When I make that statement.

I'm not talking about Social Security or Medicare or CHIP.

I'd be more than willing to let the feds, or even the state use more money for anti-poverty programs. I do not think the City, with limited resources, inefficient spending, poor history of procuring services, etc., is in, or should be, in a position, to massively fund anti-poverty programs.

Plus, I think that, if the alternative is working, my time and efforts are worth something--like most of ours. We should never discount human capital.

Heck, I can't get sanitation workers on my street to not simply toss our blue-buckets and trashcans all over the sidewalk when they come through! They really just toss these things--sometimes, hitting cars!

Side note: last week, I hit my "end point" and walked up to the workers and explained to them that when they leave the trashcans and recycling buckets laying on the sidewalk, not only makes the community look bad, it makes it difficult for seniors to walk through and school children toss them around. Of course, I wasn't that nice about it, but we shall see what happens tomorrow--I'm thinking about working from home to watch them. If that doesn't work, I shall do whatever it takes to ensure they do their work properly. I hate short-cuts. Really, I've become neutoric since becoming a homeowner. I'm in the process of caulking everything on my house--because its fun.

I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese

Though not filled with profound stats or anything, I felt Mark Bowden's piece on the "religion" of privitazation summed up a lot of my sentiments on the current debates about the turnpike, the war and other privitization efforts. Maybe it's my upbringing or a realization of how much that I've benefited directly from government involvement in the economy, education, etc, but I've always been wary of privitization efforts. Read the article if you haven't.

www.whatever-it-takes.net

My time to make comments is a bit short today so my apologies for having to disappear after posting this and for making broad comments directed at this thread than at any particular post. In 2005, between 70 and 80 percent of taxpayers in Philadelphia have taxable incomes less than $45,000 a year. Overtime only taxable incomes at and above the 90th percentile in Philadelphia have grown faster than prices.

Of course in 1973 an Ipod didn’t exist, and today’s Ipod is cheaper and more powerful than the first generation introduced late in 2001. If the Ipod was a measure of well being in Philadelphia it would be true to say that despite incomes for most people being lower Philadelphian’s today are better off today than we were in 1973 or in 2001. Of course it’s silly to think of an Ipod as a measure of well being. What you might spend on an Ipod will not cover your mortgage payment, it will not cover the bill if a loved one gets sick and it will not send your kids to college. These are the kinds of expenses that matter to poor and middle income families.

To paraphrase if not directly quote Richard Freeman, Per Capita Gross Domestic Product in America is 60 percent higher today than it was in 1969 and yet the percent of people living in poverty is higher.

We live in a society that is increasingly productive but the material gains of that productivity are accruing to an increasingly narrow group of people. While it is true that markets always produce inequality is not true to suggest that markets necessarily have to produce only growth in incomes at the top of the income distribution. Between 1947 and 1973 low and middle income family incomes grew as much as incomes in the top fifth of families. This doesn’t mean that all families earned the same income, they didn’t, but it meant that as the economy grew that prosperity was broadly shared.

Ray said that :
"young people who complete high school, and don't go to college . . . "

The School District estimates that since 2000, 30,000 young people under age 17 have dropped out of high school. I wish the problem were that they don't have a college diploma, but in Philly, the consequences of not even completing high school (or for that matter even 11th grade) are drastic and the options for young people even more severe.

The way I think about it -- and which might bring us back to Otis/Esquisite's original point -- is that while the problems for workers/families earning $45K are real (I know firsthand how real they are), there seem to be political solutions to these problems, with solid momentum and a political constituency behind them, even if some of these solutions are contentious and even if they're treatments rather than cures.

Universal health care, universal education, child care funding, better job security, workforce housing, mortgage and rental protection, improvements to mass transit and other reduced transportation costs, better services, progressive payroll taxes, a lower or progressive wage tax, and other mainstream ideas can actually go a long way towards helping the $45K family.

This is because by and large, while the $45K family may have been failed by the global economy and the national and local political process, they haven't really been failed by their K-12 or college educations, the criminal justice system, public housing and welfare, child and protective services, disability services, the war on drugs, the U.S. military, organized crime (including sex work), the mental health system, their own families, or themselves -- at least to the extent that the people in the bottom half of the local income distribution have been. Even if they've brushed up against any of these deeply dysfunctional parts of our city/country, they've made it through reasonably intact.

Here's an example. Lou Agre recently posted that if you want job security and discrimination protection, you should join a union. This is a solid but difficult solution to the problems of most of the $45K class. But it doesn't really apply to the disabled veteran, the welfare mother, the transsexual sex worker, the undocumented laborer, or the untreated schizophrenic. Or even the healthy, employed, but disposable retail worker, telemarketer, domestic, or graduate student. (Hey, I had to work that in.)

Ideally, you would like to transform the problems of the bottom half or quartile into the problems of the $45K family. Then the questions do become largely political -- can you work out a compromise on health care or education or taxes or whatever, what will it look like, etc. Instead, what's happened too often is that the class of workers that once enjoyed the benefits of and expected only the problems for the $45K workers are instead finding themselves at or near the poverty line.

The question is whether there are political solutions for the people in the bottom half or quartile, near or below the poverty line or off the grid altogether. And if so, what will those solutions look like?

It seems clear to me that you can't ignore one of these groups at the expense of the other. It's also clear that while there may be some overlap, these two sets of problems and their solutions are and will have to be quite different from one another.

There is a cultural component to both sets of problems, but it isn't just the culture of the people on the inside that is the issue. It's also our culture, all of ours, that in some ways has never adjusted to the economic realities of the U.S., past or present. Both will have to change for any change to occur, but that change may not (perhaps must not) be a matter of public policy, except to the degree that public policy continues to exacerbate those problems. If you're a policy maker, you have to concern yourself primarily with the structural problems that government can fix, with all hope that those fixes will compound themselves in cultural benefits in the long term.

But this is why policy for the genuinely impoverished is so hard -- because not only do you have to deal with centuries of compounded institutional dysfunction, but that the solutions are not nearly as obvious. What may be most saddening is that our political institutions have so degenerated that we have to solve both problems simultaneously with the apparatus sufficient to solve neither.

--Tim