2005. He would have us look instead at the percentage of all people who live in deep poverty. That figure is important, and it is not at an all time high. It rose to 5.4 percent in 2003, and stayed at this level in 2004 and 2005. Yet as Brad DeLong noted, four years into an economic recovery, this figure, as well, remains higher than its level during the 2001 recession. This, too, is not good news.
The upshot is this: The percentage of the poor living in extreme poverty is at an all-time high - coupled with the fact that overall poverty itself has risen markedly in recent years - shows that we have an economy and a safety net that leaves too many people deep in poverty. Whatever else the effects of welfare reform - both salutary and not so - one consequence appears to be that significant numbers of people are being left behind.
And my authority is not strong enough to carry this point, and I'm OK with that, perhaps Mickey might like to check in with the views of those, like the conservative Ron Haskins, the chief House staffer in 1996 on welfare reform. He notes, "The most important of these challenges is the finding that there is a group of mothers at the bottom of the income distribution who appear to be floundering under the new and more demanding welfare system." And here when asked, "Would you agree, Ron Haskins, that there is a part of the population that has not done well?," he replies, "Yes. That definitely is the case. It's undeniable, because we can see it very clearly, again in Census Bureau data, and there have been a number of very, very good studies.
Oh, and Mickster, The Pentagon is reporting that "Conditions exist for civil war in Iraq," here. Are you really so sure Chris Matthews--God, it hurts to have to defend him--required a script change for saying "All signs point to a continued degradation of our situation in Iraq," because of a note posted on a blog hosted by a 24 year old "Reason" intern on Andy's blog, of all places? Just asking...
Bush Lies, Heroes Die, Bin Laden Hides, Taliban Strides, Heroin Flies... [permalink]
I used to think the absolute worst thing the Bush administration ever did was lie to the heroes who rushed into the World Trade Center to try to save people about their knowledge of the relative safety of breathing the air there. Now, five years later, I think that lie was merely emblematic of their modus operandi. Newsday's story focuses on the fact that respiratory function has been so severely compromised in some World Trade Center rescuers that even as the fifth anniversary of the attack approaches, experts are reporting a dramatic aging effect in the lungs of firefighters and others, and this Times story focuses on how "government officials have only recently begun to take a role in the care of many of the 40,000 responders and recovery workers who were made sick by toxic materials at ground zero."
In addition, public health specialists David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz offer a blistering reconsideration of how the Bush administration dealt with public-health matters at Ground Zero in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and created the first "Katrina moment." Amid much ineptitude and incompetence before -- and on -- September 11, 2001, there was at least one shining story of efficient, on-the-spot government: the public health system in New York City. Though few noticed (until Katrina arrived four years later), the administration started to undermine and sabotage that system almost immediately.
They write:
One of the great ironies of 9/11 will pass unnoticed in the various memorials and remembrances now descending upon us: In the wake of the attacks, as the Bush administration claimed it was gearing up to protect us against any further such moments by pouring money into the Pentagon and the new Department of Homeland Security, its officials were also reorienting, privatizing, militarizing, and beginning to functionally dismantle the very public health system that made the catastrophe of 9/11 so much less disastrous than it might have been.
No doubt a number of those heroic first responders are wishing they sat back and hired Jack Abramoff to get them some contracts, instead heeding their government's call for help... like good Republicans.
And finally, we let the bastards in Afghanistan get away, here, so that our soldiers could be sent to fight and die chasing phantoms in Iraq.
Shame, shame, shame.
My old friend Rick Stengel continues his predecessors' policy of keeping liberals out of the magazine and even invites a few new conservatives to contribute like the equally overextended LA Times columnists Niall Ferguson and Max Boot to complement the hysterical liberal-hating Joe Klein. Don't feel you have to buy this magazine on Friday, Monday, or whenever, until Rick hires a liberal for the actual magazine and one who's specialty is not posts on as***ucking.
Sorry Mr. Legendary Power Forward but Newsweek's a lot better. Fareed, for instance, would be a left-winger at Time. At Newsweek, he's the sensible center. "Look at your calendar," writes the future Secretary of State--something I called back in 1996 or so, by the way, "it's 2006, not 1938." Here.
(Remember not long ago, Time's Klein was talking about what a great idea it was to threaten to nuke these people.)
What no "Ann Coulter?" Roll over Bill Paley, tell Bill Murrow the news.
"Lee Siegel is my Hero..."
You know it ain't good news when they put it up on Friday night before Labor Day. The backstory is here and the greatest hits are here. They are all particularly rich material for a psychological case study, but this one is particularly interesting/weird/frightening: someone in the comments section of the "lawyers, guns and money" website found this from Lee's diary entries on Slate:
As for the dark Internet tales, maybe Stephen Glass has his finger on the viscera of the time. He has sensed that in a commercial society that constantly stimulates the libido and makes satisfaction the highest criterion of success, any shortcut to satisfaction is permissible. Lies become a consumerist tool. Their effectiveness as a tactic earns them the quality of truth. And the libido makes no distinction between past, present, and future. It exists in an eternal present, in which each successive lie displaces the previous one and becomes the only reality. In a different age, Glass would be like one of Nabokov's madmen, deranged frauds who have an artistic temperament but not the artist's rational will. In our moment, the Glass-type is becoming more and more common. The Internet must be full of them.
An aside: I know Siegel a bit and I once referred to him as "brilliant but crazy" on this blog (and long before he declared war on "Blogofascism"). He came up to me in the Green Room of the LA Times Book Festival when I was eating bagels with the kid and demanded, in a not friendly or ironic fashion, "Crazy? Crazy? Give me one example." "How about this, Lee," I said and went back to the bagel.
Can you believe I forgot the bagels? My list of great non-arts related aspects of this country, in the service of the Silvermans, is here.
My favorite song of Steve Earle's is the one that goes:
There ain't a lot that you can do in this town
You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around
You go to school and you learn to read and write
So you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life
I work at the fillin' station on the interstate
Pumpin' gasoline and countin' out of state plates
They ask me how far into Memphis son, and where's the nearest beer
And they don't even know that there's a town around here"
Dontcha think this story is all about that song, or vice-versa?