America's Dirty Little Secret: Who's Really Poor in America?

America's Dirty Little Secret: Who's Really Poor in America?

Leo Hindery, Jr.
Chairman, US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation
Posted: February 23, 2010 10:28 AM

Two old friends, civil rights activist David Mixner and former U.S. Senator (and my oft co-author) Don Riegle (D-MI), believe that in the economic recovery, not enough attention is being given to 'who's really poor' now. David and Don have for years advised me -- and others -- on the issue of poverty in America, and they are worried that too many people, and especially too many people in the administration and Congress, are missing this imperative.

To help make their point, they referred me to poverty activist Marsha Timpson, who describes today's poor as "America's dirty little secret, hidden in the backyards of America's shining homes, the hollows, the reservations, the border towns and the dark ghettos of the city where they are the lie of the American dream."

I agree with my friends, and with Ms. Timpson's view, and everyone else should as well, for right now in America:

• At least 50 million people are ill-fed -- up from 37 million just a year ago -- including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions -- the very large 15-state 'South' being one of them -- where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.

Although I myself grew up in a fairly hardscrabble environment, as the father of a daughter who was in fact able to create a successful life from the opportunities her mother and I could give her, it is hard for me to imagine what it must be like to have your child needy and hungry. Yet all of us need to 'imagine' this, because each night in America millions of children do in fact go to bed hungry and under-nourished, while also lacking proper housing, needed clothing, and the basic education required to develop and ultimately find gainful employment. And while I wholeheartedly support the First Lady's new "Let's Move" effort to improve the nutrition of America's children, we must first react to basic hunger rather than to food quality.

• 30% of the nation's 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011. It would cost about $745 billion, more than the size of the original 2008 bank bailout, to restore these borrowers to the point where they were breaking even, which there is no obvious political will to find right now.

• Despite the truly dismal 'real unemployment' figures with which most everyone now agrees -- a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force -- very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation's 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 -- an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 -- which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.
The overwhelming problem today for most workers isn't this recession, as horrible as it is -- it's the fact that for every earned income level except the top 10%, average household income hasn't changed a bit for 10 years, and that for the bottom 60% of wage earners it hasn't changed for more than 20 years. Through economic expansions and recessions -- and bull and bear markets -- alike, 90% of workers in America have been standing still earnings-wise.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr/americas-dirty-little-sec_b_473026.html?view=screen

Analysts for several industries had to have foreseen the gaps, and their effects long before they were so extreme and deeprooted. Why, if leadership is effective and accountable to its voting public, was something to safeguard against where we are now not addressed or resolved?

The dirtiest part of the secret for me, is when I think about how much our downfall is by design.

...probably lies in the concepts of Disaster Capitalism and Shock Doctrine.

Money is made from chaos. Power is seized through chaos. That is the reality for the elites -- who are themselves protected from personal chaos.

His Stimulus Plan helps the rich, investors, and corporations more than it helps anyone else.

We keep hearing that it has been working. But we're still loosing jobs. We're just losing them more slowly. Yes, it's progress to lose them more slowly, but we're still LOSING jobs instead of gaining them.

700 billion in stimulous money, 100s of billions more in loan guarantees and other stimulus efforts that went to wall street through the fed, and we haven't even started to produce a gain in jobs yet.

Banks had record profits and gave our record bonuses. Insurance companies had record profits. Oil companies had record profits again. Lots of predatory businesses are doing amazingly well.

People are not doing well, because people got a tiny amount of the aid compared to the amount that went to the corporations. People are suffering. Homelessness is at epidemic levels. Real unemployment is close to 25%, and many people have now been out of work for years. People are expecting that it will be several more years before there will be any jobs.

So how are real people supposed to survive if government's goal is to only create 9 million jobs and we need several times that?

How are people supposed to find homes when the banks would rather hold or destroy homes than sell them for what poor and destitute people can afford?

Our government used to build low income housing. And our government used to make homeless people the priority for that housing. Then HUD changed the policy and "poor" families that could pay $40,000 got priority over homeless people. So homeless people stopped getting any of those HUD homes. So how are homeless people supposed to get housing if even the government won't help?

Why are we still giving hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies? Why? Why do they need it? What public interest does it serve to give them all that tax money when tax payers are suffering so much? Why can't that money be used to help people who have no homes and no jobs?

Why are we spending millions of dollars a MINUTE still fighting two unnecessary wars? That money could Fix the economic crisis were are facing in this country. It could create job programs for millions of people, and build low income housing for millions of people, and stock food banks coast to coast.

Somewhere in DC, priorities are all messed up. :(